The Lady and the Robber Baron

by Joyce Brandon

  Jennifer took the elevator to the room Mrs. Lillian had set aside for her. She tried to call Peter to tell him she’d gotten trapped at the Bricewood, but apparently the telephone lines were down again, or still.

  She found a blanket and draped it over her shoulders so she could stand at the window watching the raging storm. Chane was out there somewhere. She thought of him and her heart ached.

  New York was still and silent. Not a vehicle rolled through the white-blanketed streets. Not a man nor a woman was to be seen on the sidewalks. Except for the howling wind and the blowing snow, nothing moved.

  She prayed that Chane was inside, warm and safe and asleep.

  The next morning, to pass the time, Jennifer joined the troupe and worked out at the barre for two hours. During the break, Simone whispered that Bellini had fired Frederick.

  “Do you know why?” Jennifer asked.

  “Not really. I think it…I heard a rumor that it was a suggestion by the management of the hotel.” She shrugged, embarrassed. “But I don’t know.”

  Jennifer didn’t know how she felt about that. She could certainly understand why Chane wouldn’t want Frederick around. But to destroy his career?

  The break ended and Bellini ordered them into the center of the room. “We’ll start with your first solo, Jennifer.”

  She was only ten beats into it when Bellini rapped his cane on the barre. “Listen to the music! You are two beats behind where you’re supposed to be.”

  “Two beats?” Jennifer couldn’t believe it. Usually her timing was her most reliable asset. She started again, saw Bellini shaking his head, and stopped. “Now what?”

  “Feel the music, Jennifer!”

  “I do feel it.”

  “Then why are you now three beats behind, and you’ve only just begun?”

  She tried six more times, and failed. Finally, with tears in her eyes, she walked back to center stage, determined that she would do it this time or die.

  Bellini walked over to her, took her hand, and started her at the right time. Seconds later he rapped his cane on the barre again.

  “Now what?” she asked, perplexed.

  “I just don’t know how you could get so far off the beat in only a few seconds.”

  He was glaring at her as if she were doing it on purpose. Jennifer’s chin started to tremble. Tears burned behind her eyes. Bellini shook his head in chagrin. “Take a break. We’ll try again later.”

  Jennifer intended to spend Christmas alone in her room, but Mrs. Lillian invited her to Christmas dinner. It was a glum affair, subdued by Chane’s continued absence.

  Without knowing how she knew it, she realized that the longer Chane stayed away, the slimmer were her chances of reaching him once he came back.

  “Hello,” Steve said into the telephone mouthpiece. There was no answer. He waited a second. “Hello.”

  Chane had to force himself to speak. “Steve…Chane here. I, uh…just wanted to see how things are going.”

  “Business has been slow, what with the blizzard and all.” He paused. “And Jennie’s still here at the Bricewood. She got stuck when the last blizzard blew in.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll call again before I return.”

  “When will you be coming back? Where are you? Mrs. Lillian’s been worried about you.”

  Without responding, Chane hung up and sagged back into his chair. In spite of everything, part of him ached to be with Jennifer. Another part of him knew better, but it felt too damaged to ever function again. The rest of him would have to drag that part of him around forever. It would serve to remind him that he had no business falling in love. Colette had certainly given him reason never to love again, but he hadn’t learned that lesson.

  Shame filled him, triggering the memory of an event he had all but forgotten. When he was seventeen and serving with the Texas Rangers, his friend Charlie had been captured and killed by the Comanches. They’d scalped him and cut off his testicles.

  Chane had helped dig the hole to bury him, but even that hadn’t worked off his anger. When he finished digging, he hurled the shovel away from him, barely missing one of the other Rangers.

  His captain took Chane aside. Pulling off his hat and dragging his arm across his perspiring brow, the captain said, “Charlie was your friend. You didn’t want him to die. But he and his maker had other ideas. You kin either keep on being mad or you kin make a good stagger at life like the rest of us.”

  “I don’t know how to do that,” Chane had admitted, wiping tears out of his eyes.

  “Jes plow to the end of the row. Ya gotta accept what ya cain’t change. I have a rule for myself. Anything my dog trees, I’ll eat. Simple as that.”

  He had treed Jennie. Now he would get over her.

  Chane willed himself to accept the prospect of life without her. It helped to pretend Jennie had died. He willed himself so sternly and so persistently that within five days he could sit up straight and eat a meal. When he had eaten three meals in a row and slept most of a night, he decided he was ready to go back and make a good stagger at life.

  On Wednesday, a week after the blizzard that had brought New York to its knees had ended, Chane returned to the Bricewood.

  Jennifer heard the news of Chane’s return from a young waiter rolling a dinner cart into Chane’s suite down the hall from hers. He was back. Her heart pounded, and her body seemed tense as a buggy spring, but she felt paralyzed. Before, she’d wanted to rush to see him, and now she couldn’t bear to face the hatred she would see in his eyes.

  That afternoon, Steve Hammond called on her, looking uncomfortable. His eyes avoided hers. “I, uh…brought an agreement…outlining the things we talked about earlier.”

  “We already have an agreement.”

  “This is a little more comprehensive, and it’s written.” Steve knew the fallacy in verbal agreements between men and women. He was not a complete innocent.

  Jennifer read it in silence. Chane was proposing to pay her a thousand dollars a month if she would stay away from him. He was willing to settle a hundred thousand dollars on the child at birth to assure its care. He would change his will to make her child his heir. He would settle other sums on the child when it reached certain ages.

  “It seems all right to you?” Steve asked nervously. “We can negotiate the amounts. He wants to be fair. Whatever you say…”

  “It seems fine.” Holding the agreement in both hands, she tore it cleanly in half lengthwise.

  Steve had worked for hours on that document. He couldn’t believe she would just tear it up like that. Staring at her beautiful, relentless face, he realized that women had a lot more violence in them than he had thought.

  She let the long strips flutter into the wastebasket beside the mahogany desk and lifted her gaze to Steve’s.

  “As difficult as you will undoubtedly find this to accept, I am refusing his generous offer. I will not sell him his freedom or my right to his name.” Rage was apparent in every word. “He is my husband. He married me for better or for worse, and I intend to hold him to that.”

  She walked to the door, opened it for him, and watched with satisfaction as Steve walked through it and quickly away.

  For the first time in days she wanted something specific and attainable. She wanted to talk to Chris Chambard.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Jennifer! Mon ange! Come in. Come in. Mon dieu, what has possessed you to stand on my doorstep with slush up to your knees?”

  Christopher Chambard didn’t wait for her reply. He pulled her into the room, slammed the door, and guided her shivering body toward his fireplace.

  “That is a long story,” she replied grimly. She had walked away from the Bricewood expecting to find a cabriolet, but every vehicle passing her had been filled. So she’d had to walk all the way to Chris’s house, on Park Avenue in the forties, an area of fine old homes that formed the core of an exclusive residential district.

  Her feet were wet and cold, and her b
ack ached. Her coat had barely helped. After a short time of walking through snow, the bottom of her skirts and petticoats had become sodden and filthy up to her knees.

  “We need to get you out of those wet things,” Chris said, ringing for Newgate, his butler.

  Newgate smiled warmly at Jennie and led her into Christopher’s bedroom, where a fire crackled in the hearth. Newgate brought one of Christopher’s bathrobes, waited outside the door until she had changed, then took her dirty clothes.

  Jennifer walked back to the library to rejoin Christopher. Newgate brought a tray with hot cocoa and tiny sandwiches. Jennifer sipped the warm, chocolaty milk and sighed. At last she warmed up enough to stop trembling.

  “Mon ange…” Christopher prompted.

  Jennifer told him what had happened between her and Chane. Christopher listened, his fine gray eyes telegraphing his compassion and support.

  “So where do you go from here?”

  “To see Peter. I have been so worried about him. But he probably thinks I’ve forgotten him. I only managed to visit him once, and he was asleep…”

  “Peter knows you love him. How could he not? You have been dotty about that young man since he was an infant.”

  Jennifer smiled at the truth of his words. “Men forget. They’re more likely to ask, ‘What have you done for me recently?’”

  Christopher laughed. “Ah, women are getting smarter.” After a moment he asked, “What about Kincaid?”

  “He hates me now. It’s over.”

  “Who ended it?”

  “He did, of course.”

  “Ahhhh,” Christopher said, shrugging his dismissal. “An affair of the heart is not over until the woman says it’s over.”

  “I might wish that were so, but I know better.”

  Christopher smiled and shook his head.

  “Christopher, what are you saying?”

  “That you are abdicating your responsibility,” he replied simply and emphatically.

  “Abdicating! With any other man perhaps, but not with Chane Kincaid—” Her voice broke on his name. A rush of hot, intense feeling pressed like a wedge against her throat. She could not continue.

  “Jennifer, we are trapped in these human bodies. We have no choice. We can fight our battles with people we love and know well or we can keep training new people to fight with.”

  Jennifer laughed, brushing aside quick, hot tears. A gleam of love and compassion lighted Christopher’s eyes. She looked frantically away. She could handle anything except tenderness. “Don’t be sweet to me.”

  “I should be mean to you?” he asked gently.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Sorry, mon ange, but I could never do that. You are like a son to me.”

  Jennifer laughed. To Christopher that was the ultimate compliment. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She reached up and brushed them aside.

  “Stay here tonight. It is almost dark. I will not have you traveling these streets alone.”

  “I need to see Peter.”

  “Call him. The telephone lines seem to be up, at least in some parts of the city.”

  Jennifer asked the operator for the Van Vleet town house and waited. Augustine came on the line, sounding wan and unsure of herself.

  “Augustine, it’s Jennifer. Is Peter there?”

  “No, madame.” Her tone brightened at the sound of a beloved voice. “He went back to work today. I don’t expect him until later.”

  “Tell him I called, will you? I’m going to spend the night with Christopher.”

  “That old man! Pah!”

  Jennifer laughed. “I’ll tell him you said hello.”

  Augustine snorted her disgust.

  “Tell Peter I need to talk to him…I’ll call him later. If he comes home early enough for us to talk, perhaps I’ll have him send the carriage for me…”

  “Are you well? We’ve been worried.”

  Jennifer reassured Augustine and ended the conversation. Christopher guided her gently into the guest bedroom where Newgate had started a fire. “Lie down until dinner, mon ange. You look exhausted.”

  Jennifer did not remember falling asleep. She woke suddenly, as if something had startled her, but heard nothing. A lamp burned on the bureau. The room was too hot. She had thrown her covers off. She felt sweaty and sticky, and her back ached terribly. She struggled into a sitting position and looked around her, trying to remember where she was.

  Christopher’s house. She had spent many nights in his house as she was growing up. He always left a lamp burning for her. Her stomach growled, and she smiled at the thought of him letting her sleep through dinner.

  Another familiar pressure reminded her she needed to pee. She slipped off the high, feather mattress and squatted to look under the bed for the chamber pot. She saw it and stood up, rubbing her aching back with her free hand.

  Her borrowed nightshirt felt wet. In the dim light from the fireplace, it looked black. Puzzled, she touched the darkness and recognized it as blood.

  She pulled the covers back. Another dark spot soiled the indentation where her hips had lain.

  A terrible thought crossed her mind. Had she miscarried? What was she to do about it? She’d heard all the usual horror stories about miscarriages, but she’d never heard anyone say that anything made a difference. A doctor probably wouldn’t help. She knew nothing about having babies, but she felt certain that the minute blood appeared, it meant the baby was dead.

  Confused and chilled, Jennifer took off the wet nightshirt and picked up the towels Newgate had brought for her earlier. She put one over the blood, climbed back into bed from the other side, folded the other towel under her hips, and covered herself to stop her shivering. She felt badly that she’d ruined Christopher’s fine feather mattress ticking. She would have it replaced for him.

  Jennifer was devastated about the baby. She had promised she would take care of it, but somehow she hadn’t. It had probably already died. She wanted Chane. She needed him. She hoped this was a bad dream. She wanted to wake up in the morning to find the bed clean and dry, and her baby safe inside her. She felt feverish. Chane should be here with her. He had said he would take care of her, and she needed him now.

  Then she remembered how Chane had looked. How many ways can you kill a man, princess?

  She had killed him and the baby. Grief filled her. And then hopelessness. She had failed him and her baby. Chane had been right to banish her from his life. She made too many mistakes. Her whole body felt as though it were crying. She pulled the covers over her head and closed her eyes.

  She woke to see Newgate’s concerned brown eyes peering into her face. He had sad, asking eyes that reminded her of a terrier Peter had brought home once. She had the urge to reach up and pat his head, but her arm didn’t respond to the signal. He seemed to need something from her she was unable to do. He kept calling her name. Her eyes closed.

  She woke again. This time a man she’d never seen before was frowning down at her. “Mrs. Kincaid…I’m Dr. Antonovich. I need to examine you.” He had a Russian accent and kind eyes.

  He probed her belly with his fingers, asked questions about her last monthly, looked at the blood in the bed, and sighed. “You seem to have miscarried. Based on your last menses, you couldn’t have been more than six or eight weeks along.”

  Sadness welled up from some deep place in her. It was so spontaneous and hot that she could not control it. Tears filled her eyes and ran down her temples into her hair. She wanted Chane. She rolled over and covered her face with her hands.

  Part of her cried and part didn’t. It felt odd to cry over a baby she didn’t know, would never know. Part of her wondered at her sincerity, but not the part that was crying. With the loss, she had finally realized that the baby had been real.

  Embarrassed, the doctor cleared his throat, walked to the door, and opened it. Christopher must have been pacing in the hall outside. The footsteps stopped.

  The doctor spoke in hushed tones. “She’s mi
scarried. Appears to be fine, though.”

  “She will recover?” Poor Christopher. He was like a mother to her. His voice was tight with worry.

  “She needs rest. Lots of it.”

  “Oh, la la,” Christopher breathed.

  “Keep her in bed a week. She’s lost a good deal of blood. Send Newgate to my office. I’ll have the nurse make up some pads for her.”

  For days Jennifer was glad to be in bed. She had no desire to talk to anyone, not even Peter. The thought of lifting the telephone filled her with despair.

  The doctor came again on the fourth day. She endured his checkup stoically, then sat up and pulled her gown around her.

  “When can I go back to work?”

  “What kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m a ballerina.”

  “Oh, not for a week or so. Wait until the bleeding stops completely.”

  “Isn’t this bleeding more like my monthlies?”

  “I suppose,” he admitted weakly. He didn’t appear to enjoy discussing these intimate matters with a woman.

  “I’m not hemorrhaging, am I?”

  “No, no, it’s not that sort of bleeding.”

  “Then I can go back to work as soon as I feel like it?”

  The morning of the sixth day dawned bright and clear. The sky looked misty toward the ocean, but crystal clear inland. Mid-morning, Jennifer walked down the long curving stairs for the first time since her miscarriage.

  The warm kitchen smelled of bacon and yeasty, fresh-baked rolls. Newgate was an excellent chef who could have worked for prestigious giants of industry, but he’d chosen not to. His only regret was that Christopher Chambard was too light an eater. Christopher failed to eat the enormous quantities most of the wealthy consumed, but Newgate appeared happy in spite of it. Christopher entertained the crème de la crème of the artistic community.

  They breakfasted before the fireplace in the kitchen. Few French aristocrats ate in the kitchen, even in a fine, cozy kitchen such as this one, but Christopher was old enough, and rich enough, to ignore any convention that displeased him.