By The Sea, Book One: Tess

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  To inherit. Tess turned the idea over in her mind, tormented by its possibilities. To inherit meant that you need never worry, really, about the future. It meant that you could send someone you loved who was ill to take the cure at Hastings, or on the south coast of France. It meant that fathers and brothers did not have to live separated from daughters and sisters. Perhaps it was true that the meek would inherit the earth. But the rich would inherit most everything else: good health, happiness, lovely manners.

  It was a long night for Tess, filled with forebodings. That's from Mother, Tess thought wearily. Mother, who never saw the rainbow, but only the rain.

  Ironically, Maggie had got her best night's sleep in a long time. For once she awoke without an unhealthy red flush in her cheeks, which made Tess immeasurably happy. Tess's feelings toward her older sister had always been oddly maternal; since their mother's death, more than ever.

  Maggie came and sat on the side of Tess's bed, very much as she used to when the two were little girls in Cork. "I feel so much better today, Tessie. This afternoon when we've done with our work, let's go off for a walk along the beach. We'll have tea."

  "So you plan to go leaping down the lane like a deer, miss, and all because you've had one good night's sleep?" Tess threw her blanket off and strode to the corner washstand. "Whatever next? You'll be off to join the equestriennes in the circus, I suppose," she teased. "My own thought on the matter is that it's early days to be thinking of hauling yourself cross-country," she said firmly. And then, in perfect imitation of the cultured tones of the mistress of Beau Rêve, Tess, a born mimic, added, "However, I daresay a stroll along Bellevue Avenue would suit you perfectly, darling. I shall arrange your hair, and you shall have my silk parasol."

  "Oh, never the silk one!" Maggie cried, delighted.

  "Indeed, you shall have it."

  But first the laundry. At most of the great Newport houses, Monday was set aside as laundry day. Articles were sorted and inventoried in the washing book, after which they were set to soaking in soda or lime solutions until Tuesday morning, when the fires would be lit for heating the huge copper tubs; and soon after, washing would begin. But at Beau Rêve, entertainment proceeded at a breakneck pace. Caroline Winward accepted invitations only from half a dozen among her exclusive circle of friends; mostly, she entertained. For practical purposes, there was little to distinguish a dinner party at Beau Rêve from a state dinner at the White House: Ambassadors and senators, English earls and European counts were summoned with equal confidence to the tables of both, the chief difference between them consisting, as the Duke of Marlborough once had it, "of several square yards more of elbow room, and several pounds more of food" for each guest at the Newport table.

  At any rate the linen, being in constant use and of considerable value, required an uncommon amount of attention. As a result, the huge coppers were filled three times a week instead of once, and there was never a day when something was not being soaked, boiled, rinsed, rubbed, or wrung in the wet laundry; and mangled, starched, glazed, or ironed in the dry.

  Still, this particular Sunday was less grueling than some others, perhaps because both sisters were in such cheerful spirits. Maggie was looking much better, smiling often in happy anticipation of the afternoon holiday. She coughed little, almost not at all, and insisted on helping Tess with the wet, unmanageable damask tablecloth.

  "We really could use more help with this," ventured Maggie.

  "With this and with everything," said Tess. "The Blessed Virgin herself would be hard put to keep up with this laundry, if her Son was to turn out a different miracle every day of the week. It's wearing you to the bone, that it is."

  "How did you ever manage by yourself in Wrexham?" asked Maggie.

  "That was in a simple English country house, goose. The laundry was a bit of a simplicity by comparison. Do you think Lady Meller cared a fig if Lady Shaftesbury set a heavier damask? That wasn't the point, was it? But in Newport, it certainly is."

  Tess shook her head and sighed. "The fact is, I don't understand what the purpose of all this is," she said as she stretched the cloth over the massive, specially made drying rack. "To cart a piano, half a ton of silver, chinaware to fill a dozen lorries, and rugs and tapestries to cover up a soccer field, all the way from New York City to a wee speck of an island no one in Ireland has ever even heard of, and in eight weeks to be carting it all back again—whatever is the point, Maggie?"

  Tess looked more carefully at her sister, who had lost much of her animation. "Maggie?"

  Maggie managed a trembly smile. '"Tis the air in here, Tess, I do believe it: I feel as if my breast were made of sopping wet sponges. Do you think we can go now?" she asked plaintively.

  "In a bit, I should hope." Tess was not in a position to say yes; permission must be got from the head laundress, a lazy, flirtatious woman with good skin but very little else. She was married to the head coachman, although Tess had never once witnessed an exchange of affection between the two. After much hemming and hawing and a stern look or two, Enid granted the two girls their leave, admonishing them to be indoors by eight o'clock or to risk the considerable and probably tragic consequences.

  Maggie's spirits rallied when they returned to their room and changed into walking clothes. She put on a blouse of navy blue poplin fronted in a multitude of pleats and tucking into a too-bright skirt of magenta poplin, edged with row after row of white braid. Tess settled for a simple, very proper dress of black twill, which fit perfectly and showcased her glorious auburn hair.

  Maggie was fitting on a black straw hat, atop of which was perched a white feathered bird very like a large seagull. "How do I look, Tess?"

  "Oh, quite grand, Mag," Tess answered affectionately. Maggie had little skill with the needle, and no good eye for fashion. She was drawn invariably to bright colors and outlandish hats, almost as if to compensate for her quiet, washed-out manner. Tess found the effect to be in marginal taste but utterly charming.

  By the time the two young women slipped away from the great marble cottage into the hedge-lined servants' path, it was four-thirty and the carriage parade up and down Bellevue Avenue was in full swing.

  The daily coaching parade was one of the more curious phenomena associated with the intensely competitive and mostly hollow rituals that characterized a summer's day in Newport. After a drawn-out, elaborate luncheon, Newport society would take to their demi-daumonts, victorias, landaus, and four-in-hands for the traditional exchange of calling cards. Those who could compel their husbands to accompany them did so; those who could not had their children in tow, hideously bored but spotless in white gloves, clutching their own little card cases. The coachman, rigid with stateliness, his black boots polished to the same blinding perfection as the coach box he occupied, would bring the superbly bred horses to a stop in front of a prominent entrance along Bellevue Avenue (known simply as "the Avenue"), and a liveried footman would alight to deliver the occupant's card to the front door. No one was ever home, of course; each of the ladies was out dropping her own cards at the castlelike "cottages" of her friends.

  Just as the great marble cottages were not actually designed to be homes, the dazzling equipages were not intended as mere transportation. They were entries in a grave competition of wealth, painstaking arrangements of rosettes and braided manes, issuing from huge stables and carriage houses that would humble virtually every home in America. Never mind that on this typical Sunday afternoon, many of the husbands were hiding on their yachts or had fled to the safety of their Wall Street duchies; never mind that the miserable young heirs and heiresses who were pinned to their carriage seats were forbidden to move a muscle. The important thing was that, to most of the participants as well as to the spectators, the display of opulence seemed to have enormous significance.

  Certainly Maggie thought so.

  "Ooh, Tess, just look! It's Mrs. Astor; I could tell her anywhere, even without the blue livery, by the way she holds her head so high and still. Why, sh
e don't see anything or anybody!" Maggie giggled and pulled at her sister's sleeve. "Would you be looking at those two—in the barouche—fussing for her attention. There, now, she never saw 'em, and their heads spinning around like piano seats when they passed."

  "And look at the wheel spokes," Tess added in a scandalized tone, humoring her sister. "Caked with mud, and the sky without the merest cloud in almost a fortnight. Wait until I tell Father. Who are they, do you suppose?"

  "Trash from New York, I'm sure," Maggie said flatly. "Bridget says most everyone new this summer is in trade. Bridget says it's got to where everyone's a millionaire and the 'Four Hundred' is soon to become the 'Four Thousand.' Bridget says, why, it's madness, and there's folks will gladly pay fifteen thousand dollars to be invited into one of Mrs. Astor's balls, only they'd be laughed at. Imagine that." Maggie never took her eyes off the snail-like progression that was inching its way up the Avenue as she babbled breathlessly on.

  "And you're going to believe everything Bridget says, are you?" Something like affectionate jealousy crept into Tess's challenge.

  "Well, of course," said Maggie equably. "If Bridget isn't the third cousin of Mrs. Astor's scullery maid, I don't know who is."

  "The scullery maid! And I suppose she hobs and nobs with the rich cottagers, does she?" demanded Tess.

  "Oh, Tess, don't be that way, so standoffish with the other servants. Bridget regards you as the most haughty creature, and she'll never believe me that it's you're shy—"

  "I am not shy, Margaret Moran. And I am not standoffish. It's only that I have—other considerations on my mind."

  "I know you do, Tessie," Maggie agreed, instantly repentant. "Don't I know that you're the one holds us all together? And that you're doing my work for me in the laundry? But soon that will change, Tess. I'm better today, and tomorrow I'll be better still, wait and see."

  "I should think so, my dear Mag. And when you are, I'll make you my slavey and you shall do all the work while I loll on a chaise longue or knock about with the others at Easton's Beach."

  The prospect of Tess, who possessed a rather fierce energy, lolling about on a longue or anywhere else caused both sisters to burst out in laughter so bright and merry that the occupants of a passing phaeton all turned as one to stare. The two women in the carriage, both of them young and pretty, lifted their chins and returned their attention to their companions. But the young men gazed on a bit longer, and one of them, wonderfully good-looking in his silk hat and dark mustache, smiled encouragingly. Instantly he was poked good-naturedly with an unopened parasol by the livelier of the two ladies, but not before poor Maggie, confused by the attention, waved her gloved hand timidly in greeting.

  Aghast, Tess whispered, "Maggie, how could you!"

  A bright scarlet, an unhealthy shade of scarlet, suffused Maggies cheeks. "I didn't mean to be bold, Tess. Only, he seemed kind. I don't expect they're people of any consequence, Tess; it was only a phaeton, after all."

  "And that's one phaeton more than you or I possesses. Oh Maggie, they were laughing at us, didn't you see that?" Now it was Tess's turn to blush, which only heightened the translucent beauty of her pale skin.

  "There you go again, Tessie. It's what Bridget says: you don't trust anyone. He was only being friendly-like. And why shouldn't he? Aren't you prettier hands down than either of them?"

  "It takes more than looks to make a lady, Mag," said Tess, a little wistfully.

  "And who is it that's reading the works of Tolstoy in her room every spare moment she gets? Not theirselves, you can be sure," Maggie argued.

  "Everyone in the world has already read Anna Karenina, Maggie. Now stop."

  "I'll bet a hat they haven't," insisted Maggie. "I haven't, and no one we know has, and what does that tell you? That you're as good as they, or better."

  "This is getting us nowhere at all, and—oh, look, Maggie, maroon livery!" Tess said, diverting her sister's attention to a footman perched atop a magnificent victoria that was parading north. "Would that be the Vanderbilts, do you think?" she asked innocently.

  "I'm sure of it!" cried Maggie.

  The Vanderbilts, having taken Mrs. Astor and her Newport by storm, had, for the last several years, been engaged in a ferocious competition among themselves to out-cottage one another. The mid-century era of summering in Newport's comfortable hotels became unfashionable with the advent of stick- style cottages—large wooden mansions designed to house one (and one's retinue) in luxurious privacy. Inevitably a competition resulted, and the Vanderbilts understood the game better than anyone else. In 1888 William K. Vanderbilt commissioned the illustrious Richard Morris Hunt to build for his wife the biggest and the best Newport cottage, and the aptly named Marble House was the result: an eleven-million-dollar neo-classic palace modeled after the Petit Trianon in Versailles.

  All during the building of Marble House, which took place behind high walls in closely guarded secrecy, wild rumors swirled around the servants' halls: of a ballroom carved from gold; of an entire medieval museum inside for the old man's pleasure; of entry doors weighing as much as a coach-and-four. And then, after the grand housewarming in August of 1892, a hundred ladies' maids brought back confirmation: all of it was true. Alva's divorce of her generous husband two years later sent the servants' halls rocking once more, but even that paled against the captivating rumors a few months later of a grand coming-out party for Consuelo Vanderbilt. It was whispered that nine chefs would be serving dinner to five hundred guests, and that one of the courses required the flesh of four hundred different birds.

  But Consuelo's coming out was not until late August, and meanwhile another Vanderbilt cottage was going up and another Vanderbilt daughter coming out, earlier in the month: that ultimate symbol of the Gilded Age, The Breakers, was to be house but not especially home to twenty-year-old Gertrude, her four siblings, and her parents. From the beginning, the Breakers project had captured the imagination of Newport's domestic class. Of its seventy rooms, thirty-three were designated for service, by far the greatest number of any place in Newport. A fair-sized house could be dropped into its two-story kitchen and never noticed. The building itself occupied nearly an acre of land; its entrance hall was four and a half stories high. The Breakers had more marble than the Marble House, and more of everything else besides. The Breakers overwhelmed you with its situation, crushed you with its significance.

  Tess knew that, because she had sneaked down to the Cliff Walk one Sunday afternoon and had stolen a peek at the furiously ongoing construction. Before she was shooed away in Italian by a stonemason, she'd caught a glimpse of the mansion's stunning east-facing facade. Tess knew then that nothing built by the other millionaire barons would ever surpass it. If The Breakers did not actually represent the end of an era, it was certainly destined to be its apex. Although she'd flinched in the afternoon sun before its excesses, Tess had been left almost dizzy with longing: to have that kind of wealth, that kind of power...

  "Tessie, look!" squealed her sister. "It's Bridget, dashing in the way of the Vanderbilt carriage. She must be mad; she'll be run over sure," cried Maggie, covering her eyes.

  Tess snapped back to the present. "Maggie, open your silly eyes. The horses are barely moving; there's a delay ahead. Still, Bridget’s a fool to challenge Mrs. Vanderbilt's right of way."

  Bridget was making a beeline for the two sisters. Surprised, Tess said, "It's us she's rushing for pell-mell."

  Bridget, red-faced and out of breath, her bright orange hair still pinned to receive a cap, fetched up before the two sisters like a setter on a short leash. "Maggie! Tess! Come quick! The house is in anarchy! Cook has left, but first he spit in the soup, and two of the footmen as well, and Enid's run off with the butler, but first Mr. Waterman and the head coachman were rolling around on the stable floor like two schoolboys, and your father has one eye black as a lump of coal! Hurry!"

  Chapter 3

  The three young women ran back to Beau Rêve as fast as Maggie was able to manage,
while Tess did her best to untangle the hopelessly knotted skein of events that Bridget had described. As far as Tess was able to make out, it all started when one of the lunch guests made a disparaging observation about French Catholics. One of the footmen had carried the comment straight back to the kitchen, and the overworked, temperamental chef, his Gallic pride flattened like a failed soufflé, dug in his heels and refused to serve lunch. Unfortunately, the remark was made just as the guests were being seated. For fifteen minutes Mrs. Winward and a dozen of her peers languished on gilt chairs and the purée d'aspèrges sat in the kitchen, cooling in its Sèvres tureen, while the staff split up into pro- and counterrevolutionary forces.

  "Cook was livid, he was," said Bridget. "And himself descended from six generations of chefs—he said not one at madame's table knew who their grandmother's father was, much less what faith, and then he said "Pfooey' and spat in the tureen, and may I burn in the deepest circle of Hell if he didn't! Then Jimmy Conner said, 'An Irish Catholic's still a Catholic for all that,' and he spat in it too; and Herbert—a simpleton if ever there was one—he spat in the soup because Jimmy did."

  "But what did Mr. Waterman have to say about all that?" Tess cried, shocked.

  "Well, that's the amazing thing," Bridget continued. "He was for dismissing them on the spot, as you might expect. But just in the middle, if it isn't Enid herself bursts in from the laundry room and cries, 'I've taken about all I can from them pigs'—her family name being St. Onge, you know, though I couldn't say as she's seen the inside of a Catholic church in Newport or anywhere else—and doesn't she make straight for the tureen, but Mr. Waterman stops her. Then, as God is my witness, and before you could say 'Bob's your uncle,' why, herself is in Mr. Waterman's arms, and crying, 'You promised to take me away from this hellish life, you did,' and meanwhile a queue is forming to spit in the soup tureen."