Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  No. 17 had been Elizabeth’s house to him, a place where he went at first with a lukewarm sense of obligation and later with a weighty sense of his own poor behavior. Before that it had been just another well-appointed landmark on the tour of properties owned by the Old New York families whose gentility was becoming more and more outdated every day. On that Tuesday evening, it was only Diana’s house to him. All the rooms but hers could burn for all he cared. That low feeling that he had been living under was gone. The central facts upon which that feeling was based—that Elizabeth was dead, that he was to blame, that youth was fragile, that he could not be with the one girl who made matrimony seem attractive—had been dispelled by a few words. There was only one person with whom Henry might have wanted to share this great good news, and, conveniently enough, she was the sister of the girl who wasn’t dead.

  He could not have been sure how long it took him to arrive there. It felt like no time, and yet it must have been forever, because somewhere in between the limestone edifice on Fifth and the simple brown town house on Gramercy, all of his mistakes had been erased and he was again a man without regrets. The last and only time he had seen Diana’s bedroom he had reached it by the trellis, but he had now so fully recovered his uncircumspect self that he walked straight up to the front door and found that it opened easily at his touch. This was all the invitation he needed, and into the darkened foyer he went. He continued on to the second floor, taking no notice of details, and there he chose the door with light under the jamb. There was no knocking this time, either. He turned the knob and went in.

  The little room was cast in warm lamplight, which illuminated the damask walls and the bookshelves and the bear rug by the unlit fire. Beside it was an old wing chair, where Diana sat in a pile of white laces with her dark ringlets in heaps, looking fixedly at a book. Perhaps she assumed that the open door meant only the intrusion of her maid, for she didn’t immediately look up from the page. Her legs were disguised under an old quilt and her eyes continued along the lines of her novel as though nothing in the world were so important. When she reached the end of her paragraph she laid the book in her lap and looked up. She realized that it was not her maid, and then the whites of her eyes expanded and her mouth opened as though she might scream.

  Henry was at her side immediately, his hand over her mouth. “Don’t,” he said in a gentle voice.

  Her eyes widened, but he must have conveyed something to her with his tone, because some of the anguish and surprise went out of them. There remained, in her great brown irises, a kind of apprehensive wondering, however, and at last she said, with quietness to match his own: “I can’t imagine what you would be doing here.”

  “I am here.” His voice was full of absurd good luck, and he gave her a lopsided smile that he thought might convey how pleased he was by this fact.

  She only went on staring at him in the same way. “I can see that.”

  “Di…” Henry fell to one knee and reached for her hand, but she was quicker than he and drew it away.

  “Our last meeting didn’t leave much room for friendliness, Mr. Schoonmaker. If you really think you have a chance of seducing me on any random dark night you choose, I can assure you that you are wrong.”

  Henry was confused by this hard, cold version of Diana, and he paused and tried to draw on his vast experience, hoping he somehow already knew how to deal with such a situation. But he had never had an experience like this one before. He opened his mouth a few times but failed to produce any sentences. He decided to try taking up her hand again, and at last she allowed him to—albeit with a certain cold disinclination—and then he finally found the words. “Elizabeth is alive,” he said.

  Diana closed the book in her lap and sat up straight. She left her hand in his—a positive sign, which he found himself ridiculously pleased with—but she went on staring at him searchingly. When she at last whispered, “I know,” some of the thaw was off her voice.

  “You know?” This was a shock, but Henry was too elated to really parse it. “But that morning, after you came to the greenhouse…I saw Elizabeth…I thought she…might not have wanted to live—”

  “No,” Diana said cautiously. “She’s alive. And quite happy, I think.”

  “Well, it’s all right, then, don’t you see? I mean, if she’s all right, if she isn’t dead, if she never wanted to marry me anyway and that was some colossal mistake, then you and I can be together. You and I can—” Here he broke off and allowed the arch of a dark eyebrow to complete his thought. He realized that his knee, digging into the floorboards, pained him, and he sat down on the floor beside her chair. “You should have told me a long time ago.”

  The rose was returning to Diana’s cheek, but the way she was looking at him still suggested caution. There was something almost unbearably poignant about seeing her here in her small room, with its salmon-colored walls and books, the room where she had been a little girl. “It’s a secret. I promised Elizabeth. If anyone were to find out…” She pulled back her hand again all of a sudden and brought the lace collar of her dressing gown in close over the skin of her neck. “How did you find out?”

  “Penelope told me. She just told me, less than an hour ago. My stepmother was giving a dinner party—”

  “What is it between you and Penelope?” Diana had stood up, and she moved away from Henry across the floor toward the narrow bed, with its headboard upholstered in pale pink silk.

  That Diana might feel jealous of Penelope had not occurred to him. Still, his sense of lightness and emancipation had not diminished and he stood and placed his hands in his coat pockets. He gave her a long, serious look, holding her gaze with composed affection. “There is nothing between Penelope and me,” he enunciated.

  “Nothing?” Diana answered bitterly. “How could I possibly believe that? I’m not blind, you know, and I’m not totally out of things. I see how she looks at you. And I know what you have been.”

  “The way she looks at me doesn’t say anything about my feelings for her, which are exactly as I’ve told you. They are nothing. Haven’t I always been honest with you?” he went on in a softer tone. “I was the one who told you what had passed between Penelope and me, so why would I lie now?”

  “Because you’re a bounder, I suppose.”

  Diana’s face was full of outrage, but her breath was stuck and her heart seemed to be almost visibly beating. Henry could see plainly that she was at war with herself and that she didn’t know what to believe. He went on looking at her with all the weight of his sincerity and then he moved toward her. He took her little face in his hands and kissed her open mouth.

  The kiss lasted a long time, and when it was over she whispered, “You’re not a bounder.”

  “It’s all right.” Henry began to play with one of the curls behind her ear. “Your sister’s alive, Di, which means there’s no tragedy here, no grand betrayal. If we wanted we could—”

  He was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell from below, which was faint but definite, as it repeated itself over the silence in the house.

  Diana’s eyes went around the room and then met his. There was trepidation in her gaze, and when the bell sounded a third time, she said, “Maybe it’s Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth?” This seemed unlikely to Henry, but then, his expectations were being so quickly overturned that he was disinclined to fully dismiss any possibility. “Wouldn’t she just let herself in? That’s what I did, and I’m not even related….”

  Another girl, coming on the possibility of being discovered with a man to whom she was neither engaged nor married, would have gone into an agony of self-recrimination and wrung her hands at the specter of her coming ruin. Not Diana. There was a bite of the lip and an extension of her white neck and then she took Henry’s hand and led him to her door. She opened it deftly and they moved out of the room in silence. Down the hall they went, her arm extended backward to pull him, her hand gripping his with affectionate confidence. She stopped them just bef
ore the top of the stair, so that they were obscured from down below by a wall. A light had gone on in the foyer.

  “Mr. Cairns,” said a female voice that Henry didn’t recognize, “we haven’t seen you in such a long time. What brings you here, and so very late at night?”

  Diana looked back at him, and through the darkness he saw that the perfect roundness of her lips was mouthing, “Aunt Edith.”

  “I’m very sorry for the impropriety, Miss Holland. I’ve just come from Boston and I would have arrived at a much more acceptable hour had not the weather taken a turn for the worse. I have been meaning to pay you a visit since I heard of Miss Elizabeth’s unfortunate passing, but business detained me. I have recently been hearing reports of your family’s distress and I—”

  “Mr. Cairns, please, there is no need for you to explain yourself. I will have the maid make up a bed for you. In the meantime, go into the drawing room. Mrs. Holland is ill, far to ill too receive you. But I will get Miss Di and…”

  Edith continued her speech downstairs, but at the mention of her name Diana turned, startled. She moved in close to Henry without any definite purpose and lifted her little chin upward. The shadows falling across her features only made him yearn to see her more clearly, and he had to look away to keep himself from lifting her up and pressing her small body into the wall with his.

  “You have to go,” Diana whispered.

  “I know. I’ll come back soon. I’ll come back every day hoping to get you alone.”

  “Good.” She gestured unhappily toward her room. “The trellis…”

  Henry had met before with the trellis to Diana’s bedroom, and it had ended with bruises and scratches and a wedding date being moved up. “No, not that again.” He could not stop himself from giving her a knowing little grin, despite the danger.

  Diana pressed her lips together and her eyes darted. “The servants’ stairs, then.”

  She gestured to the door. Henry had been so absorbed in the facts of her skin and the glitter of her eyes that he did not notice, until just then, that the conversation downstairs had come to an end and that there were footsteps falling on the stairs. He moved quickly to the door Diana had indicated and without even the luxury of a backwards glance went down the narrow, dark servants’ stairs. He was concentrating on the sounds of feet above, going up, and so didn’t consider what he might find at the bottom. That was how he came stealthily into the kitchen and saw the back of a maid in a coarse black dress, bending over a stove.

  She was tired—this was evident by the stoop of her shoulders—and her red hair was only partially restrained as it fell down her back. She must have been awakened by the bell, and seemed to be going about her task of making tea and setting up a tray with a slowness that would not have been tolerated earlier in the day, or in another house. Henry crept along the wall, stepping mindfully across the old wooden planks of the floor. His thoughts were moving so quickly and his blood was so astir that he was shocked that his presence wasn’t deafening to her. But she kept at her work with a sleepy diligence, and Henry managed to go out into the hall without her noticing him.

  The foyer was lit by a gas lamp but was empty of any human presence. Henry was swift, and in a moment he was back out in the night air, moving steadily north past the iron gate of the pleasant park, which was now covered in a thickening blanket of white. He was breathing rapidly. He had escaped unnoticed. A few moments ago he and the girl who owned all of his affections had been at great risk, but the risk had passed. The improbability of this only lightened his mood and reminded him that the world was his to play in. He hadn’t felt so free in a long time.

  He crossed the street, its white sheet of new-fallen snow reflecting the purplish light of the street lamps, and walked north along the park. It was at the northwest corner that he came across a small band of men wrapped up in coats and scarves and caroling with all the power of their stout bellies, “And heaven and nature sing! And heaven and nature sing! And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing!” He paused and watched them, feeling in the moment as though they had been placed there with the express purpose of voicing his inner exaltations. One of the men noticed Henry and immediately laced arms with him, pulling him along with the group as they headed toward Fifth.

  “I had no idea it was so near Christmas,” Henry said, when the song was over. He didn’t recognize any of the men, though they were dressed well enough. They had apparently been to another party before this one.

  “Oh, yes, it’s the twentieth tomorrow,” replied the man who had drawn him in jovially. He reached into his coat and produced a metal flask. “Any excuse for some brandy—do have some,” he added with a slight slurring of the final word.

  “Much obliged.” Henry took the flask and happily swigged to the lifting of his cares and the restoration of his girl.

  “Say, friend,” the man went on genially, “do you know any other carols?”

  Henry had suffered through caroling several times in his life, but at that moment he was unable to remember any song besides “Joy to the World,” and said so.

  The little band roared at this, and then picked up the song again from the beginning. They were louder this time and Henry felt its message all the more. He took another swig and began to sing along, too, as they moved joyously onto the avenue, thoughts of Diana and her glossy lips and their future together dancing in his head.

  Twenty One

  With our many modern conveyances, arrivals late at night and early in the morning are highly avoidable, as any polite house guest well knows. A hostess cannot always select her guests according to their manners, however, and should make herself presentable and gracious at whatever hour is required.

  ––VAN KAMP’S GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING FOR LADIES OF HIGH SOCIETY, 1899 EDITION

  WHEN DIANA ENTERED HER FAMILY DRAWING ROOM late on a Tuesday evening it was with a composed appearance her older sister might have strived for. She wore a simple black dress that circled in to display her small waist but disguised her other physical gifts, and her hair was more neatly in its place than it had been all evening. She carried herself with quiet dignity across the carpet to the unlit fireplace where her aunt Edith was waiting as though engaged in some kind of performance, and indeed it seemed to Diana that several layers of artifice would be required to disguise the emotions she felt within. Henry loved her again; her whole body was beating with it.

  “Mr. Cairns,” she said, extending her hand but letting go of his grip before he could kiss it. Snowden Cairns had been her father’s occasional business partner and sometime fellow adventurer. The poor man, she thought. He was looking at her so earnestly, and she knew that her skin was lit up like some Hudson River sunset and that her pupils were dark and wide. “It’s been so long.”

  “It has, a fact I regret. I hope you received the letters of condolence that I sent after your father’s passing? And news of your sister’s untimely end has recently reached me. You must accept my deepest apologies for not being here for either funeral…. I have been traveling, and there are times when returning to the eastern seaboard is too complicated even on the gravest occasions.”

  Diana gestured for him to sit, and she herself moved backward into the faded bergère chair beside the one in which her aunt sat. Snowden went on saying kind things about her family, but she was having difficulty following every word. It wasn’t that Snowden didn’t seem earnest and well meaning, and though she had always thought of him, when she thought of him at all, as a friend of her father’s, he did not look nearly old enough to play the part. His nose was short and blocklike and his eyes, which shifted from green to brown, were set far apart under straight, thick brows. His face was not unhandsome, despite its appearance of having weathered a great deal of time out of doors. He had thick, preternaturally blond hair that rose back from his forehead on either side of a middle part, and he made a nice presentation of himself. But he was not Henry. He was only the reason that she was not with Henry now.

  She had b
een reliving the sensations of that unexpected kiss when she noticed that her visitor was still standing. “How is your mother?” he asked, his tone gentle and considerate.

  “She is very ill,” Diana replied, perhaps with more irritation than she had intended. She looked at her aunt for confirmation of this fact; Edith’s concerned eyes moved from Diana’s to Mr. Cairns and then she nodded gravely.

  “Well, no wonder…” he answered, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It’s freezing in here. I am surprised you are not taken ill yourself.”

  “We…” Diana colored and paused. “We hadn’t been expecting anyone this late in the day.”

  She saw Snowden looking at the empty brass rack where the firewood was usually stored. She wanted to tell him that she was taking care of it—that in fact a fire had been built in her mother’s room and the kitchen and even her own room that day, thanks to her ingenuity—but of course, that would only lead to questions about where the money had come from. And her trip to East Sixteenth Street was not something she could reveal. They had owed so much money to the wood company that her earnings really hadn’t gone very far, so it was true that Claire was rationing it and was probably waiting to see how long Snowden planned to stay before she wasted any of it on a fire so late in the evening.

  “Miss Diana, if I may,” Snowden went on, moving toward her and crouching at her side. The proximity of his face did not make it any more attractive to her. “I have heard reports of your family’s misfortunes, and while I can scarcely believe it, having been so closely allied with those fortunes in the past, I am here to help in any way I can. You need not be proud with me.”

  Then he rose and moved swiftly to the bay windows that faced onto the street. He rapped on the pane, and Diana caught a glimpse of a private coach outside. A few minutes later Snowden’s valet was making a fire. Diana’s thoughts were too scattered, in that particular moment, to dwell on the peculiarity of Mr. Cairns’s traveling with firewood. The valet was dressed similarly to his employer, in workaday brown trousers and a waistcoat of worn black leather. Snowden’s shirt, however, was of slate gray silk, rather than thick, utilitarian cotton, and Diana could not help but note a gold bracelet at his cuff catching the light.