The It Girls

by Karen Harper

  Elinor went into the paneled library and dropped into the large armchair she’d had upholstered especially for Milor in burgundy leather. Thatcher had brought in the December 11, 1916, London Times, yesterday’s issue here in exile as they were, with every crease ironed out of it as Milor requested when he was here.

  As ever, she skimmed articles for his name. She completely understood his being ambitious. That streak ran in her blood too, and just look at Lucile.

  “Oh, not this again!” she said aloud in the empty, chilly room, as if she were arguing with the vaunted paper. “He’s always been so loyal and does things for good reasons, so must they keep carping on this?”

  The paper was rehashing last year’s huge headlines declaring that the Right Honorable Curzon of Kedleston had “betrayed” former Prime Minister Asquith and joined Lloyd George’s coalition government just to obtain a place in the cabinet. “The government needs good minds in these perilous times we are at war,” she continued her diatribe. “So of course he had to switch sides.”

  Rather than getting upset over all this again—Milor had explained it to her—she flipped way back to the pages that covered society. And there, almost immediately in the various birth, marriage, and death announcements, her gaze snagged on Curzon’s name again.

  She skimmed it and gasped. Wide-eyed, she read it again and screamed. This was a nightmare! This could not be!

  George Nathaniel Curzon, the right Honorable Curzon of Kedleston of the PM’s cabinet is betrothed to a Grace Duggan, and they are to be married on 22 December of this year, with a ceremony in the United States and a smaller, later ceremony in January 1917 at the Ritz Hotel in London.

  The paper slid to the floor, and she stamped on it as she clutched her throat with one hand. She knew who this woman was, a very wealthy American widow with two sons. No doubt young enough to give him sons—and her fortune.

  Elinor tried to get up but her legs gave out and she slid to her knees with her elbows on the chair seat as if she were praying at a prie-dieu. Sobbing silently at first, she felt stabbed in the heart and soul. To lead her on, keep her here, betray her. Her adored and beloved Milor, faithless and vile.

  Gripping her hands together, she burst into tears and flooded his chair until Thatcher found her slumped there hours—or maybe eons—later.

  CHAPTER Twenty-Nine

  It was cold and snowing hard, but Elinor didn’t care. She felt as if she were being tormented in the depths of hell.

  How dare George Nathaniel Curzon and his new wife hold their second wedding for all his friends—oh yes, the Souls would be there in fine fettle—in the Ritz Hotel, a place that had often been her personal home away from home. He’d secreted her away in tiny hotels, but he was proud to show off his new bride in the grandest.

  So Elinor was in the backyard behind her mother’s small London house, and she was going to erase that man from her mind. What the deuce, but she had been out of her mind to trust him, to love him! The heart had its needs and reasons, but he had ruined her lifelong belief in true romance.

  The wind and snow—tiny pellets now—peppered her face and bare hands, but she didn’t care. This had to be done now. Perhaps it would help the burning pain inside to burn the past.

  She scraped a wide circle of snow away with her foot and dumped the big box of his letters to her on the damp, crushed grass. Stirring the pile with her foot, she took yet another letter from her coat pocket and tried to light it with the box of lucifers she’d brought out. It flared fast and burned her fingers. She hardly felt the pain. It was nothing next to real agony.

  She tried again, shielding the lighted envelope. Oh, she had admirers still, one in particular who had been attentive for years. But never would she play with the fire of passion and romance again, except in her novels. There would be only happy endings. Lucile would understand. She was desperately unhappy without Cosmo but she wouldn’t give in to abandon her goals and come back to live in Scotland—not even just have the London and Paris stores as he wanted and let the American ones go.

  “The ‘It’ girls are burning their bridges,” she said aloud as she bent to touch the flame to the waiting pile of paper.

  “Elinor!” came a sharp voice behind her. “Whatever are you doing out here in this snowstorm? I thought you were lying down.”

  Her mother. Her long-suffering, blessed mother. She could not have done without her, tending her and Lucile and then her granddaughters over the years. Mother had cared for Clayton more than she had, but that was because he was generous, so unlike Mother’s second husband, the horrid Mr. Kennedy. Besides, she had never let go of the deep love for her first husband, their father, yet so handsome when he died, never to weaken, ever young.

  “I’m burning some letters, Mother. Go back inside.”

  “Do not order me about. You will catch your death of cold out here. Can you not cut them up and throw them away?”

  “I want them destroyed. I want them burned.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said as she came closer and looked down. “His love letters.”

  “Ha! Love letters! Lying love letters. Perhaps I should use that for a book title.”

  Despite the wet ground and snow, the pile of them finally caught fire. She wished her mother would go back inside. She always saw right through her.

  “I thought I would die when I lost your father,” Mother said. “And look how I’ve gone on all these years without him, thanks to you and Lucile being so—well, strong and active.”

  “And quite mad, both of us.”

  Mother put her arm around Elinor’s waist. She’d come out so quickly her coat was not buttoned nor did she wear gloves or a hat. Elinor dug her gloves out of her pocket and put them on her mother as if she were a child.

  “Dearest, Elinor, you will go on without him, the wretched cad and betrayer that he is.”

  “It’s not only that. I’m burning another letter too. It came yesterday and kept me up all night. My request to the government for copyright to protect Three Weeks has not only been denied, but in the most cruel way. I wanted to protect my story from others who still make fun of it after all these years. Someone planned to make a bawdy sham of it in some dreadful, cheap London review.”

  “May I see the letter before you burn it?”

  “It was the firebrand I used to set the others aflame. But I will tell you—only you—what the judge’s decree said. It is going to make it so hard to write the book I’m starting now. The right honorable—that word means nothing to me anymore—judge decreed that I am not to have copyright protection for the novel because—and I quote—“It is vulgar, grossly immoral, and deserves no protection as a literary work.”

  “Oh, my dearest, how unfair,” Mother said, tugging Elinor back from the spreading flames the wind now fed. “So, what do you plan to do?”

  “Well, not throw myself on this blaze as if it were a funeral pyre where the Hindu widow immolates herself with her lost man. I shall follow your pattern. Lift my head and pick myself up somehow. I must tell you my next novel has a terrible, cynical, cold hero I’ve based on Curzon, but I shall have to give it a happy ending to not let my readers down. Also, I think I shall help in the war effort, here or in France. I shall do it for England, for our countrymen and for dear France. We Sutherland women forge ahead, don’t we, mistakes and tragedies and losses, no matter what? We go on.”

  Arm in arm, they stood together in the snowy cold until the flames burned out.

  Lucile looked up from her drawing board in her New York shop. For once, Bobbie’s singing was annoying her, and the bustle of the others in and out was distracting her. She stabbed her pencil point into the flowing gown she had just drawn and didn’t really like. It did not have “It.”

  “I need some quiet!” she announced.

  All the buzz stopped. Even her new designer, Peter, who was bringing her a cup of tea, froze in half step. Bobbie, who was feeling his oats a bit too much lately to order the others around, rolled his eyes
and frowned, fidgeting. Could he not sit still lately?

  “I can’t think, that’s all,” she said, amazed anew at how everyone seemed to orbit around her whims and schedule. It had to be that way, didn’t it? She was the sun, and they were the stars in this heaven of fashion and design. But, for once, she felt she’d overstepped.

  “I am frustrated by the new trends in style,” she told them. “I know America will soon be declaring war, and some will be ‘going over there’ to help stop the Huns, but we must not let women lose sight of beauty and their very special, individual personalities. Some of the new trends I’ve seen elsewhere than in this shop make women look like boys. They might as well be wearing men’s clothes with those straight skirts and jackets and those plain hats. Where is the feminine elegance, the grace and flow?”

  Several of her acolytes looked at one another but no one answered. For once, her dear Franks wasn’t even taking notes. And Bobbie dared to storm from the room.

  Lucile took two sips of the tea Peter set down silently for her, then got up and went out to see what was ailing Bobbie. It had annoyed her that he’d insisted on singing patriotic songs lately—in both English and Russian—instead of romantic ballads. Sometimes she thought of him as a friend, sometimes almost a son. She adored how he adored her, especially since Cosmo was being so stubborn and difficult, even an ocean away.

  She found the handsome young man pouting in the dim, deserted showroom with his arms crossed over his chest. He leaned against the elevated walkway she’d recently had installed so that the mannequins could strut off the small stage through the seated audience, turn round, and walk back.

  “What is ailing you, Bobbie?”

  “I might ask you the same, dear Diva.”

  “I told you not to call me that nickname. This is not some grand opera, and don’t be cheeky.”

  “It might be a tragedy but one only in the third act, I think. It’s wrong of you to try to keep me from enlisting. Don’t you think,” he asked, obviously forcing a stiff smile as he came toward her, “I would look smashing in a doughboy uniform?”

  Instantly exhausted by another go-round with him on this topic, she collapsed in one of the chairs. He perched sideways in the one next to her and leaned his elbows on the arm of the chair and clenched his hands together as if in prayer.

  “Shall I beg, oh, great one?” he demanded. “I can’t just sit here singing to you and your women clients and friends day and night, besides helping with froufrou frocks, when men are dying for a cause.”

  “Doughboy—what a wretched name,” she said, hoping she could drag him off his usual subject. “Those uniforms make a soldier look like a lump of dough in the middle.”

  “Of course you could have designed much more handsome ones to get shot up in the trenches, ones colored red perhaps to hide the blood.”

  “I resent your tone and topic. Bobbie, what is really wrong?”

  He jumped to his feet. “If you could see—see and really know—how others feel, you’d know what is wrong with me! There is a world out there beyond your talents and ambition and shops. You’ve been so kind, Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon, so good to me, but I’m not some piece of cloth you can cut and stitch to your own design and then keep in a drawer or closet! This country has been good to me, and it’s going to fight the kaiser over there, and, no matter if you are always used to having your own way, I’m going to enlist!”

  He actually saluted and turned about in a most mocking and military manner and marched out, ignoring her when she shouted, “Bobbie. Bobbie! You come back here so we can discuss this again.”

  She had a good notion to get up and chase him, try to save him from his frightening, perhaps fatal mission. But she felt frozen in her chair while his words echoed in her mind. There is a world out there beyond you . . . She knew that, of course, but what terrified her was that Cosmo had more than once written or said nearly the same thing.

  “My lady,” came a quiet female voice behind her.

  With Bobbie’s words pounding in her head, she turned slowly round. Franks. Faithful Franks standing there for who knew how long.

  “I’m all right. Whatever is it?”

  “Flo Ziegfeld sent a messenger with a letter for you. Mr. Ziegfeld wants to attend your next mannequin tableau and parade, because he wants you to design for his Follies here in town. For what he calls his ‘showgirls.’”

  “Read it to me, will you?” she asked, still not wanting to get back on her feet since that dreadful display Bobbie had just dared. Why, she’d sacked people before for such an outburst, and he knew it.

  Franks squinted at the page in the dim light. “I recognize some of these names from the show we saw. He requests that ‘The Empress of Fashion’ design for him—oh, siren gowns, Egyptian, Chinese for this list of ladies. Irene Castle. She’s that dancer, remember? Also Marion Davies—”

  “William Randolph Hearst’s latest squeeze.”

  “And Billie Burke. Why, that’s Flo Ziegfeld’s wife!”

  Lucile stood at last, holding herself erect, however deflated she’d felt after Bobbie’s accusations, which had made her think of Cosmo again. Except for businesslike notes back and forth between them, she’d tried to shut out thoughts of her husband, because it made her long for him and hate herself.

  “Yes, Billie Burke is indeed Mrs. Florenz Ziegfeld! Oh, Franks, to design again, to design elegant clothes and for the stage, the best advertisement ever!” She clasped her hands between her breasts, then reached for the letter to read it herself. “I may have signed with Sears and Roebuck, but how I’ve longed to return to my first love of designing really ethereal clothes.”

  But she thought of Cosmo again. He’d no doubt be glad to hear that Bobbie was leaving his luxurious life for a hard cot and wretched food and being yelled at to march in step, and not by her anymore.

  She skimmed the letter herself. Yes, Flo Ziegfeld promised all that, but wanted to see her next mannequin tableaus to get ideas. Oh, she had a million new ideas. Here Cosmo was always fretting that she was spending too much money, and this would be another new contract to appease him. Yet how she wished she had him here to care for the boring business end of things so she could just design, design, design.

  Cosmo had recently written that she was too much of a “designing woman.” He meant her never letting up—never letting down to relax. But that’s the way she’d been born and bred, Elinor too, who had written she was volunteering in the English war effort, delivering candy and flowers to wounded soldiers, no less, and she was planning to head to Paris to do even more.

  Well, she’d show them all that she could lift spirits too. If only Flo Z’s productions weren’t called the Follies, because that’s something else Cosmo had accused her of—as if in an afterthought—in the postscript of a note just last week. She wondered if he’d taken the quote from Elinor, who adored the classics, since it was a line from Homer.

  Lucile had only read it once because it annoyed her so—and hurt her too. It went something like this: People blamed the gods for evils, but in fact it was their own follies causing their woes.

  Well, she didn’t like the tenor of that, but she did like her brilliant plans to design for Ziegfeld. It opened up a whole new world, an escape from all this dreadful war talk, from Bobbie’s desertion, from Cosmo’s, too. Ah, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to just create and not worry for the business end of things? Now what was the name of that man Hearst had mentioned who might like to buy a big part of her business and manage the boring parts, maybe buy Cosmo’s share out here?

  “Come with me, Franks, and we shall make the exciting announcement that this next fashion parade and tableau must be perfect, all two hours of it, down to every stitch and frill and step. Ah, we’re back to silks and satins, bows and lace and ruffles and flounces. Do you realize this will mean Flo Ziegfeld will do our promotion for us? Oh, and see if we can get that string quartet back, and if they can bring a romantic tenor since, sadly, very sadly, we have lost the
one we had.”

  CHAPTER Thirty

  Lucile paced back and forth in her private office in the New York shop, reading more of Elinor’s letter and becoming more angry with every line.

  Lucile, you simply owe it to your country to come home and help in the war effort, at least in London, but Paris could use you too, and not just to oversee your shop here.

  “How dare you tell me what to do!” Lucile sassed the letter. She should have taken time to read it at home—left it at home—but she’d put off reading it yesterday when it came. More of the same, Elinor’s grandstanding, now that she was finally looking at the contents.

  I really cannot believe you are sitting the war out there in lush, plush conditions.

  “Lush and plush, indeed. I am working very hard!” she cried, planning to write back those very words in her own letter when she had time.

  I can’t tell you how hard I worked on my new novel. The book has been well received so far, although I’ve had several letters saying it has a terribly cynical heroine, especially because of the theme, which, more or less, says that it is wiser to marry the life you like, because, after a little while, the man doesn’t matter. I suppose since you and Cosmo seem quite estranged, you would agree with that.

  “If you mean I’d be imprisoned in Scotland for good—or for bad—I agree with you for once, sister. Speak for yourself about what was your dreadful marriage. You would have been better off to have left that years ago!”

  I must tell you that William Randolph Hearst has made me a healthy offer to bring out my latest novel in America, but he wanted me to soften her character somewhat and not make her so brazen as to decide she wants to lose her virginity. I told him, no, she is a modern woman, and he has said he still may take the novel!