Splendor: A Luxe Novel (14 page)

Her moody fixation with that afternoon’s visitor revived, and in her restless early-morning state she felt an extra, ticking urgency. She paused with her hand in the small of her back, and would have reached out to where the folded piece of paper still stood, like a tent on the marble, except that she noticed something else.

A blue box of very particular proportions and color sat beside the note, and she knew in an instant that it was a silver baby’s rattle from Tiffany & Co. She knew because she had—in her previous life—ordered this particular gift for the children of several of her older, married cousins. The darkness within ebbed for a moment, and she let her fingers run along its edge, thinking how kind it was of Snowden to have known her well enough to guess how much she would appreciate this particular item. He was kind, of course he was, and she should stop slandering him in her mind. But then she set the box down and picked up the piece of paper anyway.

Mr. Cairns, Please stop avoiding me.

I know what you did in the Klondike,

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and if you don’t up my payments I will be

forced to make your actions public.

Sincerely, O.L.

Elizabeth placed the note back on the marble top, just exactly as it had been, so that nobody would know it had been read. The word Klondike had a terrible significance for her; it was where her father had died.

He had enjoyed traveling to exotic locations and speculating far and wide, and he had never cared much if the world considered him a smart businessman or not. That was how he had met Snowden in the first place.

Snowden, her husband, who had known to purchase for her a silver Tiffany baby rattle. She stepped back from the note, ashamed of herself. The stairs and halls surrounding her were dark and empty, and she was relieved that nobody had witnessed her trespass. For the lesson was clear—one did not poke around at night, not unless one wanted to see ghosts.

Seventeen

Let’s get out of here

THE NOTE SLID INTO CAROLINA’S FIELD OF VISION with such subtlety that at first she didn’t comprehend its meaning, but once she had, her broad cheeks flushed pink. Her gloved hand darted the piece of paper, which had been ripped from the bottom of the menu, before Lucy Carr, the divorcée, could see it. Mrs. Carr had been one of her first friends as a society girl, and though the older woman had never been what you would call “nice people,” Longhorn had always found her amusing. There had been several nights when Carolina and Lucy had screamed in laughter about something or other, while Longhorn nodded off over his cognac, and though Carolina had found little use for the twice-wed blonde now that she was truly rich, still she felt a little bad about dismissing her too quickly.

“Did I read that you are engaged again?” Carolina asked, hoping that her gauche blush was fading from her cheeks. Across the shiny parquet floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, skirts of organdy and satin twirled and men whose bellies filled out their paisley waistcoats congregated in colonies beside gleaming marble columns. She herself wore tiers of peach chiffon layered with tiny white lace appliqué and silver sequin file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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edging, and her hair rose above her forehead and then lay in sausage curls, bound by ribbon, against her neck. Underneath the Grecian gathering of fabric at either shoulder, her freckled arms were bare.

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Carr had once had very fine eyes, although they were ever blinking, and the blinking over years had created a network of lines like dry riverbeds that reached to her temples. “To Mr. Harrison Ulrich!” She giddily extended her left hand to show off the ring.

“Very fine.” Once upon a time, Carolina would have meant it.

Mrs. Carr’s lips pinched together in a poor attempt not to smile, and her eyebrows—which were painted on, and slightly too dark a shade—arched. Then her eyes rolled slowly toward Leland, whose note was still hidden under Carolina’s hand, as though to ask, And you?

But Carolina simply responded with a bland and unaccommodating smile. In a few moments Mrs. Carr had moved on, which allowed her to crumple and drop the note under the table, where one hoped it would continue to go unnoticed.

“Come with me,” Leland whispered into her ear with sweet, urgent emphasis.

Carolina put her hand over his and cast nervous glances across the room. She had been in the famous hotel several times in the months since she had become Longhorn’s protégée and then heir, but it still held magical powers for her. The idea of absenting herself from its halls and ballrooms early caused her a slight shudder of scandal. Besides, she was there at Penelope Schoonmaker’s invitation, and though the girls were not as close as they had once been, still Carolina owed no small part of her standing to their association. What would they all say if she left Penelope’s husband’s family’s party so unexpectedly?

“But the evening is hardly over,” she protested faintly. The Henry Schoonmakers had just taken the dance floor, which meant the night might yet produce glamorous and collectable anecdotes.

“Come with me,” Leland persisted, and his tone was so firm and so sure that she found herself, despite the earliness of the evening, wanting to give in to him. To say yes to anything he suggested.

In moments they were hurrying out of the room where the Family Progress Party was honoring its next candidate for mayor, and down the bejeweled halls of the hotel. They passed the mirrored panels and amber marble coves, the gold crushed-velvet couches where common people sat and watched the parade of elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen coming and going from one party to another. It was what the papers referred to as Peacock Alley—quite a show, in which a girl like Lina Broud should have been the observer, but was now, as Carolina Broad, the observed.

Carolina could now admit—privately, to her own self—what she had long denied: that if she’d had the courage, she would have come like the other girls with deadening workaday jobs to watch the fine people strut past. Instead, she had acted too superior, and talked at length with Will Keller, the coachman, about the ridiculous vanity of all the drips of the leisure class. Those nights, and those sentiments, seemed a long time ago now, and it was partly because of this distance that she was able to glance over at the faces—rosy and imperfectly arranged, with oversized mouths and chins that sloped to nothing—of the girls worshipfully observing the parade. She smiled faintly at them in passing, as though administering a kind of benediction. But her smile fell when she saw a face she knew.

“Claire?” she exclaimed before she thought.

The girl gazed up at her, shocked and admiring from her place on a bench. She was squeezed between two other girls, clearly maids, wearing a black dress slightly more flattering than the one she wore while working for the Hollands. Her beautiful red hair was back in a simple bun.

“What are you doing here?” For a moment, Carolina was so pleased with the idea that Claire could see her, so tall and grandly dressed and with the incandescence of a thrilling evening playing beneath her skin. Then she realized that Leland, a few strides ahead of her, had paused to look back, perplexed, and the smile vanished from her lips.

Claire’s great big eyes shifted from the gentleman in tails back to her little sister. “Miss Broad,” she answered hurriedly, her voice formal, respectful. “How kind of you to say hello. You look immaculate,” she added, with a shy smile.

“Thank you.” Carolina, suddenly mindful of Leland’s presence, drew back her shoulders and did away with her familiar manner. “Are you well?”

“I am working for Mrs. Carr now.” Claire glanced at Leland, and then back at Carolina. Her expression file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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was almost pleading. Enjoy yourself, she was saying with those cowlike eyes. Don’t mind me. “I was helping her, in the ladies’ lounge, and she said she didn’t mind if I waited here, to see the gowns, instead of being sent home as usual.”

“How kind of Mrs. Carr.” Carolina knew that if she lingered it would require an explanation—but oh, how she wanted her sister to appreciate her glory, how she wished she could just ask where she was living. “Then I trust I will see you soon?”

“Yes, I hope so, miss.”

Carolina’s heaping coiffure inclined forward, a little curtly, but by then her older sister’s eyes were permanently averted, and Leland’s expectant arm was already drawing her away, toward the exit.

“Who was she?”

“Oh—just a girl.” Carolina’s voice was off key; she listened to it echo woefully in her ears.

“It was highly unusual of you to stop and speak to her so familiarly.” Carolina’s face felt cold for a minute, but then Leland went on admiringly: “It was very kind. I’ve never seen a lady like you be so warm with a girl like that.”

“Yes, well…I know a little of her troubles.” Now her voice grew surer, having glimpsed the line she should take. “She was a waif Longhorn did a kindness to once. He saw her in the street and found her a job. He was always doing that sort of thing. And at the beginning, he asked me to see that she was all right, to go to her and look in on how she was faring, as only another girl can. It was not much.” They were nearing the wide busy entrance of the hotel, and it seemed to Carolina that they moved so lightly they were almost floating.

“How incredibly gracious of you.”

The muscles of Carolina’s back relaxed. He liked her more all the time, she realized. Then she blushed a touch for good measure. “Well,” she whispered bashfully, “we all do what we can.” Their feet moved more quickly as they left the hotel be hind. Leland lifted her thin black cape over her, to shelter her from the public’s eyes, as they hurried through the crowds and outside.

“Yes—you do, because you are lovely and good! But what bores! What bores the rest of them are!” Leland exclaimed, as he hopped up behind her into his waiting phaeton and signaled his coachman to drive. The flounces of her flesh-colored dress settled in against her long, strong thighs, and spilled down to the floor and over the legs of his trousers. She was a little taken aback that he would speak that way of the famous Schoonmakers and their associates, but in the next moment she realized it was true, that he was right, that all those people, despite their fancy names and elaborate clothing and heaps of jewels, had just spent an evening boring themselves to the point of absurdity in one of the very best rooms in the city.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry!” she laughed. The coach was pulling them up Fifth Avenue, and through the open windows they could see the orange light spilling onto the walks and all the very fine houses sitting quietly, somewhat spent with all the events of the long season. “How could I have insisted upon your attending such a tedious gathering?”

“I don’t know,” Leland chuckled. “I must have done something very bad, or perhaps you are still angry that I never wrote you from France….”

“No! No, it was not meant vindictively at all. But, oh dear, now that I’ve bored you to the brink of death, perhaps you’ll cease to love me….” The word love clanged and echoed in her ears, and the skin of her face and neck began to turn a shade of red she would not previously have thought possible. There it was, her tendency to blunder and misspeak, which she kept believing herself, erroneously, beyond. “I mean, perhaps you will cease to like me—”

“Love?” Leland’s sincere blue eyes opened wide at her, and he straightened his broad torso against the carriage seat.

“Oh, I didn’t—” Carolina stuttered.

“Do you love me?”

She found that she smiled at the very suggestion—it was an involuntary, awkward smile, which she hoped the dim light prevented her beau from examining too closely. They were arranged near each other on the seat, and though their faces were shadowed their breathing had grown quite noticeable. “Yes,” she heard herself say, with courage from some inner source unknown to her.

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“You know,” Leland began, taking up her hand, “I have been saying that very phrase to myself, ‘I love her,’ ‘I love her,’ all day, but I didn’t think it was possible you would love me in return.”

“Not possible? How could you think…” But Carolina drowned out her own words with a disbelieving laugh.

“I’m not much for flirtation, and I have never paid ladies as much attention as they long for. But neither have I ever met a girl like you. You are as lovely as any of them, but there is something so very unusual about you. You are more alive than any of them. More real. You are not so simpering or coddled. Oh—I don’t know what it is.” He shook his head, as though he were frustrated with his inability to express himself. He looked down at their hands, clasping each other on her lap. “Oh, Carolina—how I love you.” The movement of the carriage jostled both their bodies as it ferried them on, into the night. A lush, leafy darkness was tangible just outside the windows, but everything beyond the simple black confines of the carriage was uninteresting to either party at that moment. She pressed her lashes into her still-red cheeks, and let the sweetness of those words settle in around her tongue and into the back corners of her mouth.

“Really?” she whispered.

“Do you not believe me?”

“It’s only that it’s beyond belief.”

“I love you.” Leland lifted her hands up, and began kissing each of her fingers. “But now I’ve said it three times, and you haven’t really said it at all! Tell me.”

“Yes.” She kept her eyes closed, for the swelling of her heart was almost too much. It was a very lucky thing she was sitting right then, because the emotions within her were so wild that she knew her equilibrium had escaped her. “I love you.”

Leland’s head bent toward hers, and he moved one hand to cup the place where her dress made a rather narrow definition of her waist. His nose nestled into her hair, and his lips began to press gently against the skin of her neck. These soft touches sent such tremors all over her body that her eyeballs rolled back and her full lips parted and she felt she would have to be very still, lest she cry out.