Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  “You’ve just got to get me out of here,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen Henry all day, and I’m cold, and if I have to touch another—”

  Buck stopped her with a knowing look. “I will take care of everything.”

  His features were soft, muted by the fleshiness of his face, and his fair eyebrows were sculpted in a way that lent him the appearance of canniness. A few more ladies, in their wide hats and elaborately lapelled coats, passed by, followed by a marching band. Penelope looked back up the street in the direction of the elder Schoonmaker’s voice and knew that his son, Henry, with his dark eyes and his troublemaker’s lilt, must be crossing into new streets along with him. Her heart sank a little. Then she turned back to Buck, who had already formulated a plan.

  Buck was over six feet tall and his body expanded outward imposingly, and he moved now, as he so often had before, to shield the girl who most benefited from his loyalty. He had not been born rich—though he claimed to be a relation of the famous Buck clan who these days mostly resided in grand old moldering mansions in the Hudson Valley—but was invaluable when it came time to host a party, and as such was often given fine things for free. Penelope pulled the veil of her hat down over her face and followed him into the crowd. Once they had made their way safely through the throng, Buck dropped his cumbersome bag of turkeys and helped Penelope into a waiting brougham.

  While Buck said a few words to her driver, she settled into the plush black velvet seat and exhaled. Inside everything one might lean against had the softness of down, and everything one might touch was made of gold. Penelope felt a softening at her temples; the world was right again. She removed her gloves in one deft motion and then tossed them through the open carriage door. Buck glanced at the slushy puddle into which they fell, and then took a step up and into the seat beside Penelope. As the wheels began to crunch across the rough pavement, he leaned forward and pulled a polished wooden box from underneath the seat.

  “Kidskin gloves?” he said. “Or would you prefer silk?”

  Penelope examined the slender white fingers of her hands as she rubbed them against each other. Most girls like her, whose fathers were industrialists or bank presidents or heads of their own insurance empires, changed their gloves three or four times a day as they moved from teas to dinner parties to intimate little musicales. But Penelope thought her hands were superior, and so preferred to change gloves ten or eleven times. She never wore the same pair twice, though her recently discovered virtue had inspired her to donate them occasionally. “Kid. It isn’t warm outside, and you never know who you’ll meet on a drive.”

  “Indeed,” Buck replied as he removed a hand-sewn pair for her. “Especially when I am giving the coachman his instructions.”

  “Thank you.” Penelope drew the gloves over her wrists and felt like herself again, which was for her always a good thing.

  “They adored you today,” Buck went on contemplatively.

  “If only it weren’t all so unbearable.” Penelope let her exquisite head rest against the velvet. “I mean really, how many poor people can New York possibly hold? And don’t they ever get sick of turkey?” She brought her kid-covered fingertips up to her high, fine cheekbones. “My face hurts from all the smiling.”

  “It is dull, always keeping up the pretense of being good.” Buck paused. “But you were never one to lose sight of a goal,” he went on delicately.

  “No,” Penelope agreed. “And I haven’t.”

  Just then, the carriage came to a stop, and Buck put his hand on the little gold crank to lower the window. Penelope leaned over him and saw that they had come around to the front of the parade and now stood in the intersection looking down at the head of the procession. There was William Schoonmaker, both tall and broad in his black cloth suit. Beside him was the second Mrs. Schoonmaker, née Isabelle De Ford, who was still young, and who was currently a vision in furs and lace. They were framed in the canyon of tenement buildings, and they paused at the sight of the carriage in their path. In a moment Henry came up to their side.

  Penelope’s breath caught at the sight of him. There had been a time when she saw Henry Schoonmaker almost every day, when they had been intimate with each other and with every secret corner of their families’ mansions that permitted behavior not suitable to the maiden daughters of high society. They had done the kinds of things girls like Elizabeth Holland had been famous for not doing—until one day Henry announced that he was engaged to Miss Holland. At a dinner party that Penelope had attended. It was enough to make one vomit, which was in fact what Penelope had done next.

  Of course, her violent reaction to that despicable news had since been tempered with understanding. Buck had helped her with that. He had pointed out that old Schoonmaker was a businessman of no small ambition—mayoral ambition—and that he doubtless liked the idea of his son’s bride being so pristine and well liked. Penelope felt fairly certain that if Elizabeth was capable of something, then she was, too, and she’d set about making herself into just such a potential daughter-in-law.

  She had rarely been near Henry since then, and the sight of him now was like a concentrated dose. He was a slim figure in black, and under the long shadow of his top hat she could see the handsome line of an aristocratic jaw. He still wore a mourning band on his left arm, which Penelope noticed even as she willed Henry to meet her eyes. She knew he would. And in a few moments, he did. Penelope held his gaze with as much modesty as she could muster, smiled an oblique little smile, and then pulled the veil back down over her face.

  “It was a lovely parade, Mr. Schoonmaker!” she called out the window, resting her hand on the half-raised glass.

  As she settled back into the velvet carriage seat, she heard Buck tell the driver to move on. But she wasn’t thinking about where she was going. She was thinking about Henry and how very soon he would be done mourning Elizabeth. He was standing back there now, she just knew, remembering what kind of girl she was under the virtuous veneer, and all that had passed between them. And this time, it wouldn’t be just stolen kisses in back hallways. There would be no secrecy and no humiliation. This time it would be for real.

  Two

  The social leaders of this city have been concerned as of late with one of their own. Mrs. Holland—whose judgment and taste were once revered by top-drawer people—has been in mourning for her husband for almost a year, but her scarcity has been noticed still. Some have suggested that the Holland fortune has dwindled over the years and that the family of the late Mr. Edward is living in near poverty on Gramercy Park. With the passing of her elder daughter, the lovely Elizabeth, who was to have married Mr. Henry Schoonmaker, Mrs. Holland will surely be considering matrimonial options for her other child, Diana, who at sixteen is still very young and has been known for being seen in public without a hat.

  —FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1899

  THE MAUVE, LEAFLESS BRANCHES OF TREES ROTATED at a giddy pace around the little frozen pond in Central Park. They moved horizontally between a gray strip of sky and a mass of people whose cheeks had been turned red by the cold. This panorama sped faster and faster until, suddenly, Diana Holland put the toe of her skate down into the ice and came to a dramatic stop. She took an ecstatic breath to steady herself, and felt dizzy and lucky to be alive and in the refreshing winter air.

  Then she saw her companion for the afternoon, Percival Coddington.

  “Miss Holland,” he said as he stumbled toward her. Although Diana felt a strong urge to be far away from Percival, she couldn’t help but fear for him a little—and for anyone unlucky enough to be within his wingspan—as he tripped forward on the tips of his skates, his arms flailing in some helpless search for balance.

  Diana was trying very hard not to laugh at him. Percival—as she had already discovered that afternoon—did not take kindly to being laughed at. He had greeted all of her jokes that afternoon with sourness and ill humor, and had several times pointed out
that she was not behaving as he believed a young woman who longed to marry should. There was really nothing to do in such situations but laugh, although she was doing her sincere best to resist. To distract him from the pickled expression her face had taken on, she now offered him her hand.

  “Miss Holland,” Percival said again as his grip tightened. She was glad that two layers of gloves separated her palm from his and made a silent prayer that she would not be pulled down with him.

  “Mr. Coddington, my sister was, and still is to me, Miss Holland. I’d prefer Miss Diana.”

  Percival, whose hair was like a greasy mat and whose nostrils flared in what could only be described as a grotesque way, lowered his eyes respectfully. It was not entirely honest for Diana to have said what she said. Despite the affected pose of extreme mourning and deep melancholy that she had employed for the last two months, she was neither bereaved nor in particularly low spirits. She felt justified in manipulating the storied loss of her elder sister, however, since it was Elizabeth’s premature departure from New York that had necessitated a host of afternoons like this one, spent in the company of wealthy and detestable bachelors. For once their mother had gotten over the initial shock of losing Elizabeth, she had redirected her ambition for an advantageous match from her first daughter onto her second. This despite her poor health, which had afflicted her for much of the fall.

  It was Mrs. Holland who had insisted that Diana accept Percival’s invitation to ice-skate that day, and she had also been the one—Diana felt she could safely assume—who had suggested the activity in the first place. Percival was objectionable in more than one way, of course, but the most pressing reason that Diana wanted to free her hand from his was that her heart belonged elsewhere. And that was not a thing a woman like Mrs. Holland would have any patience for.

  It was, additionally, just like Elizabeth to absent herself from Diana’s life at the precise moment Liz finally had an interesting story to tell. For she had been driven to fake her own death by her love for a boy named Will Keller, who had once been the Hollands’ coachman and was good looking enough that Diana had wondered on more than one occasion what it would be like to kiss him. The faked death had involved the Hudson River and the assistance of Elizabeth’s treacherous friend Penelope Hayes, and then the older Holland girl had gone off to California in pursuit of what must have been a very agonizing, and thus fascinating, love. But since she had learned of her sister’s romantic deception, Diana had received only the most limited information about Elizabeth’s whereabouts.

  And so while Diana supported her sister’s quest for true love, and while she remained desperately curious about it, she also couldn’t help the feeling that one of its unintended consequences was her own exposure to a matrimonial campaign of which she was neither the ideal nor the intended subject.

  She maintained her sad eyes as she skated along with Percival, through the crowds of happy people in bulky coats, betting that if she continued to look abject he would continue to be foiled in his attempts to talk to her. It was with her heart-shaped face and shiny dark eyes focused downward that she first noticed the crack in the ice.

  “I’m sorry to have made you think about Miss Holland again,” Percival said haltingly as Diana pulled him to the side of the hole along the pond’s edge. Already she could feel the dampness of his palm seeping through her knit glove. She could not help but compare him to her bachelor of choice—who was in every way Percival’s superior—and this only strengthened her desire to snatch her hand back. “You don’t seem so very much like her, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve as much sympathy as anybody.”

  “Oh, it’s quite all right.” Diana quelled her irritation at this comment by reminding herself how insignificant his chances of ever escorting her anywhere again were. Her dissimilarity to her sister had not of course prevented him from surreptitiously glancing over her entire form several times. She made two strong pushes against the ice. As her speed increased, the deadweight that was Percival Coddington jerked along behind her as they circled the rink. She turned her face shyly in his direction, and attempted a slow, inviting smile. “Surely you can go faster than that, Mr. Coddington.”

  Percival’s father had been an industrialist and his mother the plain and consumptive third daughter of a branch of the Livingston family. It was apparent to anybody who cared to pay attention that their eldest son had come by his personality matrilineally. Since Percival had inherited his father’s fortune, he had distinguished himself neither in business nor in society, though he was known to collect the weaponry of foreign cultures. He was not known for being courageous, however, or particularly light on his feet. As Diana moved forward, her awareness of the squealing children and far-off music, of the trees and the sky and even the cold began to fade. She was moving around the rink with purpose now, and she could feel warmth growing in the muscles of her calves as her skates moved against the ice. They were approaching the crack again now, and she could see the dark water through it.

  Diana gave Percival one more faint smile, took two strides forward, and then jerked her hand back. She disguised the intent of this motion by turning on her skates and making a little ta-da flourish with her arms as she began to skate backward. Percival looked at her through pinched, far-set eyes, and for a minute he seemed impressed by Diana’s trick. But soon he was wheeling his arms in an attempt at balance, and it became apparent that he did not know to turn. His skates kept him moving in the same line, and when he saw the direction in which they were taking him his face froze in terror. Diana did not wait to witness Percival’s inevitable fall. She continued to move smoothly backward through the crowd, her glossy brown curls blowing forward across her small, pointed chin as she did.

  When she heard the cries for help and saw the crowd rush to the place where the fissure in the ice had been, she knew Percival would be all right. She put her knit-gloved hand over her face and allowed herself a giggle. She felt much lighter on the ice now, and very pleased with herself for showing Percival that, even if she was not quite as marriageable as her sister, still she was not for sale. A brief bath in freezing water would remind him that he was quite far from deserving any Holland girl for a bride, and she was only sorry that Henry Schoonmaker was not there to appreciate the orchestration of this quite deserved comeuppance.

  It had been over a month since she’d spoken to Henry. He, too, was in mourning for Elizabeth, and though his engagement to her had never been a love match, he did not know that she was alive. For him her death was real, and very sobering. But Diana was the one he truly loved. At least, that was how it had seemed to her, a month ago, the last time he’d paid her mother and her aunt Edith one of those melancholy visits where nobody said a word as they sat and grieved and looked into their lukewarm tea. He must love her still. Diana was sure of it.

  She reached the edge of the pond and took a few choppy steps to a wooden bench. The crowd had formed a dark wall around the place where she’d let go of Percival’s hand. Beyond them the landscape was still and white, with the Dakota apartment building rising sternly over the trees. She bent and unlaced her skates with nimble fingers, and before she had even removed them from her feet a boy emerged from a nearby hut with her black leather boots. She reached into her coat pocket to find him a tip, but he must have been eager not to miss any of the action across the ice, because he didn’t even wait for it. No one could resist disaster, she supposed.

  She had just secured the boots when she noticed a man who had departed from the crowd and was sailing across the ice in her direction. He was wearing a Russian fur hat and a camel-colored suit that didn’t look entirely warm enough for a day spent on ice, and he was skating forward with his hands behind his back, which struck Diana as rather jaunty—almost like a pose Henry would assume. When she realized that his shoulders were too wide to be Henry’s, that his figure was somewhat more filled out, she felt all the crushing sadness of being woken suddenly from a pleasurable dream.

  When
he was a few yards away, the man came to a halt, lifted his hat, and tipped his head in her direction. Diana found his appearance, his broad cheeks and sharp nose and brow like some great crouching woolly spider, familiar; his hair was dark and cut close to his head, and he had a certain attentive manner about the eyes. He replaced his hat high on the back of his head and said, “I fear your escort is not going to be able to take you home.”

  “Oh?” Diana answered innocently. “I suppose that’s what all the hubbub is about.”

  “I’m Davis Barnard,” he went on, accepting her comment at its face value and offering his hand. “Would you like a ride?”

  “Oh…Mr. Barnard.” As she pronounced the name, a host of associations came to her. “You write the ‘Gamesome Gallant’ column, don’t you?”

  Her new acquaintance smiled faintly and nodded. When he was done changing into his shoes, they walked to his waiting carriage in silence. Diana knew that it was bad form to accept rides from gentlemen she barely knew, but she considered herself unconventional, and anyway, she’d always wondered what a newspaper man looked like up close. It was only once she was situated under a blanket on the leather seat that he began to explain himself.

  “You know, I was always a great admirer of your sister, the elder Miss Holland…” he began, as the horses moved forward and jerked the carriage into motion.

  “Yes, I remember.” Diana knew she should not go on, but did. “You wrote such pretty things about her. Mother always liked that.”

  “It was a tragedy,” he said, which forced Diana to assume the stricken face she had worn so often in the last few months. “I find it very hard to write about your family since your sister’s death.”

  Diana, not knowing what to make of this, remained silent. “But I still read everything, of course. That piece in the Gazette today, for instance, speculating about—” Here he broke off and looked to Diana for her reaction.