Relative Fortunes (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  “Glennis.” Winterjay spoke sharply. “I’m serious. I understand you’re upset, as we all are, but Chester is in charge here, and he’s dangerously close to losing patience with you and your reckless talk. You know what that means. You know what he can do.”

  She began to protest, then stilled as Winterjay pressed a second fingertip to her lips. In its wordless linger Julia sensed the more visceral warning. It worked. Glennis stifled whatever protest she had been about to utter. Winterjay cupped the back of her head and gave it an affectionate waggle. “Good girl. Let it go. Don’t make Naomi’s mistake.” He rose and slipped from the room as deftly as he had entered, smiling in quiet conspiracy to Julia as he eased the door shut behind him.

  Glennis reached for the glass of sherry Julia held out. “That’s all you need to know right there,” she said, her voice small and flat. “Be a good girl and button it. I’ve heard it a hundred times, Chester bellowing about how hard it was to keep Naomi quiet. He actually used to drown her out, pounding on the piano keys when she was arguing about something. He wouldn’t stop until she did. If she made even a single peep, bang! A fist on the keys. No wonder she couldn’t take any more.”

  Julia’s spine tightened. She saw Gerald’s tear-streaked face, his father singing a hoarse “God Save the King” at the top of his lungs. Whenever Gerald had tried to speak of the hellish trenches, his father had badgered him to stand to attention and join the raucous din.

  Julia set down her glass. “And yet she did make a peep, didn’t she? Isn’t that what suicide is, in the end, one last cry to be heard?”

  Even after the horror of Gerald’s death—his thin body hanging from the conservatory rafter in his parents’ country house, where they’d sent him to “stop moping”—his family still refused to recognize his ordeal. They blamed incompetent doctors, faulty medication, bad dreams. Silencing his message to trumpet their own, they declared him a war hero, a patriot proud to sacrifice for king and country.

  “I suppose.” Fresh tears glazed Glennis’s eyes. “And she’d have been trying to say something big, Julia, something important. Only now Chester’s made sure we’ll never know what. He’s a pig, and I hate him, but you heard Edward. There’s nothing I can do.”

  Winterjay’s warning had conquered Glennis’s defiance far better than Chester’s angry slap. She spoke through her teeth, as if those fingertips still hovered across her lips, resigned to enduring whatever it took to get her to that wedding next spring. It was painful to witness. Julia knew little about Glennis and far less about Naomi, but she did know about powerlessness. She remembered the shame that had flooded her own cheeks just a few days ago, when Philip’s careless departure left her without means to pay for her own taxicabs, much less meals. The trouble Philip caused her was not deliberate (she trusted), but its difficulty was very real nonetheless. How far worse to suffer willful humiliation.

  “You can find out what really happened to her,” Julia said. “Not that bunk Chester wants you to believe.”

  Glennis’s wide forehead rucked in a familiar frown. She finished her sherry in one go and plunked down the empty glass. “I don’t see how. He’d squash me flat.”

  “Not if I help you. He can’t cut me off.”

  Beneath the peevishness flickered Glennis’s returning indignation. Her voice rose. “You would? Really?”

  Would she? Julia wondered at her impulsive offer. By rights (and good manners) the mysterious nature of Naomi Rankin’s death was none of her concern. Until two days ago, she’d never even heard the name. But something about the woman’s story moved her, stirred her sympathies. Julia knew what it was to be dismissed as “difficult,” her desires deemed inconvenient, her skills and judgment thought incapable of governing her own life. As a female she had to wait four years longer for her inheritance than Philip, who came into his share at twenty-one. Only his signature, not hers, could secure her flat in London. She could vote now, yes, but the choices were likely still two men, both insisting they knew what was best for her.

  Like Glennis and Naomi, Julia knew what it was to have dependence imposed on her. Julia’s despot had been relatively benevolent, but that made Philip’s power over her no less rankling. She felt a frisson of sympathetic outrage. Her grievances were minor compared to Naomi’s, but they spurred fresh interest in the woman whose fate she might have shared. What drove Naomi to pester her family, and apparently the world, so loudly and persistently? What drove her ultimately to take her own life?

  Suicide. Wasn’t that finally what pushed Julia to seek Naomi’s truth? She’d been powerless to challenge the lies that obscured Gerald’s death, but perhaps she could do for Naomi what she couldn’t do for him. Helping Glennis discover the truth of Naomi’s death could never right Gerald’s injustice, but it might ease the pain that still swelled each time Julia remembered it. There might be nothing to discover, or they might fail in the effort, but she had to try. Maybe together she and Glennis could achieve what neither could alone. Wasn’t that the message women like Naomi preached? That together muted voices might make themselves be heard?

  Julia finished her sherry and took two ten-dollar bills from her handbag. She handed them to Glennis, who stared in confusion, then waved them away. She’d forgotten, of course. To her it had been a trifling loan, hardly worth the fuss, but to Julia paying her own way was important. She’d left a note about the problem for Philip on the hall table, and he’d laid out ten neat bills for her to find this morning, with a hasty mea culpa scrawled across the verso of her note. So easy a gesture, so small a matter—for him.

  She sorted out her legs and stood, straightening her frock. Her unpleasant business with him loomed tomorrow, and it was time to gather her thoughts for that. She hoped the others downstairs were now gone, implicated as she was—however unwillingly—in Glennis’s rebellious exit from the dining table. “I must be going now, Glennis, but yes, of course I’ll help. If there’s anything to be learned, we’ll find it together.”

  At the door she turned to receive Glennis’s grateful embrace and was nearly knocked off balance by her friend’s breathless squeeze.

  She’d forgotten about Glennis’s fearfulness. She clung to Julia now, just as she’d clutched her arm when facing her family downstairs. At school they’d been misfits together—both new girls, neither popular nor pretty—but Julia had long since grown into her own best friend, her own champion and defender. Not Glennis. Despite her nightly social rounds, Glennis was still afraid of being alone. No wonder she fretted so much about marriage. She wanted desperately to belong to someone, someone whose arm would always be hers to hold. Lacking a husband, she needed Julia to be the next best thing: companion, confidante, friend. Julia was touched and a shade alarmed. Not even David expected so much of her. Not even Christophine. In that moment she felt the immense loneliness of that frothy white bedroom.

  Julia held her friend a beat longer than was customary before easing free and stepping cautiously into the hall. Her shoe crunched on something smooth. Beneath it lay a wrinkled beige envelope. Glennis tore it open and held the note out for them both to read: Miss Rankin, I would be grateful if you could come to the Empire State Equal Rights Union, on lower Broadway, at your earliest convenience. I need to talk with you in private, quite urgently. It was signed Alice Clintock.

  CHAPTER 6

  The long-awaited appointment with the lawyers was delayed again. Julia could only watch as the firm’s secretary resettled at her desk and raised her voice above the din of quarreling motor horns in the street below. “Mr. Van Dyne sends his apologies, but asks you please to wait a few minutes longer.” This time she offered no consoling smile—the only hint of annoyance at Philip’s third inquiry.

  Julia unfolded the newspaper across her lap. The delay left her in a difficult position. She had trouble reading the tiny brevier type but preferred not to use her spectacles in public. She checked the seams of her stockings, adjusted the drape of her skirt, and tried again to consider the patchwork of
headlines. Early September, and already the papers were a snooze of candidates’ speeches and party rallies in Albany or Cleveland or New Orleans, enough to weary the staunchest of citizens. She couldn’t imagine how anyone endured the eternity until elections. Coolidge or Davis? Roosevelt or Smith? This man or that man? The ’24 election meant nothing more to her than rank upon rank of gray newsprint faces. She masked her face in civic absorption and studied her half brother from the shadow of her hat brim.

  Sprawled sideways across the opposite chair, Philip sent a stubby pencil swishing over the sketch pad on his knee, pausing only to flick smudges across it with the side of his little finger. He propped an elbow against the chair’s back cushion and settled his chin on his knuckles. The past hour they’d spent together in the taxicab and this reception lounge—their longest stretch together in more than ten years—had convinced her the man was a kaleidoscope of postures: motionless, then a slithery blur. Agile as an acrobat, he could shift from one pose to the next like Nijinsky himself. He had the shoulders and grip of an athlete but affected utter lethargy. He was as likely to collapse into a chair as to sit in it, to slump against a wall as to stand upright.

  The pencil paused, and Philip’s eye rose fractionally to study her left foot. He flipped to a new page and began a portrait of her shoe. How apt that the dart of his hand across paper was the most animated thing about him. His signature was all she really knew.

  When the lawyers’ official summons had reached her last June, of course it had been alarming. Three days later Philip’s personal note arrived, apologizing for the bother and dismissing his challenge as a mere formality, a tidying up of some inconsistency or ambiguity. He said only that he’d found a “spanking fine conundrum” that ought to put the lawmen through their paces, as if they were languishing horses in need of a good gallop. He’d been courtesy itself, inviting her to be his guest when she returned to New York. If a chap has only one sister, he wrote, he might as well get to know her before she flies the ancestral coop. Of course she would go. To defend her inheritance, certainly, and for the last chance to know the man who not only held such power over her but was also her closest kin.

  The wait grew. A few minutes stretched to another twenty. Julia examined her manicure, refolded the newspaper. Philip’s dark eyes rose and met hers. One cheek twitched in camaraderie at the shared tedium before he lowered his head and resumed sketching. On impulse Julia leaned forward. “A friendly proposal?”

  His pencil paused, but he didn’t look up.

  “If this Van Dyne fellow doesn’t appear in the next five minutes, how about we simply talk this through? We’re both adults now. Surely we can sort it ourselves.”

  He smoothed his hair back from his face. A long strand sprang free and returned to its perennial place, a black stiletto against his forehead, tip buried in his right brow.

  “Philip?”

  Head still down, he added a swath of charcoal, three quick smears, and said nothing.

  Again? For the second time since her arrival, he’d cut her flat. Not ten minutes after wrestling her luggage down the hall to his guest quarters, Philip had turned on his heel with a backward wave as she began to thank him. Her gratitude had sputtered into astonished silence. His manners were as quixotic as his posture.

  Amazement again hardened into caution, and all sprouts of filial armistice shriveled clean away. Fine. Business, then. Fourteen more days until her birthday. Years of childhood solitude had grown into what she called freedom, and her taste for it was both deep and determined. If he preferred a fight, he would get one.

  At last a distant door squeaked, and a young man approached. Freckles mottled his face, and dark-auburn hair lay in waves spreading from a part down the center of his scalp. He wore a brown suit half a size too large for his shoulders, but when he gathered up his modest stature to greet them, she saw he was at least her age, possibly closer to thirty. Van Dyne introduced himself with a smile as soft as his voice, making him not at all the sort of legal man she had been braced to confront.

  He escorted them down a corridor of paneled cherry doors with engraved brass nameplates to the last door on the left, a scuffed wafer of birch with ESSEX J. VAN DYNE typewritten on a card slid into a small enameled frame. Judging from the space he proposed they squeeze into, Julia suspected the label had once read BROOMS. Had she crossed the Atlantic only to be shunted to the office dogsbody? Surely their business warranted more gravitas. She balked in the threshold, and Philip stumbled to avoid treading on her heel.

  “Tripping not allowed,” he said. “Nor poison darts or knuckle-dusters.”

  “I understood there were to be three arbiters,” Julia said. “To ensure fairness?”

  Van Dyne slid past her to his desk. “The active senior partners, yes.” He motioned her to the room’s only armchair, and Philip and the secretary, Miss Baxter, took the remaining seats.

  Donning round tortoiseshell eyeglasses, Van Dyne became a red-haired Harold Lloyd. He spoke in a rush of words that sounded painfully rehearsed, which perhaps explained the delay. “We here at Feeney, Churchman, Kessler, and Rousch”—Van Dyne pronounced the firm’s name with a melodic bounce—“are pledged to consider this matter with utmost impartiality. This morning’s session ensures you both fair opportunity to speak and to address each other’s arguments.” He looked at Philip. “Soberly, I trust. This is a serious matter.”

  Philip’s chin sagged in a comical show of bland affront.

  “Once today’s transcript is added to the file,” Van Dyne continued, “they—I mean, we here at Feeney, Churchman, Kessler, and Rousch—will review all the documents most carefully.” Once begun, the recitation of names could not be halted, and it spilled forth like a troupe of dancers taking a bow. His cheeks colored.

  “A paragon of judicial scruple,” Philip said. He perched sideways in his chair, one elbow hooked over its back.

  Julia’s nose flared. Why did he talk such piffle? Van Dyne, however, gave Philip a look of such deep gratitude for the frivolous reassurance that Julia uncrossed her legs, alert as a garden rabbit. Were they acquainted? They must be; she would not mistake that flash of familiarity. Van Dyne would not be involved in the judgment itself, but even so, any slant in Philip’s favor was hardly cricket. She shifted forward, heart beginning to pace warily in her chest.

  The firm’s proposal of internal arbitration had seemed reasonable last spring. For two generations Feeney, Churchman, Kessler, and Rousch had handled all Kydd family affairs, including Julia’s, and no one wished to make the quarrel, if that was what this was, public. And yet and yet. There was still time to march to the nearest magistrate’s office and demand a judge and formal hearing instead.

  “We’ve made every effort to ensure a fair and thorough procedure, Miss Kydd.”

  Nervous hesitation lifted Van Dyne’s statement into a question. He must have sensed her new misgivings. She looked away, unable to think with all four of those eyes pleading at her. Her gaze fell on an unframed etching of an old woman’s hands that was tacked to the back of the door. It resembled one of Dürer’s studies, but these surging veins and outsize thumbs evoked less piety than poke-in-your-eye defiance. Interesting. And recently done, she guessed, noting the inky residue on Van Dyne’s right knuckles. So he was an artist—and a fairly gifted one, to judge by the etching. She rearranged her gloves across her knee. Fiddlesticks. If the man had art in him, as it seemed he did, how could she not give him a chance? Rash or not, she’d agreed to this arbitration. So be it. They had promised strict impartiality, after all. She edged back in her chair, dipping her hat in (tentative) acquiescence.

  Van Dyne aligned his pen and letter opener. “So. As we all know, Miss Kydd will soon turn twenty-five. Although the terms of your late father’s will are somewhat ambiguous—”

  Philip coughed at the euphemism, and Julia’s jaw stiffened. If anyone had cause to mock the careful caution of ambiguous, it was she. Philip was the one who had manufactured confusion where none e
xisted.

  Van Dyne reddened and began again. “Under the extreme circumstances that arose in November of ’13,” he said, “it was agreed that Philip Kydd would act as guardian for his half sister until she reached twenty-one and as trustee of her estate until she either married or turned twenty-five, whichever should occur first. While that arrangement was admittedly hasty and expedient, we believe it’s been satisfactory, considering it was devised under duress.”

  More prepared prose, tepid and precise. Julia willed the fingers gripping her handbag to relax. She would not so much as blink. Those extreme circumstances, as Van Dyne described her mother’s death, still tightened her throat.

  She had been stretched out reading Lorna Doone under the coverlet when Christophine had knocked on her bedroom door. Her gentle hesitation had brought Julia’s head up in suspicion. “Miss?” Christophine whispered. “We—” Her voice disappeared in a choke. We? Christophine and old Timkins, the butler, were waiting in the hall. Timkins held a folded telegram, which Christophine took and cupped to her throat like a wounded thing—a small dove tucked beneath her dark chin—as she explained in her lilting Caribbean Swedish English that Miss Lena, Julia’s mother, had been struck down and killed by a motorcar in Stockholm. She’d left in a scrambling hurry the month before, called home by her brother’s sudden illness. There’d barely been time for a brief, distracted goodbye, a kiss Julia had tolerated with a resentful shrug because she couldn’t go too. Timkins stepped back respectfully and swayed, fists by his sides, as Julia furiously denounced the telegram’s lie, then sputtered and finally quieted into a mute and dry-eyed terror. Christophine had wept for them all that night.

  Van Dyne lifted a document. “The crux of the matter lies here, in Milo Kydd’s only known will, deposited with the senior Mr. Kessler on January 28, 1890. It states simply that his fortune is to be entailed equally upon his beloved wife, Charlotte Vancill Kydd; his son, Philip Oswald Vancill Kydd; and any future issue yet unborn.”