‘Of course, Mann is remembered primarily as being the father of American public education,’ Maxwell Bradley said a few hours later as they were served pan-fried foie gras in the Aquitania’s chateau-esque Louis XVI dining room. ‘But he was also much more. When John Quincy Adams died of a stroke on the floor of the US House of Representatives in 1848, Mann was picked to fill his seat. He then crusaded against slavery with the same zeal he had exhibited in his fight for public schools.’
Rozalind took a sip of her wine and decided it was time to find out if he and Horace Mann had something in common. And do you also sit in the House of Representatives, Mr Bradley?’
As a matter of fact, I do.’ The tough, straight mouth twitched in amusement. ‘How did you guess?’
‘When we were boarding I overheard the welcoming officer address you as Congressman Bradley’ She tilted her head a little to one side and an amethyst drop-earring danced against the side of her neck. And do you occupy a seat to the left in the House of Representatives or to the right?’
‘Will my answer determine whether our dinner together will, or will not, be repeated during our crossing to Europe?’
She flashed him her wide, easy smile. ‘I’m not rabidly political, so you’re on safe ground. Now which are you, Congressman Bradley? An out-and-out Democrat or a dyed-in-the-wool Republican?’
‘I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, Miss Duveen.’
‘Unlike your hero.’
He quirked an eyebrow. ‘It would seem you know far more about Horace Mann than you led me to believe.’
‘I never said I knew nothing about him.’
Rozalind was unfazed at having been caught out so easily. What did it matter now that he knew she had deliberately angled to pursue their acquaintance? The bottom line was that if they hadn’t been seated together as they were, she would have been dining on her own – and that would have led to half a dozen well-intentioned matrons protectively insisting that for the rest of the voyage she dine with them. She wouldn’t have accepted such invitations, but they would have been an annoyance.
‘Are you disembarking at Southampton or going on to Cherbourg?’ he asked as hors d’oeuvre plates were removed and a first course was served.
‘Southampton. Then I will be visiting family in London.’ She speared a button mushroom with her fork. ‘I have three English cousins, and though I’m very fond of all of them, I’m particularly close to Thea and Olivia, who are closer to me in age than Violet, their younger sister.’ She laid her fork down. ‘Olivia is living in Berlin at the moment and so I’ll be joining her there for a week or two. And then, when I return to London, I’m hoping there’ll be an opportunity to visit Yorkshire.’
‘Yorkshire? Is that somewhere near Scotland?’
Laughter fizzed in her throat. ‘Give or take a couple of hundred miles. It’s Britain’s biggest county, and I adore it. My cousins’ family home is on the outskirts of Outhwaite, a small village in the Dales and – apart from the war years – I’ve been visiting it every summer for as long as I can remember.’
‘I envy you. The kinds of visits I make to England are never long enough for me to visit anywhere but London – and I rarely get to meet anyone who is not a politician or a civil servant.’
She didn’t ask why. She wanted him to think her sophisticated, not schoolgirlishly predictable. The realization that what he thought of her desperately mattered came with a slam of shock.
When had Maxwell Bradley metamorphosed from a personable middle-aged man who took an intelligent interest in photography and who was pleasant company into a man she found so devastatingly attractive that, even though she was seated, her knees were now weak?
That he was wearing white tie and tails helped, of course. Most men looked devastating in white tie and tails, but there was far more to it than merely what he was wearing. It wasn’t anything obvious. He didn’t, for instance, look any younger than she had first thought him; if anything he looked a little older. His dark-brown hair, hidden at their first meeting by his homburg, was lightly flecked with silver at his temples. There were creases at the corners of his unusually dark grey eyes. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the effect he had on her. No one else she had ever met had caused her heart to beat in short, slamming little strokes that she could feel even in her fingertips.
She also realized that she absolutely couldn’t allow him to disappear from her life when they docked at Southampton. Somehow, some way, she had to make the kind of impression on him that he was making on her.
She was accustomed to dazzling men. Until now, though, all the men in question had been a good decade – and in some cases a couple of decades – younger than Maxwell Bradley, and nothing so far in his manner indicated that he was in the process of being dazzled by her. That he found her agreeable company was obvious – otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted her suggestion that they have dinner together. It hadn’t, though, turned into a romantic dinner à deux. His attitude towards her was no different than her Uncle Gilbert’s would have been, if he had been dining alone with her.
It was something Rozalind was determined to rectify.
She picked up her wine glass, excitement at the prospect of success singing through her veins. There were six more days before England hove into view – and a girl of her allure could achieve a lot in six days.
She’d hoped to kick off her seduction technique later that evening over coffee in the Adams-style drawing room, but the opportunity didn’t arise. He ordered coffee for them at the table and a little later, when other diners began strolling out of the ornate dining room and heading towards the drawing room, smoking room or the ballroom, where a big band was playing Dixieland jazz, he courteously brought their evening together to an end.
With her hopes of a romantic moonlit stroll on deck dashed, Rozalind went for a moonlit stroll by herself, confident that he would seek out her company the next day.
He didn’t do so.
By four o’clock in the afternoon, though she hadn’t purposely looked for him, she hadn’t seen him anywhere. When she was invited to dine that evening at the captain’s table, she accepted, cross that the first day of her six-day seduction campaign had been so unproductive. That evening, knowing that as a single young woman at the captain’s table she would be the focus of a great number of eyes, – not least, hopefully, Maxwell Bradley’s – she dressed flamboyantly.
Her drop-waisted scarlet silk and satin gown was decorated with panels of jet beading that complemented the glossy helmet of her raven-dark hair. The neckline plunged front and back, and the mid-calf hemline was deeply fringed, fluttering about her legs as she walked. She was wearing flesh-coloured stockings, T-strap shoes and a long pearl necklace tied in a knot and worn so that it dangled down her bare back, emphasizing her flawless skin. The pièce de résistance was an exotically beaded headband, worn low over her brow, and a jet slave-bracelet clamped above one elbow.
Taking a last look in the mirror before leaving her cabin she was satisfied that when Maxwell Bradley saw her, albeit from a distance, he would be knocked for six.
She was one of a number of first-class passengers dining with Captain Charles that evening and was introduced as Miss Rozalind Elizabeth Duveen, daughter of Guthrie Clarke Duveen, president of one of the country’s most prestigious investment banks.
America’s ambassador to Great Britain, Ambassador Alanson B. Houghton, was one of Captain Charles’s guests, as was his wife. Other guests were a famous movie actress and her rather less famous husband; a steel magnate; an elderly, wizened French marquise; a British Member of Parliament and his daughter; an athlete who had won a gold medal at the last Olympic Games; a silver-haired Washington newspaper proprietor and his very young, very beautiful wife. Last, and seated on her left at dinner, was a young man whom Captain Charles had judged to be the most eligible bachelor that voyage, Bobbie Hunt, the twenty-eight-year-old heir to a rubber-tyre fortune.
It was an attempt at matchmaking that was doomed to failu
re because, aping Rudolph Valentino, Bobbie wore his poker-straight hair slicked back with Vaseline. It was not a look Rozalind favoured.
Ambassador Houghton was seated on her right and, when Rozalind told him she would be interrupting her trip to England in order to visit Germany, he was immediately all interest.
‘I was head of the US Legation at Berlin from 1922 until February this year, when I was transferred to London,’ he said, giving her his whole attention. ‘Germany needs a lot of financial help at the moment, but I won’t bore you with that. You’ve probably heard quite enough about war reparations from your father.’
Rozalind hadn’t had a meeting with her father for more than a year, and when they had last met it was her own financial requirements that had been under discussion, not Germany’s.
Seeing no reason to make Ambassador Houghton privy to her bleak parental relationship, she said, affecting knowledge of the subject that she did not have, ‘Are all major investment banks loaning to Germany?’
‘Oh, yes. It isn’t only Duveen’s. The money will enable Germany to expand industrially and give it a basis from which it will be able to pay its reparation debts – especially its debts to Belgium and France.’
‘Which are how much?’ Rozalind asked, politely keeping the conversation going, as she scanned the chandeliered dining room for sight of a broad-shouldered Bostonian with stunning grey eyes.
‘Pre the Dawes Plan, the reparation was fixed at an annual fee of one hundred and thirty-two billion gold marks.’
The amount was so stupendously colossal that it did what Rozalind would have thought impossible. It engaged her full attention.
‘How much?’ she asked disbelievingly. ‘One hundred and thirty-two billion gold marks?’
Ambassador Houghton chuckled. ‘Astronomical, I agree – and quite beyond Germany’s ability to pay. And we all know what happened when she defaulted. Though Great Britain’s solution was to lower the amount of the annual payments, France and Belgium’s solution was to occupy the Ruhr and take in kind what Germany couldn’t afford to give. Such a volatile situation couldn’t be allowed to continue, hence coordinated action by Great Britain and America, resulting in the present, very satisfactory solution.’
Interesting though it was, Rozalind had no desire to talk about it further. Once again she scanned the room and this time, by adjusting the angle of her chair, did so with success.
Bradley was seated at a table with five other people, two men and three women.
Her throat constricted so tightly that, even if she’d wanted to continue the conversation with Ambassador Houghton, she wouldn’t have been able to do so. Numbers like that meant he was quite obviously paired with one of the women. But which?
‘. . . and did you see Rose Marie at the Imperial?’ Bobbie Hunt was asking. ‘What a swell show!’ He began humming the show’s title song.
Rozalind was unappreciative, for her thoughts were elsewhere.
One of the women at Bradley’s table had her back to her and, judging from her dowager’s hump and snow-white hair, was elderly. The other two women were much younger, possibly in their late thirties or early forties – which made them approximately the age she judged Maxwell Bradley to be.
The constriction in her throat intensified. What if one of the two women was his wife? Why had she never thought to wonder whether or not he was married? Hard on the heels of that thought came the impossibility of it. How could he have a wife, when the previous evening he had dined alone with her so publicly, and when he was well known to the officers on board ship? Congressmen had to maintain spotless reputations. He wouldn’t have risked his reputation in order to chat pleasantly about Horace Mann.
‘What say we move on to the ballroom and shimmy, when dinner is over?’ Bobbie’s voice was low in her ear. ‘It isn’t the Cotton Club, but the band play great ragtime.’
Rozalind didn’t reply. Her eyes were still on Maxwell Bradley. One of the women laid an evening-gloved hand proprietorially on his arm, laughing as she leaned intimately towards him. He laughed back at her.
He hadn’t laughed once the previous evening over dinner. He had smiled occasionally, but that was all.
She decided that he was boring and that she didn’t give a jot if he preferred the company of a woman more his own age to hers. Finding him nerve-tinglingly exciting had been an aberration, nothing else. She remembered their wine. It had been the first time she had drunk Château d’Yquem and although it had been delicious, she made a resolution never to drink it again. It had obviously addled her brain.
‘I’d love to shimmy,’ she said. ‘And I’ve never been to the Cotton Club. It sounds huge fun.’
‘Maybe I’ll get the chance to take you there some day.’ Bobbie gave her a conspiratorial wink. ‘Let’s quit the table the first chance we get.’
Forty minutes later, with a cold, hard feeling in the pit of her stomach, Rozalind accompanied him into the ballroom. Bobbie was a good dancer and, as they Charlestoned, she almost forgave him his Vaselined hairstyle. The music changed to a foxtrot to enable people to get their breath back, and she saw Maxwell Bradley lead onto the dance floor the woman he had been laughing with at dinner.
As they danced they were deep in animated conversation, and Rozalind said tautly, ‘Is the woman wearing emerald-green with scarlet beading one of the Rothschilds?’
Bobbie followed her line of sight. ‘Nope. She’s the recently widowed Mrs Clancy, an Astor.’
They executed a smooth rise and fall and then went into a swing and sway. When they were again doing a chassis, Rozalind said, fishing for more information, ‘And is her dance partner about to become husband number two?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. He’s a Congressman. Rich, but not Astor-standard rich, and you can bet your life Mrs C is on the lookout for a title, second time round.’ He led her into another swing and sway, saying as he did so, ‘No doubt she’s hoping to bag a prince or a count while she’s in Europe.’
Out of the corner of her eye Rozalind saw Maxwell Bradley foxtrot his partner a little closer to them. When their eyes met unavoidably, she gave him the kind of faint smile she would have given to someone she vaguely recognized, but couldn’t quite place. Though she was going to great lengths to ensure there was no expression in her eyes, she was thrillingly aware that, as one of his eyebrows lifted ever so slightly, there was a great deal of expression in his.
Outwardly all ice-maiden froideur, inside she felt gleeful. He was interested, and not merely in order to talk about Horace Mann, or photography.
If she knew anything at all about men – and for a girl of nineteen she already knew a lot – then the game wasn’t over. Where Maxwell Bradley was concerned, she knew with exciting certainty that all was still to play for.
‘And so the next day I acknowledged him with a little bit more warmth, but declined to have coffee with him in the ship’s garden room,’ she said to Thea as, in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row, they slowed their horses to a walking pace in order to be able to talk and catch up on each other’s news.
‘Was he put out?’ Beneath the shade of her navy-blue riding bowler Thea’s eyes were avidly interested. She’d been pushing boundaries of her own of late, but not with anyone a couple of decades her senior.
‘If he was, he didn’t let it show. An hour later he was strolling the deck with the happy widow.’
‘And?’
‘And as there were only another three days before we docked in Southampton I decided I couldn’t continue playing it ice-cool.’ Rozalind’s horse skittishly tried to break into a trot. She reined it back to a walk and said, ‘The next day we had coffee together in the morning, and dinner in the evening. By the time we said goodnight we were on first-name terms.’
‘Rozalind and Maxwell?’
‘Rozalind and Max.’
‘Did he kiss you goodnight?’
‘Not then, and I couldn’t understand it. There was enough of a sexual charge between us to light up London.’
‘He’s married?’ It was a suspicion Thea had had almost from the moment Rozalind had mentioned how much older than her he was.
‘No, he isn’t married, but he does have someone waiting for him in New York.’
‘So that’s it then.’ There was a disappointed finality in Thea’s voice. ‘Your romance is at an end.’
‘No, Thea. It’s very far from being at an end. I’m going to see him again while he’s in London, and I’m certain that he’ll write to whoever is waiting for him in New York and end the relationship.’
Thea shrugged. ‘And then, Roz? What if he ends up asking you to marry him and you have to turn him down? Think how ghastly that would be.’
‘But I wouldn’t turn him down.’
‘Of course you would. He’s miles older than you are! When you are thirty, he’ll be fifty!’
‘Fifty-two, to be exact.’
‘And you don’t care?’
At the stunned disbelief on Thea’s face, Rozalind laughed. ‘No, Thea. I don’t care. I’ve never before met anyone I’m so crazy about, and although Max keeps his cards close to his chest, I know he feels the same about me. This is it, Thea! The big one. The walk-down-the-aisle, happy-ever-after one.’
Thea swiftly averted her head before Rozalind could see the pain in her eyes. The big one – the walk-down-the-aisle happy-ever-after one – was how it should have been between her and Hal. That it wasn’t caused her an agony so deep there were days when she didn’t know how she was surviving it.
She hadn’t seen Hal since the night of her coming-out ball more than a year ago, but she knew, via letters from Carrie, that he was courting a Richmond barmaid. ‘Courting’ was the word Carrie had used, but Thea was certain he was sowing his wild oats and that, when he had tired of doing so, he would propose to Carrie.
A Season of Secrets Page 14