The Invitation

by Belinda Alexandra

  The crowds were even thicker near the church: mostly women, struggling and quarrelling with each other to get a better view of the wedding party. The policemen were having trouble holding them back. When they saw my carriage they pushed harder and I cringed at the sight of the policemen shoving them back or threatening them with their clubs.

  The coachman had to stop the carriage some distance from the church steps, and I was protected by a column of policemen as I squeezed my way to the door. The bridesmaids, who were waiting on the porch, peered at the crowd with terrified faces.

  I walked past the bridesmaids and into the church. Someone must have signalled the bellringer because the bells pealed out in anticipation of the appearance of the bride and her father.

  My courage almost failed me as the guests rose to their feet. Grace turned and blinked at me in surprise, but everyone else melded into a sea of silks, brocades, linens, feathers and pearls — until I spotted Caroline in the front pew. She was frowning, probably thinking I had entered the church out of order due to nerves. She would never have anticipated what her downtrodden little sister was about to do.

  Mistakenly believing the bridal procession had begun, the organist commenced the Bridal Chorus and the choir began singing. But they were abruptly stopped by the orchestra’s conductor when he saw I was alone.

  Stunned silence reigned as I walked down the aisle, before hushed whispers began running through the gathering. I didn’t dare look in the direction of the Duke and his groomsmen, or the Bishop of New York and his clergymen who were waiting in their places on the chancel. I could have cursed Oliver for leaving me to walk into enemy territory on my own, but because we’d had to act quickly there had been no other choice.

  When I came to a stop in front of Caroline, I was David facing Goliath. My stomach sank to my feet.

  ‘Caroline, I need to speak to you and the bishop, alone, in the vestry.’

  Her face froze. ‘What is it? What has Isadora done?’

  When I realised that she was more concerned about the murmurs going around the church than Isadora’s wellbeing, my courage returned.

  ‘There isn’t going to be a wedding,’ I said.

  Lucy, standing beside Caroline, gasped. The bishop stepped towards us to find out what was happening.

  ‘I’ll fetch my daughter myself if you and Oliver can’t manage to bring her here!’ Caroline shot back.

  ‘Isadora’s not at the house.’

  ‘We had best speak in the vestry,’ the bishop whispered, nodding in the direction of a side door.

  The murmurs grew louder as Caroline and I, followed by Lucy, made our way to the vestry. The guests now understood that there was a serious problem.

  ‘The bride has been kidnapped!’ I heard Mrs Warburg say to another guest. ‘The unions must be behind it. They don’t want so much money leaving the country.’

  The bishop shut the vestry door behind us and waited for me to speak. I opened and closed my fists as if I could somehow speed Oliver and Isadora on their way in Oliver’s private railcar. Isadora had already packed for a long trip so all they had to do was get to their secret location.

  ‘Where is Isadora?’ Caroline demanded.

  ‘She’s gone. Oliver has taken her away. I don’t know where.’

  It was the truth. Perhaps at the time Oliver had left the house with Isadora he hadn’t been certain himself where they were going. He had told me only that he would have a room booked at the Waldorf-Astoria for me, and had ordered Jennie to have my clothes and personal items sent there.

  ‘I will arrange for your passage back to Paris,’ he’d assured me. ‘And a bodyguard if you need it.’

  I had thought he was joking, but perhaps not from the fierce way Caroline was glaring at me now. It was as well Oliver hadn’t told me where he was taking Isadora: Caroline might try to torture it out of me.

  ‘This is an outrage!’ Lucy hissed at me. ‘How am I supposed to explain this to the Duke? You have made us the laughing stock of society! Not just here but in England too!’ She fixed me with that condescending look I knew so well. ‘You ungrateful, pitiful woman. How could you do this to Caroline after all she has done for you?’

  Caroline glowered as if a demon had possessed her. Her eyes were narrowed and she bared her teeth at me. ‘Of course she can do it!’ she spat. ‘I invited her here believing I could trust her: my peculiar little sister and her strange books. But she couldn’t make anything of her own life so she came here to destroy mine out of jealousy. I should have known she wouldn’t be loyal to me. She’s treacherous! She was born with an evil soul.’

  I flinched at Caroline’s attack. Born with an evil soul? I had been an innocent child who had adored her. And I’d come to New York out of a strong desire to help my niece and a secret hope that Caroline and I could be sisters again.

  Lucy was taken aback by Caroline’s outburst. She glanced at the bishop, who was watching the exchange with his mouth open.

  ‘We must stay calm, Caroline,’ Lucy said, touching my sister’s arm. ‘We must keep our heads and think of something to tell the guests. We can say that Isadora has come down with some terrible illness. Or she’s been poisoned. We must buy ourselves time to fix this.’

  Caroline turned cold, hard eyes on her friend. ‘Why don’t we tell them she’s dead? Because that’s what she is to me.’

  Lucy’s hand flew to her mouth. For once she was lost for words. Obviously she had never seen this side of Caroline’s nature.

  ‘Mrs Hopper,’ the bishop intervened, ‘we are in the house of God.’

  Caroline paid him no heed. Her eyes fixed on me with a fierce stare. ‘I should have finished what I tried on the plantation.’

  Her words baffled me. I began to unravel, and wanted to turn and run, but my feet were glued to the spot. ‘What do you mean? What did you try on the plantation?’

  Suddenly I was overcome by a deep primal fear. It chilled me like ice down my back. For some odd reason I remembered Monsieur Plamondon remarking that Louisiana had a darkness to it, and although I’d been very young when I left there, such things could remain in the unconscious mind.

  ‘When you were a few weeks old, I snuck into the nursery and saw your pale form,’ Caroline said. ‘No human could be that white and I knew you were a bad omen. I picked up a pillow and tried to smother you, but I was caught by your nursemaid. After that, they kept me away from you.’

  ‘Caroline! You don’t know what you are saying!’ Lucy cried. ‘You have been under enormous strain. I will call for Doctor Mitford and he will give you something to calm you. Please don’t worry. We will sort this out together as we always do.’

  If Caroline heard her friend’s pleas she showed no sign of it. She just kept her eyes on me and I saw their deep emptiness. I had suspected well before now that I was nothing to my sister; merely someone to be summoned and used. What I hadn’t fully understood was that Caroline actually hated me. But I also saw that it wasn’t my fault. She was someone devoid of love. Perhaps even devoid of a soul.

  If she had spoken those words to me as a child, I might have thrown myself in the Seine. Even if she had said them only a few months ago, I would have been shattered. Now all I experienced was the severing of any final attachment towards her: it tore like a thin, worn-out rope.

  ‘She does know what she’s saying, Lucy,’ I said calmly. ‘And she means every word of it.’

  But she couldn’t destroy me because I finally knew who I was, and it was someone infinitely better than her.

  I turned and walked out of the vestry, down the aisle past the gaping guests, and out of Caroline’s life forever.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Paris, 1900

  Dear Grace,

  I am very sorry to hear that your mother has passed away. I know she was precious to you, and she couldn’t have had a more caring daughter.

  It does give me great pleasure, however, to know you will soon be joining us in Paris and also on our planned trip to Italy.
Our initial stay there after the debacle in New York was soothing for us all, and Isadora and Thomas (I’m finding it difficult to stop calling him ‘Mr Gadley’) were married in Rome.

  Our little ‘artists’ village’ here in Rue Jacob is a happy and productive place. We spend our mornings working: I write, while Isadora and Thomas study, model, cast and carve together. In the afternoons we visit the museums or walk the streets for inspiration. Isadora is working on a large-scale sculpture of a mother bear defending her cubs. It will be superb when she finishes it.

  Oliver continues to be very generous to us, offering to pay for a grand apartment and for Isadora’s tuition at the École des Beaux-Arts, but my niece is determined to make it on her own. She has told me that she can feel Grand-maman’s presence in this apartment, helping her with her work, and wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

  She is barely recognisable as the Isadora we knew in New York. She is strong, calm and confident — and not easily fooled by anyone. She and Paulette have formed a solid bond, and like to go to the market together. Sometimes the vendors try to cheat them, but nobody can pull the wool over Isadora’s eyes. She can argue and bargain as well as any fishwife. She has become as vibrant and lively as I always sensed she could be.

  I have received very generous advances for my novella The Mysterious Cat and my novel set in New York, so I am now without debts and determined to be a self-made woman too. We have instead asked Oliver to be a generous patron to Charles Garrett House in Greenwich Village and their subsidiary projects, which he has been doing with some zeal I believe.

  I was pleased to learn from you that Oliver and Mrs Natica Miller have come to an understanding. Oliver was never particularly interested in New York society, and as Mrs Miller was shunned after her divorce from her horse-loving husband, they should make quite a pair. Oliver was very generous in his divorce arrangements with Caroline — even going so far as to allow himself to be ‘caught’ with a woman of ill-repute so the blame would fall on him. He deserves to be happy now that he has escaped my sister’s clutches.

  I stopped writing and turned to the newspaper articles Florence had sent me. All of them were about how Caroline had become a champion for women’s rights and a defender of the poor tenement dwellers of New York. I picked up the one from the New York Times.

  Since journalist Cecilia West exposed Permelia Frances’s ill-advised ‘hobo party’, where the guests came dressed in rags and ate their dinner off garbage lids, New York society has been held in contempt by the general public who once venerated it. People are now demanding laws to make sure the wealthy contribute their share of taxes and to establish better and fairer labour practices.

  Nobody in society has listened to the public’s cries better than Mrs Caroline Hopper. ‘As a society leader I consider it my duty to set high standards of behaviour and to pave the way for other women in less fortunate positions,’ she said. ‘That is why I decided to divorce from my husband despite the risk of being shunned for it. I don’t believe any woman should be forced to stay with a cruel and neglectful man.’

  The article went on to say that after ‘Mrs Hopper’s courageous decision’ other women of note had divorced their husbands.

  ‘I have always been the first to do anything,’ Mrs Hopper said. ‘I have always been a natural leader.’

  I shook my head in amazement. Never mind that it was Oliver who had wanted the divorce! But that was Caroline. She could rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the worst scandal and somehow turn the situation around to appear in her favour.

  I knew my sister didn’t care about working women or New York’s poor. She only cared about herself and how she appeared to others. As soon as social reform went out of fashion, she would drop it like a hot potato and find something else she could use to aggrandise herself. Still, I had to admire her ability to survive.

  I sighed and returned to my letter to Grace.

  You asked if I ever think of Caroline. The answer is that it gives me more peace not to do so. But during those moments my mind does drift to her, I try to picture her keeping vigil over her dying son, or as a child terrified by the destruction of her home during the Civil War. When I do that, I am able to see her as human. Otherwise, the story of my sister and my relationship with her is too tragic to contemplate.

  Oliver, Isadora and I were the people who loved her most. We would have been there for her. But Caroline cannot really love herself and therefore she could never love us. And she didn’t want our love anyway; all she wanted was our blind obedience.

  Maybe one day some very clever scholar of the mind will devise a theory to explain personalities like Caroline’s and Harland’s. For myself, although I often yearn to find an explanation for the inexplicable, I have learned to let things be.

  After I’d finished my letter, I took out the typeset pages for my novel, Death at Waverly, to mark up my corrections before the final version went to the printer. I was making annotations in the margin when I heard Isadora and Thomas burst into laughter. I smiled. They laughed so much together I didn’t know how they managed to produce such good work — but perhaps that was their secret.

  The mirth continued for some time and my curiosity got the better of me. I winked at Grand-maman’s photograph and put the pages aside. ‘Let’s go and find out what they’re up to.’

  I entered the sculpting studio — formerly Grand-maman’s bedroom — expecting to find Isadora and Thomas with their heads bent over a clay model. What I witnessed instead was Isadora sitting in a chair sketching while Thomas reclined on a couch as naked as the day he was born. At the sight of me he grabbed a handkerchief to cover his nether regions.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ I cried, trying to make a hasty retreat but getting my sleeve caught on the door catch.

  Isadora cackled with laughter. ‘Aunt Emma! I never expected you to be a prude! Thomas is posing for me. Come and see the miniature clay models I’ve made of him. I’m working on a bigger one now.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ I said, having trouble freeing my sleeve. My face was burning. ‘I must finish the final editing of Death at Waverly today.’

  Thomas stood and tugged on a robe. ‘Emma,’ he said, trying to calm me, ‘you know that women artists aren’t allowed to work with life models as men are. That puts them at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to public commissions. I’m merely offering my humble form so my wife can create the art she’s capable of. There can’t be a scandal if she uses her husband for her studies.’

  I remembered Douglas Hardenbergh’s extensive collection of female nudes. Thomas was right: there was a reason female artists had been limited to painting fruit and flowers.

  ‘Very true,’ I said, finally freeing my sleeve and escaping out the door. ‘I won’t keep you.’

  I was returning to my room when the ringer on the front door tinkled. Paulette was out on errands so I went to answer it. My heart stopped when I found Claude on the doorstep. Under his arm he held a painting covered in cloth and tied with string. He must have been on his way to his art dealer.

  The surprise slowed my responses and I stared at him for a long moment before coming to my senses.

  ‘Claude! Come in!’ I stammered.

  He was as beautiful as ever with his handsome olive-skinned face and mop of wavy hair. An ache welled inside me, just like the day I’d left Le Havre on the ship to New York. Only this time it was worse because of how things had changed so significantly between us and why.

  ‘I knew you were in Italy for a while,’ he said, following me into the drawing room, ‘but I didn’t find out until yesterday that you’d returned to Paris. Belda told me.’ He looked at me directly. ‘Why haven’t you come to see everyone at the café? They’re all asking after you.’

  I indicated for him to sit down and took a seat too. For the first time since he had arrived, I managed to lift my eyes to his. From the perplexity in them I realised he was finding this visit as difficult as I was. It gave me the courage to be honest. />
  ‘I wasn’t ready, Claude. It would have been too hard for me to see you with Lise.’

  He stared at me unblinking. ‘Lise and I haven’t been together since I received your letter from New York. It wasn’t a serious liaison on her part or mine.’

  ‘Oh.’ I turned away, my mind racing as my sense of reality shifted. When I’d seen them together in New York I’d thought they were in love. But perhaps my deep hurt had exaggerated things in my imagination. I squeezed my hands together so tightly they throbbed. Was it possible I had been acting on a wrong conclusion these months past?

  A burst of laughter came from the studio. Claude glanced in that direction.

  ‘My niece and nephew-in-law,’ I explained. ‘They enjoy working together . . . a lot.’

  He nodded and glanced around the room. His eyes rested on the bronze bust Isadora had sculpted of me, and he stood up to examine it.

  ‘This is a superb piece. It captures your natural radiance and poise.’

  I liked the bust for those reasons too, and gazed at it whenever I felt my courage failing. It was failing now. Claude was watching me, but I kept my eyes averted.

  ‘She did a lot of damage, didn’t she? Caroline, I mean,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Claude. The worst thing was how much she hurt you. I will never forgive her for that.’

  ‘What about you, Emma? Aren’t you angry about what she did to you?’

  Tears rose in my eyes so I squeezed them shut, then opened them again. ‘I can’t. If I feel rage, it ties me to her . . . and I’ve set myself free.’

  He listened intently, absorbing every word. I’d forgotten how good Claude was at listening; it was one of his many endearing qualities.

  ‘I liked what you wrote in your last letter,’ he said. ‘I admire your determination and self-reliance. I’ve heard that your career is soaring too?’

  ‘I’m certainly enjoying more success than I did in the past. But it’s my life that I’m thinking about now — I treat it as a piece of art that will never be finished. And I’ve learned that it’s full of surprises. I longed for a family, and now I’ve got one with my niece and her husband. I’m very happy even though it isn’t the family I’d pictured.’