Splendor l-4

by Anna Godbersen

  The housekeeper, Mrs. Schmidt, a fastidious widow in middle age whose late husband had been for many years an employee of Snowden’s, had come up behind her and was now lingering in the doorway. She appeared just slightly displeased that the lady of the house would be poking about.

  “Mr. Cairns said I was to see that you don’t overexert yourself, and to make sure that all of your needs are met while he is out on business….”

  Elizabeth rested her hand on her considerable belly and tried to let a certain glowing kindness light up her heart-shaped face. Excepting the case of Lina Broud — who had been the final lady’s maid of her life as a debutante, and with whom she had sparred mightily — she had always had a nice way around the help. With Mrs. Schmidt her gentleness seemed to hold no special power, however; the two women had yet to strike a natural ease in their relationship.

  “No, I’m all right, but thank you.” When the older woman did not budge, Elizabeth added, almost apologetically, “I wanted to put Mr. Cairns’s study in order myself.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Schmidt replied, although still she hesitated until Elizabeth gave a firm gesture of dismissal with her pointed chin.

  When she was gone, Elizabeth busied herself with the arranging of pens and paper on her husband’s broad desk and the placement of several objets d’art. She turned over in her mind which of the taxidermied heads lining the walls she could persuade him to do away with, for though Snowden was an outdoorsman, and though she did not want him to abolish that aspect of his character, she felt that as his wife, she owed him the benefit of her rather excellent eye. The animal trophies did not, in her opinion, belong in such a genteel home. When the room was finally starting to appear tended to by a steady feminine hand, she turned to a box of papers that needed sorting.

  The ordinary activity of putting a house together had calmed Elizabeth, but that steady, neutral feeling evaporated when, after carefully filing several bank statements and business documents in the drawers of the large walnut desk, she glimpsed her own name as it had been written during the first eighteen years of her life. And not just her name, but along with it the name that she chanted in her thoughts each night before going to bed — the name that she still thought of as hers, too. Her brown eyes grew large.

  A letter to Stanley Brennan, who had once been her family’s accountant, was clipped to the document, and the bit that caught Elizabeth’s attention read: Please have the deed for the California property transferred — immediately and jointly — into the names Elizabeth Adora Holland and William Keller. The signer of the letter was her late father; it was dated a week before his death, and posted from the Yukon Territory. Her heart had begun to thud and her vision was growing blurry with tears. Still her eyes lingered there. Even the sight of Will’s name brought to mind the picture of him in a new brown suit on the day they were married, the last time she remembered feeling anything like pure joy. It was another few moments before she was able to collect herself and read the rest, and thus to realize that the paper she held was in fact the deed to a bit of land she knew quite well.

  She could not begin to understand why her father would have put her and Will’s name together on any document, much less one that connected them to the land that they had in fact lived on, quite happily, far, far away in a place called California. She had known that her father had told Will it might be a lucrative territory, but that he had owned it, much less deeded it to his oldest daughter and former valet, confounded her.

  She rose to her feet with some difficulty, and then went as quickly as she could down the stairs, calling for Mrs. Schmidt.

  “When did Mr. Cairns say he would be returning?” she demanded when the wide, flat face of the housekeeper emerged below her in the foyer. Elizabeth clutched the curved railing for balance. From below, her swollen figure must have appeared tremendous.

  “I expect him home any moment now….” The housekeeper was wiping her hands with a cloth. “What can I do to assist you in the meantime, Missus?”

  “Please tell him that I am in the second-floor sitting room when he returns.” She covered her mouth with her hand and tried not to feel woozy. “Tell him I must speak to him as soon as possible.”

  She did not know how long she waited. It might have been several hours or only a part of one that she reclined in the ivory wingback chair in the sitting room next to where she slept, and felt her heart rise and fall over recollections that she could not keep at bay. They were a deluge. By turns they washed her onto high, dry land and then back to rough waters. In moments she was there — making dinner for Will while he searched for the oil he believed would make them rich, her skin a little browned in the sun, her body warm — and in the next, she was on the platform at Grand Central Station with the sound of bullets ringing horrifically in her ears and the smell of blood turning her stomach.

  “What is it, my dear?”

  Snowden came rushing through the door, as though she really were his wife and it really was his child whose birth he was nervously anticipating. Elizabeth’s pale lashes fluttered. But of course she was his wife, she reminded herself, as he knelt by her side. He grasped her hand, and she realized that he had scarcely touched her since kissing her in the carriage after he’d first shown her the new house.

  “Please — can you explain this to me?” Her voice broke over the words as she thrust the peculiar document in his direction.

  Snowden’s small mouth twitched. Slowly it became a gentle smile. He wore a waistcoat of striped brown silk, which had not in the past been a fabric he favored. He took the paper, glancing over it before folding it away in his pocket.

  “This is a deed,” he began. “One of the ownership docu ments of a piece of land your father purchased, in California, near a little railroad town called San Pedro….”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth whispered. She looked into her husband’s eyes, imploring him to explain it all for her. “I know that land.”

  “Yes.” Snowden’s eyes darted across her body to the floor and back again. Then he went on in a rapid voice. “Your mother and I discussed it, of course, when you returned from California with — your first husband. He had mentioned there was oil on the land, and as a close family friend, your mother confided in me. I told her that of course oil speculation was a very complicated business, and awfully difficult to turn a profit on, but that Will seemed like a capable boy, and that if he didn’t make it there he would make it some other way….”

  The sun was falling out of the sky, and shadows touched all the objects in the room. Snowden’s face, a few feet away, was growing indistinct in the waning light. Breath had escaped her, and she had to remind herself to inhale. She nodded at him that he should go on.

  “After…the tragedy, after Will’s death, I began to piece together an explanation for an odd series of documents that I’d found amongst your father’s papers, when I first came to help your family, early last winter. Of course I did not then know who William Keller was.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes had become watery and her pale pink lips parted involuntarily. “He knew,” she whispered.

  “That there was oil? He must have believed so; why else would a man like Edward Holland have been interested in land like that?”

  “No…” She bit her lip and swallowed hard as she took in her father’s sanctioning of Will’s love for her, so long after both men had died. “Father knew that Will loved me. That I loved him.”

  Snowden looked away.

  In her more gathered moments, Elizabeth would have thought to apologize, but it did not occur to her now. “Why did you not tell me?” she pursued.

  “My dear Mrs. Cairns, you were in no state to receive this kind of news. But you needn’t have worried. I have been seeing to your interests. I’ve taken several trips to California to inspect the land, and it is in truth a rich oil field. Production has begun, and we’ve already seen returns on the property. How do you think I was able to secure funds for this house, my dear?” His hand swept through the a
ir, and her eyes followed the arc it made, as though some detail in the molding would symbolize her father’s prescience. “Of course, the natural treasure of the land will not be realized overnight, but very soon it will be paying us all — the Hollands, that is — quite handsomely.”

  “Oh!” Elizabeth took a breath; she had never breathed so deeply. Her long, fine fingers fluttered over her chest and she tried valiantly not to cry again. So it was Will who was caring for them after all.

  The fatigue she had been dodging all afternoon was suddenly overwhelming. She fixed her gaze on the short, blunt stubble of Snowden’s chin, which was a light color, and so caught the very last of the sun — and she tried to smile a little in gratitude.

  “Thank you.” She closed her eyes, and when she whispered it again, she was thinking of her father and the father of her unborn child, who were, perhaps, just at that moment, watching over her from heaven. “Thank you.”

  Eight

  Now that Carolina Broad has shown all of society her splendid new abode, and all the wonderfully precious things she has managed to acquire for it, we suppose there will be no more doubting that she is at last one of us. Although the wardrobe that she ordered for her first summer season might have been taken as sufficient proof of this, or, for that matter, the fact that she retained her benefactor Carey Lewis Longhorn’s famed box at the opera, and is regularly seen entertaining there.

  — FROM CITÉ CHATTER, SATURDAY, JULY 7, 1900

  ELITE NEW YORK WAS SITUATED IN A HIERARCHY of boxes, arranged around a grand horseshoe, high above a vibrant and melodramatic performance on a stage that few, if any, audience members were still paying attention to. The light of a giant chandelier played against their raised lorgnettes, which were adorned, like the hands that held them, with jewels of all varieties. There was plenty of drama to be witnessed, after all, by gazing through those ornamented lenses at the wearers of Doucet gowns, and at the gentlemen who had escorted them. Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker was out for the second night in a row, but nobody dared visit her box for fear of angering her father-in-law; Eleanor Wetmore, who was said to be desperate for a proposal since she had played maid of honor at her younger sister’s June wedding, was twittering again beside that known roué Amos Vreewold. It was less than a year ago that Carolina had first come, wide-eyed, to this very box. But tonight she was no longer interested in what might be glimpsed or overheard around her, for she was sitting next to her first love, or her first real one, anyway. He was one of the favorite sons of the tribe that filled the parterre boxes at the opera, and so she knew that tonight, at his side, she was the girl to surreptitiously observe.

  Earlier, they had dined in Leland’s grand town house, a choice of venue that had initially disappointed her — for she was desperate to be seen out with her new beau — but which she had, in the end, found the beauty in. “It was so much more intimate that way,” she could already imagine telling her lady’s maid later, when her corset was being undone, and she would be telling the truth. For it had been much easier — sitting across from each other, the candlelight flickering in the darkened room, the prettily patterned white damask cloth between them — for Leland to stare appreciatively at her aubergine chiffon flounces and lichen-colored eyes. And he had felt comfortable enough to grow animated telling her about all the different places in Paris where he had thought her name to himself, and contemplated the qualities that set her apart from all the other girls he had ever known. His words received encores in her thoughts now, as she sat in Longhorn’s traditional box, with glazed, rosy vision and a probably dopey smile. Any attempts to change that expression would have been useless. Occasionally Leland reached out, boldly, to squeeze her gloved hand under the cover of her shawl.

  Now he bent in her direction, and spoke at such low vol ume that she had to tip her head toward him. The roughness of his skin came close enough that it tickled her neck, which would have made the corners of her mouth flicker had they not been already.

  “You’re far better in person,” he said.

  The tingling sensation that played along Carolina’s exposed arms and shoulders told her how strenuously she was being watched from all angles, but Leland’s vigor and apparent obliviousness to the prying opera glasses all around them was something she wanted to share in. She drew back and smiled at him, straight on and adoringly. Moments had passed, or the better part of an hour, she wasn’t sure, when he spoke again. The performers onstage were all different by then.

  “How lucky that we live on the same block!” he went on, disbelieving.

  “Yes!” Carolina’s head bobbed in ebullient agreement. “What luck.”

  Stars bloomed in her eyes. Still Leland’s presence there beside her, and in her very own box, was something she could only consume in small doses. There was his height, and his solidity, and his overgrown, wheat-colored hair tucked behind his ears, and his long legs in black dress trousers, crossed and still almost too large for the small space, each of which taken alone might have caused a touch of trembling in her knees. She went on sneaking glances at him, but then he would turn and gaze at her with wide-open eyes, almost as though he were feeling the same wonderful, scarcely credible thing. It was faint-making. Looking at Leland was almost too much for her — it threatened to overwhelm. Then she looked away.

  Her glances fell across the capacious room: On her friend Penelope, whose blue eyes flashed in defiance; at Reginald Newbold and his new bride, Adelaide, who was wearing a diamond choker; at the Whitehall Vanderbilts, who rumor had it were not speaking to each other after their last trip to Monte Carlo, and whose postures in their box confirmed the tale. Then her gaze fixed itself on the face of Mrs. Portia Tilt and that lady’s companion, who was a far younger, far thinner man than her husband. He had fine, architectural features and eyes of a hypnotic quality, although he held no allure for Carolina. No allure, except that she felt an immediate urgency not to give any clue that she knew him.

  Tristan Wrigley was a Lord & Taylor salesman, but he was many other things besides: a hustler, the first man ever to kiss Carolina, and the person who had originally suggested to her that there might be a fortune in her friendship with Longhorn. Then he stood, and she realized she’d been caught staring. The possibility that he would enter her box, that she would be seen in front of all New York society talking to someone worse than a nobody, occurred to her with a crush ing gravity. Slowly, delicately, she released Leland’s palm and rose to her feet.

  Luckily for Carolina, Amos Vreewold entered the private room behind her box just then. She saw, in a second, how easy it would be to absent herself, and avoid a visit from Portia Tilt’s well-made companion.

  “Why, Mr. Vreewold,” she began, gathering herself. “You must excuse me, I was just on my way to the ladies’ lounge for a freshening-up. Surely you will have much to discuss with our dear Mr. Bouchard.”

  “Vreewold…,” Leland said, turning, engaging the other man in conversation, “you haven’t changed even a little!”

  She put her fists into her skirt, to draw it back from her toes, and reminded herself that in this, her second social season, she already occupied the most coveted box at the opera. She had followed the lead of her friend Penelope Schoonmaker and chosen a signature color with imperial connotations; Penelope’s was red, hers was purple. She was not to be trifled with. As soon as she stepped into the curving corridor, she came face-to-face with Tristan Wrigley.

  “Can I help you?” Her voice was ever so low, ever so refined.

  The man met her cool stare with a smile that spread slyly across his face and twinkled with charisma. He had a fine American jaw, and cheekbones that might easily convince an inexperienced girl that he came from good people. Like the real gentlemen in attendance, he wore shining black tails and a white bow tie, which fit him with certain flair. Though she would have known him anywhere, she maintained her indifferent, unresponsive gaze. Still, below her ribbons and her bows, underneath the bones of her corset, a layer of sweat began to colle
ct on the skin of her ribs — for after all, it would have been impossible to completely forget how he entered her life, during that wild, impressionable period when she was just a lady’s maid recently fired by the grand Holland family, making a fool of herself in all of Manhattan’s best hotels.

  His muddy golden eyes swept her figure, taking in the pearls at her décolletage and the tiers of chiffon that hung about her like delicate aubergine leaves. After an inappropriately long pause, he emitted a slow, appreciative whistle. “I would say so.”

  Carolina straightened. That angry, righteous feeling, which was such an inescapable piece of her personality, was seeping into her lungs. “Excuse me?”

  He rested his shoulder jauntily against the curved wall of the corridor. The music of the orchestra sounded muffled and far away here. No one had yet passed them, but how long could that last? “I see my Carolina has done well for herself.”

  The phrase “my Carolina” came off his tongue purposefully, as though he wanted to remind her of the night he’d surprised her with a kiss on the mouth in an elevator, or of that brief period — after Mr. Longhorn had died, but before she knew the kindness he had bestowed upon her — when she had believed herself helpless, and had depended on Tristan for shelter and other things better now forgotten. That he would lord these events over her put a match to her rage, and heated the tender edges of her ears. But then she remembered herself, and glanced back toward the box. The curtains formed a sliver, through which she could make out, with relief, silhouettes of Leland and Amos bent in conversation.

  “I am not anybody’s Carolina,” she returned.

  Tristan shrugged and took a step toward her, leaning in close enough that she caught a faint whiff of onion on his breath. “I can’t pretend I made you all on my own, but you know very well you couldn’t have gotten here without me.” The tone of his voice was lined with malice now. The smile became a grimace. “Longhorn was my idea, or had you forgotten? I believe you owe me some gratitude…Miss Broud.”