Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  Diana watched as he pulled back the black velvet lid and revealed a delicate pearl choker that, on another day, she might have readily agreed would go very well with her dress.

  “But—tonight?” she started, her cheeks slackening. She was all of a sudden back in the parlor with all the dark woodwork and the olive-colored walls. Her skin was being scorched by the fire, and, try as she might, she could not recover her flight of fancy. She was only, horribly, here. A quiver of disappointment shot through her. Tonight she was supposed to be with Henry, in his greenhouse, but she would not even have time to send him a note explaining her absence.

  Snowden, if he noticed, was not deterred. “Yes—has there ever been a more perfect time for it? The reservation is for nine o’clock,” he said as he moved to hook the double string of pearls at the nape of her neck. Diana’s face was cast into shadow as Snowden’s torso moved in toward her and she took the opportunity to grimace for all the things she would miss. The pearls were cold against her skin, and the clasp made a sound of sick finality as it snapped shut.

  Twenty Six

  …at the same gathering, the enchanting Miss Diana Holland was seen chatting intimately with Mr. Teddy Cutting. She’s also been spotted recently at the opera with Spencer Newburg and skating in the park with Percival Coddington. One might infer that Mrs. Holland is looking to make a match? Of course, Cutting’s position, fortune, and age make him the most suitable of these suitors….

  —FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1899

  HENRY CROSSED HIS LEGS AND SHIFTED IN THE wooden rocker that was positioned so as to casually access a view into the long main room of the Schoonmaker greenhouse. He was wearing trousers with whisper-thin pinstripes and a cream shirt fastened at the wrist with cuff links that bore his initials. Dressing well was a habit for Henry, but he had put extra care into what he wore that particular Friday evening. This despite the fact that he was on house arrest, after celebrating his renewed hopes for a life with Diana Holland with a group of drunken Christmas carolers. He had brought extra blankets to the gardener’s old bedroom himself and lit the small wood-burning stove, but still he was concerned that Diana, when she came, would not be warm enough.

  He had been stuck inside the house for two days, during which time he had done little but experience a building frustration and dream of Diana. He had rallied all his ingenuity to find a way to slip her a note without his father getting mind of it.

  Of course now it was well past the appointed time, and there was still no sign of her. He had gone out twice to sneak along the gate and look for her, but a prolonged presence there would only have given him away. Since then he’d had a good hour to contemplate whether this was the longest he had ever waited for a woman. While it far outdistanced the third occasion, it only came in second, after an evening one summer in Newport when he waited for a woman whose smile gleamed with the same pristine glory as her wedding ring and who, the hours finally proved, was never going to show up. He had already known in his heart that she wasn’t coming, and as such was so thoroughly boozed up that he wouldn’t have been allowed to return to gentle company anyway. He instead lay back in the grass and thought maudlin thoughts about love and matrimony and how he would never engage in either.

  His mood was different now. He was entirely sure that Diana was on her way to him, that he was in her thoughts as she was in his, and that the time before they were again together was finite. Quite finite.

  Still, waiting was not something he was used to; he was not, in any event, doing it very gracefully. He stood, walked around the bed, arched his neck to look at the curved ceiling with its glass panes in their white iron web, which hung over the simple bed buried in quilts. He breathed in the rich, earthy air and straightened his collar. He checked the smoothness of his vaguely golden skin over his high cheekbones in a small mirror and wondered if he had time to get a bottle of wine from the cellar. He turned, finally, back to the chair, where he crossed his legs in the other direction and then began rustling through a pile of newspapers on a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. He supposed the gardener brought them there so that he could read something while he was taking lunch. Henry reminded himself that he should check with the gardener, who was now living with one of Isabelle’s seamstresses in the main servants’ quarters, to see how much time he spent there before he planned another rendezvous, as he was already planning for many more.

  Of course, that was an attitude he had before he began idly flipping through the old newspapers in a vain attempt to pass the time. Henry was not naturally interested in world events or stock crises or theater reviews or the problem of public drunkenness amongst the city’s coachmen and cabdrivers. He was interested in yachting and horses, topics amply covered by that week’s papers and that he might have read about on another occasion. At that particular moment, with the stars positioned as they were, he was only really prepared to read to the bottom of a sentence that contained the words Diana and Holland. And after a few moments of shiftless reading he did find one.

  The paragraph began innocently enough with some account of a dinner party of Florence Cutting’s—she was Mrs. Darroll now; a few other details followed, but Henry wasn’t reading that part so carefully—which apparently Diana, his Di, had attended. Not only attended, but spent in the company of his friend Teddy. The “intimate” company. This word conjured for Henry all the irritating ways his friend behaved when he took a special liking to a girl—stroking her hand and fetching anything she might have a vague desire for and generally being overly solicitous in a way that no man in his right mind would ever have the patience to be. Henry read the item again four times but found the account unchanged.

  Now he saw why Teddy had been so against his relationship with Diana. It was because Teddy wanted her for himself. Henry balled up the paper and threw it onto the bed.

  He walked through the long central passageway of the greenhouse, surrounded by year-round hyacinths and orchids, and into the main house with a single thought. He must find Diana and demand to know what had happened. Before she told him too much he would explain how insufferable Teddy was, what a do-gooder, how often—against his own sense of style and his best friend’s frequent cajoling—he succumbed to decorum. He would tell her how Teddy, like an old matron after too much tea, had discouraged their love…. But of course, this line of thinking only made Henry realize how much his friend had gained by stalling him.

  Henry continued through the small first-floor galleries with the idea of finding a servant who might be able to help him locate a coat. It was cold, he knew that much, and he had no time to ascend the stairs to his own suite of rooms. He was thinking about the coat and whether he should in fact go to Teddy first when he stumbled into one of the private drawing rooms and saw that it was occupied. By his father, stepmother—though he still had a hard time thinking of her that way—and Penelope Hayes.

  “Oh, Henry!” his stepmother gasped, turning in her chair and batting her fan with some mixture of cunning and glee. She was wearing a dress of black chiffon that gathered in folds at the bust like a Grecian gown and cascaded from her shoulders like wings. White lace covered her slim arms and her neck all the way up to her chin. “So glad to see you. We are having one of these private little quiet evenings, which we fashionable people are being said to prefer this season, and it’s boring me half to death. Since you were the last one to bring shame on the family, the very least you could do is join us.”

  “Oh, do,” Penelope seconded in a voice that subtly contained—he knew it well enough—the intention to seduce. She was clothed all in off-white. It was not her color. She was cold, and there was something about her skin that suggested death.

  “You must excuse me,” Henry began, backing for the door. Isabelle arched a blond brow, and Penelope’s fan came down to her lap in a swoop. He saw in an instant that the women were colluding with each other. “You see, it’s that I’ve got to—”

/>   Henry was cut off by the sound of the carved and polished legs of his father’s chair as they screeched backward against the floor. The man’s solid frame came to standing and then crossed the parquet, where he grabbed Henry by the arm and said coldly, “Oh, no. You’re not going anywhere. Or have you forgotten the fact of your house arrest?” Henry looked at the roaring fire and the ladies by it as he was forcibly brought back into the room. “How poor your memory is,” his father continued, almost as an aside, as he pushed him into the settee by Penelope.

  This closeness to the Hayeses’ finest product was a thing he once sought out, but he felt a strong disinclination to it now. She had seemed, then, like the perfect partner in crime—a girl who shared his contempt for all the rules everybody else was so terrified of breaking. Now he saw that she was happy to break them only when it aligned with her other calculations. She might have shared his contempt for everybody else, but she still wanted their adulation. This seemed a very bloodless, unimaginative kind of desire now that his heart was so full of Diana Holland. He clenched his fists and glared at the people who were keeping him from her.

  Twenty Seven

  Of course a girl may have multiple beaux, but she should not appear to have too many and should be careful what she promises them. She will have to be especially careful of appearances when she is older and can no longer explain away her behavior as naïveté. And of course she should be considerate, and make sure that two beaux do not meet.

  —FROM THE “DEBUTANTE” COLUMN, DRESS MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 1899

  “MISS BROAD, HOW LUCKY CAREY FOUND YOU!” Lucy Carr, the merriest divorcée in New York society, cried happily as the older gentleman’s brougham came to a stop in front of her apartment house in the East Forties. Over dinner, she had told Lina ostensibly everything there was to know about her, and on the ride home she had kept her arm laced in the younger woman’s with a tautness that seemed to resist any potential letting go. The night air was chill and their breath came through their fur wrappings in mystical white gusts. “We are so in need of new blood in our set. And everybody but me is married, which gets awfully dull.”

  “You forget me,” Mr. Longhorn put in from the opposing seat.

  “Oh, surely you don’t count,” Mrs. Carr replied with a brassy laugh.

  “You’re right, dear. I’m so old I sometimes forget that Central Park is a park at all and not some great wasteland of swamp and rock. But I did throw a lovely dinner, didn’t I?”

  If Lina had once thought it would be difficult to catch his attention a second time, she had been disabused of this notion as soon as they crossed paths in the lobby and he asked her to dinner. She’d said yes, after which he apologized at length for having misunderstood her name at the opera. “It was a lovely good time, Mr. Longhorn.”

  She said this with a shy sweetness that was the mode of flirtation for girls her age—or at least, it was the mode of flirtation she had seen employed by Elizabeth Holland in her own drawing room—although her feelings fully backed the sentiment. It had been a lovely day. They had raced sleighs in the park and dined in one of the private room at Sherry’s, which she had read about but never entered, and her nose was still a little red from the exertion and the champagne and she felt almost giddy at having met so many new people. She had caught her own reflection in plenty of mirrors and knew her eyes to be very bright. The ease with which she had been swept up by Longhorn’s circle startled her, but she didn’t mind. Anyway, their association was bound to be brief. The world seemed good after all just then, and very likely to supply her with the means to buy a ticket west any day now.

  “Mrs. Carr,” Mr. Longhorn prompted. “Your apartment?”

  “Oh, yes!” Lucy kissed Lina on the cheek and made her promise that they would soon be in each other’s company again. Once Mrs. Carr, and the long furs she was trailing, disappeared into the brightly lit lobby, the carriage jerked into motion. Mr. Longhorn and Lina did not speak again until the horses came to their final stop at the New Netherland.

  “My dear,” the older gentleman said, as he came down to the sidewalk, “I haven’t had you to myself all evening. Won’t you come up for a brandy?”

  “Of course, Mr. Longhorn.” Lina remained aloft for a moment on the carriage’s backseat. All was very still and quiet on the street, but those heroic buildings with their gilded flourishes rose above her, twinkling at the windows. She sighed, and then took Longhorn’s man’s arm so that he could help her down. “I’d be delighted.”

  “You go on in then,” he said kindly. “I won’t have anyone talking about you going to an old man’s room late at night. Go to your room and take off your coat, and I’ll send Robert for you in a little while.”

  Lina’s bottom lip trembled up under her teeth and she nodded. She went into the grand lobby, her feet falling lightly across the mosaic floor. She requested her key with such entitlement that she wondered briefly if Mr. Cullen wouldn’t mistake her for someone with a grander room. Then she crossed to the elevator and told the attendant what floor she was on without making the mistake of looking at him. The iron door closed and she felt herself rising. I’m rising, she thought, I’m rising, I’m rising.

  “Carry yourself awfully high, don’t you?”

  Lina’s breath stuck at the impertinence. Her cheeks flamed up as she waited for the attendant to turn. When he did she saw a reckless smile and a pair of hazel eyes that she recognized as Tristan’s. The light of the chandelier was suddenly blinding. She stepped back instinctually.

  “Where did you get that uniform?”

  “Ah, you underestimate me, my Carolina,” he answered with the same smile. “It seems you had a successful evening.”

  “Yes.” Lina took a breath and began to recover herself. “He’s asked me up for brandy.”

  “Good! He’ll soon be ours. But be careful—give him too much, and you’ll be as useless as any maid.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And for God’s sake, keep on the lookout for a new friend. Being seen with divorcées like Mrs. Carr is worse than having no friends at all.”

  Lina didn’t ask herself how he knew about Mrs. Carr. “I’ll remember that.”

  “And be careful not to say too much, or you may give yourself away.” Tristan moved his hand to the elevator’s lever.

  “No, of course not.”

  “And if it’s the only thing you remember: Pretend to drink, but in fact take little. He may get drunk, but be careful you do not.”

  Lina nodded and continued nodding until he told her to stop. She would not have predicted what he did next once if she had been asked a thousand times, which was that he stepped toward her and tilted his head. She felt the leather-padded wall of the elevator against her back and his lips against hers. The skin of his face was rough as sand; her chest swelled up and it touched his. It was her first kiss, and it was both hard and soft at once. She had imagined Will doing this to her a hundred times, but imaginary kisses were nothing compared to the real thing. It felt like a whole bouquet of flowers opening in the light.

  When the elevator jerked to a stop everything about her dress was in order and she stepped onto the ninth floor without looking back.

  “Be ready, Miss Broad,” she heard Tristan say as she walked toward her room. “My next move comes soon.”

  Lina was surprised at herself. For a girl who had just experienced her first kiss, her nerves were remarkably steady. She was careful not to take too much brandy even as Mr. Longhorn enjoyed his. She smiled charmingly as he told her stories about his country estate and his yacht and which of his business associates bored him particularly. Despite the cues Tristan had just given her, she was certain that everything she knew about sitting still and appearing entranced she had learned from Elizabeth, but she didn’t mind this. Elizabeth had taken plenty from her. It was only fair to take a little back.

  “I would like to take you to Paris…” Mr. Longhorn was saying. He had been talking about Paris quite a bit. His long limbs j
utted out lazily from his rather full center, which a velvet smoking jacket, of a slightly deeper shade than the one he had been wearing when they met, encased richly. He had put off his cigar for the moment, which Lina was thankful for. No one in the Holland household had ever smoked them—except, occasionally and in secret, Edith, old Mr. Holland’s sister—and so she was unused to their odor. “Paris,” he went on wistfully, “is where every good thing happened to me.”

  They were situated on rich brown club chairs in front of a roaring fire in the sunken sitting room of Longhorn’s suite. The cut-glass decanter sat between them, and Longhorn’s man hovered in the background. It was impossible to know what the hour was, although Lina wasn’t sure she had ever been awake so late, at least not this way.

  “Surely not every good thing,” Lina said.

  “No, not every good thing,” Mr. Longhorn returned gaily. The lines of his well-lived-in face deepened, and he tossed his head back. His gray hair grew most thickly on the sides of his head and over his ears, Lina noticed, although it was still an impressive head of hair. “Not everything at all! But I was there when I was a young man, so I can’t help but associate it with the best times.”

  Lina smiled blandly at this. She wasn’t sure how else to respond and so she did as Tristan had instructed and kept quiet, which the passing seconds proved to be a reaction of which Longhorn approved.

  “See how young I used to be!”

  Lina looked around her, almost expecting to see some apparition of his younger self. She saw him gesture, instead, toward a wall of portraits that she had glanced at cursorily on her entrance and taken to be nothing more than his famous collection of beauties. They were all portraits, it was true, but as she rose and approached she saw that one of the thick gold frames contained the likeness of a man in his twenties. He had a mane of black hair and a nose still fine and sculptured. But she recognized the high cheekbones and the playful eyes, and she saw clearly enough where Mr. Longhorn got his taste for old-fashioned collars. She looked at the painting and felt a passing longing for her first kiss to have been with a gentleman like that.