by Tom Murphy
Then why could she not clear her damned head of him? Why must she keep seeing him, and seeing him again in the first wondering surprise of him, seeing that fine and noble-looking head come suddenly around the dark edge of the dining-room door, filling her empty heart with this unfamiliar, terrible sweet burning?
She stabbed her thumb with the needle, and swore, and thought how it had been years, she couldn’t remember how long, since she’d made such a stupid mistake sewing, and knowing why, and hating herself for not having better control than that, and wondering where, if ever, this would end.
Brooks Chaffee looked at the room, and at the girl, and laughed for no reason. A violin played gypsy music three flights below, and the music wound its plaintive way up the carpeted stairs and down the hall. It even seemed to fill the big back bedroom, as the girl did herself, and her perfume, and her promise of pleasure. Brooks looked at her and smiled, and wished he hadn’t drunk quite so much of the widow Clicquot’s champagne.
Rose, her name was, and truly she looked like a rose, pink-skinned and soft, a bit on the plump side, older, he thought, than his age, but not so very old. Only her eyes were old, and they were merry too. A girl who liked her work. Jack, good old Jack, always knew where to find them. This was a new place, discreet, just another house in a row of fine town houses off Sixth Avenue, nothing but the number 16 to advertise its presence. Inside, the discretion continued. Luxury, to be sure, but understated; nothing was loud, or ever would be. Madame Duveen ran a top-drawer house. The only danger, Jack had said with a chuckle, was running into your own father on the stairs.
Then Jack had disappeared with two of Madame Duveen’s finest girls, laughing still in his pleasure over Brooks’s protests of how much the night must cost: “Consider it your Christmas present, old man, underwritten by the New York and New Haven Society for Moral Rearmament.”
The NYNHSMR was Jack’s invention, and its activities could have kept an army of reformers very busy for years. He even had cards printed, naming himself as director. There was never a dull moment when you were with old Jack, not by day, not by night. Brooks was a New Yorker born and bred, but Jack had shown him a New York the Chaffees never imagined. It was Jack who took him to the Louvre, Manhattan’s gaudiest dance hall and concert saloon, where the waitresses were much more than waitresses and the revelry never stopped. With borrowed pistols, disguised in rags, they’d cruised the murderous dives from Five Points to the docks, heard the lurid tales of characters like Sadie the Goat and her Charlton Street Gang, river pirates complete with Jolly Roger and a plank to walk, and Gallus Mag, the six-foot cockney barkeep whose skirts were hoisted by her man’s suspenders, whose favorite trick was to bite a man’s ear off and hand it to him with the bar chit.
Brooks looked at his Christmas present. She stood before him, pink and fragrant and ready. Rose helped him undress. Then she stood back and regarded him solemnly. For an instant Brooks wondered if he met her standards—whatever they might be. Then she grinned, and came to him, and enfolded him in her soft perfumed arms. Rose kissed him full on the lips, still standing there near the wide bed, and all the quick hot blood in him began churning and throbbing with desire.
She threw her head back then, and laughed, and said: “Aye, lad, and it’s sure I don’t know why you’re paying for it, but to say the least, you’re well-equipped to get your money’s worth!”
She took his hand then, and led him to her bed. Merry Christmas, Jack, he thought. And then he abandoned thinking altogether.
11
MISS MARIANNE WALLINGFORD
TO MARRY CLARENCE, BARON WEST
British nobleman arrives on HMS “Brunswick”
New York, January 7, 1855. Baron West arrived here today with a retinue of servants to claim the hand of his betrothed, the lovely Miss Marianne Wallingford, daughter of Mr. & Mrs. John Frederick Wallingford of Fifth Avenue in this city. Mr. Wallingford is the owner of the Wallingford Emporium, and is prominent in other business ventures in Manhattan and elsewhere.
Baron West, who will be residing amidst the well-known splendors of the St. Nicholas Hotel on Broadway, is the seventeenth Baron West of Castle Westover, in Hertfordshire. The ancestral demesne consists of some 17,300 acres of land and the fabled castle itself, which was bestowed upon the first Baron West by Henry V in 1419. Baron West is a fifth cousin, once removed, of her Majesty, Queen Victoria. The nuptials will be celebrated at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Saturday, February 17. The newlywed couple will then set sail on a honeymoon cruise to the Mediterranean, after which they will reside at Castle Westover and at the Westover Square home of Baron West in London.
Lily was happy for Marianne, and all the servants basked in reflected glory. The article came as no news to the Wallingfords’ servants, but it was read and reread in the servants’ hall nevertheless. The intensity of Mrs. Wallingford’s preparation for this marriage had been building ever since her arrival from Europe in October. Marianne Wallingford would be the first American girl in decades to catch herself a bona fide British nobleman, and her mother intended to make the very most of it. Sure, there were penny-plentiful—and often dubious—Italian titles and French titles and German titles by the score. But an authentic British barony! To be a shopkeeper’s daughter and become Marianne, Baroness West, of Westover Castle! It was almost too good to be borne, yet Mrs. Wallingford blossomed under the strain. Dear Clarence must not be disappointed in his choice, and dear Clarence had very high standards, indeed.
Mrs. Wallingford’s first household change was to insist upon uniforms for one and for all, just as they did things in the great houses of England. Patrick and old Williams, grumbling, were made into proper coachmen. Groome became even more flushed and stately in a frock coat and white gloves. The maids were fitted out with dark blue gowns and white frilly aprons and tiny white butterfly caps. Two young footmen were hired to man the great front door at all hours, for the door began swinging now at a rate that Lily feared might melt its hinges. Nearly every day now there were supper parties and luncheons and teas to be given or gone to, and in the meantime, plans and plans and more plans to be hatched and followed through in thousands of complicated details.
On the day of the Mass, for instance, it would not do to use the regular everyday candles in St. Joseph’s. Lily was sent with her measuring tape to take the size of every candlestick, so that colored, perfumed candles could be especially ordered from Paris for the great day. The invitations were anguished over, not only for the question of whom to invite and, more importantly, whom not to invite, but the very size and design and color of ink. Should they be gilt-edged or just plain? Or possibly edged in a color, royal purple perhaps? Was it a done thing to use the bridegroom’s crest? Should they cook up a Wallingford crest for the occasion?
Lily had never seen such a fuss, and she was glad of it, partly because the preparations were exciting, and even more because the extra work helped take her mind off Brooks Chaffee.
She had never seen him again after that one unsettling afternoon in the dining room. Oh, and sure, she knew he and Mr. Jack were thick as thieves together. But Lily saw even Mr. Jack himself very seldom now, busy as she was with his mother and the wedding plans, isolated as she was with the ladies in the ladies’ retiring rooms when the Wallingfords entertained on a big scale in the evenings. Maybe it was the not seeing him that intensified her memories of that golden head, the clear blue of his eyes, the tone of his voice, the way he stood, tall and proud he was, straight as a soldier but not in any way threatening. Except to her sanity, for truly there were moments now when Lily thought she might be going mad. Sure, and I’ll end my days raving in the madhouse, she thought, as the head of Brooks Chaffee popped uninvited out of some dark pantry, out of her sewing basket, out of a dark alley. Poor girl, she went mad for love, she did, turned into a right lunatic from just one sight of him. And Lily would smile then, quietly, to herself, but it would be a bitter smile, for her secret was a sad secret.
N
o more did she ask Susie McGlynn about the Chaffee lad. Once, bringing Mrs. Wallingford some tea late in the afternoon, Lily caught a glimpse of Mr. Jack and his friend just as they were going down the great marble stairway, Jack with his arm on Chaffee’s shoulder and both of them laughing, not one care between the two of them, Mr. Jack’s dark, mocking laughter making a noticeable counterpoint to his friend’s lighter, more even tone. Lily had paused then, her silver tea tray growing heavier as she stood there, and she caught a glimpse, just a flash of the dark gold head in the sudden light as one of the new footmen opened the great front doors. A flash of sunlight on gold, that’s all it was, and the two young men were gone on a ripple of laughter. And Lily wondered what fine young girls might be waiting, for surely there must be girls, surely that laughter, those looks, those eyes were not to be wasted. Then she started, as if from a dream, and walked down the hallway to her mistress’s bedroom.
Clarence, Baron West, had only one failing, but in the eyes of Susie McGlynn it was a major flaw. Her eyes widened as she told Lily what Pat had just revealed. Lily blushed. She knew such things existed, but, good heavens, he was royalty, he was betrothed to Miss Marianne.
“You don’t mean it! Patrick’s joking.”
Susie nodded wisely, sure in her knowledge of the wickedness of the world. “Never, Lil, not about something like this. Pat went there, don’t you see, went right up to the baron’s suite in the St. Nicholas Hotel, with a message from Mrs. W., in the morning it was, just yesterday, and in he goes to the suite, and hears funny sounds, laughing and sportin’ and carryin’ on, and naturally he’s thinking the sly baron’s got a fancy woman in there, havin’ his will of her and all, and he’s just about to leave the note, except he can’t, because the mistress is expecting a reply by hand, and all of a sudden who should leap out but the baron himself, naked as Peter’s goat he was, and in a passionate condition at that, says Pat, and what should he be doin’ but havin’ his sport, all right, but with one of those footmen he’s brought all the way from his old castle.”
“God in heaven! And what did Pat do then?”
“Well, Patrick’s no angel, as well I know, but even he was shocked, for he’s all man is my Pat, and what should the baron do but invite Patrick to join in with their filthy games.”
Susie had to stop then, because she fair to died of laughing at the spectacle of the great lover, Pat, being confronted with such a distasteful invitation.
“No!”
“Ha! That’s not the end of it, Lil. He offered Patrick money.”
“God. How much?”
“Five dollars, Lil—now what do ye make of that?”
Lily stood silent for a moment, chilled to the bone. Then she spoke.
“I think,” said Lily gravely, “that someone ought to tell Miss Marianne. Or her parents. Lord Almighty, Susie, think what’s waiting for her back at that castle.”
“Unspeakable perversions!” Susie spoke with a kind of glee that shocked Lily even more than this unexpected bit of information about the baron. Lily felt no special affection for Miss Marianne, in fact she knew the girl very little. From a distance, Marianne Wallingford seemed as empty-headed as most of the other young ladies Lily saw at such close range in the ladies’ retiring room at the Wallingfords’ parties. They all seemed more concerned with the sweep of a train or the cut of a bodice than any of life’s real problems. Yet Lily felt a great reluctance to judge these girls, her betters, and so ordained by fate.
At last she spoke. “What did Patrick say then? Did they fight?”
“Not Pat, the sly fox that he is. He put on his finest manner, did Pat, and smiled, and bowed, and said, Thank you, your Lordship, but I am otherwise engaged!’ Can you imagine?”
“I can. What then?”
“Cool as ice cream, the baron, who’s still Adam-naked, mind you, and still in a condition of lust, goes to the desk and writes a fine reply to his future mother-in-law, hands it to Patrick without so much as a smile, winks at Pat as if to say, ‘Well, lad, if not this time, maybe some other time,’ bows, and goes back to his buggery.”
“Patrick should tell Mr. Groome. And Mr. Groome should tell Mr. Wallingford.”
“That’s what I told Pat. He won’t do it.”
“Why not, for the love of God? Miss Marianne’s whole future happiness might be at stake.”
“It’s as simple as this, Lil, and maybe he’s right: who would believe an ignorant stable lad against a fine English baron? People would think Pat was just setting up for blackmailing the baron—or the Wallingfords—or anyhow, that he’d be up to some kind of mischief. At least that’s how Pat sees it, and I’ve got to admit he might have a point there.”
Lily sat on the edge of her little bed, as she had been sitting through all this recital, and then stood up and walked to the small round window. It was dark out. She could see the lights from the stables and from the carriage house across the courtyard. Of course Pat was right. Who, when it came right down to it, would ever believe a servant—any servant—against the word of a gentleman? Or gentlewoman? She looked at her friend.
“What you say is true. It may be we can do nothing at all, and there’s the pity of it.”
“I feel,” said Susie with a sigh, “sorry for Miss Marianne, with all her gowns and jewels and her baron.”
“Fancy us, Susie, feeling sorry for the likes of her.”
“Better we look to our own advancement, and forget the telling of tales like that one.”
“Could she know?”
“Never. I mean, she’d never go through with it if she did.”
“Are you sure? There’s some who’d say the Wallingfords are very strong after his title, to make ’em more respectable, and you can’t deny that it’s worked. We’ve all seen what’s happened since the announcement: Astors all over the place, where never a one set foot before.”
“Ah, then, Lil, what kind of a mother would sell her daughter to a pervert just for the sake of some old title?”
“There’s them as would. There’s them as have sold their daughters—and, yes, their sons too—for much less than that, I fear.”
This was true. Lily had heard too many stories of the brothels that festered and flourished in New York’s teeming underworld, places where the wicked could buy just about anything, however lewd, girls, boys, even, some said, animals, and in every combination, too. Lily thought of these strange things, and of Mrs. John Wallingford, and wondered what lengths that lady would go to to elevate her daughter into the highest circles of titled European society. It was a question fraught with danger, and Lily decided not to think on it too deeply, for what was bought and what was sold and the prices paid that had nothing to do with gold or money were no concern of hers, nor should they be. Instead Lily thought of happier things. She thought of her nest egg, safe with Mrs. Groome, safe and growing now, thirty-six dollars she had, and if her wages went up a bit, that would soon enough be fifty. Fifty dollars! That was a sum to conjure with. And to think that nasty baron offered Patrick five for…what? A moment’s dissipation. She shuddered. It all came down to nothing more than buying and selling, and glad she was that Pat decided not to sell. But still and all, Lily wondered, with a nagging, abrasive wonder, how strong she’d be in such a situation, faced with such temptations.
The days raced on, and there was no more talk of the Baron West and his strange tastes in love. The great house on Fifth Avenue seemed to vibrate with the growing excitement of Miss Marianne’s wedding. All day long carriages came and went at both entrances: to the front, with an endless variety of wedding gifts, with invitations and notes and flowers; and to the service entrance came rare wines, rich foods, more flowers. Special tables had to be set up in the ballroom to hold the glittering trove as all of New York society and all who aspired to that society entered into a kind of golden competition to see whose offering would most impress the future Baroness West of Castle Westover.
Wattled dowagers with ancient names and predatory eyes, women wh
o six months ago would have sneered openly at the nouveau-riche Wallingfords, entered smiling and traded little jokes and larger secrets with the triumphant Mrs. W., the shop clerk that was, the arriviste who had now very definitely arrived.
Lily watched it all unfolding, and if she smiled in secret at the schemes and antics of the rich and the mighty, she could not help but be mightily impressed by the sheer mass of their wealth. Great mounds of wedding silver overflowed the display tables in the ballroom, huge trays encrusted with swags of flowers and cupids and burnished silver fruit, punch bowls big enough to bathe in, armies of candlesticks there were, sufficient to light six churches, Lily thought, and thought, too, of who would have the sore arms from all the polishing. There was gold, too, among the silver; vermeil dishes gleamed like some old king’s treasure, as well they might, for surely a baron was much like a king, was he not, or at the least a step in that direction?
Not all the gifts were gold or silver. There was china too, cups so fine you could read the paper through them, an old French mirror Mrs. Wallingford said had once belonged to Louis himself. Lily wasn’t sure who Louis was, but his mirror was a fine thing, going a little smoky now with age, but splendid nevertheless in its carved gilt frame.
Lily paused, one afternoon late in January, in front of old Louis’s mirror. It stood behind one of the tables in the ballroom, reflecting a priceless array of gifts and the table on the other side of the long room, piled even higher. Soon they’d have to put the things on the floor, or build more tables. Five shafts of golden afternoon light cut the dense gloom. Lily looked at the mirror, and at her reflection. It was like looking at another girl, from another time. Lily wore her new uniform, dark blue woolen, with a little white cap and touches of white at the neck and the cuffs of the sleeves. The Lily in the old mirror seemed to float across a forgotten legend: there was a power in the mirror. It knew secrets. Slowly, hypnotized, Lily lifted a hand to touch her hair, which made a spot of brightness in the gray, silvery image on the old glass. It was reassuring, somehow, that as Lily raised her hand, the reflection also raised its hand. It was proof the thing was just a mirror after all, not magical—and stop daydreaming, girl, she told herself sternly, you’re going off your head for sure, that’s all there is to it! But still she paused, fascinated not so much by her reflection as by the sense of magic in the glass. The voice, when it came, shocked her.
