Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  “Good night to both of you then,” Mrs. Schoonmaker said, only now turning her focus away from the cards. She shot a look at Penelope. “Apologies from Mr. Schoonmaker; he was called to the club unexpectedly. Some political bore or other.”

  “Good night,” chorused the others.

  The two men walked toward the door. Once they were out in the hall, Henry turned to his friend as though he were bidding him farewell. Teddy risked a look backward and nodded as he handed Henry his hat. The two men shook hands and then walked past each other, Teddy moving in the direction of Henry’s rooms and Henry, the hat pulled down over his face, toward the Cutting carriage that was waiting by the curb.

  Twenty Nine

  Perhaps the Holland family is not so bad off as they say, for the late Mr. Holland’s business partner—Mr. Snowden Trapp Cairns—was seen squiring Miss Edith Holland and her niece Diana at Sherry’s last night. The light from their windows has, neighbors report, been uncommonly bright in the last few days. But will these developments stamp out the rumors of Elizabeth’s unfortunate fate, or will it fan them higher?

  —FROM CITÉ CHATTER, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1899

  “LADIES USUALLY DO NOT BELIEVE ME, BUT THE Yukon can be quite lovely in summer,” Snowden Cairns was saying as the remains of the broiled squab were being removed from the Hollands’ table. “The drifts of fuchsia fireweed, the lavender lupins, the daisies, the arnicas, all of them giving off their pungent perfume…and meanwhile the robins and woodpeckers making their music…”

  Diana’s softly rounded cheek was rested on her balled fist, and her lids were heavy. Her drowsiness was not, she was vaguely aware, what her mother had meant when she asked her to be nice to Snowden. But drowsiness was the only alternative she currently knew to a kind of wild agitation. She could hardly swallow a bite of food, her skin felt cold despite the many fires now burning in the hearths of No. 17, and her head was encircled in feverish heat. She was lovesick for any sign of Henry, and she now understood—as she had never before understood—how literally true that phrase could be. Snowden, her constant companion, did not make not seeing Henry any easier. He was a dull and repetitive conversationalist, she had decided over dinner the night before, and she had not yet revised her opinion.

  “Of course, that was before the stampede, before the boomtowns started appearing and the unsavory characters spilled off the ships in droves….”

  Snowden’s man had finished clearing the dinner things, and Edith, who was positioned on the other side of the table from Diana, was giving her a look. There lay between them new candles and piles of oranges and the old crochet table linens and what was left of the family silver.

  “Are you tired, Di?” her aunt asked her, interrupting their guest’s soliloquy. They had tacitly agreed to let him speak, since his retinue had gone about repairing the house, securing the kind of fare the Hollands had not consumed in months and positioning a decorated tree in the parlor and locating new pictures to fill the unfaded squares in the wallpaper. It would have taken something more than indifference to politesse not to listen to whatever he wanted to say.

  “Yes, Miss Di, you do look weary,” Snowden seconded with a tone of concern that she would have given many things not to be the beneficiary of.

  “I am,” she lied. “I am entirely fatigued. Perhaps it is the weather, or perhaps I am worn down by my gratitude,” she said with a sincerity that was strong but not strong enough to escape Edith’s notice. “So many things you have done for us!” she added quickly. “It rather overwhelms.”

  “Then you had better go to bed,” her aunt went on with a warning eye. Diana could never tell if it was the facial resemblance between herself and her aunt that made her feel understood at moments like these, or if she really was being empathized with.

  “Indeed, you have listened to enough of my boring stories.” Snowden gave her a smile that she supposed she might have found generous if she did not find his every gesture a tiresome intrusion on her thoughts. “Please don’t weary yourself further on my account. You were such a pleasure to dine with last night and tonight. I hope you will have the strength for many more meals in my company.”

  Diana managed a kind of smile and left the low-lit dining room with lowered eyes bearing only a lazy implication of regret. Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty, she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep, and that if she dreamed, she might then finally be with Henry. Earlier in the day, when Snowden’s retinue was carrying in crates of produce and bundles of firewood, she had managed to slip a bottle from one of the cases of wine. When she reached her own room, she thought, she would have a glass of it, and then she would become giddy and then hazy, and she would drift off soon enough. It had not occurred to her that she had no means of uncorking it, or that she didn’t even know how.

  She climbed the stairs indifferently, holding back her skirt. She paused with her hand on the brass knob and considered going back for a corkscrew but decided against it. If she ran into Snowden, there would be more odious conversing, and then she would never get back to her safe little room. When she opened the door she saw that such a trip had already been made unnecessary.

  For there Henry sat next to the opened bottle of wine. He had been so present in her thoughts that it seemed entirely rational for him to now be present in reality. It was only how much better he looked in person that needed getting used to, and that she absorbed soon enough. His face was set in a subtle, familiar smile, and his eyes were full of fire. He was wearing a black dinner jacket, and a shiny top hat rested in his lap. He was still, watching her, and yet every inch of him was animated. Diana leaned against the door behind her to close it and felt for the lock without diverting her gaze. She would not have trusted him to stay there if she had looked away.

  The light in the room came entirely from one lamp by her bed and the dying flames under the mantel. Henry was sitting next to the fireplace, in the wing chair with the worn gold upholstery, where she had imagined herself reading a few verses before that hopeful sleep. The embers lent his skin even more of a metallic glow than usual. She did not think that his dark eyes had blinked even once since she entered.

  “You’re in my chair,” she whispered.

  Then she gave up the support of the door and crossed to him, her feet falling across the white bearskin rug. She plucked the hat from his lap and placed it on her head, jauntily, and then she sat across Henry’s legs sidesaddle. He brought an arm around her and fixed his palm on the high, flat part of her thigh, his gaze unwavering. When she realized that she could smell him, she finally knew he was real.

  “I’d like to reply that you’re wearing my hat,” he said, “except that it’s not mine.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s Teddy Cutting’s.”

  His expression was unchanged, but she could hear the difference in the way he pronounced the name. It was not how he ordinarily would have pronounced it. Diana’s confusion was momentary, and then she remembered, in a rush, a room on East Sixteenth Street, a desperate feeling, and a gossip item that she herself had spitefully composed. She took the hat off.

  “Oh, you can’t think—”

  “No, but still I’d like you to tell me.”

  “That was a silly prank, Henry.” She tossed the hat toward the bed and fussed with her long, white skirt. “There’s nothing. It was when I thought that you and Penelope—”

  “Enough.”

  She watched the play of light in his eyes and decided that if Henry had felt jealousy over the Teddy incident, then she could truly let go of the emotions his past involvement with Penelope had caused her. She bent her face toward him and waited until his lips met hers. He brought his mouth to hers again and again, slowly and softly at first, but then with a growing urgency. His hands were in her hair, they were at the most siphoned part of her corset. She was only vaguely aware of the sound her heeled slippers made when they fell to the floor, one and then the other. It seemed very nat
ural that, as she knew somewhere in the margins of her consciousness, her hair was spilling down around her shoulders. Minutes had passed, but she had no idea how many, when he pulled her face back from his.

  “I love you.”

  He said it simply, quietly. He didn’t say those words as she had imagined them said so many times by characters in novels. He didn’t say them with desperation, with pleading, with futile rage or florid persuasion. He spoke without lasciviousness; he spoke only with the intention of being understood.

  Diana’s response was a smile that was radiant and beyond her control.

  “You know I never loved Penelope, and I never will.” She wasn’t sure she had ever seen his black eyes so devoid of mischief, so sincere. “It won’t seem right to people, you and me. They don’t know Elizabeth is alive—they’ll just think that I’ve replaced her with another horse from the same sire. Whatever position your family is in now, our affair won’t make it easier.”

  Diana raised her chin and held his gaze. “It’s right to me.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to do anything that made you feel—”

  But Diana had heard enough. She stopped Henry with a lasting, humid kiss. When it was over, she drew him down backward onto the bearskin rug. He propped himself on his elbow and looked at her for a long moment, in which she felt she knew what it was to be an artist’s model as she was studied. He reached for the open wine bottle, which had been sitting beside the chair, and took a long sip. Diana took it from him, and she too sipped, and after that there was no more discussion.

  Henry rose over her with careful hands and watchful eyes. He took off his jacket, and then he rolled back her stockings and examined her small feet. He kissed her on the ankles, and then he planted kisses up to the insides of her knees. She was trying to keep herself very still, and she found she had to remind herself to breathe. By the time their mouths met again she had lost all sense of the outside world, but she hardly cared.

  He asked her once more if she was sure, and she nodded that she was. She told herself she was.

  There was a stabbing kind of pain at first, and Diana briefly wondered if she were perhaps the first human woman born physically unable to commit original sin. But then Henry whispered to her and time passed—she would never know how much—and she found her body wanted to move against his in a way that she had never, even at her baddest moments, imagined herself moving.

  Later, at some remote part of the night, she woke to find Henry examining her naked shoulder. He watched her and she watched him back. She went down to the kitchen to get them water, but she mostly spent the rest of the hours before morning curled against his chest as tightly as possible.

  She couldn’t remember when her thoughts merged into sleep, but she knew exactly when she was awakened. There was the sound of the door handle turning in its groove, and then she opened her eyes to see her own bedroom bathed in morning light. It was sparkling white all around her, but all Diana could think was: I am not a virgin anymore. I am no longer a girl. Her body was different, too; it felt sore but experienced, like a body prepared for everything the world had to offer.

  Then the door swung against the warped wood planks and she looked up and into the face of her lady’s maid. Claire was holding a blue-and-white porcelain pitcher. Diana turned to where she was looking and saw Henry’s handsome, sleeping face beside her on the bearskin rug. His face looked even better in the morning, at close range. The fire had died down in the night. By the time she looked back at the door, it had been drawn shut. Thank goodness it was only Claire, she thought, and moved back into the warm, sleeping form beside her and let her eyelids flutter contentedly shut.

  Thirty

  The value of secrets is ever fluctuating, although ladies who have been in society for a long time learn that a secret kept can be worth more than a secret told.

  —MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

  LINA WALKED BETWEEN THE WHITE AND BROWN patches of lawn and the sparsely leaved trees of Union Square at a pace that was neither hurried nor careless. She walked like a girl wearing a new fur coat, which in fact she was. It was made of broadtail, with a high chinchilla collar. Tristan had helped her pick it out that morning. And she was trying to walk as she remembered Elizabeth Holland walking: as though she were sublimely indifferent to the cold, and to the passing, bundled girls who looked in wonder at the rich pelts she wore when out for a stroll, trailed by an obedient maid. She wasn’t really a maid, of course. But Lina had instructed her sister to walk behind her today at a cautious distance.

  “What if we see Mrs. Carr or one of the others?” she had explained, and Claire, giddy at the thought of her little sister socializing with such fine people, had agreed.

  “That is a very fine muff,” Claire said now. She was referring to the Persian lamb muff that Lina had purchased, what seemed a lifetime ago, with her Penelope money. Lina’s hands were protected by it now, as protected from the chill wind as a fine pair of white hands that had never seen a day of work might be.

  “Isn’t it?” Lina replied over her shoulder. The muff didn’t seem so special to her now that she had the coat. She liked to think that, framed by the collar, her neck appeared longer, more imperious, like the neck of a girl named Carolina. At moments like these, her feelings for Will dimmed slightly, and she thought that she could stand to be in New York just a little longer, to practice her manners that much more. Certainly passersby, noting the quality enveloping her long body, would read her faint freckles as exotic and her sage green eyes as too aloof to be categorized as green or gray. But it was the muff that Claire had noticed—and Lina, sensing a way to begin telling her tales of all her fantastic new friends, had lied. She’d said that Longhorn had given it to her, like he’d given her the coat.

  “You will have to be careful to take good care of it.”

  “Oh, I will.” For a reason Lina couldn’t quite pinpoint, this comment gave her a little shiver. Claire could not have meant to, but her warning reminded Lina how tenuous her grandeur was, even now that she had accepted Longhorn’s proposal. Tristan had admonished her again that morning for a failing she was beginning to care more about; he had reminded her how short-lived her social career would be if she did not win the friendship of some female other than Mrs. Carr. “I know how, after all.”

  “That is true.” They were moving forward, past wrought-iron benches, across the octagonal stone pavement, and Lina could hear the crunch of the remains of the last snow under her feet. It was too cold that day for a stroll, and so there were few people in the park. “I only wonder what Mr. Longhorn will expect in return for such a present.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t have to worry about that. Tristan says—”

  “Who’s Tristan?”

  Lina stopped walking and her irises rolled to the sky. The sound of his name was both confusing and pleasing to her. She hadn’t told her sister about Tristan when he was just a department store salesman, she certainly didn’t know how to explain now that she knew what he truly was. Or, rather, now she knew that he was more than he seemed. And also now that he had kissed her. When she imagined how she would begin such a story, she wondered if the whole thing didn’t sound a little mad. No, better not to bring up Tristan. She turned and took Claire—who looked almost surprised to have come face-to-face with her newly grand sister—by the arm.

  “I’ve talked so much about me.”

  “Oh, but I like hearing about all your new friends.” Claire, who was wearing a black cloth coat and a hat that matched it in color and age if not in style, smiled through her shivers. Her nose had grown almost painfully red. Lina drew her toward one of the benches and removed her muff. Over the tops of the leafless trees, they could see the high stone roofs of the buildings on the east side of the square.

  “Try it on,” she instructed. When Claire demurred, she continued with an “I insist.”

  Two female servants in plain coats were passing with goods from market
, and it was only once they had passed that Claire took the glossy black piece and considered it. She was slow to put it on, but once her hands had disappeared inside, a pleased expression began to take hold of her features.

  “You should keep it,” Lina said impulsively. As soon as she had spoken, the thought of losing the muff, which now seemed sentimentally like one of the first fine things she had purchased for herself, was terrible to her.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t, Lina, it’s yours—and anyway, what will Mr. Longhorn say when he sees you’re not wearing it?”

  Thus reminded of her lie, Lina began to feel that she didn’t deserve the stole to begin with. “He will wonder what’s happened to it,” she replied darkly, “and I will tell him that I must have been silly and left it somewhere, and then perhaps he will buy me a new one. Or perhaps he won’t. It will be a little test to see how deep his affection goes.”

  “Oh, Lina! You mustn’t be like that.” Claire smiled through her disapproval. “That would be such a Penelope Hayes thing to do.”

  Hearing that name out loud did not, at that moment, improve Lina’s idea of herself—in fact, it raised a glowering shame for being so recently in a position of peddling secrets—and so she brought the conversation in a different direction in the only way she could think of. “How is Diana? You know, I ran into her quite literally at the opera.”

  “Oh, yes, I know. I didn’t believe the Carolina Broad in the paper could possibly be you, until she confirmed it for me.” Claire looked around her, at the small park in its shades of gray with the skinny trees casting shadows even at midday. There was no one near them, and those at a distance had wrapped scarves and hats around their ears to protect themselves from the cold. She lowered her voice even so. “But you know, I am worried about her.”

  “About Diana?” Lina said. “I can’t imagine why—she never worries about anyone else.” Her sister gave her a look and she grudgingly added: “I only mean that she’ll be all right because she’s always been so good at watching out for herself.”