A fresh gust of chilled air whooshed into the stuffy overheated room, and his eyes went instantly to the door, where Elanora was entering, bending over, solicitous to her father, an angelic vision in a shimmering pale apricot gown which highlighted the light gold translucence of her skin.
She moved with grace, head bent towards her father to catch his words, then rising to her full height, all supple grace and smiles, a young beauty in full bloom.
She glanced across the room as if her spirit was irresistibly drawn to his, and her cheeks flushed a faintly deeper gold as their eyes locked. They held that gaze, unaware of anyone else in the room for long seconds, and then with what he sensed was a steely control, she turned to his mother.
“Aunt Coco … We are so delighted to be here.”
Their families had been friends since long before he and Elanora were born, and Connie — though no relation of blood in any way — had comforted Elanora with a mother’s heart in the years since her own mother had died.
From a tiny tot Ellie had called Constanza ‘Aunt Coco’. Connie would like nothing better than to weave her into their family as her daughter-in-law.
The two women shared a brief hug, and then Elanora parked her father in his chair alongside their hostess — the seat she always insisted be reserved for him — and shook hands with William before progressing down the table to take her place beside his fifteen-year-old sister Alycia.
Elanora patted her on the shoulder and leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Alycia, you are getting more grown up every day. In no time at all you’ll be the belle of the ball!” He sensed his serious-minded young sister stiffening a little at the compliment.
She flashed Elanora a wry grin. “But I don’t want to be belle of the ball!”
Elanora patted her arm affectionately. “Of course you do. Any girl of fifteen does.” She turned to greet the diner on her left and missed the annoyance that flashed across Alycia’s face.
Constanza cleared her throat and nodded — Eustace’s cue to act as heir apparent and welcome the guests to the table. He got to his feet, looking to William as he rose.
“Father,” a nod of deference, “Mother,” another pause, “and all our very welcome guests. We’re gathered here together, as you know, to celebrate another very successful year for Mountfort Imports. Thanks to my father’s astute direction, we have enjoyed our best year ever and look forward to an exciting new alliance in the year to come.”
He turned to the white-haired man seated on his right and to the younger man with the same patrician profile who sat next to him. “We’re delighted to have Mr James Wollander and his son Bartholomew with us tonight. Let me introduce you to the guests you haven’t yet met.”
He gestured to Elanora and Henry. “I think you know everyone here except Mr Henry Travers and his daughter Elanora, who are very close friends of our family.”
Elanora bestowed a winning smile on the newcomers. “Delighted to meet you, I am sure. Forgive our late arrival.” She glanced to her father’s wheelchair. “Unavoidable sometimes, I’m afraid.”
James Wollander’s eyebrows rose in appreciation. “I’m sure your father is delighted to have such a devoted daughter, Miss Travers. So glad to make your acquaintance.”
He glanced down at Eustace and back to Elanora. “We’re very strong in the sugar trade in the Indies, and Eustace and William have excellent sales networks here and elsewhere. I can see us all working together very well.”
He smiled around the table and the other guests: Will Jackson, the company lawyer, and his wife Adelaide, and Mountfort accountant Sam Chambers and his spinster daughter Cassandra — visibly relaxed and looking expectantly to their plates. Eustace noticed for the first time this evening that Will and Adelaide Jackson’s daughter Amelia, who often accompanied her parents to these functions, was absent.
“Thank you, Eustace. Formalities almost over. Time for grace!” William Mountfort chimed a teaspoon against a wine glass to get attention, recited a perfunctory prayer and black-aproned servants trailed in with first course: tureens of pea soup and platters of cold tongue.
“So, Elanora, my dear girl, what have you been doing with yourself since your wonderful birthday party?” Connie had put on gold-rimmed glasses and looked over them fondly.
Elanora paused with a spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. “Oh, not a lot Aunt Coco. I went to Barnum’s with Amelia the other day and we saw General Tom! That was an experience!”
Elanora flashed a smile at Amelia’s mother. “Amelia isn’t with us tonight — is she quite well?”
Adelaide nodded. “Perfectly well, thank you. Just needed to rest. She’s been so busy lately.”
Elanora glanced back to Connie. “General Tom’s a remarkable little fellow — have you ever seen him?”
Constanza shook her head. “Oh no, dear, I’m far too busy.” There was a satisfied silence as the guests cleaned up their plates ready for the next course, then William’s voice chimed in, loud and intrusive.
“Looking after all the paupers in the municipality, aren’t you, Constanza? Or as you like to call them the ‘deserving poor’.” The corner of William’s mouth turned up in a sneer.
Eustace saw his mother’s shoulders stiffen, but when she turned to answer him, her expression was composed.
“I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything, William, but I’m sure there’s room for more than one opinion in the most successful of marriages. That’s what keeps them interesting, isn’t it? However, our guests don’t want to hear about it over dinner.”
She fixed her calm gaze on him for a few more seconds and then smiled fleetingly at Elanora. “Now what were you just saying my dear? Barnum’s circus is still drawing the crowds, then?”
“It certainly is.”
Eustace sensed that beneath the gay rejoinder, something was troubling Elanora. And when he glanced back at his father, he could see he had not taken his wife’s mild reprimand well. His face above his black beard was brick red, his jawline rigid.
As the main course rolled on — roast turkey, oyster pie, baked sweet potatoes, celery and squash — it became clear Mr James Wollander was much enamored with Miss Elanora Travers, and he exercised every gambit at his command to engage her in conversation, while his son sat mute beside him.
Which human curiosities had she enjoyed most at Barnum’s? Where would she and her esteemed father be spending Christmas Day? And had she ever been to the West Indies?
“No, I have not, Mr Wollander. I haven’t traveled any farther than Saratoga, although one day I certainly would like to visit foreign climes.”
She smiled encouragingly over her wine glass. “Have you been living in Bridgetown long? I suppose it’s very hot most of the time? And I suppose there’s lots of palm trees?”
“It is hot, Miss Travers, most assuredly. But you get used to it. And there are lots of palms, for sure. Barbados is known for them.”
“Elanora won’t need any palm trees. She’s not going anywhere. It’s Eustace who’s going.”
William had hardly spoken during the meal, and even Eustace was shocked by the surly undertone in his father’s casual remark.
Wollander’s neck flushed red above his collar.
“Oh, of course, Mr Mountfort. A silly remark. I meant nothing by it.”
William dismissed the protest. “Not your fault, James. Not at all. It’s just young people sometimes get silly ideas.” He looked at Wollander junior, who seemed to shrink into his chair under his cool gaze.
“Possibly your young chap Bartholomew is the exception. But I was just wanting to make our arrangement quite clear. Eustace goes to work with you in your order and dispatch department, while Bartholomew comes to New York and learns our end of the business. When we agree the time is right we will discuss a merger of Mountfort and Wollander. Or Wollander and Mountfort.”
He threaded his fingers and placed his hands in a satisfied gesture in front of his mounded belly.
“That’s the
only way the arrangement will work. And Eustace doesn’t need any encumbrances to distract him from his work.”
An awkward silence fell over the table. Eustace ventured a glance toward Elanora. She sat bolt upright, but head down, staring at the empty space where her plate had been, gripped by an icy composure. And she chewed her lip. A sure sign she was upset.
Constanza grasped the silver hand bell next to her wine glass and rang it vigorously. “Time for dessert, I think, and then the gentlemen can disperse for their cigars and liquor while we ladies enjoy a coffee.” She looked to the door as it swung open at the butler’s hand. “Oh, there you are, Mr O’Malley. We’re ready for our Chancellor’s Pudding with brandy sauce. Please serve it at once.”
Eustace turned to Bartholomew Wollander, who looked nearly as mortified as Elanora. “You’ll find New York rather different after Bridgetown. Have you spent much time here before?”
Bartholomew grasped at the thread gratefully. “No, not really. I did some of my schooling at Albany, but that was a while ago. And New York changes so fast. They reckon that even if you grow up here, move away for five years and you won’t recognize the place when you get back.”
He flashed an uncertain grin. “You might find that yourself. Not that you’re going to be away five years of course. But you never know. You might get to really like the place.”
Eustace glanced uneasily across the table to Elanora. She had lifted her head and was staring directly at him, her eyes wounded. She thrust up from her chair suddenly. “Aunt Coco, I’m so sorry, but I do seem to be developing a headache. Could I retire to the parlor and rest? I don’t want to spoil the fun.”
Constanza looked concerned. “You’re not going to faint, dear girl? It wasn’t those oysters?”
“No, no, I’m fine. Just got a nasty headache, that’s all. Father, just call when you’re ready to go home. No need to rush.”
She turned toward the door, a stricken sheen on her cheeks. Eustace rose to follow. “Let me accompany you, Elanora. We wouldn’t want you to fall.”
Before he could escape from his chair, his father’s lumberjack’s hand thumped the table. “Leave the girl be, Eustace. Can’t you see she wants some privacy? And you’ve got guests to entertain.”
The Wollanders were silent. Will and Adelaide, and Sam and Cassandra were trying hard to not notice anything was amiss, chatting lightly among themselves, but Eustace knew the score.
His father had very publicly declared Elanora had no place in his future as the heir to the Mountfort Wollander enterprise. And unless he found some freakish way to escape, that commercial union was going to supercede any hope he had for personal nuptials with his beloved Ellie.
Five
Elanora slept with the little black box under her pillow that night, but it did nothing to ward off the crushing headache that throbbed at her temples when she woke in the early hours of the morning and lay staring into the dark dawn. Well, she’d learned one thing. An engagement ring in the little black box didn’t have magic powers to make everything alright again.
So just how did she pick herself up and go on from here? She had been imagining herself sharing her life with Eustace since she was sixteen. She’d had only eyes for him since she’d had a nanny in the nursery. And she’d avoided seeing the thing that now stuck out more clearly than any other.
Eustace would never stand up to his father and be his own man. His comfortable life as merchant-man-about-town depended on him obeying his father’s every wish. This week it was the demand that he goes to the Indies. This time next year it would be something else.
She rested her hand on her stomach and recalled their love making. All done on impulse, but on the assumption they were soon to be man and wife. She rolled over in bed, suddenly feeling hot and sweaty even though the snow still lay several feet deep on the ground outside. She drew her knees up to her chest and keened silently, rocking from side to side, a sharp stabbing pain in her chest.
She put her hands to her eyes and pressed them down so hard she saw little shards of light behind her fingers. How could she have been so naive? Didn’t they say “Like father, like son?” She really should have known better, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Even with Aunt Coco. She pictured Coco’s kind, careworn face, one she now knew better even than her own mother’s. Things wouldn’t be the same there either. Firstly, she knew William’s awful secret.
How could she look Coco in the eye and not have something of what she knew leak out of her? And secondly, Coco’s first loyalty would always have to be to her son. She, Elanora, was no longer in the first circle of family. She’d just been banished.
What to do? Who to talk to? She couldn’t imagine that her life would not be scarred forever by what had unfolded last night.
Unbelievably, she dropped off into the welcome oblivion of an exhausted sleep, and the light had fully broken when she was woken hours later by an urgent rapping on her bedroom door. She struggled up from the pillow and the hammering in her head resumed the second she opened her eyes. A bitterness burned in her mouth.
She recognized the Irish brogue of their housekeeper, Dana O’Loughlin; a doughty woman Aunt Coco had rescued from a Five Points tenement house and helped set back on her feet.
“Miss Elanora …” There was the faintest hint of a rolled “r” in the loving caress of her name. A long pause. “Miss Elanora, please … You have a visitor.”
Her heart leapt. Eustace. It was Eustace coming to tell her he was choosing her over his father. That he was going to start work as … She flopped back onto the pillow. It was not going to be Eustace.
“Who is it, Dana?”
“Miss Amelia is here to see you. She says you were taken unwell last night, and she’s concerned.”
“That I was, Dana. That I was. But I’m better this morning. It was just a headache, nothing serious.”
She drew her legs to the edge of the bed and placed them down on the rug that overlay the cold wooden floor. “Give me just a few minutes to clean up and I’ll be down. Set her in the parlor and make some coffee, would you be so kind, Mrs O’Loughlin. I’ll be down, right smart.”
“Certainly miss. Straight away. Miss Amelia will be ever so relieved.”
So Amelia’s parents had reported last night’s humiliation. The chill of the ice-cold water from the bedside ewer was just what she needed. She dipped and rung out the muslin face cloth and applied it to her eyelids, the back of her neck, her arm pits.
Then she doused herself in lavender water in the places where she’d had the ice-cold cloth. Within minutes she was pleasantly revived. She wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of talking about her behind her back. And today, what was it, a week before Christmas. She was going to set about making a new start.
Six
“This color would look wonderful on you!” Amelia stood beside a mahogany counter in Alexander Stewart’s cavernous five-story Broadway department store and fingered a bolt of pale green and red striped alpaca — the hot new fabric for ladies’ fashion. She smiled encouragingly. “You could put it together with that raspberry velvet for a mantle and that green bonnet lined with the rose-pink satin over there.”
Elanora laughed at her friend’s earnest eagerness. “I’m fine, really Amelia. I don’t need to be spending any more of Father’s funds.”
Amelia reached out, her hands warm through her thin kid gloves. “You deserve a Christmas treat. You’re so devoted to him. And he can afford it. Why not lash out and buy a length for a new promenade dress? Give yourself a boost?”
They were on the second floor of A T Stewart’s ‘first department store in the world’ — popularly referred to as the ‘Marble Palace’ because of its magnificent Italian Renaissance palazzo styling and dazzling white marble facade.
Elanora looked around her at the airy circular courtyard that stretched for the full height of the interior, covered by a domed skylight. They were only a few blocks from the wharves and the Mou
ntfort’s warehouses, but you felt you were in another protected, opulent world.
Since it had opened a year ago, Stewart’s was the only place to shop for the fashionable set. Some ladies even sat outside in their carriages and had merchandise brought out to them for their approval. Elanora and Amelia had come downtown in Amelia’s father’s carriage and were browsing the ‘Ladies’ Parlor’ where they could admire themselves in full length Parisian mirrors.
Mannequin dummies displayed the season’s ‘look’. Every year it seemed skirts were getting bigger, the sleeves more cumbersome and the bodices tighter and harder to breathe in. They were dresses designed for women who did very little except sit passively and observe life passing them by.
Elanora shook her head. She felt bruised from last night’s encounter with William Mountford. She could swear her ribs felt sore, and she didn’t want to squeeze herself into a gown designed for graceful submissiveness. These dresses made anything except a meek and demure glide from door to chair impossible.
“No, it’s fine Amelia, really. I don’t need another dress.” She pulled her gold watch out of an inside skirt pocket and glanced at it. “Didn’t you say we were expected at Lottie’s Ladies Club at 3pm? It’s nearly that now. Let’s get going.”
Amelia gracefully acquiesced, and in a short time they were alighting a few blocks away at the first ladies only ten pin bowling alley in the country. It had been quietly opened nearly a decade ago by a couple of rebel women who got bored at having their fun limited to card games and dancing. They’d started it purely for their private pleasure but word had spread, and the membership now included women from fifty of New York’s first families.
“Place looks busy today,” Elanora commented. “Hope we don’t have to wait too long for a turn.”
Amelia shrugged and laughed. “Who cares? We’ve got plenty of time to talk and have coffee.” She gathered her arm around Elanora’s waist, and they progressed to the Irish doorman who welcomed them with a bow and tipping of his white top hat. “Coat check that way, ladies.”
Of Gold & Blood Series 2 Books 1 & 4 Page 33