The Luxe

by Anna Godbersen

  “My father gave it to my mother before they were married. I’ve never understood what it meant. I suppose he might have given it to the seventeen-year-old girl he married in the hope that she would always be seventeen.” Henry gave a muted, ironic laugh. “But that’s not why I’m giving it to you.”

  “I know,” Diana said as she tucked the cross into her bodice.

  “It’s more understated than all the things he gave her later; maybe that’s why I like it. I don’t remember her very well; I was only four when she died. But I think she was that old-fashioned, natural kind of beautiful that doesn’t benefit from all the ornament.”

  Diana took this in. She had learned so much about Henry over the last evening that he practically constituted an entirely new person, and everything he said now seemed a wink to her special knowledge. She leaned forward from her seat in the plain buggy, the one vehicle Henry could possibly have managed to borrow unnoticed from the Schoonmaker carriage house, and around the black folding top. They were paused on Broadway, waiting for the right moment for Diana to slip into the morning crowd and make her way home. She turned her sleepy, adoring eyes back on him and tried to smile as best she could. “It’ll be hard watching you marry Liz, Henry….” She had intended something more finalizing and profound, but her throat was constricting so painfully now that she knew she wouldn’t be able to say any more.

  Henry kissed her below her right eye. Diana took a final look at him before pulling her hood firmly over her face and slipping down to the street. Once her feet touched the ground, she found it easy to move forward and join the hordes on their morning route. All around her, men in bowlers and cheap three-piece suits walked at a swift gait that didn’t allow for time to wonder at the darting girl with the hood.

  Before long she had found the alley off Nineteenth Street, which led into the Van Dorans’ property and then into her own family’s. She had risked the trellis the night before, which had been nearly as dangerous as venturing out by herself into the New York night, but today she took the easier route of the hatch door into the basement washing room. From there it was a breathless dash up the servants’ stairs and she was on the second floor and very close to the door to her own safe bedroom.

  There was nobody there, which was some kind of relief, but the room was altered from when she had left it. All the dresses that she’d pulled out to consider wearing for her evening with Henry had been put away. All her high-heeled slippers, too. And sitting on top of her neatly made bed was the hat that Henry had worn on the day they met. Anxiety began to grip at Diana as she went to the bowler and picked it up. She was frozen in place, immobile with the sad, awful thought of who had been there the night before.

  Forty Two

  It has become widely acceptable to be late, a new social phenomenon I frown on intensely. A true lady always arrives at precisely the promised hour.

  ––MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899

  IT WAS NINE THIRTY ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, AND Elizabeth found herself stopped on Broadway, in the middle of all the morning bustle, her limbs paralyzed by hopelessness. All the chaos—the horse-drawn delivery carts, the trolleys, the yelling of drivers, the sounds of carriage wheels against the battered pavement, the throngs of pedestrians—ceased to exist in her mind. The scene she had just witnessed was not, after the evidence she’d seen the night before, a surprise, but the emotion it awoke in her was startling.

  The hooded figure of her younger sister had already disappeared down Twenty-first Street. The sight of Diana, on a Manhattan corner so early in the morning, had confirmed all of Elizabeth’s suspicions. But she remained strangely stuck to her spot, watching the person who had been left behind. He had stepped down from his buggy, and was just standing there on the curb. She couldn’t be sure, because she had always been the one doing the running away, but she was nearly certain the forlorn way Henry was looking down Twenty-first Street wasn’t so different from the way that Will must have looked every morning when she turned her back on him and went into the house.

  Elizabeth had barely managed to sleep the night before, and still she had risen from bed without the slightest idea how she could subdue Penelope, how she could save Diana, or how she could possibly resign herself to marrying the loathsome Henry Schoonmaker. She had tried to dress herself with some determination, in the same dress of blue-and-white seersucker she had worn the day he had proposed, and because she sensed the weather was about to change, a camel wrap with a hood and flannel lining. Once she was dressed she still hadn’t known what to do, and so she had decided to walk, all the way up Fifth Avenue to face Penelope. Every member of the household was employed in some wedding-related task or other, and in the few moments when her opinion was not required she had managed to slip out the door.

  Last night she had come to the conclusion that her fiancé was the most licentious man she had ever met. But his appearance now dispelled that belief. She stood there watching him a moment longer, in his simple black suit, with his face overcome by loss, and felt sure that he was not trying to take advantage of Diana. He actually did love her sister, and though she couldn’t totally explain it, she had the growing conviction that her sister loved him in return. Elizabeth had been wrong. Her anger had dissolved in seconds.

  A high, black coach, with men in work clothes standing up on the back, paused between Henry and Elizabeth, considering how it should enter the fray on the wide thoroughfare. When it had passed and her view opened up again, Henry had turned and was looking in her direction.

  Henry lowered his head, but kept his eyes, full of remorse and resignation, looking directly into her own. She could see now that he was not so unlike her—that he was willing to marry for some reason having more to do with family and duty and class than love, but that his heart lay elsewhere. He took off his hat and tipped it gently in her direction. She bent her head slowly in reply, to let him know they understood each other, and then turned away and moved northward into the crowd. She had an appointment for which she could not be late.

  Everything was different now, but still as impossible as it had been before. Elizabeth realized with sadness how easy everything would be if she simply did not exist. She no longer needed the forty-block walk to the Hayes mansion to figure out what to do. In an instant she had realized what that single devastating thing was.

  Forty Three

  We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them.

  ––REVEREND NEEDLEHOUSE, COLLECTED SERMONS, 1896

  DIANA HAD BEEN STANDING STILL IN HER ROOM for well over an hour, wondering what she should do with that hat, when a scream from downstairs broke through her state of shock. A new frost alighted on her heart. When she had left the house the night before, it had seemed impossible that she might get caught—nobody was paying any attention to her doings these days, and besides, her whole evening had seemed like an episode out of time, ending as abruptly as it had begun. But the noise coming from below was most certainly a cry of grief, anger, confusion, or some combination of all three.

  Diana looked at the hat, placed just so at the center of her bed. She was trying to think of some story to explain this clear evidence of her misbehavior, when another cry—this one more of a moan—came up from the first floor.

  Diana threw Henry’s hat under her bed and turned to her closet. The dresses she had taken out the night before were all there. It was too late to change, she told herself, so she quickly checked herself in the mirror. She did not look any different, after her night with Henry, but she felt much older already. Then the moaning started again, and she had no choice but to take the stairs two at a time to face what would surely be an inevitable circle of accusations and confessions.

  Diana burst into the drawing room to
find Penelope Hayes, her dark hair unusually low and messy, and her red muslin dress dripping onto Louisa Holland’s favorite Persian carpet. She was drenched and blubbering, punctuating her nonsense with occasional shrieks.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Aunt Edith said, coming up beside Diana and wrapping her in her arms.

  “How could you sleep so long on a day like today?” her mother added as she, too, came over and pressed Diana’s head to her breast. “Out of all the tragedies the Hollands have suffered.”

  “What are you talking about?” Diana whispered. It was the loudest voice she could manage. She looked out from the clot of arms around her, at Penelope, who had all of a sudden quieted down.

  “It’s almost too much to bear,” her mother said.

  “It is certainly too much to bear,” Aunt Edith seconded.

  At that moment Claire came rushing into the room. “I found a policeman on the street,” she said hysterically, “and he said he would go to the precinct and summon his superiors. Mrs. Holland, do you need salts?”

  “Yes, Claire, please. And water.”

  The three Holland women moved in a cluster to the nearest settee and sat down together. Diana was by now cognizant of the fact that this had nothing to do with her late-night tryst. Something far worse must have happened. She glanced once more at Penelope, whose expression implied that she had borne witness to a very grave occurrence.

  “What’s this all about?” Diana managed. Her heart was thumping so loudly now that the rest of her surroundings seemed muted. Both her mother and aunt looked pale and exhausted from crying. They clasped each other’s hands across Diana’s lap.

  “Your sister…” Aunt Edith began in a faltering voice.

  “She’s…well, she’s gone from us, Diana.”

  “Gone?” Diana whispered stupidly. “Gone where?” It was only then that she began to take in the details. The hat, placed with such perfectionist zeal at the center of the impeccably made bed. It was a message from Elizabeth. With every passing second, it was becoming more horribly clear. She felt dizzy and sick with herself.

  “It happened this morning,” Penelope broke in, suddenly regaining her speaking voice. She moved forward assuredly, and situated herself on a small silk hassock in front of Diana and her family. Every sound and color seemed extreme to Diana now, and she was painfully aware of the droplets of water falling from Penelope as they hit the ground. “Elizabeth came by to visit me early this morning. We had planned to go to the dressmaker’s together.” Penelope spoke carefully, as though she were thinking out each word or trying to keep herself from crying. “She was all nerves about the wedding. I think it was just dawning on her how much there was to be done by Sunday. I thought it might be a good idea to take an early-morning ride by the water to calm her down. I wanted her to able to speak freely, so I tried to drive us myself. I just wanted to reassure her. After all, it will all get done…or it would have. That’s what I told her.”

  Penelope’s speech slowed, and Diana turned her wild eyes toward her mother, expecting her to complete the story. Before she could, Penelope broke in again: “There was a strange man by the waterfront. The horses got spooked, and…and…I couldn’t control them! I couldn’t…oh…oh, oh, oh.”

  “She was thrown,” Mrs. Holland said distractedly.

  “Into the river. And then Penelope and the carriage were pulled for many blocks before she managed to get control of the horses, and by then there was no sign of Elizabeth anywhere.”

  “My new phaeton,” Penelope continued, more to her hands than anyone else. “It goes so fast and it’s set so high!” she explained, and there was something in her voice that reminded Diana of bragging. “I can’t even really make sense of what happened. And then the water, when I tried to see if I could find her. It was so cold, so bone-chillingly cold.”

  Diana was stunned and full of disbelief, but what she had seen upstairs told her that she had to believe. Surely it was Elizabeth who had come into her room and put all the clothes away. And surely she knew where that hat had come from and, put together with Diana’s absence last night, what it meant.

  “But how could she have been thrown while Penelope remained in the carriage?” Diana asked. She didn’t want to ask these questions, but she had to. A nauseating guilt was sweeping through her, and she could feel Henry’s cross, underneath her dress, digging at her skin and reminding her of what she’d done. Her sister was dead, and it was her fault. She brought her eyes up to Penelope, who was staring back with what must have been pure shock in her face. “I mean…” Diana went on, in a barely audible voice, “you don’t think she threw herself, do you? On purpose, I mean.”

  Diana felt the bodies of her aunt and mother draw back from her own, and a silence descended on the room.

  She thought she saw a spark of interest cross Penelope’s face, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come and once again Diana saw only a mask of distress.

  “We’re all a little shaken,” Aunt Edith said. “Or you wouldn’t say something like that.”

  “Diana, this is an awful moment, and it is understandable for you to not quite know what you’re saying. You couldn’t, or you wouldn’t say things like that.” Her mother was struggling to keep her voice level, and though her face was unmoving, there was a muddy quality to her eyes that suggested untold grief. “You must go to your room. You must rest. But don’t go on saying things like that—you must not—or someone might give them credence.”

  Diana was grateful that they wanted her to leave the room. She walked to the hall without a backward glance. Her chest was brittle with grief, like it might catch fire or crumble away. The thought of being around people who believed she was innocent was abhorrent to her. Perhaps, in her way, Elizabeth had loved Henry. Perhaps she had been so distraught by her sister’s secrets that she had wanted to do herself harm. Elizabeth must have felt like the whole world was upside down, and maybe the cold embrace of the Hudson had, in the end, seemed preferable to a world where the Hollands were not wealthy, marriage had nothing to do with love, and her future husband spent the night with her little sister.

  Diana entered her room and picked up Henry’s hat. The things she had done yesterday had been thoughtless, but their result was horrific and everlasting. She had never really known guilt, and now it was overpowering her. Diana lay down on the crisply made bed, put the hat over her face, and let her whole body be racked by tears.

  Forty Four

  …And then there is the American princess who met with the waters of the Hudson in an untimely fashion. The mysterious case of Elizabeth Holland is being called an accident, but there are a number of reasons to believe it was the opposite. There are simply too many loose details, including some reports that a man—tall, slender, and well dressed—was witnessed at the river’s edge….

  ––FROM THE “POLICE BLOTTER” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1899

  ON THURSDAY MORNING, LINA ROUSED HERSELF AND chose a dark-colored skirt and a light-colored shirtwaist. These pieces were not quite so flashy as the red dress she had put on two nights ago, but Lina had had her fill of red for the moment. And anyway, what she was wearing was nice enough to impress her sister without making her feel jealous. During her hurried departure from the Hollands’ home, she and Claire had agreed to meet at eleven on Thursday—the one hour when her older sister was reasonably sure she would not be needed by her mistresses—on one of the benches in the park in Union Square. Lina was still feeling a residual shame for her drunken behavior of the other night, and hoped that, when and if she managed to find Will, he wouldn’t somehow sense the depths of her depravity. It was some relief that she couldn’t remember much of the episode in the saloon.

  She did her hair the old way, with a sharp part and a low bun, and then she put on a little tailored jacket. When she realized how late it was getting, she tucked her purse under her arm and scuttled down the stairs.

  She hurried through the small lobby, past the sing
le drowsing clerk. Outside she could see the rain was falling heavily. It occurred to her that, given the weather, Claire might not even be able to make it to their meeting. But Lina felt she must go. Her sister would do everything in her power to be there, so she must do the same. And besides, she was harboring a secret hope that Claire would have heard something about Will. Perhaps she knew something that would help Lina find him. As there was no forgotten umbrella upstairs, she swiped the copy of the Imperial that was lying at the clerk’s desk.

  She stepped tentatively onto the one little step down to the street, where she was still protected from the rain by an awning. The sky was an ominous slate color, and the air smelled of all the grime being washed out of crevices and into the street. A few people ran by, shielded under black umbrellas, and those passersby who had not thought to bring such protection were quickly soaked to the bone. She unfolded her paper, propping it open so that she could at least shield her head from the onslaught. A chill set in at the back of her neck when she saw Elizabeth’s name.

  There it was, on page eleven. Elizabeth Holland had been plunged into the Hudson River and was presumed dead. It would have been less surprising to see a front-page banner headline proclaiming that the end of the world had been scheduled for later that afternoon. Lina had felt so many things for Elizabeth—adoration, envy, jealousy, and fury—it seemed impossible that she might simply…die. This thought revived something in Lina’s memory, but she couldn’t quite grasp hold of it. As the news settled into her consciousness, Lina began to feel a little sick and dizzy.