by Shana Abe
Dust motes spun and drifted through the sunlight surrounding her, a thousand winking specks soundlessly lifting, turning, falling.
There was a red marble clock inset in that distant fireplace mantel, just beneath a painting of a pretty girl surrounded by flowers, also inset. Madeleine leaned forward from the mess of her bedding, straining to read the time. It was nearly ten-twenty; no wonder Jack was gone.
Her stomach growled.
The linden floor beneath her feet was a cold shock. It took her a moment to find her slippers, then another moment, much longer, to find the bell pull for the maid. She yanked at it, hopefully not too hard. If it rang, it must have been somewhere deep inside the mansion. Madeleine heard only silence.
She thought about retreating beneath the covers again but worried about how it would look, to be discovered back in her marital bed when obviously she had to rise from it to pull the bell, like she was too spoiled to withstand a little chill. So she shuffled to the fireplace instead, trying to control her shivers, trying not to look as disheveled and uncertain as she felt.
She didn’t know this place. She didn’t know this room, its customs, or even where her clothes were, and yet she was supposed to be the mistress here. She was the mistress here.
Madeleine inched closer to the dying fire.
The inscription beneath the painted girl framed by the mantelpiece read:
Innocent.
* * *
So, that first morning in the Manhattan mansion, she washed, she dressed, and then she found her way downstairs to the dining room alone. She encountered no one else, not even a footman, although the silver chafing dishes along the sideboard were still warm, and there was toast (not warm) lined neatly upright in a pair of porcelain racks.
A garland of evergreen, woven with holly, decorated the mantelpiece of the fireplace, a nod to the season.
She took a plate, a pale omelet topped with herbs, bacon, toast, no fishcake. She filled a crystal goblet with water from the decanter, another with orange juice, and found a seat near the middle of the table, covered in yards of off-white jacquard. After a bite of the omelet, she got up and moved to the foot of the table instead of the middle, to the high-backed chair where the lady of the house was supposed to sit.
Where Lina had surely sat, and Ava after her.
She ate slowly, aware of the emptiness around her, the zest of evergreen in the air, the small noises coming from parts of the mansion she could not see, a servant’s corridor behind a wall, perhaps, or maids dusting in another room. As she finished the bacon, there came a clicking of toenails against stone just outside the doors; Kitty wandered into the chamber, walked over and lifted her nose inquisitively toward Madeleine’s plate, then (with no bacon forthcoming) wandered out again.
Madeleine had never been in this room alone before. Maybe that was why she’d never registered how vast it was unpopulated by Astors or guests, how the marble walls shone slick with light, how the Brussels tapestries told stories of men and gods in shifting tones of green, gray, blue. A clock was ticking somewhere, although she couldn’t see where. As she was craning her neck to search the corners, the ticking became a spill of chimes from clocks near and far, a count of eleven that trembled along the floor and walls and slowly smoothed to silence.
Her plate was empty. She stood, wondering if she should move it to the sideboard, if she should ring for someone (where was the bell?), and finally just left it on the table. There would be someone nearby, no doubt, a footman or the butler, perhaps in the great hall. She could let them know she was finished.
As she passed a gilded console table by the fireplace, she noticed a stack of letters and cards on a salver and paused, spying her name (her new name! Mrs. John Jacob Astor!) on the envelope on top. This, it seemed, was where the household mail was placed. The letter was a congratulatory note from Leta, bubbly and short, hoping they could meet up soon. Madeleine smiled, flipping through the remaining stack, plucking out the correspondence addressed to her, or to her and Jack, until she reached the bottom of the pile, where a single sheet of paper had been already removed from its envelope. Dark, sloping handwriting covered the page.
My dearest boy, it began, and Madeleine put the sheet back on the salver. She squared the letters in her left hand and then, despite herself, found her eyes returning to the opened letter, the stock thick and creamy, the folds precise, that tilting script leaping out at her.
. . . not too much of a bother, ask him again if I might have the Waterhouse portrait of us. I cannot imagine he wishes to keep it, a reminder of the family he used to have, not when he has obviously decided to begin a new one without us. Whereas I, naturally, will treasure it . . .
“Do you want to see it?”
Madeleine started, the letters she held scattering to the floor. Vincent watched her with his hands in his pockets, unmoving, as she bent and gathered them up again.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, straightening. “See what?”
His mouth screwed into a smile, mirthless. “The painting, of course. The portrait my mother wants. She wasn’t granted it in the divorce, so she has to beg him for it.”
“Oh, I . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t know—I mean, I wasn’t—”
Vincent turned away. “It’s in my bedroom.” At the doorway, he paused, still not looking back at her. “Breakfast is always at seven sharp. You’ve thrown the staff off their schedule, Mrs. Astor.”
He left.
* * *
All the meals at the chateau followed a strict schedule, as it turned out: breakfast at seven, luncheon at noon, high tea at four (if anyone was home for it), and supper at seven-thirty. The chef heading the kitchen here was from Orléans, Jack explained that night, and was far more thin-skinned than the New Englander on the yacht. Monsieur was prone to sulking if the soup got cold or the puddings soggy.
“We’re lucky to have him,” Jack said. “My sisters have been trying to poach him away for years.”
They sat in the music room before dinner, Mrs. Astor at the piano, Colonel Astor reading a newspaper by the fire, a whiskey sour sweating lightly on the end table nearby. She played carefully, a lullaby she remembered from her childhood, because she was out of practice, and she didn’t want to perform poorly in front of him, even this uncomplicated tune.
“I see,” she said.
He smiled at her from his place on a rose-pink davenport, the newspaper flat across his knees. “You’ll become used to it. Haven’t you ever been terrorized by a chef before?”
“No. The cook at our house is from Newark. I suppose she might terrorize the greengrocer some, but she was always nice enough to me.”
Against the wall behind the davenport was a bronze of Ariadne, nude and leaning against a rock, a hand covering her eyes. The metal curves of her captured the firelight, rounded hips and breasts and belly.
Madeleine said, “Can’t we adjust the schedule?”
“Why?” Jack asked, returning to the paper.
“I don’t know. Seven seems early to me for breakfast.”
“You’ll become used to it,” he said again.
She frowned at her hands, at her fingers testing out the notes. She thought of rising at six every morning no matter how late the night had gone before, of crossing that enormous bedroom to the bell pull, of getting dressed in the boudoir, and saw in her mind another woman doing all of those things: Ava happy to wake with the dawn, or before it. Ava happy with the schedule, with the moody French chef.
“I just want it to be a little later, that’s all. Will it disrupt the entire household if we push it to eight?”
Jack didn’t look up. “You can ask him.”
Madeleine focused on the keys, the halting lullaby. For the first time in weeks, she wondered what her family was doing right now; if Katherine was at home in the cozy drawing room with their parents, or maybe out at the theater, laughing and having a fine time, not at all worried about having to rise at six in the morning to avoid cold toast.
“Madeleine.”
She swallowed, looked up. Jack was studying her with an expression she knew well; she’d puzzled him in some way, and he was going to pick it apart until he understood her again.
That concentration. That scrutiny that pierced straight through her, that boiled through her veins and brought every little insecurity right to the surface of her skin in a hot-and-cold blush.
He said, “How about we try a small reception before Christmas? Nothing too formal, not yet, but maybe a Sunday luncheon for a few important friends? It would be good practice for you for the larger events we’ll host later on, the business dinners and balls and so forth. You’ll have a chance to learn for yourself that monsieur isn’t such an ogre.”
She opened her mouth to agree, found her voice didn’t want to work. So she nodded instead, pasting on a smile. He smiled in return and flipped the paper back up to keep reading.
“We can have diamond rings as the favors, perhaps.”
Madeleine, flabbergasted, found her voice. “Diamond rings? For a luncheon?”
“We’ve done it before,” he said casually. “They were a great success.”
We’ve done it before. We.
Jack dropped the paper once more. “Or a brooch, or a pin. A gold stickpin with our initials intertwined, to formally mark ourselves as a couple. It wouldn’t be difficult to commission. Riker Brothers or Tiffany could do it in a snap. What do you think?”
“I . . . I think that sounds quite brilliant.”
“Good. It’s settled. I’ll have Dobbyn give you a list of who to invite. I don’t think we should go above fifty, not this first time.”
“Of course,” she said, faint.
Madeleine took a few careful breaths, then began a new piece. Clair de Lune, with its deceptively simple beginning.
“Has Vincent gone out?” she asked the piano.
“He told me he’d be dining at his club tonight,” Jack said, and Madeleine nodded again, following her fingers on the ivory and ebony, the honeyed light that flicked, so tricky, across the keys.
* * *
Vincent’s bedroom was on the third floor, in a secluded corner that overlooked the back of the property. She knew this because she’d asked the butler that afternoon, pretending she was attempting to memorize the layout of the mansion, as it would be far too easy to become lost in these fields of rooms. And at least that last part was true.
She walked quickly, trying to keep her footsteps soundless against the floor, which was sometimes possible (if there were rugs), and sometimes not (marble and hardwood). There were portraits all along the walls she passed, flat dead faces with flat dead staring eyes, but none of them was the right one. It made sense that Vincent had claimed his mother’s image; she should have guessed that if there did still exist a record of Ava in this mansion, it would be secreted in his room.
She did not knock on his door. She assumed it was his; it matched the butler’s description, and when she opened it and stepped inside, it seemed like a bedroom. There was moonlight enough coming in from the windows to make out the sleigh bed, the armoire.
She found the switch for the electric lights. The sudden glare of the chandeliers made her close her eyes, open them again.
Another giant chamber. Silk mandarin curtains, broad Persian rugs. A discarded bow tie had been tossed over the back of an armchair; a top hat sat upright at the foot of the bed. They were the only signs the room was occupied. Every other inch of it was just more of the chateau, rich and cold and spotless.
The walls were chockablock with paintings. Landscapes, seascapes, horses, churches, nudes. By fate or intuition, she found the one of Ava at once, because it was directly above the nightstand by the bed, larger than all the rest.
Luminous.
She had been painted as a Roman goddess, standing in a flowing tunic of royal blue, one leg flexed, a copper-red wrap falling gracefully from her white shoulders. She wore a diadem of green stones and held an empty chalice in one hand, gazing directly at the viewer with a subtle, intrigued smile. Madeleine had never seen her predecessor’s face before, but there was no question it was she, because her other hand rested atop the tousled head of a young boy who was clearly Vincent, also in robes, looking up at his mother with an expression of reverence. They posed in bright light against a pillar of stone; just behind it stood a third figure in shadow, tall and lean. It was more a suggestion of Jack than a portrayal of him, but there he was, his face angled away, his head bent. The imperfect outline of his shape melted into a background of clouds and sky. Even little Vincent seemed less than his mother, fuzzier, a visual device meant to indicate where one should look.
At Ava, of the rippling chestnut hair and cupid’s bow lips.
Ava, with her long neck and flawless skin and sloping shoulders, and dark doe eyes that held Madeleine’s own with the confidence of the very rich, the very lovely, the very talented and unique.
Madeleine returned that gaze a minute longer, then turned around and crept away.
CHAPTER 15
December 1911
Manhattan
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Goelet regretfully decline the polite invitation of Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob Astor for Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mr. and Mrs. G. W. Vanderbilt II regret that an absence from town will prevent them from accepting the kind invitation of Col. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor for Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs regrets that she is unable to accept the polite invitation of Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob Astor for Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mr. and Mrs. William Church Osborn regret that they must decline the kind invitation of Col. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor for luncheon on Sunday, December seventeenth.
Mr. and Mrs. August Belmont regret that a previous engagement prevents them from accepting Col. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s kind invitation for Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mr. and Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller must regretfully decline the kind invitation of Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob Astor for Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mr. James B. Duke very much regrets that he cannot accept Col. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s kind invitation for luncheon on Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Fortune Ryan regret that a prior engagement prevents them from accepting the polite invitation of Col. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor for Sunday afternoon, December seventeenth.
Mr. and Mrs. John Pierpont Morgan, senior, regret that they will be unable to attend the luncheon of Colonel and Mrs. John Jacob Astor on Sunday, December seventeenth . . .
CHAPTER 16
We were roundly snubbed. I don’t mind admitting that to you now, although at the time, it was a reality we danced around, your father and I. A blank space had opened between us, this conclusive fact of our apartness, and neither of us could quite think of how to breach it. Or even if it was ours to breach. Anyway, it’s not much of a secret these days, that cocoon of isolation the Four Hundred spun around us after we ventured off the Noma. I honestly can’t claim it came as a surprise—at least, not to me.
But I don’t think Jack had ever noticed how many versions of she’s certainly not Ava, is she? were exchanged behind our backs. The whispers of the Knickerbockers never wormed their way into his ears the way they did mine.
The press delighted in noting our unusual lack of festivities, especially so close to the holidays. Why, the colonel and Mrs. Ava Astor had entertained so grandly in the years before! They had opened their mansion and their wallets and the legendary stories of French champagne and resplendent dinners and costume balls had become etched in the memories of anyone who mattered, and a great many more who did not. It was, after all, an Astor tradition to throw such glamourous parties, those lavish fêtes, just as the Mrs. Astor used to do.
; How strange that her son and his teenaged bride had shunned the idea of even an informal Christmas reception. Perhaps the new Mrs. Astor wasn’t feeling quite well.
And I wasn’t. Not really.
The mansion was cold. I was cold. Every single day was cold and raw and lonely, even the ones when my family came to visit, or some of my old Junior League friends (their eyes wide as soon as they walked in, trying not to gawk at the relentless cascade of ostentation and gloom).
Jack told me to give his people some time. “They’ll come around,” he said. “They must.”
But I didn’t see why they should. They were his set, not my own. I had nothing to offer them beyond myself, and they had already made their feelings about that resoundingly clear.
The jewelry safe in my boudoir still holds nearly forty stickpins of solid gold, untouched, each engraved with our initials, J&M, lovingly intertwined.
I suppose I can always sell them for scrap.
December 1911
Manhattan
The fire was tall and blazing in the south morning room, lending the brèche blanche marble hearth an ambered, shifting glow. Even with the logs burning so hot, even with the winter sun outside shining so bright, the chamber remained shivery, the heat lost to the immense corners and lofty ceiling, or eaten up, perhaps, by all the cuivre doré, gold and gleaming, that seemed to decorate every last inch of space.
