Splendor l-4

by Anna Godbersen

  Penelope’s neck twisted sharply around and she saw, on the far end of the lobby, by a grove of potted palms, the prince’s man guarding a mountain of luggage. Without glancing back at the concierge, she strode across the floor.

  “Where is Frederick?” she demanded, once she had arrived beside the great piles of leather cases and packed crates.

  “Ah…Mrs. Schoonmaker.” The valet looked up from a folded broadsheet. In his polished British pronunciation, she could hear all the backward American associations her married name held for him. “He has departed already, I’m afraid.”

  “What do you mean, departed?” Her shoulders had become frozen, tight and high under her little jacket. “Departed where? To another hotel? Was something amiss with the service here? Because my family often throws parties at the Netherland, and if you need my father to speak with the management—”

  “He sails for Europe today.”

  “Did he leave instructions for me?” Her desperation to have this vexing news explained was not subtle in her voice, and she hated herself for it, even while she was helpless to fix the unpleasant sound. “Shall I meet him on the dock or—”

  “The prince is sailing today,” the valet went on, placing each word carefully after the last. “He has become engaged to Therese, the future countess de Perignon, and he wants to travel to see his family as quickly as possible. He hopes to tell them before the engagement becomes too generally known.”

  “But—” Penelope’s eyelids fell shut as a sensation of utter abasement swept over her. “I thought—” she began, and managed to silence herself before saying, I thought he was in love with me.

  Surely the valet noticed the shock and humiliation draining what color there was from her oval face. And perhaps he even pitied her a little, for he continued in a whisper: “You ought to consider it a compliment, for the prince is known in his own country for the artfulness of his seductions, and ladies who have laid down their honor for him are known to brag of it for years to come.”

  “Oh, God, what a fool,” she spit. She had to put her hand on her famously narrow waist to steady herself. It would be a useless waist to her from now on, for she was not even twenty and already damaged goods. A ruined girl. She was not going to be a princess after all; that future would never be. She’d have to stay in New York, where everybody was already whispering viciously about her bad behavior, and where her husband was poised to trade her in for his preferred vintage.

  “You might yet catch him, I suppose.” The valet gave her a doubtful look. “The ship sails at noon, but he wanted to hurry ahead to be sure that his fiancée and her mother were comfortable.”

  But Penelope had no desire to go to the docks. The humiliation was already too heady for the girl the prince had used up and promptly discarded. She had spent so much time with him that week, and every second since the afternoon of Carolina Broad’s canceled nuptials — it seemed impossible to her that he could have found an hour to propose to the little French woman, but then she realized that he had perhaps already been engaged when she arrived on Sunday. In a matter of minutes, her slender body had been thoroughly depleted by a very crushing shame. It was too much for her; her great blue eyes disappeared under thick lashes. The tall white column of her wavered, then crumbled, as though into pieces on the ground. As her head slumped to her shoulder, and her sense of her surroundings began to fade, she heard feet rush in her direction. Someone called out for a doctor. The last thing she heard was the arch voice of a lady saying, “My word…if it isn’t the fallen Mrs. Schoonmaker.”

  Forty Two

  I have followed with great interest the story of Carolina Broad, the Western heiress whose name was first introduced to the demimonde in this very column. The rise of her social star was proved indeed too good to be true on Sunday, when her wedding to one of the most sought-after bachelors in the city was called off in spectacular fashion. Apparently she was, all along, nothing more than a lady’s maid from New York who wanted to dress up as her mistress did. Though she has lost her chance to marry into one of our most esteemed families, she is still rich — Mr. Carey Lewis Longhorn left her plenty of very real money — and we cannot but acknowledge that we have glimpsed in it the future of high society: wealth without class.

  — FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, TUESDAY, JULY 24, 1900

  “MISS BROAD, IS THERE ANYTHING I COULD GET for you, perhaps tea or—”

  “No.” Carolina — posed limply on a pink upholstered silk settee, below the window in the second-story drawing room of her town house — did not so much as blink an eye as she rejected her maid’s offer. She wore a dressing gown of coral-colored lace that piled up around her torso and rose and fell in listless folds. It was too late in the day, she was dimly aware, not to have put on real clothes, but she could not bring herself to care. She had grown weary staring out the window at Leland’s house, but there had been nothing doing. One of the girls who worked in her kitchen told her that she had heard from one of Bouchard’s parlor maids that the master had already left town, for a long stay at his family’s country home on Long Island. “Nothing.”

  Ever since her return from church on Sunday, she had found it difficult to put more than one word into a sentence, or to want very much of anything. “Nothing,” was what she heard herself saying over and over. Food, tea, drink, flowers, gowns, jewelry, sunshine, stars — all seemed like so many varieties of pointlessness to her. The only thing she wanted in the whole wide universe was Leland, and he was the least possible for her to attain. Her eyes were sore from crying. It was as though her whole body had gone dry, after such a vast expenditure of tears.

  It no longer seemed possible to her that she could be one of the richest girls she knew. And yet she was. There was nothing Tristan could do to her anymore, and perhaps sensing this, he had not again tried to claim some compensation for his knowledge of her past. The modest town house near the park was still hers to live in, except that it seemed entirely too big for her, now, when she was so unbearably alone; just as her wealth seemed a kind of perversion, when it could not purchase her lone desire.

  “But would you perhaps like a book, some cake, the papers—?”

  “No papers.” Carolina drew her prominent, round shoulder — white flecked brown by the sun — to her cheek, and closed her eyes. “Please just go.”

  The maid shuffled away, leaving Carolina to attempt sleep. She tried, but could not transcend that sad room, that impossibly fraught street, into dreams. The sourness in her stomach was too great; the regret seized her brain every time she thought it might be possible to doze. Time passed, she had no idea how much, and then she heard the stairs from the first floor groan as someone came up from below.

  “Miss Broad, I’m sorry to disturb—” the maid began.

  “I said go,” Carolina muttered without opening her eyes.

  “But Lina,” said a third voice, “you can’t just lie there being useless all day.”

  Carolina’s lids fluttered back. The sunlight fell like a path of gold across the long parquet floor, leading to the spot where Claire had put down a small black leather case, beaten almost gray by the years.

  “Oh, my dear,” the older girl sighed. Her red hair was pinned under a simple hat, and she wore the black boatneck dress that had been both Broud sisters’ uniform for years. “Oh, what has become of you?”

  For a moment, the mistress of 15 East Sixty-third was angry that her sister had been allowed to witness her in defeat. But then the need for human warmth overwhelmed. One and then the other of Carolina’s enfeebled arms reached out. The older girl arrived at her baby sister’s side and pulled her in close for an embrace, just as she always had when they were children, in the days after their mother was gone, when Lina had had a nightmare.

  “I was a lie,” Carolina whimpered.

  She was being kissed, on the forehead, at the hairline. Feeling was coming back to her, but this only made fresh for her all that she had lost
, and she began to cry again.

  “They took it all away from me,” she wailed, as her sister tried to blot the salty droplets staining her cheeks. The tears were no longer the main thing, however; her whole body was being wracked with sobs. “They took him away from me.”

  “Oh, my little Lina, my little Lina,” Claire whispered, as she rocked her younger sister. “You really loved him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But at least you have experienced such things,” Claire reasoned, kindly. “At least you are not like me, who has never even been in love….”

  The intention was kind, and yet there was nothing to say after a thing like that. For Carolina it colored the situation even bleaker. She wailed again, and burrowed against her sister.

  “Listen,” Claire went on, once the sobbing had quieted. “I have brought something to cheer you up.” She paused to draw a piece of newspaper from her pocket. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, a girl following her sister’s every move in the papers? You must think I’m an awfully silly, simple sort of person.”

  Perhaps a few days ago Carolina would have responded to this confession with a mixture of imperiousness and embarrassment. But her whole life had been turned upside-down, all its contents spilling out and a scattering across the floor, and the notion that someone might want to read about her, much less be considered simple or silly for doing so, seemed the height of absurdity. She almost wanted to laugh — and then, through her misery, she did manage something like a guffaw. “I am silly, or the world is. You are not.”

  A slight glow of relief came into Claire’s fair, round face when she saw her sister laugh. “Listen,” she insisted. “It’s from Mr. Gallant’s column: ‘We cannot help but acknowledge that we have glimpsed in it the future of high society: wealth without class. And while I am sure many will bemoan the death of an era, I for one think that the inbred old families of this city have reigned long enough, and that if new blood comes from a girl who, no matter her other qualifications, so charmed a connoisseur like Longhorn that he left her everything, I am inclined to say that is not altogether a bad sign.’”

  Carolina watched her sister’s cheeks swell up in smile, and the daylight reflect in her cheerful eyes. Behind her, the room was full of the ghosts of parties and little evenings she’d had, or planned to have. She remembered sitting in just this spot on nights when Leland appeared, on the landing, with his excitement at seeing her clear in his face. For a moment she feared this house would always make her sad. But then the beautiful rosewood paneling, the dangling crystal chandelier, the fine parquet all twinkled at her, and she saw that it was just as fine a home as it had been the week before.

  “Don’t look dour, love. It’s not so bad really, don’t you see? Imagine, my Carolina in the ‘Gamesome Gallant’ column. He thinks that no matter what is being said about you right now, you have your independence, and you represent the direction the fancy world is headed in. Carolina Broad is the future, he said. That’s you!”

  “No.” Carolina took her sister’s hand, and forced her bee-stung lips into a kind of smile. Her dark hair, which not so long ago had been arranged in curls, fell across her shoulders and chest. Once her face had assumed a happier expression, she realized that it was not so far from her feelings after all, and that perhaps her circumstances did, in the end, warrant some joy to chase the melancholy. The dressing gown was pleasant against her skin, and the air around was fragrant and warm, and the person at her side loved her no matter what she had done. “That’s us. I hope you brought everything you want from Mrs. Carr in that old case, and told her good-bye, because you live here now, with me, and — you and I? We’re going to have an absolute ball.”

  Forty Three

  The return of Teddy Cutting is quite a boon to mothers with debutantes to marry, for he has long been one of their most prized quarry.

  — FROM CITÉ CHATTER, TUESDAY, JULY 24, 1900

  “I DON’T KNOW THAT I AM READY TO GO IN THERE,” Elizabeth said, gazing up at the simple brownstone façade of No. 17 through the window of Teddy’s carriage. She had brushed her hair with her fingers and braided it in the back so that she would be slightly more presentable. But she looked a fright, she knew, and didn’t want to worry her mother. In the small dark enclosure of the Cutting coach, on its soft, worn blue velvet seat, her heartbeat had returned to something like its normal rate.

  “You don’t have to,” Teddy said. “You can stay here as long as you like.”

  “Thank you.” The air was sweet with the life of deep summer. It wafted into the carriage along with so many slow moving motes. The indirect light, filtered through clumping green leaves, did little to illuminate her delicate shoulders, still clad only in a white cotton dressing gown, and the small round fruit of her mouth. “But of course you have done so much for me today, and listened so generously, and I am sure you have so many other places to be.”

  Teddy, beside her on the bench, replied with a kind of stunned expression. “Where could I possibly have to be?” he said after a minute.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she went on, in a voice that probably would have been better suited to a year ago, if perchance they had met in her family’s parlor. “You are a soldier now, so perhaps you have soldierly things to do? And anyway, I am sure there are many unmarried girls in this city, who deserve your company far more than I do,” she went on lightly. She did not feel remotely light about it, but she knew that the steady comfort of his presence could only last so long, and that even if he did, somehow, in his way, love her still, that there was the large belly, in which another man’s child grew, between them. She had already taken up too much of his time explaining what Snowden had done to her, and to her father. “You must not worry too much about me, I am stronger than I look.”

  Teddy’s mouth opened, a narrow glinting prism, but the importance of what he was trying to say seemed to overwhelm him.

  “I know how much strength you have,” he began eventually with a wistful shake of the head. “I’ve always known how much stronger you are than I, and only sought to be worthy of it. I went to war thinking I might prove myself, that I might come back deserving you…but I saw and did awful things there, and I know I am no soldier. I only wore this today”—he gestured to the blue coat with the brass buttons, smiling wanly—“because I thought it might intimidate Mr. Cairns.”

  This confession made him seem to her, for a moment, like the bashful young man who used to visit her for tea on Sundays. She replied sweetly: “I am sure it would have.”

  “It doesn’t matter, anymore, Lizzie. He’s gone, and thank God. I don’t know if I will ever forgive myself for waiting so long to come rescue you….” He nodded firmly to himself, as though dismissing a futile line of thought. “But what matters is that you, and your child, are all right.”

  Outside there was the chirping of birds, a horse’s hooves against the pavement on the other side of the park, a low rumble of traffic from the avenues.

  “When I came back, and heard you were married…that, too, was something I thought I’d never forgive myself for. I realized how foolish it was to think I could make myself into the man you wanted by going all the way around the world. I belong here, anyway, and I think, in my way, I can lead a noble life in the place I was born. I will, no matter—” Teddy broke off, clearing his throat. His face had grown slack and pale, and Elizabeth realized he was nervous. Meanwhile, the blood just below her skin had begun to hum. “But the surest way I know my life will be noble is if you would agree to be my wife, and to be with me for all the rest of my days.”

  The dainty manner of speaking that Elizabeth had recently assumed abandoned her now, and her mouth quivered in a little circle. “You don’t want me,” she whispered. She had meant to say something more articulate and persuasive, but the threat of tears was too great.

  Teddy’s reply was rushed, nervous: “We are neither of us new, Elizabeth. I assure you that I am not as perfect a gentleman as some would have me, either.�
�� He squeezed his eyes shut, as though he was allowing some excruciating pain to pass. When he opened them again, his voice was steadier and he met her gaze. “But I have never for a moment wavered in my belief that we would make each other very happy, and I swear to you, with my whole being, and no matter the circumstances, I do absolutely want you.”

  Now it was Elizabeth who had to look away. The sight of Teddy’s earnest eyes, the sincerity with which all of him addressed her now, was too much. It caused a tide of emotion within her; it created almost too much feeling. She wanted to tell him nothing but yes, but her sense of propriety, never flagging, reminded her there were a few more things he deserved to be told. “You know Cairns wasn’t my child’s father. I was never…with him that way.”

  “I know. I knew you wouldn’t have married, like that, so suddenly, to someone merely convenient, if it hadn’t been a desperate situation. And I realized, a long while ago, that there must have been more to your kidnapping than was reported in the papers.”

  Elizabeth bent her head. She didn’t want to tell Teddy the whole story, but somehow she sensed that he was her friend, too, that he would understand. “His name was Will Keller; he was my father’s valet and coachman. I fell in love with him when I was a young girl and I had to be with him. It was impossible here, of course, so we went to California.” It was strange, after so much secrecy, to say these facts out loud. This was her history now, she realized; soon it would be in the past. “My father knew all along, I discovered, and he had tried to arrange something for us to live on. If my family hadn’t pulled me back…,” she trailed off as Teddy brought her hands firmly into his grasp.

  “Lizzie, I have loved you a long time.” The intensity of his gaze told her no more information was necessary. “I will always love you.”

  In the time it took him to speak these words, her whole face had become wet with tears. Her nose glistened with moisture, and she would have wiped it, but she didn’t want to let go of Teddy’s hands even for a second. “I was thinking, if the baby is a boy, that I’d like to call him Keller. Could we do that?”