The Luxe l-1

by Anna Godbersen

  She knew Elizabeth would soon be advancing up the main stairs, and she felt a rebellious instinct rise up in her. Once she arrived, Lina would have to undress her young mistress, and wouldn’t be in bed herself until after morning’s light. Just imagining the very task she had performed thousands of times, but escaped for months, caused her body to flush with resentment. She pushed herself up from the sill and shuffled hurriedly out of Elizabeth’s room and down the long carpeted hall. She reached the back servants’ stairs in a few moments, and then hustled down two steps at a time.

  As Lina moved toward the kitchen, she could hear the Holland women on the main stairs, going up. She paused and considered whether she would be punished, and how, for abandoning her duties on Miss Holland’s first night back in New York. But she wanted to tell Will about all the French airs her mistress had acquired. She wanted to see him laugh and know she had caused it. And maybe…maybe she would find a way to tell him how she felt. So she gave herself a little nod and dashed through the kitchen and out the rear pantry door, which Elizabeth had installed last fall to facilitate deliveries from the grocer.

  Then she stepped lightly onto the hay-covered ground of the carriage house. Will had been removing the equipment from the horses. It lay there on the ground in neat rows so that he could clean it before putting it away. The threadbare cotton of his blue collared shirt clung to his skin from working with those gleaming black animals. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, and his hair was damp where it hung beneath his ears.

  He took a step forward and met her eyes, then stopped as though he had realized something.

  “Hey,” he greeted her quietly. He looked over her shoulder, toward the door, and then smiled tightly as he refocused his eyes on her. “Shouldn’t you be upstairs, helping the Misses Holland?”

  Lina stood still near the door and smiled uncontrollably. She hugged herself and waited for him to invite her in like usual, but then he turned his gaze away and spoke in a very different tone from the one she had grown used to over the summer. “You know you’re testing your luck, sneaking around at night. Now that Miss Liz…I mean, Miss Elizabeth is back. You shouldn’t. You…can’t.”

  Lina’s heart was startled in her chest, and time stretched slowly in front of her. She was so confused by the way he was acting. It was as though all the closeness that had grown between them over the summer had disappeared in an instant, or had only ever existed in her imagination. She blinked, wishing that he would just look at her for a moment.

  Then he did finally bring his gaze to meet hers. His face was frozen and his mouth was set and his eyes were blank. The horse nearest him shifted, prancing in place and shaking its head. A moment passed, and then Will reached up and quieted the large animal.

  “Will,” she said, her voice rising with an unpleasant pleading quality that she could not control. She desperately wanted him to say something familiar and encouraging, to make some joke that would eclipse the awkwardness she was feeling now. “Why can’t I visit with you like usual? The ladies do it during the day, with tea, but because we’re who we are, we have to do it at odd hours and in ”

  “Lina,” Will interrupted. She was jarred by the name, which he rarely used. Over the summer he had always used her childhood nickname, Liney, to address her. He looked to the ground and sighed. Then, without meeting her eyes, he moved toward her. He gently took both of her hands, and for a second Lina thought her heart might stop. But then he pushed her back toward the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Lina,” he said softly as he moved her up those four wooden steps and into the house. “Not tonight. You can’t be here tonight.”

  “But why not?” she whispered.

  Will stared at her. His brow was tensed and his eyes seemed very blue and very serious. He just shook his head, like whatever he was thinking was something she wouldn’t understand. “Just not tonight, all right?”

  And then she was in the kitchen and the door had closed in her face. Lina reached out for a wall in the darkness. She slid down to the floor, which smelled of cooked onions and dirt, and there she remained. She sat like that for a long time, feeling lonelier than perhaps ever. Outside, the sky began to turn from black to the darkest purple.

  She was still there when the door to the servants’ stairs opened, and a figure in a white silk wrap hurried across the floor. The girl was as darting and iridescent as a ghost, and she kept her head down as she moved.

  She had already pushed through the door to the carriage house when Lina realized that the girl was Miss Elizabeth Holland.

  Six

  Paris, August 1899

  The summer is almost over, and I now understand my role more clearly what it is to be a young lady of the Holl and family, and all that is expected of me. I must not always be so indulgent and careless although I find it difficult to regret anything I have done.

  — FROM THE DIARY OF ELIZABETH HOLLAND

  ELIZABETH, WRAPPED IN THE WHITE SILK KIMONO her father had bought on a trip to Japan and given to her for her sixteenth birthday, hurried through the kitchen and out the back door. She was moving with the trembling determination of a desire that had been building in her all night. She kept her head down as she stepped onto the first of four steps made of old pliant wood and then onto the stable floor.

  She stood there on the soft ground, the air all around her heavy with late-summer heat and motes of hay. She listened to the sounds of horses gently shifting in their stables and felt fully awake for the first time all night. These things the sound of the animals, the crisp and quiet night, the sweetness of the hay they were everything she had tried so hard not to think about while she was gone. She stepped lightly in her satin slippers, trying to keep her kimono from catching any incriminating bits of hay.

  “You came,” Will stated, though it sounded more like a question. His legs dangled off the loft where he slept, and his hair was greasy from humidity and work. He had the habit, when he was nervous or annoyed, of pushing it repeatedly behind his ears. Will, unlike the boys her friends lusted for, had a hooked nose from the time it was broken in a brawl, and thick, expressive lips. His eyes were a bright, wounded blue, and he was sitting in a familiar position it was the position of waiting. “I’d nearly given up on you,” he added, the cautiousness of his phrasing masking the fear in his voice.

  Looking up at Will, Elizabeth felt elated and weary at once, and she realized what a very long night it had been. The whole ball all that shrieking laughter, all those elaborate gowns seemed like the stuff of a bright, absurd dream that had passed with the coming of morning. There had been dances with enough bachelors to make her mother happy, some of them less eligible and more charming than Percival Coddington. She had found time to catch up with Penelope, and they’d clasped hands and whispered appreciatively back and forth about each other’s dresses. She’d forgotten to needle Penelope about the secret affair she was a bad friend, she realized now, but she would make a big show of begging Penelope to tell her who the unnamed beau was later. They’d agreed that the terrine was delicious, though they had both been too excited to really eat any of it, and that they’d drunk more champagne than they had meant to. But champagne, they agreed, as they always had before, was not to be resisted. It had been a very long night, but it seemed to her now that it could have ended nowhere but here.

  “I’m sorry…but you know you shouldn’t always be waiting,” Elizabeth finally answered, even though she might as easily have told him that she’d thought of him every day and that their separation had been excruciating. She wanted to tell him about the far-off places that she had seen, how the broad avenues of Paris curved and opened onto grand vistas unimaginable in straight-up-and-down New York. There were many things she wanted to say, but instead she mumbled: “I wouldn’t want you to count on my coming even when I might not be able ” She stopped herself when he looked away. “Please, Will,” Elizabeth said then, a little desperately, her chest aching at the sight of Will’s downcast eyes. “Please…”

 
It was remarkable how quickly she adjusted from her big comfortable room upstairs to down here in the carriage house, how quickly all the rules that governed her daily life became useless and silly-seeming. Of course, she had long told herself to reverse this course. In Paris, she was sometimes sure that she could, that she had outgrown Will, that she was now fully the lady her social position called for. But when she came off the ship and down the plank that morning, she saw him waiting with the family carriage and realized that he, too, had grown up. He was somehow even handsomer than he had been before, and she knew from the way he carried himself that he was no longer the sort of boy to get in useless fights. There was purpose in his every gesture. And here she was now, stuttering and stammering, near begging him to adore her again, the way a girl in love would. That’s what she was, after all: a girl in love.

  But all that could not stop a few stray thoughts from returning to the words that her mother had uttered just before Elizabeth had set out on the dance floor with Percival Coddington. The one thing we do not have is time. Her words hovered like an augury over Elizabeth’s head, even now, as she stood on the stable floor.

  “You were gone so long,” Will said quietly, and shook his head in a show of despondency. Elizabeth looked up at him and tried to banish those words still looming like storm clouds. “And then tonight, standing out on the street, waiting for the ball to be over, not knowing what you were doing in there, who’s touching you, who’s ” He looked straight at her then, which made any further words unnecessary. One of the horses shifted, hooves against the hay, and neighed softly.

  “Will, I couldn’t not go to the ball.” She widened her eyes helplessly, wondering why he had to fight with her over things she couldn’t change, especially on her first night home. After all, wasn’t she the one risking everything she had ever known, creeping around the house at night? Couldn’t he just love her in the time they had? “I’m here now, Will. Look at me, I’m here,” she said softly, stepping forward. “I love you.” She almost laughed because she meant it so much.

  “I kept picturing you inside, dancing with those other men.” Will fixed his grip on the wooden edge of the loft, and then went on. “Those Henry Schoonmaker types with their hundred-dollar suits and their country houses even bigger than what they have in town…”

  Elizabeth reached the ladder and took two steps up. The wood was rough on her soft, unblemished hands, but she hardly thought of that now. She kept her eyes on Will’s and a crescent smile on her lips. “Henry Schoonmaker? That cad? You must be joking.” She couldn’t help laughing her high, fine laugh outright now.

  She didn’t know where it came from, this urge to comfort and hold Will, but it was as deep in her as fate. She didn’t even know when their childhood adoration had turned into adult love, but whatever it was that pulled her to Will had always been there. She’d never met anyone so true, so stubbornly good. Sometimes he verged on righteous, but Elizabeth knew how to calm him down. She looked up at Will, all worn out with feeling, and knew he was ready to not be angry anymore.

  Will lowered his eyes and pushed his hair behind his ears once again. Then he raised his face slightly and peeked at Elizabeth. “Are you laughing at me, Lizzie?”

  “I would never,” she said seriously, rising another step on the wooden ladder.

  Then he swung his legs upward and stood, his worn leather boots making the loft shake. When he reached the ladder, he bent and swooped Elizabeth up, so that she was folded into his arms. He smelled like horses and sweat and plain soap it was a smell she knew and adored. “I’m so happy you’re back,” he whispered into her neck.

  Elizabeth closed her eyes and said nothing. It was so rare and so good, this being touched. She hadn’t known how much she’d missed it until now.

  “So what kind of evening was it?” he asked, speaking low, directly into her ear as he set her down on the loft’s plank wood floor. “Elegant or wild?”

  She pressed her face into his chest and tried to recall the party, but all she could remember were her mother’s ominous words and the strange looks she kept shooting at her daughter. Elizabeth considered her reply, and finally said, “Boring.” Then she looked up at his big, handsome face and wished she could forget the evening and who she was and what her obligations were. She had come down here because what she wanted against all her upbringing was to be close to him for a few hours. “I thought about you the whole time. Now can we never talk about fancy-dress parties again?”

  He smiled and gently laid her down on the spring mattress he kept in the corner of the loft, under the wood beams where he hung his clothes to dry. Elizabeth untied her silk kimono. He hovered over her, holding her face in his big hands and kissing her lightly again and again. A natural smile spread, unbidden, across her face. “I think you do love me, Miss Holland,” he whispered.

  The light of an already advanced morning streamed through one small window. A certain feeling of agitated ecstasy coursed through Elizabeth’s comfortable body, reminding her that comfortable was not how she was supposed to be feeling at all. It was her second morning back in New York, but she had not yet slept in her own bed.

  “What are you thinking about?” Will whispered, propping himself up on his elbow.

  “I hate that question,” she said, because she was again thinking about her mother’s warning, and how waking up in the warm crook of Will’s arm was the opposite of heeding her. She sat up and looked out the window onto the vegetable garden in the back. “I should go.” She could hear the lack of conviction in her own voice.

  “Why?” Will slid his hand inside her kimono and rested it above her heart. The touch made her conscious of how quickly it was beating, and that every moment she spent there made her more nervous about the goings-on in the house. Lina, despite her strange absence the night before, would likely be arriving soon with hot chocolate and ice water to find an empty bed. Elizabeth forced herself to give Will a quick kiss on his soft lips and then push herself out of his grasp.

  “You know why.” She stood, wrapping her robe around her. Elizabeth looked down at the horses stirring in their stables below and tried to look like she was doing what she thought was right. “If my mother found out that I come here if anyone found out it would be the end.”

  “But if we moved out to Montana…or California…nobody would care what we did. We could lie in bed all morning,” he said, his voice growing warm and persuasive. “And then, when we did get up, we could go for horse rides, or whatever we wanted, and…”

  Elizabeth had heard all this before, but she could tell that he’d thought about it much more in her absence. She liked it when he talked this way. He was the only boy she knew who looked into the future and tried to imagine how it would be better than the present. Will was the most frightening and beautiful and exacting person she had ever known. Being somewhere far away from New York, where they could be just any boy and any girl, was the prettiest idea she could think of. There would be no more hurtful misunderstandings, because she wouldn’t have to sneak around and visit him only when she knew the rest of the house was too exhausted to notice.

  She turned back, half-ready to entertain the fantasy, but she was silenced by what she saw: Will, wearing only his faded black long johns, his chest slender and strong and naked with a few errant hairs, raising himself up from the bed and onto one knee. Elizabeth had seen this position before. She knew what it meant.

  “Maybe you should be thinking about a new kind of life…” he said softly, and then reached for her hand. Elizabeth snatched it away instinctively as her heartbeat regained its rapid, nervous pace. She looked down at her palm and wished that her sense of propriety didn’t make her do things like that.

  “I’ll be back when I can, all right?” She forced herself not to look into Will’s face, which she knew would be twisted with confusion. If she did, she might realize how afraid she was of losing him. She might become neglectful of all the things a good girl like her must do.

  She climbed the
familiar wooden steps into the kitchen, readying herself to scale the servant’s stairs to her bedroom, where she could do what the rest of the girls of her set were doing: sleeping off the first ball of the season, content in the knowledge that they could doze into the afternoon, dreaming all the while of the dresses they would wear and the boys they would dance with in the coming months.

  “Morning, Miss Holland.”

  Elizabeth turned to see Lina, sitting in her constant black dress at the heavy, uneven table in the kitchen where the cook took her breaks. While Elizabeth was in Paris, her maid had grown longer and skinnier, and the freckles splattered across her nose had increased in number. The sight of her, looking plain and a little sullen in the early morning, caused Elizabeth to gasp. She could feel sweat collecting in the small of her back, and closed her robe around her to disguise the flush that was spreading to her throat. Elizabeth was surely beginning to panic, so she was shocked by the calmness in her voice: “I have been looking for you everywhere. I am ready for my bowl of chocolate now. And bring water also. I have been all night without it.”

  Then Elizabeth turned for the stair. “Where were you last night, anyway?” she added as she hurried out of the kitchen. She tried to tell herself that she had pulled it off Lina was too sulky a girl to pay attention to Elizabeth’s doings. And anyway, how long could she really have been sitting there?

  Seven

  At the Richmond Hayeses’ ball, on the evening of September the sixteenth, the young lady of the house was seen dancing quite amorously with a certain young man whom we shall refer to by the initials HS. They were a pair so obviously pleased by each other’s company that members of society are whispering that an engagement is not far off, though an announcement had yet to be made by press time….