by Megan Chance
“Yes sir,” I said.
I heard the rapid scratch of pencils on paper, a murmur that seemed to hover at the back of the room.
“Next, please.”
It was over.
As the carriage started off, Papa closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Well, thank God. I’ve made arrangements to take you back to the Row, Lucy. I thought you’d be more comfortable there, given the circumstances. I’ve removed Harris from . . . the other house and told the other servants they were dismissed as of this morning. And I’ve moved my things from the club, so I can be with you.”
“You needn’t have,” I said.
“It’s quite obvious you need someone to watch over you,” he said. “And I gave my word, as well as my money.” He grunted and glanced out the window. “What an incredible circumstance. I never could have imagined it. Not even when . . .”
He left the words for my imagination to fill in, which it did, neatly: . . . your mother was alive. I supposed my father would always thank God that my mother had the grace to kill herself before she could embarrass him as fatally as I had.
It was drizzling now, gray and foggy. I was cold inside the carriage, even huddled as I was against my father’s bulk, with the traveling blanket over my lap. I wondered if I would ever be warm again.
We arrived home to a smiling welcome from Harris and another new lady’s maid, one Papa had hired for my return. Her name was Gillian, and she was a quiet, biddable girl who had dark hair and apple cheeks. Her wide blue eyes regarded me with wariness.
“It was hard enough to find someone,” Papa said gruffly. “Once they heard who they were serving. I hope she’s efficient enough, but I doubt it. Had to pay her an exorbitant wage just so she wouldn’t run off in fear the moment she saw you.”
“If you don’t mind, Papa, I’m quite tired.”
He nodded, and I hurried to my room, to quiet safety. But when I walked through the door and lit the gas, everything was different. This room was no longer quiet or safe, no longer mine. I had been gone too long; I had tried to make too many other places my own. I realized suddenly, with a strangeness that I could hardly reconcile, that although William had understood nothing else about me, he had perceived this: that the room kept me the girl I’d always been. I was no longer comfortable here but cocooned. I remembered standing before the mirror, feeling like a stranger to myself. I wanted to laugh at how fine and ephemeral those feelings seemed to me now, how weak they’d been compared to this strangeness. How much older I felt, how unreconciled to these things of mine, to that bed, that chair. I did not belong here any longer.
But where I did belong—I dared not think of that now. Not now. There would be time enough later.
On Thursday morning I prepared myself for the calls that Papa had been certain would come. They won’t dare snub you, he’d said before he left that morning, but I was not so certain. I sat in nervous anticipation, wondering what I would say, wishing I could avoid it all. When there was a knock on the door shortly after one o’clock, I rose from my chair and smoothed my skirt, taking a deep breath for strength. I was relieved when I saw it was only Millicent.
She entered the parlor fluttering, nervously smiling, patting at the pink-throated thrush on her hat. She carried a beribboned box, which she set before me as I embraced her and urged her to sit.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Nothing, really,” she told me. “Some of those pastries you like so much. I thought . . . Well, I didn’t know you couldn’t go out before, or that you wouldn’t.”
“How lovely,” I said. “How thoughtful of you.”
She smiled weakly. “You’ve decided to come back here, then?”
“For the time being,” I said. “Until the trial is over.”
She winced at the word trial, and I realized what this visit was to be like when she said, “Did you hear that Consuelo Martin’s daughter is engaged to some duke?”
I poured tea and watched her drink it. I watched her fumble with the cakes Papa’s new cook had created—delicious little cream-filled things that neither of us had the appetite for. We talked pleasantly, as if nothing had happened, as if she had not watched me pull a gun from a beaded purse and shoot my husband. After fifteen minutes had passed—the allotted time for an afternoon call—she said, “Mr. Howe has asked me to serve as a witness on your account, Lucy. I’m not to have any contact with you until then. I haven’t told anyone I was coming here today, but I felt I should come first and let you know.”
I stared at her in surprise—we had been talking of a dinner party I’d missed, and I had thought the conversation would continue in that vein. “Oh.”
She loosened her bag from where it had tangled at her feet. “I—I would do whatever I could for you, Lucy, you must know that.”
“How good of you,” I said sincerely.
She looked at me, and I had the sense that she was trying to see through me, to my soul, perhaps, to find the answers she wanted. “I’m your friend,” she said simply, and perhaps that was all it was. The words were so quiet and sure that I felt tears come to my eyes.
“Yes,” I said, “I believe you are.”
She made a quick, definitive nod as if she had discharged a duty and now meant to go purposefully on. “I’ll take my leave, then,” she said. “You must take care of yourself, Lucy. Promise me you will?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
She paused, and then she said, “You mustn’t be too hard on them, you know.” I needed no explanation to understand of whom she spoke. Our friends, who I realized would not be coming to say hello or show their support. “They don’t know what to think. No one does.”
“I understand,” I whispered.
“I hope you do,” she said, and she rose and smiled and said her good-byes, and I was alone again, in a parlor filled to overflowing with bronze statues and marble sculptures, silent and unmoving. The clock ticked on.
She was the only visitor I had that day. Or any other.
I did receive a few invitations. I was surprised until I saw who they were from—the faster crowd, Alma Fister and the like. With an unpleasant start, I saw that I was notorious, a fine entertainment, as Victor had been this summer, or as a European actress might be—with all the rumor and innuendo attached to an immoral life.
“You should go, my dear,” Papa told me. “Show your face. Show them you’re a Van Berckel. I’ll accompany you if you like.”
Two nights later, my father and I arrived at Alma Fister’s door and were shown to a parlor already filled with guests where an effusive and beaming Leonard Ames held court.
“Why, DeLancey, why, Lucy, how good to see you. Lucy, how fine you look; if I didn’t know the truth, I would have thought you’d been to the continent.”
Papa flinched; I attempted to keep my smile. In the corner was the notorious Italian opera singer Alma had ostensibly held the party to celebrate. He was superbly dressed and handsome in a darkly Mediterranean way. He was rumored to have several mistresses, and I had no doubt that was true. Alma was talking urgently to him. She caught my gaze and whispered something in his ear. An appraising look came into his dark eyes—eyes that reminded me of someone else’s.
I reached for the nearest glass of champagne. I had not been out since my return home. Millie had been the only person I’d seen, except for Papa and the servants. I had known it would be this way; I had known there would be whispers. Naively, I had not known they would be so uncomfortable.
Alma came over in a rustling of deep violet silk shot with silver. “My dear Lucy,” she said, purring. “How good of you to come. And to bring your father too. Dear DeLancey, you haven’t been about for the longest time.”
“No, of course not,” he said sharply.
Alma nodded commiseratingly before she turned to me. “Lucy, how wonderful you look. Especially after such a terrible ordeal.” She shuddered dramatically. “Well, you will tell us all about it, won’t you? Sergio is quite curious.
When I told him who you were—he’s read the papers, you know, though I was surprised to find he could read English. Apparently he’s quite educated.”
If I’d had any doubt that I’d been brought to serve as the evening’s amusement, it fled with her words. When she brought the opera singer to us, my father squeezed my arm as if to give me strength, though the truth was I didn’t need it. I understood my role now.
The crowd was faster even than I’d expected. Leonard, of course, and Alma, but there were others too, men from the Belmont clique who never missed an opportunity for notoriety, women I barely recognized who stared at me with unsuppressed glee.
“We should leave, my dear,” Papa whispered into my ear. His hand on my arm was shyly insistent. “It won’t do to be seen here after all.”
He was right. This crowd was too scandalous. But I shook my head and took another glass of champagne and wondered why this didn’t distress me. I’d been abandoned by my own crowd, though they pretended to favor me for the newspapers. Here I was not quite accepted, but curiosity would not be gainsaid. It became clear as the night went on that they expected some show from me, some little trick of insanity, something to amuse them. We sat in Alma’s darkly wallpapered dining room and ate from Minton china embellished with deep blue borders and exotic birds. The room was small; we were so close together we bumped elbows, and still I was watched. I was, if possible, better behaved than I had been in years, but they were not quite sure what to do with me—how could they be? How does one look at a murderess over roast fowl in claret sauce? They didn’t need a trial to tell them what I was. They had all heard every detail. Some had even been there. But I saw doubt in their eyes. Their memories were already growing faint. Had I really done what they thought I had? Here I was, well behaved, with my well-connected father beside me, and no outward sign of hysteria or insanity—could it really be true? And there were the newspaper reports as well, the article from that Adler woman. Poor persecuted Lucy. And William—they had never liked William, never really trusted him. . . .
They wondered, and I let them wonder. I drank champagne and ate and listened to Sergio’s lovely baritone as he sang for our pleasure, and I only smiled when they asked their questions, because I knew that they had invited me not just to be an entertainment but because I had come down in the world, because I was not so untouchable, and that reinforced their own sense of superiority, their need to make their lives secure. I will never be like her, they told themselves, and I did not disabuse them of the notion. I didn’t tell them what I knew: that it was easy to be like me. All it took was a slip, a step from the path we’d all been trained to tread. We were none of us different from the others; that was the lesson I had learned. We were all capable of anything.
They charged me with first-degree murder on a Tuesday and set my trial for early December. That afternoon William Howe lounged in my father’s parlor, drinking brandy from fine leaded crystal. He looked out of place there, decorated as he was with jewels, too flashy for the pale blue walls that had entertained the best of Knickerbocker society for decades. But I was out of place here too—not because of what I wore, which was black, as befitted my status as a recent widow, but because the black was so heavy with irony it was hard to walk within.
Howe exhaled deeply and held his glass up to the light from the open window, swirling the brandy. “Well,” he said, looking around him, “I must admit this is unusual for me. Most of my clients aren’t so high-toned.”
I had to restrain myself from going to the window. “It’s all happening so fast,” I said. “I’d thought the trial wouldn’t be until spring, at least.”
“They’re torn between wanting to show the world that the rich aren’t different and wanting to have it all behind them. Those newspaper articles have won you support. It’s worked to our advantage. There’s no need to stretch things out.”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“Mrs. Carelton, I know this is difficult for you. Trust me, I don’t believe the end of this will find you behind bars. Wouldn’t it be better to have the uncertainty done with more quickly?”
“Yes, it would.”
“Your father tells me that your friends have been too busy to visit you.”
“Let’s not hide behind niceties, shall we?” I said. “I’ve become a curiosity. Curiosities are not the kinds of people Caroline Astor wants at her suppers.”
“As long as they continue to join ranks behind you publicly, it doesn’t matter if they cut you at every opportunity.”
“How easy for you to say.”
His expression became quizzical. “Come now, Mrs. Carelton. You should have expected this would happen when you decided to shoot your husband.”
“I told you—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” He waved my comment away. “I’ve heard more excuses in my career than you could possibly imagine. It doesn’t matter. In the end this case comes down to one thing.”
I frowned. “What’s that?”
He fingered his watch chain, stroking a jeweled cross that hung from it. “What we’re presenting is not a regular insanity defense. I’m going to argue that you were laboring under a momentary ‘irresistible urge.’ You were sane before you pulled the trigger, you were sane after you pulled the trigger. But when you pulled the trigger . . . let’s just call it ‘temporary insanity.’”
I laughed incredulously. “Who will believe that?”
“The jury, when I’m finished with them,” he said confidently.
“But I was in an insane asylum.”
He smiled. “The burden of proof is not on us, Mrs. Carelton, you should remember that. It would be the state’s responsibility to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you were insane, which they won’t do. Remember, punishment is what they’re seeking. They don’t want an insanity dodge. Mr. Scott will try to prove that the murder of your husband was cold-blooded and premeditated. They will certainly call the superintendent of Beechwood Grove, and he will no doubt say that you were quite sane when he released you. After all, it would be highly irresponsible of him to release a madwoman into the public. None of this worries me.”
“Why is that?”
“Because we have two things that will convince the jury. First, it will be clear to them that you were not yourself when you pulled the trigger.” His smile became smug. “I’ve spoken to Dr. Seth, and I think we have cause to plant ample doubt in the jury’s mind about what happened that night.”
I kept my voice as neutral as I could. “You said there were two things.”
“Ah yes.” He played with his watch chain again. “What did your father tell you about your husband’s funeral?”
“That it was a short service.”
“Did he tell you who attended?”
“Not many of our friends, I take it. Mostly the men who worked with William.”
“Yes, well, there were others. One woman in particular who interested me very much.”
He was happy about this news, I knew, yet I could not help feeling a twinge of dread. “Who was that?”
“William’s mother.”
I went numb and still. William’s mother. I remembered telling Victor that I’d never met William’s parents, that I wasn’t interested in them. I could not imagine how his mother’s coming could help me, why it shouldn’t hurt me unbearably. How could I look her in the face after I’d killed her son?
“His mother?” I asked carefully. “Not . . . his father?”
“Apparently the man died two years ago,” Howe went on. “His mother said she’d never met you. Now, I found that curious. She’d never met her own son’s wife, and it’s not due to distance. Why, she only lives in Newport. Where you and William spent every summer.”
I remembered the bail hearing. William Stephen Carelton, lately of New York, originally of Newport, Rhode Island.
“Newport,” I repeated.
“You didn’t know?” Howe asked.
I shook my head.
“Why is that
, Mrs. Carelton? How could you not know your husband’s own parents?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I sank onto the edge of the settee. “He never spoke of them. I assumed, I don’t know, that he was estranged from them. Or that they were dead. I had no idea they lived so close. I would have insisted on meeting them.”
Howe leaned forward. “Do you know anything about them? Or about William’s relationship with them?”
I shook my head, and he leaned back again. The many- colored floral pattern clashed with his garish vest—also floral, in greens and oranges and an odd shade of red. I had to turn my gaze away.
“Mrs. Carelton, listen to me closely. I must ask you to tell me whatever it is you know about your husband’s parents. Anything at all.”
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “I already told you, William never spoke of them. Why? Is something wrong?”
Howe shook his head. “Wrong? I should say not.”
I watched him carefully. “Then why all the questions? Is there something I should know?”
“Mrs. Carelton, I would prefer it very much if you didn’t know,” he said, wheezing as he rose. “And that is why I won’t tell you. You must trust me about this.”
“But if there’s something that could have a negative effect on my trial—”
He laughed, a short burst of sound that silenced me. “Don’t worry about your trial, Mrs. Carelton,” he said.
But that was exactly what I did. As the weeks passed and the date came closer and closer, Howe’s words became even less reassuring. That there was something I didn’t know, some plan I wasn’t privy to—I began to worry as I hadn’t before. The idea of a future in a prison cell was no longer so unreal.
Howe’s visits came less and less often. Little Mr. Blake told me he was busy preparing. I was not to worry. But I had nothing else to do. I’d lost the desire to go out. Invitations became less and less frequent; too much time had passed, and I was no longer the topic of conversation. It was easy to forget me in the bleak snows of winter, when the wind was so bitterly cold.
But the day of the trial came too soon.