Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  Dedication

  For Francesca,

  and all the wild girls

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Two

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part Three

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Part Four

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Anna Godbersen

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  The Maiden Voyage of the Princess

  by Dame Edna Sackville

  You have all heard by now of the Princess of the Pacific, the Farrar Line’s newest and most impressive ship. But only I, dearest readers, can give you the full story of her maiden voyage, for today I sail on the celebrated ship into the open ocean, that vast and magical field of water—a landscape by turns starkly brilliant under the rays of a fierce sun, or dizzying, changeable, windswept. Who cares about all that, you may wonder, when there are three formal dining rooms, a Turkish bath, and a ladies’ couturier on board? Fear not, I will give every detail, my sweet ones, the landscape and the parties. It is sure to be a romance to thrill the heart and elevate the soul, this voyage to the very edge of the world. But, like many a sea voyage, the plot began to thicken while still on land. . . .

  The land in question is the farthest west you can go in our country, a backwater called San Francisco (named by the Spanish, who tromped through in one or another of the previous centuries), where a fortune of two generations is considered old money. This is a town where you always smell the sawdust, not to mention the low tide. I descended upon the place along with many of the fine people you are familiar with from my columns—the Misses Van Huysen, Emma and Lucille, resplendent in the couture they acquired over the summer in Paris; the Marquis and Marquise of Brenn; members of the most eminent families of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston; and descendants of the grand old lines of Europe. The first voyage of the Princess is one of those events that bring all the best people together, for it promises lavish parties and gossip galore. (I suffer for you reader; I do, I do.)

  The Farrar Line, which has been responsible for moving stylish people across the Atlantic for over fifty years now, spared no expense in publicizing the Princess. It is well known that she has a swimming pool and tailor and wireless on board. That there is an indoor tennis court and a top-deck observatory. Over the summer it was a kind of competition amongst the sporting set to get on the passenger list. And for no one more so than the unattached ladies of the best families. . . .

  The scions of the Farrar fortune will be making the trip, too, you see. The elder Farrar son, Carlton (first in line to succeed his father, that eminent businessman and philanthropist Winthrop Farrar II, as head of the family concern), is here with his wife, the renowned beauty Camilla née Jones. But more exciting to the rest of us: the younger son, the one the columnists call Fitz (just as dashing as he sounds, I can assure you!). He is popular among the gents for his legendary explorations (serialized by my competitor The Evening Phoenix, but we forgive him) and with the ladies for cutting such a fine figure and for being such a riotous good time. These young men are thought to be one of the main attractions on a ship that boasts many unheard-of luxuries and entertainments. The charter is San Francisco–Honolulu–Sydney, and as has been much reported, the young Fitz will be leading an expedition into the interior of Australia upon arrival.

  The night before the ship’s departure, a grand fete was held at the Palace Hotel for all the first-class passengers, and while it was at first a staid affair, soon well-dressed people who were not on the guest list began to arrive and I got to witness firsthand the spirit of this barbarous coast. San Francisco society is not at all as formal as we are back East, and certainly not as sophisticated as in the grand houses of Europe. Even among this rather raucous group of young millionaires, one young woman stood out. Not on account of her stature—she was rather slight—but because she seemed entirely indifferent to the rules of decorum usually observed in such rooms. She was dressed impeccably—I could not fault her there—but she talked loudly, ordered champagne rather than waiting to have it brought to her, moved around the room to whomever she found interesting, expressed frank opinions, and was generally conspicuous.

  And yet Fitzhugh Farrar could not take his eyes away.

  Presently, Fitz and this wild girl began to dance together, and with such energy that many saw not only the lady’s stockings but also her underskirts. It must be admitted that the heir to the shipping fortune drank more than his older brother thought proper. It was a true “scene,” as we say, though nothing compared with what I expect shall come next.

  For Vidalia Marin Hazzard—that is the peculiar name this rogue of a girl’s parents gave her—has just been added to the passenger list of the Princess, having taken a very fine suite on the promenade deck. I wondered, as any reasonable person might, if there was a story in this sudden thirst for travel. . . .

  One

  For Vidalia Marin Hazzard—age seventeen years and four months, height five feet one, with eyes a color as shifting as fool’s gold—the ocean possessed no special romance. To be certain, the silver, shining sea was a perfectly beautiful backdrop to a picnic in the Presidio, or an evening’s entertainment at the Cliff House, but she was a girl with feet firmly planted on the earth and had never thought anything much of the vast waterway that was her own backyard. But now, in the hustle of the Embarcadero, seeing the gleaming side of the ship that rose from the gray-green surface of the San Francisco Bay like a monument, like a towering city unto itself, she felt her breath snatched and her spine tingling and she had to admit that maybe it was impressive enough to merit so much frenzied anticipation.

  “Vida!” cried one of the scrum of reporters gathered at the waterfront to document an event that had been the talk of the town for some months already. He had to shout to be heard over the brass band and the confetti shooter and the ubiquitous exclamations of wonderment. “Miss Hazzard!”

  His shouting cut into the fog that resided somewhere between her forehead and the backs of her eyes, and she remembered what a hideous quantity of champagne she had drunk the night before. But a headache was no excuse not to leave a winning final impression on the people of her hometown. She turned in her artful way and by the time she met the young man’s eye her mouth had assumed a magnificent smile. She clutched a fistful of her opulently tiered ivory skirt (White for sailing, she had decided that morning, after her parents had told her to board the famous ship or settle quickly on a local boy to marry before she ruined her reputation once and for all) and placed her other hand on the narrow of her waist. A camera’s flash went poof. “Yes?” she said to no member of the assembled in particular.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “It’s a little small, don’t you think?” The young man laughed and she shrugged and went on in a confessional tone: “Oh w
ell, I guess it is a little wonderful after all.”

  “Not more wonderful than you.”

  “You know very well that I would never say any such thing—I am never immodest,” she replied, and winked. For it was one of her charms that she knew who she was, and never tried to hide that she wasn’t really very modest at all. The reporter, who had been with the Chronicle almost a year now, and whose favor she had bought with little favors like opera tickets and baskets of big ripe strawberries from the Salinas Valley, knew it, too. He had been crucial in keeping certain stories about her out of the press, and getting others into print—which was one of the reasons it had taken until this morning for her parents to become fully aware what a wild kind of life she had managed to live right under their noses.

  Her immodesty had nothing whatsoever to do with beauty, however. She was not a beauty, as she was quite aware. Her chin was an imprecise proposition and her nose was broad and she was too short to stand out in a crowd. But she had a gift for putting herself together so as to bring attention to her best features. That, and how to let the light of her spirit shine through the pale skin of her face so that everyone who met her came away with the impression that she was the loveliest girl in all of California.

  Why try to stand out in a crowd, when you could rise above like a shining star?

  That was Vida Hazzard’s personal philosophy, and on a fine, late-October day, which had dawned bright and a little misty and was now absolutely blue, her way of doing things was on display to a rather dizzying degree. Her late-night adventures had appeared in the early edition of the paper, and her parents had fretted and paced, and she had lain on a chaise longue with a cold compress on her forehead wishing very much that they would shut up. It was hard enough, without their pacing and fretting, to decide if it was better to marry the most malleable boy she knew (and carry on as she had been, albeit with a new ring and a new name) or leave town and try to save her reputation that way.

  In the end it hadn’t really been much of a choice. She wasn’t interested in the ocean, but she was interested in all the places she had not yet seen. The world was big—so she had been told—and she had never been content to sit still long.

  Leave town it was.

  The papers had been calling the Princess the “Millionaire’s Ship of the West,” to rival the White Star Line’s grand floating worlds that moved every sort of person and package between Boston and New York and the ports of the Mediterranean and the British Isles. The people her parents socialized with had talked of little else all summer, which had stoked her contrariness. She had taken every opportunity to insist that this going on about a boat was enough hot air to fly a balloon. The notion became quite fixed with her, and she insisted to her parents—who were perfectly nice in their way, but were prone to put too much stock in the general prattle—that she would never set foot on such a grand lie. Yet she had a weakness for parties—the party she could not resist. She insisted they go to the party for the Princess’s inaugural passengers at the Palace Hotel, the night before the ship sailed, just to see all their acquaintances who’d been taken in by this Farrar Line racket behaving like suckers.

  “All right,” her father had agreed. This was yesterday afternoon. He told his butler to go steam his white tie and tails. Her father didn’t follow the news unless it pertained to his business, but he, like his daughter, enjoyed a party. “Where, by the way, does this ship of fools go?”

  Yesterday it hadn’t mattered, and Vida had told him so. Today it did.

  Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Hazzard—whose family holdings originated with bitumen, but were now comprised of all sorts of industry—had purchased the tickets that morning. They had been in a high tizzy over the swirling stories of what a scene their daughter had made the night before. “She’s ruined, she’s ruined,” her mother had wailed into her cocoa, and her father had patted his wife’s shoulder and told her that all could be solved by a swift engagement. They sent cards to several friends to say they planned to only go so far as Hawaii, where they did have a few business interests to see to. But they told Vida to pack for a longer trip—if everything went according to plan, she would be engaged by Honolulu, and it would be only logical for all three Hazzards to travel on to Australia with her intended.

  If Vida became engaged to Fitzhugh Farrar, they reasoned, the stories of her wildness the night before would soon be forgotten. If she did not become engaged soon, however, she risked dying an old maid. The whole brouhaha seemed rather humorous to Vida, but if it assuaged her parents’ anxieties she would go along with it, and have a little adventure in the name of getting respectable.

  “Will you remember me on your voyage?”

  Vida had almost forgotten the young man from the Chronicle, so digressive and flighty were her thoughts. It really had been a very late night. “You know I will,” she said. “Don’t you go forgetting me, either.”

  “Come back soon. It will be a boring town without you.”

  She didn’t want to agree too readily and so gave him an oblique little smile and a lazy wink, and let her gaze roam over the gathered crowd, many of whom she knew from the early days of her much-remarked-upon social career. There, with elbows on the rail of the promenade, was Theodore Grass—the first boy to propose marriage to her. His father was a newspaper publisher, and Theodore had been educated back East, but he possessed an unwavering love for his hometown, and though he was as adoring of Vida as a girl might rightly hope, she knew he could not keep up with her. He was perfectly content where he was, and there was so much she yearned to see. And there, sitting on the second-floor terrace of a saloon, was Bill Halliday, the author of her third proposal, with a stormy quality in his eyes. She winced a little at the memory of Bill, with whom she’d had some fun—he drove his horses fast, and was on speaking terms with parts of the city that fine people like them were not supposed to visit. But his adventuring had only left her with a taste for more, and anyway, she had seen how his father’s same proclivity had dwindled the Halliday family fortune. And there too, leaning against a ticket agent’s kiosk, was Whiting de Young, who only last month she had warned with a flash of the eyes that he should not humiliate himself by trying to propose at all. He watched her now with a sad little smile, and she could see in his eyes that he half expected her to change her mind and come running to him. For Whit was all things: rich, jocular, adoring, and descended from two of the most prosperous and prominent families in San Francisco. If he had come to her father with a ring, she knew that she would have had to marry him. Her parents would have insisted. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him, and she was even rather fond of him.

  And that was how she knew.

  That was how she knew for sure that marrying well in San Francisco was not enough for her, and that she would always be vaguely dissatisfied with her lot, always wondering if there was something better going on elsewhere. That she would have nothing to do about it but to stay out too late and get boring people to tell gossipy stories about her the next day. She was a huntress—her hunting grounds were drawing rooms and polo fields, it was true; but that did not make her any less a huntress. Now, standing alongside the sheer cliff of the Princess (which she had derided for months as not worth talking about), she shuddered with some presentiment of the future.

  For a moment she saw clearly that her fate and the fate of this ship were entwined.

  After all, if she had not bothered to argue about its worthiness, she would not have made a spectacle of herself, and would not be here now.

  “You can come aboard,” said a familiar voice at her ear. “It’s almost time.”

  Vida squeezed the hand of her maid, Nora. Nora was a tall, bright-eyed girl with an upturned nose who had been her ally in all her stratagems since she had begun training for cotillion five years ago. They moved together toward the plank. It had a fancy rope gate for a railing, and was made of handsome wood, but it was still a plank. As Nora guided Vida upward toward the little door in the side o
f the ship several stories above the pier, Vida felt how it swayed with the wind, and her heart bounced with a thrilling fear.

  “Wobbly, isn’t it?” said Nora, who had been this way already to escort Vida’s several suitcases.

  “Well, yes,” Vida replied drily. “Though I may be wobbly for other reasons.”

  Upward they went through the decks, past uniformed sailors and early-boarding travelers, past vast quantities of starched sheets and pillows, glassware and dinnerware, past salons, past dining rooms and observation decks, up interior and exterior stairways, all that brass and oak and freshly painted white iron, all of it brand new and gleaming and as suitable for a grand ball as any millionaire’s house. Nora was urging her on and on until suddenly they were outside again, on the polished planks of the top deck of the Princess, with all the city spread out beneath them.

  When she had been a part of it, Vida had sensed the largeness of the crowd, but she hadn’t really understood until she looked down on it from above. Beyond the piers that jutted from the Embarcadero was San Francisco, looking very much like a diorama city constructed by a child out of pastel blocks of Turkish delight. As Vida strode toward the rail, Nora placed the scarlet scarf in her hand; it was half unfurled by the time she reached the edge. For a moment, Vida forgot to breathe. She was farther up from the pier than she could have imagined, and had not been prepared for the dizzy feeling that overcame her when she looked down from on high. Then she remembered herself, and gazed out at the crowd, all of her friends and acquaintances reduced by distance to miniatures.

  “There he is,” said Mrs. Redford Flynn to her daughter—they were standing close to the rail a few feet away, both in enormous fur coats.

  Vida’s skin prickled at the word “he.” She knew who he was.

  Down on the pier was the young man that Mrs. and Miss Flynn had been referring to. Unlike the other men, he had forgone a navy or white suit for a khaki getup, and he was talking to a number of reporters and curious crowd members who had formed a circle around him. He cut a trim and rakish figure, and even at a distance Vida recognized the playful darting of his smile and the aristocratic line of his jaw. She had observed both quite a bit last night, at much closer range. As anyone who read the papers knew, this was Fitzhugh Farrar, the second and handsomer son of Winthrop Farrar, who controlled the Farrar shipping conglomerate.