by Alma Katsu
“We’re out of tea, Mrs. Astor. Would you like me to send for more?” a maid was saying, though the words felt a bit as if they were moving toward her through water.
Her husband rattled his newspaper. “Dear—Miss Bidois is asking you a question. Do you want more tea or don’t you?” Jack was looking at her in a way she had learned to dislike only a few months into their marriage. As though he were a schoolteacher and she a disobedient and not very bright pupil.
“No, thank you.”
The maid nodded and exited the room.
The protracted honeymoon to Europe and Egypt had been a way to avoid the press—so much speculation about the timing of their marriage, so much sniping—but it had been much better than she’d expected. They’d had a wonderful time. Everything—even the . . . intimacy—had been easy and immediate between them. Though he was nearly three times her age, and some of her school friends had whispered and giggled about what that would be like, she’d been surprised to learn it wasn’t so terrible. Jack sought her pleasure with the patience of one who has never known hurriedness, never known need. One who had built a life instead around the joy in, and pursuit of, things not needed, only wanted. He was generous with her—physically, emotionally, financially.
All he asked for in return, of course, was complete and utter loyalty.
And she had no reason not to offer that to him—except the workings of her own mind. She sometimes wondered if she’d been designed purposely to push against things. She used to think it was curiosity. That’s what her father had called it. Her teachers hadn’t always been so generous. “Don’t be willful. It’s an unattractive quality in a lady,” they’d said to her on more than one occasion.
Now she wondered if the teachers had been right. If what resided inside her was something more like resistance.
Surely, others would call her spoiled. But could a person simply have a predilection for unhappiness? Not suffering, mind you—she had no desire to suffer—just a quiet, tickling dissatisfaction with the way things were—no matter how wonderful things actually were?
If so, that was Madeleine’s illness, her personal curse.
And now, after six months, they were on their way back to New York, and a dark, fluttering worry had begun to inhabit her chest, moth-like, invisibly eating, eating, eating. . . .
Something was wrong. Did no one else see it?
She clenched her eyes shut, trying to chase away a coming headache.
Jack let his newspaper droop. “Are you feeling unwell, dear? Perhaps you should go back to bed.”
The bed was calling. How late had it been when Madeleine had finally been able to get to sleep? She’d tossed and turned for hours, thinking of the boy. And, too, of the prophecy . . .
“Perhaps you’re right.” She rose and made her way slowly to the bedroom on swollen, tender feet, though what she wanted more than to sleep was to be home, not in Newport but in New York, among her real friends, the girls she’d grown up with. Not the young women who fawned over her in her travels, the other heiresses and new wives and society connections who’d become their natural companions on the trip.
For so many years, marrying well had been her vocation, her calling, she thought as she slipped in between the silken sheets of their bed. There had never been any pretense otherwise in her family. She had been given the best the family could afford, private schools and finishing classes, lessons in dancing and singing and tennis. Parties in the homes of the very best people and vacations in the right places. It had worked for her sister, Katherine, gotten her an enviable marriage and social standing. It would work for her.
And this expectation had never bothered Maddie. She loved school, had been an eager student, a natural leader among her set, and a social butterfly. Things had come easily for her—but she always found herself craving a challenge.
Some people talked about her family, called them social climbers and jumped-up merchants, but her parents paid no heed. “It’s been this way for centuries,” her mother sniffed whenever they were snubbed by some matron or other. “That’s how you get ahead, through strategic alignment. That’s how great families are forged.” Theirs would be a great family, it went without saying.
She’d met John Jacob at Bar Harbor the summer of 1910. Madeleine had been seventeen and Jack forty-five. They were vacationing at the summer home of mutual friends, Maddie playing tennis with one of the other girls, showing off her fine form. Jack retrieved an errant ball and walked all the way over to the court to return it to her. She knew what was meant by the look in his eye when he handed her the ball and introduced himself. Her mother nearly fell all over herself afterward. “Mr. Astor has taken an interest in you, my dear! We must play this very carefully, very carefully indeed!”
She didn’t need her mother to tell her that. A long game was Madeleine’s very favorite type of game. She, like her friends, had been groomed and bred to wed princelings. Being a debutante was a blood sport. And she had succeeded, gotten the richest man in the world to propose to her. It made her the envy of all her friends. One even had a nervous breakdown over it.
Maddie’s maiden name was Force, after all.
Kitty, Jack’s Airedale, lay by her feet—she always slept on the bed with them. Now the dog whined lightly, as if echoing the restlessness in Maddie’s head.
A sick tumult of guilt and dread rose up from her stomach, acidic against the back of her throat, remembering that Teddy had been responsible for Kitty. The dog was probably crying for her missing friend.
“The two of you are miserable wretches this morning,” her husband observed, standing over them.
“Surely you can’t expect me not to feel something for the poor boy.”
“It’s not like he was your child,” Jack said under his breath.
She got up and moved to the wardrobe, ornate mahogany, stewing quietly as she attempted to select a daytime dress.
She was angry, she realized—and even afraid.
It was all the fault of Ava, Jack’s first wife. Her husband didn’t want to believe it—Maddie hadn’t wanted to believe it herself but came to see that the ugly little story her mother had heard was, in fact, true. Jack’s divorce had been ugly—it was before she met him, thankfully, but that didn’t stop Ava Willing Astor from being vindictive. She’d gotten terribly angry at her former husband when he announced his intention to remarry. They’d divorced less than a year earlier; he was remarrying scandalously soon—and, of course, someone scandalously young. Ava was afraid of what it might mean for her son and daughter when there was a second set of Astor children, younger and cuter and living with their father day in and day out.
Maddie’s mother learned through her spy network that Ava had hired a gypsy to put a curse on her. Maddie would’ve thought it laughable if occultism wasn’t the biggest fad of the day, if she hadn’t known for a fact that many society ladies went to mediums to speak to the dead and have their palms read. Ava’s gypsy was well-known among the Manhattan set, keeping an exotic little atelier in a chic section of the city, advertising in the Times. Maddie’s mother’s operative gave them a full report on the supposed curse. “Your husband and his new wife will never know prolonged happiness,” she’d said, mimicking the gypsy’s Slavic accent. “He will never have a child that he loves more than the children he already has, and the new wife will lose everyone she has ever loved.”
Jack had laughed it off. “Ava? A gypsy? Impossible. She’s the most sensible woman I’ve ever known.” But men often dismissed the power and importance of prophecies, of anything they could not see or hold—or own.
Maddie had waited until they’d arrived in Cairo to consult her own mystic, a one-eyed crone known to the expat set. The woman told her she could see the malignant spirit following Maddie, bound to her by the gypsy’s curse. “Get rid of it,” Maddie had said, her voice rising as she tried not to cry. “I have a child to prot
ect. I’ll pay you anything.” But the crone had insisted that Maddie had to drive off the evil spirit herself. “You must prove stronger than your foe.” Her English had been poor, though, and Maddie wasn’t sure what that meant. Maddie wasn’t one to back down from a fight, but how was she supposed to drive off something she couldn’t see or touch? She had resolved to hire a medium in New York, a famous psychic.
Now she was sorry that she’d waited.
And something had to be done now, before they got to New York. She didn’t like the shadow Teddy’s death had cast over her, over everything. The ugly suspicion that it would not be the last of the curse’s working.
She had grown very close to Teddy, in fact, feeling bad for him after she learned his parents had died, insisting they give him a place in the household. He’d become like a member of the family. Almost. She’d fancied adopting him—not in the formal way; Jack would never stand for that, nor would his two children from his former marriage, who weren’t much older than Maddie herself, and who, she suspected, truly only saw dollar signs when they looked at their father. She’d imagined taking Teddy in like a nephew, providing him with nice clothing and warm food, imagined how he’d dote on her, would love her, even. He’d come to embody all the good she was capable of.
Now, of course, that would never happen.
The worst part was she knew she was to blame, no matter what Dr. Leader had said to soothe her. Teddy wouldn’t have come on this tour if not for her. He would’ve remained behind at Beechwood with the rest of the staff, polishing the silver and running errands, waiting for their return. Jack had raised his eyebrows when she’d asked but gave in to make her happy. He hadn’t complained, not even when Teddy lost Kitty in Egypt, the dog getting away from the boy, who was then too scared to tell them. Jack had paid to have a suite of servants stay behind and look for the dog, to no avail. It was only through sheer dumb luck that they ran into the dog some days later, stowed away on the barge of another group of wealthy American tourists. She’d been sure that Jack was going to insist they get rid of the boy, but he didn’t.
She had loved Teddy—in her way—and the evil spirit had taken him away. Just like Ava’s crone had said.
Her husband caught her looking at the dog as she slipped out of her robe and began to dress for the day. “I know you feel bad about Teddy,” Jack said. “I quite adore seeing your sensitive side. But you must try to put it out of your mind. All this melancholy can’t be good for the baby.”
She rolled her eyes. As if he knew what was best for the baby.
They took their time with everything, the Astors. Even getting ready for the day was an event; and today was no different, despite the awfulness of Teddy’s death hovering over them. So it was well into the afternoon by the time Madeleine’s hair was set just right and they found their friends gathered around a table in the Verandah Café, playing cards and drinking.
No, not friends. Their circle. Their people. A few of them, stragglers who didn’t normally meet the standards of the rest but had risen momentarily to their ranks via the strange shuffling together that occurred on a ship, would be forgotten as soon as they had disembarked, shed like an unneeded umbrella.
The Verandah Café reminded Maddie of her trip to Florida, taken when she was thirteen. Indescribably exotic then, the palm trees and sand beaches and cute little alligators now paled in comparison to what she’d seen in Cairo and Alexandria. Still, the room conjured up that happy family trip, with miniature potted palms and wicker furniture, and great fans circling lazily overhead. The bright greens and corals of the cushions gave cheery respite from the unending gray of the ocean and sky outside.
And yet, seeing the crowd gathered in here gave her another moment of ill feeling—W. T. Stead and the Duff-Gordons; Caroline Fletcher and her husband, a handsome young man named Mark, his face always creased with worry. It was the séance group re-created, almost exactly, but with the addition of Dr. Alice Leader. Last night had ended in tragedy; it seemed a bad idea for them to be gathered again. This unspoken thing united them. The way the candles had all snuffed out.
The way the scream had torn from her throat when she’d first seen Teddy, strewn on her bedroom floor.
Maddie sank into a wicker chair, grateful for the plump cushions, and watched the men gravitate to Kitty, their careless hands petting her too aggressively. Men liked their pets, the implicit permission they felt in handling them however they wanted.
“There’s a good thing,” Sir Duff-Gordon said to the dog as he cuffed her chin.
“Why don’t you join us? If you both play, we could make up another foursome,” Lucy Duff-Gordon said, not taking her eyes off the cards. Though she was a year or two older than Jack—nearing fifty—she looked no older than thirty-three. She had an elegance—and arrogance—that made most women wither, but Maddie had noticed that her humor, though cutting, was always warm. She was beautiful, savvy, quick, and not easily impressed—all qualities Maddie hoped to cultivate in herself over time. And a successful businesswoman, a rarity, to be sure. One of the biggest stories of the day was that she’d fitted Gaby Deslys, the French stage actress, with an entire wardrobe of nightgowns and negligees that she wore during her courtship by the king of Portugal. After that, everyone in Maddie’s circle back at home had ordered similar slinky, silky garments though none, that Maddie knew of, had dared to wear them.
“We can put Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Stead to good use, instead of letting them sit around like wallflowers at the ball,” Lucy said.
“I’m a far more skilled observer than player,” Stead said with his characteristic aloofness.
“That’s not what I hear,” Lucy clipped back, with the arch of a perfectly shaped eyebrow.
Madeleine knew what she was referring to: Stead’s history as a newspaperman. The scandal of Eliza Armstrong in particular. Everyone knew about it. Everyone whispered. How he’d been far more than an observer. How he’d gone undercover to purchase a hired girl—a girl of only thirteen, no less—and taken her to a boardinghouse for the night, all in the name of “research.” His goal had been to expose the ease with which the sex trade was conducted right under everyone’s noses, right there in civilized England. And yet what he’d succeeded in accomplishing was causing ripples of suspicion and outrage among the elite.
It had been, when you thought about it, positively American of him.
But this had all been before Maddie was even born, and she grew restless thinking about it. Again, she felt a sudden desire for her real friends back home. Six months traveling had been an awfully long time.
She wanted, desperately, suddenly, to be off this ship.
“I don’t like bridge, in any case,” Jack was saying. “I’ve always thought women are far more skilled in the counting of cards than men. Just one of their many hidden mysteries.” He scratched Kitty’s belly, the dog on her back with her legs in the air, tongue lolling from the side of her mouth. Kitty knew how to make Jack love her. It struck Maddie that she and Kitty occupied the same level in her husband’s affections. She knew how to make her husband purr like a kitten. You learned the ropes very quickly.
“I wonder, then,” said Lucy Duff-Gordon, “that more of us aren’t operating businesses, with all our mysterious talents.”
Her husband, Sir Duff-Gordon, coughed into his sleeve. “Surely not all young women share the interest, my dear. Mrs. Astor, you can take my hand if you wish.” He rose from the table, offering his cards to Madeleine. “Though that does mean partnering with my wife. Bid high at your own peril.”
“Nobody finds that funny,” Lucy said as she rearranged the cards in her hand.
“I couldn’t,” Maddie said, demurring quickly. The truth was that she didn’t like bridge. She associated it with her mother’s set. Hours exchanging gossip in the sunroom over tea and sherry, the snap of cards played against the glass table topper. She didn’t want that to be her future, as
much as she knew it would be. Even though she’d benefited from that gossip.
She preferred more active games. Tennis, horseback riding, even yachting. She had heard there was a squash court on board, with a balcony for people to observe the game. A professional instructor and everything. She wished she were in a position to play, but running was out of the question. Lord knew she needed a bit of movement—they’d likely be sitting on their rumps all evening, between dinner and the scheduled piano concert in the reception room that everyone seemed to be planning on attending later. At least the reception room was lovely, with its Aubusson tapestry and leaded-glass windows.
She stayed to watch them play a hand, however: a foursome of Lady and Sir Duff-Gordon, Mrs. Fletcher, and Dr. Alice Leader. Mostly to see if Lucy would say anything tart about anyone else on the ship. The one thing Madeleine hated more than gossip was being left out of it.
Besides, she liked to observe people. There was so much you could guess about a person when they didn’t know you were watching.
However, Alice Leader made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t quite articulate. It seemed funny to see the doctor with this group, in her somber brown skirts and staid spectacles, hair pinned up primly. In contrast to, say, Lady Duff-Gordon, who always dressed so beautifully. Today in pale pink silk and tiny rosebuds. The two women were like chalk and cheese.
“Where’s Guggenheim? Taking voice lessons from his French chanteuse?” Jack asked, the men sniggering. Was that a tinge of envy Maddie detected in his tone? Everyone knew the hired singer he’d brought with him was not spending her nights teaching him French. At least, not French music.
“I expect that’s it,” Sir Duff-Gordon said as he discarded. His choice of card elicited a groan from his wife.
“Maybe he’s sleeping in after the excitement of last night.” Mark Fletcher was being deliberately arch.
Dr. Leader looked up from her cards. “Excitement?”