A Splendid Ruin: A Novel

by Megan Chance

  “Mrs. Hoffman?” she repeated dully. “Oh, you perfect idiot, May. It isn’t about Mrs. Hoffman, at least not today.”

  “It was him then? That man?”

  She stared out over the water at a passing steamer, and then without a word, walked on through the dry and shifting sand and sat.

  I hesitated. My skirt was new, one of those we’d bought at the Emporium, and I had not yet gained my cousin’s habit of heedlessness. But I was no longer poor May who had to do her own laundry, and when I sat beside Goldie, there was a certain satisfaction in being so heedless myself.

  Goldie wrapped her arms about her knees. “I was engaged to him.”

  “You were engaged? When?”

  “A year ago. I was nineteen. He’s quite a catch. His family is one of the most prominent in San Francisco. His father came from New York and made his fortune in the gold mines. Stephen’s a lawyer and he’s handsome and rich, everything a girl could want.”

  “You can tell that he knows it.”

  Goldie’s laugh was very small and short. “Oh yes.”

  “What was he doing with Mrs. Hoffman?”

  “His mother and Mrs. Hoffman cochair the Ladies’ Aid. No doubt it’s something to do with their annual charity ball, or the Friday Night Cotillion Club. He’s a friend of Ned Greenway.”

  “Who’s Ned Greenway?”

  “You remember—you read about him in the society column. He runs the Cotillion Club. Everyone wants to get in but no one joins it without Ned Greenway’s approval. When Stephen and I were engaged, I was all set to be a member. I had my gown and everything. But then, well . . .”

  “The engagement was off,” I put in.

  Goldie scowled. “I even met with Mr. Greenway personally to convince him that I didn’t need to be Mrs. Oelrichs to belong, but he’s really such a precious little snob.”

  “So this Cotillion Club is important?”

  “Oh, I thought it was then, but it’s really just a stupid dance club. Very staid and boring. I don’t know why anyone wants to spend their Fridays drinking lemonade and following Ned Greenway’s silly rules when there are so many more interesting things to do. Don’t ask me how he got to be so important. He’s just a stupid champagne salesman.”

  “Everyone likes champagne,” I offered.

  “It’s not that. He’s very clever. He managed to do favors for Mr. Hoffman and after that it was just a hop and a skip to his wife. Stephen’s mother too. Mrs. Oelrichs organized the best-attended charity ball three years ago. Mother was on the committee then.”

  I tried to imagine my aunt on such a committee and couldn’t. “Did Aunt Florence do a great deal of charity work?”

  Goldie rolled her eyes. “She used to say that she liked to feel needed.”

  I filed that away. Being needed sounded at least interesting, something of purpose to fill the wasted hours.

  “But that’s how I was introduced to Stephen, and that’s what Mother really wanted,” Goldie went on. “Old San Francisco money. The Oelrichs name. Their house is one of those old and creaking places on Van Ness.”

  I didn’t understand how important that was. “Not Nob Hill?”

  “Oh no. They’d never build there.” She laughed shortly. “They’re such hypocrites.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They sneer at everything that hasn’t been in San Francisco a hundred years—as if anyone has but the Californios! But really it’s that they don’t have the money to build a house like ours, so they pretend they don’t want to. I’ll bet talk of today has already reached Mr. Bandersnitch. Another chance for Stephen to humiliate me. I swear it’s his favorite thing to do.”

  “How can he humiliate you? Why would he? Is he angry that you ended the engagement?”

  Goldie dug her fingers into the sand, lifting a palmful, letting it fall like water. “I didn’t end it. He did.”

  Of all the things Goldie could have said, that was what I’d least expected. “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But why?”

  “Stephen gambles. Everyone knows it. It’s the bane of his family, but he doesn’t often lose.”

  “How lucky for him.”

  “I’d never even held cards before he taught me how to play. He took me to Ingleside too, so we could bet on the horses. I had no idea what I was doing, of course, but Stephen likes games. I didn’t realize that . . .” Goldie stared off again at the ocean.

  I waited. Finally, I prodded, “What didn’t you realize, Goldie?”

  She followed a coasting seagull with her gaze. “He liked the adventure of it. He liked it when we gambled together. It was all very risky and exciting. But it turned out that he didn’t want it in a wife. He’s so old-fashioned. The world has changed, but he couldn’t see it. I swear he would have kept me as some . . . some obedient little broodmare.”

  “I doubt you would have let him.”

  Goldie snorted. Even that was elegant. “He can’t resist making everyone think I’m the one at fault! They all think I turned down the perfect Stephen Oelrichs. That’s what he’s told everyone, because he can’t bear to look bad. When he came over to our table today he meant only to show Mrs. Hoffman how valiant he is, and how nasty I am to ignore him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell everyone the truth?”

  She gave me a horrified look. “A girl doesn’t tattle about a man like that, May. What would Mr. Greenway and Mrs. Hoffman think of me then?” She reached for my hands and gripped them tightly. “You will stay away from Stephen, May, for my sake?”

  “Yes of course. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

  “You mustn’t believe anything he says. Promise me you won’t.”

  “Why would I listen to him? I’m your family.”

  “Yes, we’re family.” Goldie squeezed my hands again, smiling in that way I could not help but answer. That smile of hers was her most potent weapon—it distracted and disguised, and I was its best victim. It swept away whatever questions I might have had about Stephen or her story.

  Goldie let out her breath. “Well, that’s that. I suppose we should go back. I hope they haven’t finished all the champagne without us.”

  “If they have, they’ll be very drunk.”

  “On one bottle?” Goldie laughed again and pulled me to my feet. “Oh, my dear cousin, you have so much to learn!”

  The foyer wavered. Only Goldie’s arm around my waist saved me from falling.

  “Too much champagne.” My voice did not sound like mine. For one thing, my lips did not want to form the right words. For another, it echoed strangely, as did every noise in this house. I stumbled back, expecting to land on the padded banquette of the hallway mirror, which was most unexpectedly not there. I fell to the floor, pulling Goldie with me. “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?”

  “The mirror?”

  “Out to be regilded, I suppose. Come on—shhh, don’t wake anyone!” Goldie pulled me up, then grabbed the table to keep us both upright.

  “No one’s even here. Where are they?”

  “Oh, who knows? The servants are probably out having a picnic.”

  The vision of Au lounging on the grass in his formal suit made me laugh so I nearly choked.

  Goldie staggered to the stairs. She gripped the newel post, where she paused, wavering, spinning in circles—or no, it wasn’t Goldie spinning. It was the hall itself.

  “I have to go to bed or die,” Goldie said dramatically.

  It seemed to take me forever to follow her up. When finally I opened my door, it was so smooth, and the squeak was gone. Someone in the boardinghouse must have oiled the hinge at last—oh, but wait, no . . . the door here had never squeaked and everything was perfectly pink. Pink, pink, pink. My stomach flipped, a wave of nausea had me racing to the bed. I closed my eyes tight, trying to ignore the spinning room, thinking instead of the day, the champagne . . . oh, the champagne. Jerome’s cousin had been at the Cliff House, and he�
��d tied the bicycles to his carriage and brought us all back because riding was impossible. It had been stuffy with all of us piled inside, sitting on each other, and the carriage swaying, and—

  I ran for the bathroom.

  Afterward, I felt marginally better, but the room remained shaky and my head began to pound, and the only thing to do was to lie very, very still, and to think of nothing.

  I heard a sound, a squeak. Mice. I closed my eyes again, but then I remembered I wasn’t in the boardinghouse; there were no mice here, and there was the sound again, a hush, the quiet click of a door. Aunt Florence, sleepwalking again. Or Goldie, sneaking out as she had the last time, disappearing into the night, dark coated, a waft of jasmine . . . Oh, but even my curiosity was not enough to prod me into rising. I heard footsteps down the hall—or I thought I heard footsteps. It could have been a dream. It was a dream. Only a dream.

  When I woke, it was late morning, and I was cloaked in sweat and faintly nauseated. I’d fallen onto the bed without even removing my boots. My tam flipped into my face, and I tore the hat from my head without a care for the pins that came with it. Half of my hair tumbled loose. I managed to take off my boots, and staggered to the dressing table, where I saw in the mirror that the chenille bedcover had imprinted itself upon my cheek.

  I rubbed, trying to make it disappear, and then I noted the circles beneath my eyes and my rat’s nest of hair. “There’s no hope for you, May Kimble,” I muttered.

  At the knock on my door, I said, “Come in,” and thought grimly that I would stab myself with a hatpin if my cousin came inside showing no ill effects—which of course she would, because she was Goldie Sullivan, and I was . . . me.

  But it wasn’t Goldie. It was Shin, bearing a tray with what smelled like coffee.

  “Bless you!” I grabbed the cup nearly before she’d had the chance to set it down. There was bacon too, and a pastry of some kind, neither of which looked appetizing this morning.

  Shin looked at me critically, but all she said was, “Would you like to bathe, miss?”

  I felt stupid and embarrassed. What must she think? But I was grateful for the suggestion, and by the time I was bathed and dressed and sitting in front of the mirror while she attacked the knots of my hair, I felt more myself. I watched as she tamed the tangle into a sleek smoothness that I had never, ever managed, even with all my digits, and tried not to reveal my continued fascination with the nub of her index finger. “Is Goldie still asleep?”

  “She has gone out, miss.”

  “Out? Where?”

  “I don’t know, miss,” Shin said.

  “She said nothing at all?”

  The maid only shook her head as she went after another tangle. I sipped my coffee and told myself it was nothing. No doubt Goldie knew I felt terrible and didn’t wish to wake me. Still, the idea that she’d gone out without leaving any kind of word . . . “It isn’t like her,” I murmured.

  I felt Shin pause, and I glanced at her in the mirror. She looked as if she might say something, then tightened her lips and continued with my hair, and there was something about that pause, something about her expression that made me remember last night, the footsteps in the hall.

  Shin wrapped a curl around her fingers and pinned it in place.

  Another curl, another pin. Shin put her fingers gently at my temples, turning my head in the mirror to admire her handiwork. She said—so quietly that I wasn’t certain I heard at first—“Be careful, Miss May.”

  I tried to catch her gaze in the mirror.

  She avoided mine neatly, placed the last pin, and said, “Will you wear the blue skirt today, miss?”

  I should have questioned her; instead I assumed that I’d misstepped again. I took her words to mean one did not ask about others in the house, and I’d crossed some tacit boundary. I had asked Shin for her help; I should not feel ashamed or embarrassed when she gave it to me.

  But I felt both. Where was Goldie? Where had she gone in the middle of the night? Why?

  “Thank you, Shin,” I said, pretending that I was everything I’d been taught to be. “Yes, the blue will be fine.”

  The house was empty. No Goldie, no Uncle Jonny. Even with the maids and the footmen who moved from room to room like shadows, I felt alone and restless, and worse, without purpose. The thought of a life spent this way . . . I could not fathom it. With no money of my own and no pedigree, I was not a good candidate for marriage. But I could not be a poor relation dependent on my aunt and uncle forever.

  What was I to do with myself?

  I remembered what Goldie had said yesterday about Aunt Florence on a charity committee, about the other women, Mrs. Oelrichs and Mrs. Hoffman, arranging charity balls. It was another thing I would have liked to ask my aunt about, and whether she’d found it interesting or satisfying, but there were my uncle’s warnings to consider, and I didn’t want to upset her. She held the key to so many riddles, and today, with nothing to distract for once, those riddles beckoned. I couldn’t go to Aunt Florence without permission, but I remembered the Liberty Bell candy jar in her sitting room, the souvenir of her life before this one. She must have other things as well. Scrapbooks or . . . or perhaps I might find the letter my mother had sent. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to do a little exploring on my own?

  I wandered from my bedroom and into the hallway. The Bulletin was on the table there, among the china fawns, awaiting Goldie, and I picked it up. It was already turned to the society page; how well everyone in the household anticipated Goldie’s every need.

  At last night’s Bohemian Club Hi-Jinx, there was much talk about the mysteries of Chinatown, though everyone seems to know every detail of the opium dens there. Professional guides will tell you of dank cellars reached by the twisting tunnels beneath the joss houses and gambling hells, but the real thing is only small back rooms full of pallets where devotees of the long pipe dream away their afternoons. That many of those devotees are oft mentioned in the society news is an open secret. That debutante (everyone knows her name) shopping for the silks and embroidered slippers in the Chinese store windows? The men-about-town playing flaneur (notable architect and favorite sitting judge among them)? And what about the matrons who have given up their Tuesday calling days to take a sudden interest in the Chinatown markets?

  Always so intriguing. How did he know all this? And what debutante would dare an opium den? No doubt she too was nearly prostrate with ennui.

  Notable sighting of the week: Miss May Kimble and her cousin, the popular Miss Goldie Sullivan, were conspicuously festive at the Cliff House yesterday with Mr. Jerome Belden, Mr. Thomas O’Keefe, and Miss Linette Wall. All were enjoying the best champagne the resort has to offer. As usual, Miss May Kimble was the talk of the town. Mr. Edward Hertford escorted the very jovial party home.

  As usual, the talk of the town? There was nothing overtly censorious about the mention, but I was horrified. I’d had no idea that the Alphonse Bandersnitch was even at the Cliff House. Why should he be? And surely . . . conspicuously festive and very jovial did not mean drunk, did they?

  My liking for the reporter chilled. Not so very amusing when it was me he turned that sharp wit to, was it? At least there was no mention of Stephen Oelrichs, as Goldie had feared. But what was to be done about this mention, if anything? Goldie would certainly know—

  A door opened at the end of the hall. I looked up to see my aunt Florence.

  “May.” She whispered my name, then looked quickly behind her as if afraid. She gestured furtively. “Come. Hurry. We’ve so little time.”

  I hesitated. I’d promised both my uncle and my cousin not to visit her again without approval. But how could I refuse a direct request? Not only that, she looked so distraught, and no one else was around.

  Once again, my aunt motioned. I followed her to her bedroom. She drew back into the darkness beyond her door to allow me to slip inside, then closed the door. Again, the curtains were drawn. The flame of a very small lamp struggled against soot-covered
glass that looked as if no one had seen to it for a year. Again, that sense of being stifled, cloistered, removed from the world and locked away.

  “Did they follow you?” my aunt asked, fumbling with the doorknob.

  “Did who follow me?”

  “Anyone. Are they listening?”

  I frowned. “No. No, we’re quite alone.”

  She opened the door, glanced out, shut it again. “They must not hear, do you understand? They must not know.”

  “Know what? Hear what? Are you all right, Aunt Florence? Is there something wrong? Something I can help you with?”

  “You don’t know what they’ll do.” She moved agitatedly from the door, jerking movements, darting eyes. “I promised Charlotte.”

  “My mother?” I grasped the one thing I understood. “What about my mother?”

  She stopped and turned to me, frowning. “Charlotte.”

  In relief, I said, “Yes, Charlotte. My mother.”

  My aunt flailed for a nearby chair, and I hurried to help her sit. “Charlotte is dead.”

  “Yes.” I could offer nothing beyond that.

  “She asked me . . .” She stared, mesmerized, at the shadow of the lamp jumping on the wall. “She asked me to care for her baby.”

  She twitched, lost in the past. I was that baby, grown up now. “That was long ago, Aunt Florence. She sent another letter. Only a few months ago. Do you remember? Do you have it here?”

  “The letter,” she murmured. “I said no.”

  “Do you have it?” I asked again. I went to her bureau and glanced over the cluttered top. No letter, only crocheted doilies, medicine bottles, hairpins. “Is it in here?”

  I turned to her, and she said nothing. I took it for permission. I was desperate; I wanted only to know something, anything, and I opened the first drawer. I’d no sooner done it than she cried out, “I said no! I promise I did. I said no!”

  Dismayed, I hurried to her. I touched her arm, wanting to comfort her, trying to understand.

  My touch only seemed to distress her more. She half rose from the chair, gripping my arms, those slender fingers like claws.