by Marlowe Benn
CHAPTER 21
Night air that had felt mild when Julia returned from Glennis’s was decidedly more bracing at three in the morning. Sleepless and a bit queasy in her bedroom hothouse of roses and gardenias, she swallowed two Spartans with quinine water, threw a shawl over her robe, and retreated to Philip’s balcony. She sought fresh air and clarity. Instead, a numbing cold seeped through the folds of silk tucked around her legs as she stretched out on the chaise. Arms tight across her body, fists mittened in her shawl, she lay as restless under the stars as in her bed. When the shivering grew worse than her brooding, she gave up and returned indoors.
Remnants of a fire glowed in the library grate. Two crystal globes streaked with brandy waited on the trolley for Mrs. Cheadle to clear in the morning, and two ashtrays held the remnants of Philip’s and Mrs. Macready’s cigarettes, the stale odor of long hours together. Mourning Lillian Vancill? Planning ways to spend Julia’s money? She switched on a reading lamp, poured some of Philip’s Cointreau, and pushed the door ajar so she could retreat at the first sign of anyone about. She pulled down the Vale Danaë and stretched across the sofa. With two pillows behind her shoulders, she sipped the sweet liquor and hoped Ricketts’s velvety black engravings would lure her thoughts far from New York and all its travails.
Three pages later she closed the book and balanced the glass on her breastbone.
Every hour pulled her closer to a new life. She hadn’t sought marriage, but realistically, she would be foolish not to accept David’s proposal. Or rather, to obey his instruction. Some women adored that sort of thing, but Julia bristled. He’d never addressed her like that before. As her lover, he had neither right nor need to concern himself with her affairs. Their lives were intermingled lines, not concentric circles. But as a wife without independent means, she’d be accepting terms, not dictating them. On the other hand, his demands would be few and hardly onerous. Marriage to David meant a future far from dire—it was boorish even to suggest it, considering Alice Clintock’s and Naomi Rankin’s meager lives and those of countless other women—but it was not the future she’d envisioned. That was what rankled. Philip’s blasted lawsuit rendered her powerless to choose her own course. First Philip and likely soon David decided everything.
But not yet. Julia had six days left in New York, six days to steer for herself.
Christophine. Marriage to David would ensure that Julia could provide Christophine secure employment for as long as she drew breath, if necessary. For that alone she ought to be grateful for Helen Adair’s quixotic divorce. Even if marriage were Julia’s first step toward becoming the next Mrs. Adair languishing in Devon, she’d have the comforts of wealth, comforts that, as Glennis so cannily understood, could be considerable.
Julia’s mind drifted to such consolations. She conjured a shopping list for Capriole: some shiny new fonts—the new Italian renaissance roman Morison spoke of and one of Fred Goudy’s fat clownish designs for a joke—and a store of proprietary papers, maybe with a caprine watermark when she felt ready to announce herself so grandly, or a fresh batch of Cockerell’s marbled papers for wrappers. With David’s money she could indulge all that and more.
She gripped her glass. Yes, but only as long as Capriole remained a pastime, discreet and elite. He’d never allow (the term scalded) her to aspire to anything serious, anything that thrust her into the fray of public markets and critical scrutiny. However acclaimed her work might become, like most men, he would find such ambition in a woman distasteful, grasping and unseemly. She could feel his voice whispering hot censure into her ear.
Art, then. He’d indulge her lavishly in art. A small Kandinsky oil, perhaps, or one of Sonia Delaunay’s panels. Julia dreamily transferred her favorite from a Soho gallery to her bedroom wall at home, above the blue velvet chaise, and admired its cheerful slices and cubes of color against the sunflower-gold walls. Wait. Her beautiful flat. She’d have to leave it. Julia swallowed more Cointreau. No, she would not think of that, not yet. Instead there’d be a tasteful house somewhere and gardens. And art. And books. Which of the pochoir French livres d’artiste would she seek out first? Something from Schmied, or a Brunelleschi, if it didn’t cost the universe. Could David find her a few prints of Barbier’s plates for Le guirlande, not too warm, within reason? There was the Daphné that Schmied would soon finish, reportedly too divine for words. Julia would melt for a copy. And a new bookplate by Janine Aghion. If her life was to be largely decorative, David’s grandest ornament, she would make it shimmer. As Julia mused, her eyes rested on the portraits over the mantel.
Lillian Vancill gazed down, some private diversion buoying her mouth. Was she snickering from beyond the grave at Julia’s efforts to gild her own cage? After just one hour in the woman’s company, Julia could hear that cackle, a hearty hoot, nothing demure or spinsterish about it.
Julia’s mind shifted to the photograph of Naomi Rankin, twined arm in arm with her friend, in easy peace with that unseen third intimate, the photographer. Had Russell Coates been behind the shutter that day? Naomi’s expression was unguarded, even fond. Julia had no doubt that they were lovers. He’d spoken of it so candidly the other night, and yet he claimed he’d hardly seen her in recent months. Was that credible? He might want no one to suspect he was her baby’s father. Or perhaps he welcomed the child, but she again refused to marry him. Would he have felt angry or betrayed enough to kill her?
Had he even known she’d been pregnant? Had anyone? That was key. Such knowledge might present powerful new motives and not only for Russell.
Julia rolled onto her side, lowering the book and glass to the floor. Glennis had said Russell had been to the house that Friday. He could have slipped downstairs or gone around outside to the basement apartment. On the other hand, Alice freely admitted she was there. Julia could find reasons to suspect either of them might be Naomi’s killer. But they were merely the two she’d spoken with. Others’ relationships with Naomi might be equally volatile. Philip said as much at the outset, and Glennis hammered on it at every chance. Julia, you blessed dunderhead. Had she focused on the obscure possibilities while ignoring the obvious ones?
She resettled onto her back, ignoring Lillian’s smirk. Everything about Naomi’s acute final illness suggested poison—death by toxic reaction, Dr. Perry had said—poison obscured first by the apparent morphine overdose and then forever by cremation. The immediate family, including both Winterjays, had access to her food. A delivery of soup from upstairs? A box of sweets? A pot of tea or coffee? It was lamentably easy. If Chester had discovered she was pregnant, would that have been the final straw pushing him to murder?
The Winterjays seemed more restrained, though Vivian had openly denounced her sister’s politics. To a devoted champion of marriage, Naomi’s pregnancy might be intolerable. According to Glennis neither Winterjay was at the house the day Naomi died, but murderers were often elsewhere when poison worked its deadly power. If anything, the couple’s absence pointed more suspicion their way, not less. Julia turned over, then back. Every way she rolled she saw faces of those who might be murderers or who just as easily might not. She smacked the cushion.
“There’s a cure for that, you know.”
She jerked upright.
Philip stood by the door.
“Are you spying on me?”
“In my own library? Surely one’s entitled to a bit of peaty solace at the end of a difficult day. You look like you could use a splash.”
He fetched the bottle of whiskey, and she lifted her empty glass.
“I’m sorry for my bad temper in the hall earlier,” he said, slumping into his chair by the fire. He too was in a dressing gown, securely belted this time. “No excuse for loutishness.”
Julia received his apology with equally subdued silence. Philip observed this with heightened curiosity but wisely said nothing. Probing questions were the last thing she could abide. Let him think what he liked.
His head settled back into the worn dent of his chair.
“Lillian’s death caught me off guard, you see. Herself too, I imagine. We both thought she’d live for another eon, as she promised. She looked like a stick, but there was steel in her pins, believe me.”
He gazed at the portraits above the mantel. “I wish you could have known her in her day. She was a rare old bird, quite extraordinary really. I always wondered if Lillian made herself tough to carry some of my mother’s weight. My mother was like mended china, liable to come apart at a hard sneeze or slammed door. Can you imagine? If Lillian wasn’t there to gallop me around the nursery on her back, I’d have busted my mother to pieces before noon every day.”
Julia suspected his peaty solace had begun some hours earlier. He was speaking to her as a friend, possibly even as a sibling, too melancholy for his usual combative wit.
“Do you remember him?” he asked, eyeing their father in the portrait: proud and somber, chin out, hand firm upon Charlotte’s shoulder as she held the infant Philip.
“Barely. A few glimpses through the balustrade, a Christmas dinner at which I couldn’t eat. I don’t recall he ever spoke to me more than a word or two.”
“You were too young. What, six, when he died? He wouldn’t have known what to say. I was seven or eight before we had anything resembling a conversation. He took me aside and said I should be a man and stop crying each time doctors came to see my mother. Babies cry, he told me, and girls.”
Losing her mother at thirteen had been a horror. Philip had been even younger, just eight when Charlotte died. Julia groped for consoling words but found only a bromide. “At least you had him for comfort when she died.”
“I had Lillian. Bless her cussed old bones. Milo shook my hand after the funeral. Man to man. I got another handshake when he returned two years later with your mother and, more or less”—he coughed—“you. I was dispatched off to boarding school within the week, I recall. He said it was time I saw something of the world. And Lillian was dispatched too, pushed out on her ear, really.”
Julia was sorry about both rude oustings, but an apology would be as unwelcome as it was inappropriate. Neither was her fault. She thought instead of how she and Philip shared Milo Kydd’s blood and until recently his money, but also they shared, it seemed, sorrow at never casting much of a shadow in the man’s life. Which was worse? A handshake or nothing?
Philip pulled her out of these ruminations with a nod to the Vale Danaë on the floor. “You admire Ricketts?”
“Better than most of his ilk. Definitely more than Burne-Jones.” Few of the English Pre-Raphaelites and their romantic brooding had ever much interested her.
He smiled. “The Kelmscotts were Milo’s. Not to my taste either.”
Julia cautioned herself. Best not to reveal a quickening interest. “You collect?”
“A bit. Work from the continent interests me more. I like my books either pure or lawless. Willy Wiegand or Apollinaire. Dufy’s woodcuts for Le bestiaire could shrivel the socks off poor Ricketts.”
She’d seen the stunning prospectus for Wiegand’s Bremer Presse’s new Iliad but knew little else about it. “I’m not very familiar with—” she began.
“I’d show you now, but I keep my anarchists in a private case down the hall.” He smiled. “Not that kind of private case. Though Lord knows esoterica’s about in droves these days, French postcards in twenty-dollar bindings. No, I merely try to shield la Cheadle’s good Methodist mind. One glimpse of Calligrames would confirm her fears of my bolshie tendencies.”
“Are you in the Colophon Club?” Julia said. “I spent an evening recently with Russell Coates and a rather boisterous set of members.”
“I know it, and I know Coates,” Philip said. “Solid chap, decent all through, but really, Julia. He’s a Morley man.”
Julia laughed, despite herself. The Morley interest was a mystery.
“Whatever you may think of me, and I shudder to imagine, I’m not that kind of joiner. The Grolier’s airless as a bank vault, but Colophon’s full of Babbitts with bookplates.”
“Not so,” Julia protested, laughing again.
He sat forward. “I should have picked a quarrel with you long ago. I suspect we’ve been missing no end of fun. How do you know your Kelmscotts and all?”
“I have an Albion,” she said. “And an imprint.”
“Good Lord!”
“Wait.” She was on her feet and out the door. Half a minute later she returned with the solander case of Capriole treasures.
“You sly thing,” he said when she showed him the daring new pressmark. “Gill plus Kydd equals Capriole. Stunning. I had no idea you were half so bold. Why didn’t you show me this before?”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested. More accurately, I expected you to mock it. Most brothers would find this rather shocking.”
“Most sisters would die of blushes, and I might yet mock that—your not blushing. May I look?” He took up each of her books and handled them with care, assessing both design and execution. The Woolf interested him most, she was relieved to see.
“Trifles, but promising. I see you worked out the kinks with a few parlor tricks”—he nodded dismissively at Gerald’s poems and Gruff—“and moved on to worthier fare. What’s next?”
“I can’t say. It may be crass of me to mention it, but private presses require means. Capriole’s fling may be over now that you’ve pinched my money.”
He looked at her with dismay untinged by guilt. “Nonsense. You’re only a concoction or two away from poison in the Rankin affair. Plus there’s that swain spewing lilies and roses. Marry his floral budget, and you’re in business for life.”
Their brief flicker of a pleasant conversation was over. “That’s vile,” she said, surrendering to a peevish disappointment.
“Better yet,” Philip went on, “be a man about it, as it were. I’m serious. Oh, marry if you must, but make Capriole something to reckon with. Play with the boys.”
“Fine presses rarely earn, Philip. You must know that.”
“Naturally I do, but most are the playthings of indolent layabouts like me, producing books as fussy as they are. Orchids all. Thrust boldly, Julia. You’ve already breached a most manly of men’s worlds. Don’t stop there. Attack. Do everything they do but better. There’s bracing new work out there dying for serious readers—have you read Amy Lowell or Richard Aldington? Lowell’s twice your age, but she’s the real ticket. I have a whacking good new pamphlet here somewhere by someone else you’ve never heard of. Hilda Doolittle, but she goes by initials.” He went to the bookshelves near the door and dropped to his haunches. “Find something worth those fancy papers and foundry types, something eye poking and teeth rattling. Pack in a few engravings or drawings if you want. Make your books interesting, make Capriole a real publisher, and collectors like me will pay. Double even, for the sheer novelty of a woman printer. Imagine! Others will buy too, if the work’s worth reading as much as owning.”
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of this from every possible angle.”
“Let me help if you’re flummoxed. I can’t compose a sonnet to save my life, much less a line of brevier, but I can goad. You or your poet quarry, whoever needs a prod. I’m a remarkably effective pest.” As you know, his wry glance added.
“You want to help me, Philip? Tear up that awful arbitration judgment. Stop raining imminent poverty down on my head. If you’d left well enough alone last summer, I wouldn’t need anyone’s help. Capriole would be happily on course.”
“Frivolous,” he said, waving at Gruff. “Charming bric-a-brac, thoroughly silly.”
“You called it promising. And at any rate it’s private. I work to suit myself, not you or anyone else. That’s the glory of a private press. I can print what I like, how I like, without pandering to the tastes of oafish buyers like you.”
“Silly and frivolous,” he repeated. “Why on earth would I heap further fortune onto you to produce self-indulgent baubles? Just as well you work a bit for your means. It might make you
more discerning where those dollars go. Pounds, whatever.”
“Philip!” The money was hers by right. Julia was no more required to deserve it than he was, just as she was now as entitled as he to cast a vote, no matter how careless or ill judged. “You’re robbing me for my own benefit? Even to suggest it makes you a worse scoundrel than I—”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted from behind the drinks trolley, where he was still crouched, looking for the pamphlet he admired. “Scoundrel, devil, beast, yes, I know. I must have left it in my bedroom. Won’t be two ticks.”
He disappeared, retreating on bare feet down the long hallway to his quarters. Julia’s shoulders fell back onto the pillows. How did he do it? Offer a glimmer of intelligent regard, display some spark of goodwill, lure her into hopeful trust—only to bash her with mockery? Why did she allow it to happen, time after time? It was bad enough to be tricked, worse to hear herself reduced to whining like a schoolgirl with sore braids.
Frivolous. Silly. Bric-a-brac. The barbs burrowed deep. Philip had a way of sharpening every blade of doubt already flashing in her heart. He was right. Savagely right. Capriole was a plaything, ambitious in its reach but self-indulgent nonetheless. She scorned his indolence, but wasn’t that precisely what she resented losing, her own idle leisure? She’d lived all her life in money-lit radiance. Shadows now taught her the value of each dollar’s tiny flame; what would she choose to illumine in her new dim world? It was a question one never asked while basking in perpetual sunshine. What vanity it was to weep for freedom without considering: Freedom from what? For what?
For Capriole money meant privacy meant whim. Money meant freedom from consequence and from judgment, which was little more than cowardice. Was her scramble for an independent income merely to protect herself from serious scrutiny? Wealth bestowed power and significance; those without it had to earn both. Money’s endless opportunities and freedoms to choose—Biarritz or Cannes? Fortuny pleats or Poiret brocades?—made Naomi Rankin’s choices poignantly stark. If Capriole was to be more than a fashionable parade of new chancery italics and naughty nymphs . . .