Heiress

by Susan May Warren

  Was Esme the illegitimate daughter?

  Or…was she?

  The thought pressed into her, grew blades. She’d simply have to prove her Price bloodline.

  “And?” Now, Esme stood before her, holding the ripped layers of the paper, her eyes sharp, waiting for Jinx to complete her sentence.

  “And…maybe there’s a reason you don’t want to marry. Maybe you don’t deserve to marry Foster Worth. Maybe you don’t deserve any of this.”

  “You’re babbling.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. Father cheated on Mother. He had children—illegitimate children. And one of them lives right here in this house.” She let the rest linger, simply raised an eyebrow. Took a breath as something acrid burned her throat.

  Esme appeared as Jinx must have, stone-faced, pale. “You’re a liar.”

  She swallowed away the heat in her throat. “Ask Mother, if you dare. But be prepared for the truth.”

  “Father would never cheat on Mother.” But her voice tremored.

  Jinx smiled. Looked out the window. A few skaters had found the pond, women in dark dresses, cloaks, etching the ice with their crisp blades. “You might want to consider why he is so eager to marry you off.”

  Esme stared at the paper.

  “If you don’t start behaving like a Price, you just might end up in one of those tenements, right beside your whore mother.”

  Esme hand went back to slap her. Jinx jerked, caught her arm a second before Esme’s hand would have hit her face.

  “I should have expected that from someone of your breeding.”

  “Get out!”

  Jinx let her go. “Marry Foster Worth and I’ll keep your little secret about your extra-curricular writing activities. Go to Father, and the rumors of your parentage will hit the front page of Town Topics by tomorrow.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Betray us and you will discover yourself betrayed. That’s a Price promise.”

  She walked out, closing Esme’s door behind her. It wasn’t until she reached her own chamber, closed the door, and collapsed, shaking, on her satin ottoman, that she realized she still wore Esme’s engagement ring.

  The eastern sun reached into the room, turning the floor to fire, and Jinx examined the ring on her hand, the filigree, the diamonds. The ring belonged there.

  If you don’t start behaving like a Price, you just might end up in one of those tenements, right beside your whore mother.

  Her words rang in her ears. How could she have said that, spoken so crudely to her sister? But Esme only saw the world from the position of a savior. She didn’t have Jinx’s view. Jinx’s room looked out over their tiny garden and beyond, into the slum neighborhoods of the Upper East Side. Coal smoke from the hovels stretching to the river darkened the sky, their filthy sewage-strewn streets seeping toward the homes along Fifth Avenue.

  She turned away from the window, considered herself in the mirror, seeing herself tear Esme’s article, hearing her words. You don’t even look like a Price! She pressed her hand to her face, searching in her reflection for something of her mother. Her nose, perhaps, but Jinx had the wide nose of her father, nothing petite and delicate of Phoebe’s features. Jinx also had her father’s wide, manly hands, but none of his tall frame. In fact, if Jinx had inherited anything from her mother, she could claim her mother’s dark hair, and over endowed bosom.

  Esme, however, had their mother’s blue eyes. Jinx had ended up with August’sgreen ones.

  She shouldn’t have flung those words at Esme. Not when she harbored the sick niggle of truth that perhaps they rightly belonged to her.

  What if Jinx was the product of her father’s indiscretions? No wonder he despised her. Why he decreed that Esme would marry before she could be presented. He didn’t want to reveal Jinx into a society that nourished itself on gossip. On speculation.

  His sins would be discovered, and although he had made his millions, their new money wouldn’t protect them from the shunning of the Knickerbockers, the keepers of society.

  Indeed, if the truth were discovered, the entire Price family might find themselves taking up residence among the slums.

  But not if Esme—or someone else?—married into the Worth family. Their lineage, their pedigree—no one would dare scuttle the Worth family name.

  Jinx twisted the engagement ring on her finger, round and round and round.

  If Esme didn’t marry Foster Worth, then Jinx would.

  She’d be the heiress the Price family needed.

  * * * * *

  Esme didn’t have to look in the mirror, examine her features, to know that Jinx spewed out lies.

  August Price lived an honorable life. He worshipped every Sunday from the Price family pew at Grace Church. He gave to the poor, and wasn’t it her father who pushed to establish the Newsboys’ Lodging House with the Children’s Society?

  Yes, he had answered for her last night, but only because her acquiescence into debutante life conspired to make him believe she wanted to marry.

  “That’s tight enough, Bette,” Esme said, and let Bette fix her stays while she could still breathe. A corset should hug a woman’s body, give it shape, not deform it. At least, that’s what Alice Stone Blackwell said in Women’s Journal.

  She kept that tucked in the drawer of her bureau, under her Godey’s Lady’s Book.

  But if women could write for the Journal and for the Lady’s Book, couldn’t they write for the New York Chronicle?

  She stepped into her skirt then held up her arms as Bette tucked in her shirtwaist and tied the floppy bow at her neck.

  After Jinx’s words, Esme had dismissed Bette, not wanting her maid to witness the effect of Jinx’s cruelty. She hadn’t believed her sister could be so wretched, although she’d long suspected that Jinx would lower herself to nearly any behavior that might accomplish her goals.

  Namely, marrying a man of noble name, if not birth.

  But to accuse their father of adultery…

  Good thing Esme had only taken tea and toast for breakfast.

  She finally washed her face and summoned her maid back, a plan fixed in her mind.

  Bette finished tying her boots then fetched Esme’s day hat, a narrow-brimmed hat, with a rich purple plumage and a wide satin bow. She affixed it on Esme’s head with pins.

  “Ow—Bette, watch your hands. They’re shaking.”

  “My apologies, Miss Esme.”

  “It’s forgiven. Are you well? You seem upset.”

  Bette raised her gaze, ever so briefly, and met Esme’s in the mirror. Funny, Esme had never noticed how green her eyes were. She never considered Bette pretty, but she had a petite delicacy about her that suddenly seemed fragile. “I’m fine, ma’am.”

  “You would confide in me if you weren’t, wouldn’t you? I do care for you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Bette finished attaching the hat then helped her into her kid gloves, the larger ones that didn’t constrict feeling in her hands.

  “It’s rather brisk outside, ma’am. Shall I fetch your mink cape?”

  “And my muff, please.”

  She gave a thought to wearing Foster’s ring and decided against it. She didn’t want her father to believe that she’d truly accepted his proposal.

  He’d simply assumed her response last night. Thought, perhaps, she had no other prospects.

  But, like Teddy Roosevelt had said, that day she’d lunched at Delmonico’s with her father, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

  Her sixteenth birthday. Instead of a gala bash, she’d asked her father for a tour of the Chronicle.

  Anything for my Esme. Those words she’d tucked away into her heart. He’d taken her on his arm on a grand tour through the arched gateways of the Chronicle Building, into the circular counting room, then through the second floor, stopping off first in his office to view Chronicle Square, the trolleys and buses and courtyard below where the newsies gathered beneath his statue. Then, pas
t the council room, down the hall of editors’ offices, where he’d ducked in and introduced her, then into the gallery of city reporters, clicking at their typewriters. They’d stopped in the library, then downstairs to the linotype room, and finally the press room where his four-cylinder presses cranked out and cut the paper. She drank in the acrid odor of ink and deliberately ran her fingers across a fresh page to imprint it onto her ungloved hands. Her father had laughed.

  Then, to the delivery room, where they bound the papers. She’d waved to the newsies lined up outside the door to peddle them on the streets.

  She could have stayed for years, but they had taken lunch at Delmonico’s on Fifth Avenue, and her father made her laugh with stories of his editors, of his early days as a student at West Point, and at the end of the meal, stood to shake hands with the police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt had beefy, powerful hands, the kind that could crush a man to his knees. He smiled at her, more with his eyes than his mouth, hidden as it was by his moustache.

  Then, he shook her hand. His hand encased hers and caused her mouth to bubble out the first thing she could conjure, “Thank you for all you did during the heat wave this summer.” She’d read about the blistering temperatures in the Chronicle while summering in Newport, how over 1,500 people perished. “You brought ice into the precincts of the poor, saved the lives of so many children.”

  He’d stared at her then, as if caught by her words, his hand warm around hers. “We all must do what we can.”

  “Indeed,” she may have replied, but Mr. Roosevelt had turned to her father.

  “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it, August?”

  “Not with this one. I expect great things from my Esme.”

  Great things.

  She stood still while Bette helped her on with her cape then fitted her hands into the muff.

  Jinx hadn’t lied about the crisp blue day, the way the fresh snow turned to jewels under the glittering sun. Esme’s breath caught in the air as the footman helped her into the closed carriage. “Not a word to my mother, Bette, until I return.”

  Not that Bette would betray her, but her mother might inquire after her, especially with her leaving unchaperoned.

  Coal smoke bit into the fresh air, but she reveled in the glorious day. If it weren’t so chilly outside, she’d walk to the Chronicle Building; but then she’d need a maid for company.

  This conversation she needed to have in private.

  Father, I have something to tell you. You know those opinion pieces that have sparked such recent popularity?

  She knotted her hands together in her muff, watching the traffic—motorcars belching out black smoke, an elderly couple seated in the back of their Victoria, an omnibus with top-loaded passengers, a horse-drawn delivery truck filled with casks of milk.

  She was grateful her driver would cut through the park, a scenic route out of the clutter of traffic on his way to the Chronicle office at Sixth and Broadway.

  They eased into the carriage entrance and lost the city behind them, dark eyes that watched them disappear into the meandering drive. She leaned back and drank in the refuge. Father, you always told me that a man needed to work for what he had. Would that apply to a woman too?

  They passed the pond, a handful of skaters. To the west, the Dakota Building rose like a castle overlooking feudal land.

  Father, you told me you expected great things, what if I told you I was…

  In the summer, before they left for Newport, she strolled the park with her writing paper in hand, the ever-present Bette at her side, camping out at the rustic waterfalls, the ornamental ponds. She composed best next to water.

  Perhaps her father would give her an office.

  They exited the park and the driver added her carriage to the congestion. A street trolley clanged past her. Someday, perhaps she’d ride one. Awnings over entry doors fluttered in the window, snow lifting off them as if they’d sneezed. Street sweepers dusted the last of the snow from sidewalks with their brooms. They passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral and, across the street, the twin ornate palaces of William Vanderbilt.

  At Lord & Taylor, she watched two women step out of their carriage and drift into the store, followed by a boy in a stiff livery assigned to carry their packages.

  Someday, that might be Jinx, a trail of young boys shuffling behind her.

  Once upon a time, one of those boys had been Oliver. She closed her eyes, trying to escape his words.

  We were childhood acquaintances, and you’re not marrying me.

  The strange tone in his voice nagged at her, dug into her chest.

  They finally pulled into Chronicle Square, freshly mopped of snow. As Esme climbed down to the curb, the bronze statuettes of the angel Minerva, the bell ringers, and owls tolled the hour from the apex of the two-story triangular Chronicle Building. The chime resounded through her, shook her, and for a moment, she stilled. Swallowed.

  I expect great things from my Esme.

  She entered the arched doors, inside to the circular lobby, and climbed the stairs to the second floor, heard the ticking of the typewriters from the nearby city department echoing through the marble hallways, matching the staccato of her heartbeat.

  Pressing her hand against her stomach, she entered the reception hall. She considered simply brushing by the reception desk, but she’d changed in four years, and certainly the young man at the desk wouldn’t recognize her. Besides, she should wait to be announced, although she could hardly bear to wait for her father’s reaction.

  “I’m here to see my father,” she said without introduction.

  She’d place the man in his early twenties, eager and spare. Perhaps he’d been a newsie once, for he had a sharp look about him.

  “He is in his office. I will announce you.”

  “Please.” She smiled at him but didn’t sit as he knocked on her father’s door, peeked inside. In fact, she pushed right past him as her father, seated at his desk, his back to the paladin windows overlooking Chronicle Square, replied, “Who?”

  “Me, Father. I need to talk to you.”

  He’d always been larger to her than his actual stature, tall and wiry, with deep green eyes that could bore through a man and discover the truth. He’d put the Chronicle on the New York landscape by covering the sensational murder of a showgirl and had the audacity to point the finger at the son of a Tammany Hall politician while the police department named a young doorman for the crime. The jury found the doorman not guilty, but the press drove the true culprit from town, a departure the Chronicle decried as a travesty for all of New York.

  August Price could reduce a reporter to garble, but she didn’t know a woman in town who didn’t look up with a smile when her father entered the room.

  Including her.

  “What are you doing here?” He wore a smile, but she didn’t hear it in his tone. He came around his desk, took her hands, kissed her cheek. “Is everything okay?”

  He helped her into a chair then leaned against the desk. Folded his arms.

  She could feel her words turning to glue in her chest. “I—I need to talk to you.”

  “If it’s about last night, I know you were surprised. But Foster Worth is quite smitten with you. You will learn to love each other. It’s a good match, Esme.”

  She opened her mouth. Licked her lips. Blew out a breath.

  “What is it?”

  Perhaps she only imagined the compassion in his tone, the way it softened, as if he might mean his words. Still, “Father, I don’t want to marry him.”

  He drew in a breath, his shoulders rising. “Why not?”

  “It’s not Foster, Father. He’s…suitable. But I don’t want to marry anyone.”

  Her father raised an eyebrow. “Do you intend to live your life as a spinster? As a companion?”

  “I want to work.”

  He made a tight knot with his lips. Glanced at the door, perhaps to see if it was closed. “Where is your
mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You came here alone?”

  “I needed to tell you something. I already know what I want to do. And actually, you do too.”

  She heard her voice begin to rise, fought it as the words tumbled out. “I want to write, father. I want to be a journalist, like Nellie Bly.”

  For a beat, her father didn’t move, didn’t breathe, as if still waiting for her words. Then, he laughed. A short burst that stripped from her the coiled breath inside. “Oh, Esme. What ideas you entertain.”

  Ideas. “No, Father, you don’t understand. I…am writing. I have been writing.”

  “I’m sure you have. I know how you enjoy your walks through the park.”

  “Father, I’m Anonymous Witness!”

  She didn’t mean to shout, but, oh—she pressed her hand to her mouth as her father stared at her, his face pinching.

  “What?”

  “I’m A.W. I’m the one writing the opinion pieces. Selling your paper.”

  His smile had vanished. His jaw closed, he breathed out through his nose. “Go home, Esme.”

  He leaned up from his perch on the edge of the desk.

  “Father, don’t you understand? I can write! You even said last week that you wanted to know the identity of the journalist.”

  “Not anymore.”

  His tone cut out her breath. “I don’t understand. I thought you liked the articles.”

  He sat down at his desk, looked at her. “Who is your source?”

  “My source?”

  “The person who’s been feeding you this information? I can find out—I’ll ask my editor who’s been delivering your letters to his desk.”

  No. She shook her head. “No, I…Father, listen. Don’t you see? I could work for you. I could be a reporter, or a…I’d even work the society pages. You liked my reports on the balls and the matinees.”

  “And turn us into the laughingstock, or worse, the Benedict Arnold of Mrs. Astor’s society? It’s one thing for them to believe the words…the jealous tirade of some society outsider. If they knew it was a debutante, they would turn their backs on our family. It’s bad enough that I know. Now get out. Go home, now.”