by Anya Seton
‘I hope, dear Mrs. Dawson, that you and the little one will be quaite, quaite at home here. Our evening collation will be at six, and you will have the opportunity to meet my other charming guests. You will find them all ladies and gentlemen of breeding. I never receive anyone here who would not equally have graced dear Mama’s hospitable board, I assure you.’
Fey made a suitable murmur of appreciation, thinking, Santa Maria! I’m glad I don’t have to stand this for long! And while she was here, she would not even be able to see Simeon except in the parlor, chaperoned by the highly bred guests.
‘You’ve just arrived in New York? ’ pursued Miss Prendergast, shedding a majestic smile. ‘And you met Mr. Tower in New Orleans?—I understand from Mr. Tower’s letter that you are a friend of Mrs. Delatone’s——’ She pronounced both the Tower and Delatone names with unction. ‘Such an agreeable connection for you.’
Fey made another murmur. All these lies—it was still doubtful whether Mrs. Delatone would consent to receive Fey.
‘Forgive me—I’m afraid the baby——’ Fey finally got rid of Miss Prendergast, shut and locked the bedroom door.
‘Ah, Lucita,’ she said to the baby, who was hitching along the carpet on all fours, ‘this is a very funny way to be married. I’m really married now and it doesn’t feel it. But we must do as Simeon says. He’s been very good to us.’
Lucita pulled herself up hand over hand on her mother’s skirt, stood swaying and gurgling proudly.
‘Oh, clever one!’ cried Fey, snatching her up. ‘We’ll pretend anything, won’t we, for Simeon, because very soon you shall have a beautiful nursery all your own, and you’ll have a real father, too, for he likes you very much.’
It was true. Simeon was fond of the pretty baby, especially as Fey had always managed that Lucita should not annoy him. His passion for Fey had surmounted even that handicap and he knew that in his big house he need never be any more aware of the child than he wished to be.
The conquest of Mrs. Delatone proved easier than he had expected. Joseph Delatone was interested in handling part of the Gulf and San Diego deal through his banking house, and perfectly willing that in return his wife should call on a young Southern widow of, as Simeon represented it, unimpeachable background.
Mrs. Delatone duly left cards on ‘Mrs. Dawson,’ who reciprocated three days later and, finding Mrs. Delatone at home in her Fifth Avenue mansion, completed the conquest herself.
Clara Delatone was a woman of great sweetness and social grace, and she was charmed by Fey, who listened admirably, spoke little, and behaved with a touching wistful modesty.
‘No wonder Mr. Tower interests himself in that attractive little widow,’ she told her husband later. ‘ Such a tragic story and she comes of Scotch aristocracy too. I’m quite in love with her myself.’
The next day, over shad roe at the downtown Delmonico’s, Delatone passed this on to Simeon, who was delighted. The Delatones were not near the inner circle of society and he hoped to do much better eventually, but they were an excellent beginning.
It particularly pleased him to discover that he might safely leave the outcome of these social efforts to Fey. ‘Though how you knew exactly when to juggle the teacups, and behave yourself with the servants at the Delatones, is a mystery to me,’ he whispered during one of his formal calls in Miss Prendergast’s parlor.
Fey gave him a naughty smile. ‘You forget that I have had opportunities to watch the rich in Santa Fe, where I myself was a servant,’ she whispered back.
‘Hush!’ cried Simeon violently, but as the other boarders turned startled heads toward their comer, he controlled himself, knitting his blond eyebrows into a frown.
‘Ah, Simeon— laugh, my husband,’ she whispered. ‘All this is really very funny. Day after day I pretend to be exactly what I’m not-Night after night I go to my narrow virgin’s bed——’
Simeon did smile then reluctantly.
‘Not for long, darling,’ he said. ‘I talked to the minister at the Presbyterian Church today. Will the twentieth of April suit you?’
A week before Fey’s Presbyterian wedding day, she had a caller. By now the papers had carried the news of Simeon’s intended marriage, brief mentions only, for the sanctities of life—birth, marriage, and death—were still handled with restraint.
Miss Prendergast, however, devoured every item, and, bleakly thrilled by the luster reflected on her boarding-house, treated Fey to special attention. She herself knocked on Fey’s door and announced the caller. ‘A rather peculiar person, Mrs. Dawson, not quaite to the manor born. A Miss Miggs. I said I would ascertain if you were at home in case you didn’t wish——’
Miss Miggs, thought Fey blankly, I don’t know any Miss Miggs. But she was excessively bored. Lucita was napping, and the refined confinement of her room stifled her.
‘I’ll come right down,’ she said.
She stopped on the threshold of the parlor which contained a plump blowsy woman in a black plush hat. The woman sat on the extreme edge of her chair, mechanically opening and shutting her pocketbook. She saw Fey, started to rise, then sat down again, biting her lips.
Madre de Dios! thought Fey, it is Simeon’s mistress. ‘Yes, Miss Miggs?’ she said, advancing. ‘You wanted to see me?’
The glint of defiance in Pansy’s prominent eyes dissolved into a swimming embarrassment. She nodded dumbly.
Fey became aware of the hovering landlady. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘come up to my room. I must watch the baby.’
Pansy got up clumsily and followed Fey upstairs.
‘Please take off your things and sit down,’ said Fey, smiling and indicating the curly-maple rocker.
‘You dunno who I am,’ answered Pansy, in a strangled voice, stubbornly standing. Her natural high color had flared to violet. Under the rakish hat her soft blond hair straggled in wisps from slipping hairpins. She was thirty-three and in the chill light of Miss Prendergast’s front room she looked more. Fey was reminded of an anxious Newfoundland lost from its master.
‘I know who you are,’ she said, gently removing the camel’s-hair shawl from Pansy’s shoulders. ‘You’ve come to talk about Mr. Tower. Sit down, please.’
Pansy gave her a dazed look and slumped into the rocker. ‘I never told nobody, all these years. I never made no fuss. I knew he might get married, but——’ Her chin quivered, and she swallowed. ‘I didn’t never really believe it,’ she whispered.
‘Why did you come to see me?’
‘I dunno—I had to see you,’ said Pansy. She clenched her hands on the rocker’s arms. ‘He ain’t been near me since last fall. I felt something, though plenty times before he wouldn’t come often. But I’d know he was busy. I was happy waiting. I wouldn’t make no fuss. But he’s gone for good now.’ Again the flat voice stopped, added in that harsh whisper, ‘I can’t stand it.’
A sudden fear diverted Fey’s pity. ‘You must be reasonable, Miss Miggs,’ she said sharply. ‘I know he’s made a handsome provision for you.’
Pansy’s eyes turned to Fey’s face. ‘Money don’t do no good. I love him. There ain’t never been nobody else since I was fifteen.’
‘But what can I do?’ cried Fey. ‘I’m sorry, very sorry, but——’
‘You can’t do nothing now, I guess,’ said Pansy. ‘I knew I was a fool to come. But if you’d only let him alone in the beginning—I know him and it was you started it—you don’t love him like I do—I feel it—you won’t do him no good——’ Her breath came in a wheezy gasp. She pulled herself out of the rocker. ‘You won’t do him no good,’ she repeated.
‘You’ve no right to say a thing like that!’ Fey rose, too, her face white.
Pansy put out a groping hand and picked up her shawl. ‘Mebbe not,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been a fool. I guess it was good of you to let me see you.’ She dragged the shawl over her shoulders, and opened the door. ‘Good-bye,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell Simmy I came. It’d upset him. I won’t make no fuss.’ The door shut.<
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Two days later, the papers carried another item buried on the fourth page amongst the advertisements. A Miss Pansy Miggs had been found dead in her bed at her rooms on Eleventh Street as the result of an overdose of sleeping tablets. The chemist testified that she had suffered for some time from insomnia and had been buying the tablets from him, and the death was doubtless accidental.
Neither Simeon nor Fey ever mentioned Pansy’s name. After the first bitter shock, Simeon managed to shut his mind to both remorse and pity. It was an accident, of course, stupid docile Pansy was not capable of an action so deliberately shocking. And he’d done the right thing by her. She’d been fixed with a tidy income for life. There was no cause for reproach. It was an accident.
Fey was denied this consoling belief. Again and again memory thrust on her that last image of Pansy at the door, the vague anxious eyes staring past Fey in a hopeless resignation. ‘But what could I have done?' Fey cried to this image as she had in reality. ‘Be reasonable, what could I have done? ’ And in reason there was never any answer.
On Tuesday, April 20, 1869, Fey thankfully returned ‘Mrs. Dawson’ to oblivion and became Mrs. Simeon Tower to the world. In all details her Presbyterian wedding struck the right note of restrained elegance. Fey’s instinctive taste supplemented Simeon’s hazy and sometimes flamboyant ideas of social fitness. By tactful suggestion she subdued the color and cut of his frock coat and prevented him from having the church decorated by a whole conservatory-full of crimson roses. She herself wore dove-gray silk, the high neck modestly filled by blond lace, as befitted a widow.
Simeon had spent anxious moments over the invitations. The Tweeds, Goulds, and Jim Fisk were obviously, unsuitable, since society ostracized them. On the other hand, it would be fatal to offend them. The only way around that was to keep the guest list exceedingly brief. A few innocuous nobodies and the Delatones. To this list Fey added only one name, Doctor Rachel Moreton. Simeon agreed very reluctantly.
‘I know she’s been good to you and all that, but are you sure she won’t talk, Fey? I mean, she knows all about you and it’s dangerous.’
Fey sighed. ‘Yes, I know. But she won’t talk. I’m going to see her first.’
Back once more in Rachel’s austere little room at the Infirmary, Fey found explanations harder than she had expected. The doctor received her affectionately and without reproach for the long silence, but as she listened to Fey her mouth tightened, and her eyes grew coldly patient as Fey had never seen them.
‘So, my dear—you are building your new life on a tissue of lies, and you wish me to be careful not to give you away? ’
She no longer says ‘thee’ to me, thought Fey. ‘Oh, Doctor Rachel •—please, please try to understand. It’s not for me, it’s for Simeon. After all, my past isn’t anybody’s business, and I’ll be such a good wife to him, help him get the things he wants.’
‘I wish you both success,’ said Rachel, after a minute.
Fey was stunned. She had never expected a tone like that from her one real friend. Her eyes stung with hot tears.
Rachel saw them, and she went to Fey, putting her arm around the girl.
‘I’ll come to your wedding, child, since you want me.’
‘Of course, I want you,’ cried Fey, and she buried her face against Rachel’s bosom. Rachel stood quiet, holding the small figure close to her.
Before she left, Fey pressed a hundred dollars on the doctor for the Infirmary. ‘I’ll be rich now,’ she said, with a touch of defiance. ‘I can help you this way better than working in the wards.’
Rachel accepted the money, voicing composed thanks and none of the objections which she felt. She attended the wedding, but not the small supper later for which Mrs. Delatone had very generously offered the use of her back parlor.
Chapter Fourteen
THE SIMEON TOWERS PROSPERED. Simeon, in the privacy of their magnificent bedroom, sometimes congratulated Fey on this. ‘You’ve brought me luck, darling. Our marriage was the best thing that ever happened to me.’
In public he naturally did not attribute to luck the way in which he managed to weather all financial storms. He had dropped the bluff, hearty manner; he no longer labored to appear as a prince of good fellows. He had become nearly as silent and reserved as Gould, and his reputation for shrewdness grew.
On May 10, 1869, the Union Pacific tracks met near Ogden, and two months later the first through train joined the two oceans in six and a half days. Simeon’s Gulf and San Diego stock leaped upward.
In September of that year a premonition of trouble made Simeon withdraw in time to sit calmly in a corner of the Stock Exchange’s ‘Gold Room’ on that Black Friday, September twenty-fourth, when President Grant, at last realizing his brother-in-law’s infamous conspiracy with Gould and Fisk, started selling gold from the United States Treasury, thereby ruining half the financial houses in New York.
Simeon increasingly played a lone hand, and had so far, by a judicious mixture of bribery, nerve, and hunches, managed to avoid the active enmity of Gould’s clique on the one side or Vanderbilt’s on the other. There were still pickings for everyone with power and capital enough to grab them.
Noah Lemming alone knew some of Simeon’s projects, far more of them than his employer realized. He underrated his secretary whose extreme usefulness had vanquished the resentment Simeon had felt the previous year when Fey had visited the Wall Street office. Since that visit, Lemming had been suave and discreet. There was still more advantage to be got from his position with Tower than from any of the other avenues which his self-interest had led him to explore.
He had been startled by Tower’s marriage. Surely Mrs. ‘Dawson’ was not the name that girl had given when she forced her way into the office that day? But he was not quite sure. And there seemed no way of finding out. He disliked Fey, and felt there was something fishy about her past, but think as he might he could see no particular gain to be got from investigation at the moment. So Lemming said nothing, worked hard for Simeon, and ran a highly profitable bureaucracy on the side.
Fey knew nothing of her husband’s financial life, nor did he wish her to. Her duties were traditional and decreed by the best society which they had not yet achieved. She was to run his home, advance his position, and help him to found a dynasty.
The first two duties she performed with increasing and charming efficiency; at the third for some unaccountable reason she failed. That this might not be her fault in view of Lucita, Simeon usually managed to forget. And Fey allowed him to forget it. In all the ways that she could she gave him emotional security.
On the whole, Simeon was content. His days were agreeably filled by the business of making yet more money, and his nights with Fey in the enormous inlaid walnut bed continued to give him a wondering and romantic release.
Soon after their marriage, while Fey was still awed by her new possessions—the yacht (which Simeon rechristened The Inveraray in her honor and as a subtle reminder to the public), the villa at Long Branch, and this grandiose town house—Simeon conducted her through his jewel collection. He had lost interest in it since his marriage and no longer spent evenings fondling the mute relics of the great or famous, but he delighted in Fey’s wonder at all' his possessions.
They stood side by side in the library while he unlocked the velvet-lined wall cases and explained each item. She exclaimed dutifully, but she was puzzled that he admired Frederick of Prussia’s curlicued snuffbox, tortured into the shape of an obese silver mermaid, far more than an exquisitely simple jade tree which had once belonged to the Emperor Ch’ien-Lung. Aware of her ignorance, she distrusted her own taste, but as she watched his undiscriminating pride in the hodge-podge of mementoes, and heard the unconscious veneration with which he spoke royal names, she felt a twinge of maternal pity.
They had finished the inspection and Simeon was locking the last case, when Fey put her hand on his arm. ‘And where,’ she asked, ‘is my turquoise?’
He stared at her, s
tartled to see that she was serious.
‘My dear girl, you didn’t really think that thing was valuable, or belonged in this collection? ’
‘I did. Yes.’ She spoke with a peculiar quiet. There was a suddenly strained look in her gray eyes.
‘Why, you little minx—you couldn’t have!’ Simeon laughed a trifle uneasily. ‘ That was just your excuse for getting to see me.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But where is it?’
‘I’ll be damned if I know. I think I threw it in a drawer in my dressing-room. Thing isn’t worth twenty-five dollars. Oh, it’s pretty enough,’ he added kindly.
‘I would like you to find it,’ she said. ‘Will you look, please?’
‘Silly child, I’ll buy you a whole bushel of turquoises——’ His eyes sharpened. ‘Who gave you this thing, anyway, that you prize it so?’
Strange that he was still jealous of Terry.
‘An Indian gave it to me long ago.’
Simeon made an impatient sound. He disliked reminders of her outlandish girlhood almost as much as he disliked her first marriage.
‘All right, I'll look for the blasted thing, since you’re in such a taking about it.’
They found the turquoise in the corner of a bureau drawer under a pile of Simeon’s colored silk handkerchiefs. The gilt cord had tarnished, and the stone itself.
‘It looks green!’ cried Fey, taking it into her hand and staring down at it in dismay. She felt a shrinking of the spirit, almost a repulsion.
‘Some of them do that in time. Oxidization, I think,' said Simeon carelessly. ‘Well, are you satisfied now?’ He put his arm around her.