Splendor

by Anna Godbersen

  There could never be a contest of strength between these two. He was solid, and she was practically a wraith, unbalanced by her immense belly. Was it her rage that gave her such force, or some mother-wolf instinct, or had God’s hand worked through her in that moment of peril? Later, when her body was no longer so storm-tossed by terror and emotion, she would come to see that it was Will who had been there, in her, like the winged angel she’d dreamed about, protecting her one final time.

  The impact of that push was sudden and great. Snowden’s slippers skidded against the step, and then his arms wheeled. The whites of his eyes grew huge, and he looked at the small, blond thing he had so easily kept subdued for many days now. But it was too late for him; the earth pulled him down hard, and not in any kind way. He hit the bottom of the stairs with a thud and a bone-snapping crack. After that Elizabeth took several quite audible breaths and still felt no kind of calm. She placed her hand on her belly, to try and stop the trembling there. The rest of her was a lost cause.

  Then she tiptoed forward, to see what she had done.

  Thirty Nine

  …and can’t you just imagine those women glaring at us for sport, calling me the second wife and criticizing my hostessing style? It’s not a game I have any interest in playing, or a place I have a taste for anymore. I can’t be without you, but I can’t stay here. Come to Paris with me. I will wait for you on the pier for the noon ship tomorrow. With all the adoration my beating heart is capable of,

  —D.H.

  HENRY HAD STAYED UP ALL MONDAY NIGHT GOING over documents having to do with his father’s railroad interests, but by the time the first peachy hint of dawn was spreading from the corners of the sky, he and Mr. Lawrence had cleared the matter up satisfactorily and he was ready to address some paperwork of real importance. He was anxious about Diana—it was now more than a day since she’d run away from him, and he was eager to show her that everything was over with Penelope officially, legally, and in every other way. The staff had reported that Mrs. Schoonmaker had not come home the night before, or shown herself today, and his lawyer was ready to draw up divorce papers on the grounds of adultery. It could be kept out of the columns, Lawrence assured him, especially if it was done hastily and while the ghost of William Sackhouse Schoonmaker still held some sway over the city’s newspapermen.

  A footman brought him the letter just as he and Lawrence were getting into the particulars. He glanced down at it, and knew immediately from the lovely looping scrawl who had written these pages.

  “When did this come?” he demanded.

  “Yesterday, Mr. Schoonmaker.”

  “Why was it not brought to my attention sooner?” He had not realized with what force he was speaking until he saw the trepidation in the young, thin face.

  “We thought you were busy…. We—”

  “Never mind,” he said. “It’s done now. Don’t worry,” he added, trying to sound a little kind. He was overtired, and the staff couldn’t help but be somewhat confused and intimidated by him now. His features had hardened with fatigue, and his lean frame was down to a white collared shirt tucked into dark slacks; his jacket and waistcoat were somewhere, but he had, in the last few days, stopped thinking so much about his clothes. He was carrying himself differently; he knew he walked through the many halls of that house with a proprietary attention that he had not formerly possessed. “Don’t think any more of it. You may go.”

  When the footman was gone, he stood and spread the pages out against the massive dark-stained wood desk with the simple bucolic imagery carved on its hefty sides. His father had bought it at the auction of the contents of some English lord’s country seat; in its previous life, it was the great bulwark peasants had had to face when they came to pay their tithes. His father always liked to keep in mind the piece’s history, and to see to it that when associates and underlings and rivals came to visit his offices, they felt a little peasantlike, too. In the last few days, Henry had come to really know this section of the house for the first time and had discovered to his surprise that he felt at ease there.

  My love, how do I begin? read the first line of her letter, after which tumbled unwieldy paragraphs of yearning and fervent feeling. Despite the desperate situation she was laying out in words, he found himself smiling. She was such a vivid, passionate little thing. There was so much emotion in every remote part of her, in each drop of her blood. She loved him—so said all of the sentences of her letter, even if they purported to be an ultimatum. There had been so many moments, over the course of the previous year, when he had fumbled hopelessly in the case of Diana. But there had been a shift inside him, and he was able to read her arguments and pleas without his confidence flagging even slightly. This he could make right.

  When he finished reading, he folded the pages of her letter and put them away in the top drawer of the desk. He hated himself for being unsure, for not acting sooner. Now he understood why she had run from him in the park—it was because he had been beastly. He had presumed that he had Di’s affections, rather than asking, humbly if she would be his wife. How he wished he had shown her, clearly, what a transformation he had undergone. In this sad, hectic week he had glimpsed the man he would become—a man she would be proud to call her husband. Lawrence—sitting in one of the black leather and wood chairs, which his father had acquired at the same auction, down near the corner of the mighty desk—glanced up. His eyes were watery and wrinkled, and he was waiting in a pose of expectation, as though acutely sensitive to some coming order.

  Henry strode across the room to the large, square windows that looked down from on high at the most famous avenue in the city. There was nothing doing at that hour, except in the sky, which was growing brighter with every passing moment. He stood pensively, his feet spread apart, and watched the day beginning. Presently he placed a cigarette between his slender, patrician lips, hesitating some moments before striking a match. Afterward, smoke curled up in his line of vision, blending with the smoke from all the fires that were being lit in that hour in all the best kitchens of New York.

  “Mr. Lawrence,” he said after several moments of quiet reflection. “How soon can the divorce papers be ready? Could we perhaps serve Mrs. Schoonmaker this afternoon?”

  “I see no reason why not,” the lawyer replied.

  “Excellent.” Henry dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out with his toe. “In that case will you send someone to call Tiffany? They’re going to have to open early for me today….”

  Forty

  Mrs. Snowden Cairns has been known for a weak constitution since the days when she still went by the name Elizabeth Holland. Of course she has not been seen out since it was reported that she was in a family way—but even her best friends, like Miss Agnes Jones, have not glimpsed her, and one wonders if her frail life can survive any more disruption….

  ——FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF

  THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, TUESDAY, JULY 24, 1900

  DAYLIGHT HAD BECOME SHIMMERINGLY VISIBLE IN the fanlight over the front entryway of the Cairns house. Soon the morning deliveries would begin to arrive, and outside, there was a summer day in the making. Halfway up the steep staircase that ran along the north-facing wall, Elizabeth Holland sat, frozen and shivering despite the heat, and incapable of going up or down. At the bottom of the stairs lay the lifeless body of her second husband, his head bent away from his body at a horrific angle. Ash blond hair fell from her bowed head and all around her shoulders. Both her hands were placed over her protruding belly, as though to shield her unborn baby from seeing, for the first time, what ghastliness the world was capable of.

  For a girl who was raised for the exclusive purpose of appearing lovely and exercising correct behavior, she’d done some bad things in her life. But nothing had shut her down like this. Her hands, her will, had snuffed out a human life. She knew that soon one of Snowden’s men, or his housekeeper, or another person who might pose a threat to her, would come along. But to run from
that place, to do anything, was to acknowledge her unspeakable act. And so she sat, rocking, and the hours passed.

  She was so distraught, so curled in on herself, that she barely noticed the sound of the door opening. Once she had, she realized that the unidentifiable noise she had been only dimly aware of for the preceding minutes must have been the doorknocker, and someone taking it in his hand.

  “Why—Elizabeth…”

  The gentleness with which her name was pronounced was so like a much-needed caress, that by the time she had lifted her head and met the eyes of Teddy Cutting, her own were filled with tears. He was wearing a fitted navy blue jacket with brass buttons up the front and black trousers; his soft face was torn open with a mournful kind of yearning. There was a pistol at his hip, in a leather holster—it was so odd, seeing something like that, on her decorous, fair-haired friend.

  “Oh, God,” he said, glancing at the broken body lying between the bottom step and the ornately patterned carpet. “I’m too late.”

  “No,” she whispered. He was just on time, she wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. He hurried toward her, stepping over Snowden and taking the stairs two at once. She tried to stand up, so as to better greet him, but her legs were faulty, and in another moment she had collapsed into his waiting arms. She allowed all of her weight to fall against him and found that he supported her completely. “You knew,” she whispered eventually.

  “The other day, when I came to visit. I saw that you were asking for help,” he began, almost apologetically. He rested a palm on the back of her head and secured her around the waist with the other arm. So drained was Elizabeth, she believed she could have fallen asleep, just like that. “I could smell the ether in that room, which I felt sure you didn’t need or want. But your hus”—his voice broke over the word—“husband was so vigilant at your bedside, and I feared that if I went to your mother she would not believe me. After all he was your hus—your husband, and why should I know any better?”

  He shook his head, lines deepening on his brow. Elizabeth knew she should say something, but speech was impossible for her, and in a moment he continued.

  “But days had passed. I couldn’t sleep I was so worried. This morning, I still didn’t know what to do, but I knew I couldn’t go another day without coming for you. So I decided I would talk to your husband myself and try to take you away without causing a scandal. But I called the police and told them to come in a little while, in case…I wasn’t successful.”

  Teddy adjusted his stance on the stairs, leaning back against the wall so that he could better hold Elizabeth. She wanted never to move from her resting place against his chest. She sighed, and pressed closer. It was strange, she recalled, and awfully irregular, to stand there letting some gentleman acquaintance hold one up. But she couldn’t care about a thing like that at a moment like this, when everything was grotesquely on its head, and anyway, manners had already been the cause of far too much pain and misunderstanding between her and Teddy.

  “But I should have been here sooner. Before this…before…what did happen?”

  Elizabeth’s brown eyes widened as she tried to think how she might possibly explain. She looked up at Teddy, whose face was as smooth as always, and you might have almost thought he was still a boy of sixteen, if it weren’t for those creases above his brow, and his height, and the gun at his hip. “It seems impossible, but—” she began.

  “You don’t have to,” he interrupted, gently, when she hesitated.

  But she wanted to, and might have gone on to explain, had not the knocker sounded against the door again. They were both paralyzed by the noise.

  Presently the squat figure of Mrs. Schmidt, still in her dressing gown and moving on sleepy feet, emerged from the rear of the house and swung back the door. Two men in police uniform were visible just outside, their brass badges gleaming on their chests. Mrs. Schmidt stood away, and the officers removed their hats and stepped across the threshold. Then the faces that express welcome and grateful greeting fell, as they took in the strange tableau of the lady of the house nearly hanging from the arms of Teddy Cutting, at the middle of a flight of stairs—her hair a wreck, her body swollen with child—and her husband’s body smashed at its foot.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Schmidt exclaimed, her hands flying over her mouth. “Mr. Cairns!”

  “What’s this?” said the first policeman. “Someone’s done a murder.”

  Elizabeth shuddered, not so much because the officer was searching for a culprit, although that thought did occur to her, but because his face was the face she had seen just before she was forced to bed. It was that boyish face, cratered by some childhood illness, which had, in a matter of seconds, unraveled all the horrors that had befallen her over the last year. The face was even more abhorrent to her now, and she held on to Teddy. His grip on her grew firm. Then he began slowly moving them down the stairs, supporting her all the way.

  “Mrs. Cairns has had quite a shock,” Teddy said once they had stepped gingerly over Snowden. The dead man’s chest was against the floor, but his head was still turned up, his face frozen in that final moment of shock. “I’m afraid I am to blame. I came to visit the lady this morning, and Mr. Cairns refused to let me see her, and she is such an old friend of mine you see, and there was a bit of an argument I’m afraid, I really don’t know how it happened, and then the old boy just lost his footing and—”

  The officers and Mrs. Schmidt stared at Teddy, confused and disbelieving. He had never been much of a liar, Elizabeth reflected. The policeman she recognized from the day Will died glanced from the dead body, to the fibbing gentleman with the fine way of talking, anger taking hold of his expression. But of course he was angry—he had been trying to extort money from a man who was no longer capable of writing checks.

  “Did you try to embrace his Mrs. before or after you shoved him down the stairs?” the policeman snarled. He took a step in Teddy’s direction, reaching as he did for the handcuffs at his belt. “I’m going to have to take you in, sir.”

  “You’ll do no such thing.” Elizabeth could not stand on her own, but her voice had all of a sudden become strong and clear and fine. “You won’t come one step closer to him.”

  The policeman’s brow soared, and he addressed her contemptuously: “He’s a murderer, Mrs. Cairns. You may not think that people like you can be arrested, but I assure you, that is not the case.”

  “My husband fell accidentally,” she went on, keeping her words even and calm no matter how her heart raced. “This is not a matter the police need concern themselves with. It is a sad fact, nothing more. You will speak no further of what you have seen here. I am sure you won’t, because otherwise I will be forced to contact your superiors and tell them how you were blackmailing my husband. I will see to it that your career is ruined. And I won’t stop there. Because you perpetrated a far greater crime, which I was also unlucky enough to be witness to.” Here her voice grew low, and she found it necessary to let her eyelids droop. “Remember that boy you gunned down in Grand Central? For your own profit? If you ever bother me or Mr. Cutting or any of our family again, I will see that you are tried for the murder of William Keller.”

  There was such a wild beating in her chest now, she felt sure everyone could hear it for five blocks. Her features, like those qualities of her personality that refined people used to always praise, were diminutive. But in that moment, she knew that all the ferocity and agony that had been trapped within her since the dream-shattering violence of New Year’s Day was bold on her face. “I loved that boy you killed, and if you think that I am too proper to say so on the witness stand, to tell everyone what he was to me, and what you did to him, you will find that you are dead wrong.”

  There was not a shard of regret or remorse in that horrible face. The policeman stared at her for another moment, and though she could see he didn’t like what she’d said, he eventually gestured with his chin to the other officer, and then they backed out of the room in defiant sile
nce. She knew she had only a little of this resolve, this fighting stance, left, and so—still hanging from Teddy—she turned to Mrs. Schmidt. “I am going to go home now. When I come back, or when I send somebody in my place, you will be gone. Is that clear?”

  Mrs. Schmidt had the kind of solid face that has been so marred by hard things that it no longer betrayed fear or intimidation. But she nodded, and Elizabeth knew that she understood what she was accused of, and that she would cause no more trouble. Then Elizabeth turned her chin up toward Teddy, expectantly, as though he were her husband instead of the man who lay a few feet from them. “Will you take me home?” she said.

  The fine, architectural planes of his face crumpled a little at the simple intimacy of her statement. His eyes were tender with concern. “Yes, Lizzie, I’ll take you home,” he answered.

  She went forward, her body propped against his, but found that she had spent all her strength. Her legs trembled and she sagged against him.

  “Don’t,” Teddy almost whispered. Then he bent and scooped her up, carrying her in his arms away from the sordid scene and into a bright new morning.

  Forty One

  When the Lucida sails for Europe today, it will have amongst her saloon passengers Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Newbold, their guest Jenny Livingston, the prince of Bavaria and his retinue, the painter Lispenard Bradley, traveling in a party with the Abelard Gores, and the countess de Perignon and her daughter, who are said not to have enjoyed our shores as much as they had hoped….