Splendor: A Luxe Novel (23 page)

“I have been very bad,” she said, not as defiantly as she had intended, as he escorted her back to their file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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table, where nearly eight courses had passed with the young Mrs. Schoonmaker taking nearly as many bites.

“I hope your countrymen will not judge you too harshly.” The prince pushed her chair in as she sat, before taking the cushioned seat beside her. He drew the bottle of champagne from the silver ice bucket, which was sweating at the center of the table, and refilled their glasses. He cast his blue eyes across the vast room, which was filled with round tables and the busy skirts that overflowed from underneath them, the chandelier light falling in flattering gold speckles across the merry diners. Prince Frederick very nearly glittered.

“Of course they will.” Penelope adjusted the white gloves that reached several inches beyond her elbows, and then rested her chin on her fist. She had had more champagne than usual, and it was causing her to wallow, which was terrible for her complexion, and not otherwise an activity she liked to be noted for.

Still she spun her glass about, melancholically, before sipping.

“My poor Mrs. Schoonmaker,” the prince lamented. “She is so impossibly sad.”

“I am not sad,” she returned. “Only a little tired. It has been a very long day.” This was true. It had been sad and lonely, and had required a great deal of poise. Meanwhile, she had stood for much too long, and she had been wearing her new black shoes, leather with grosgrain trim, and they had pinched her toes. Though the fatigue did not bother her half as much as the idea that the prince might pity her; she was not a girl to be pitied.

But in the next moment she stopped caring about that, for he placed the back of his hand on her shoulder and drew it down her arm, his nails gliding along her skin, and then the silk glove, so that little tremors spread over the rest of her frame. She hadn’t been touched like that in a long time. Her eyes closed, almost involuntarily, and she found that she wanted to be kissed by him again very badly. This desire, she realized with a slight chill, had not a thing to do with making any husband jealous, or causing any diverting scandal.

Then she felt his warm breath by the dark strands of hair, which were brushed over her ear. “You would not look so sad if you were a princess,” he said.

There was no collection of words that could possibly have been more delicious. Though spoken with purpose, they created a giddy, girlish sensation, of a variety that Penelope had not experienced in a year or more. It was wonderful, and she kept her eyes closed for another few moments, as the room began to spin with an emotion not entirely unlike love. For the first time in some years, she wondered if the title Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker wasn’t the highest she might attain.

Thirty

Sergeant Teddy Cutting has returned from the Pacific, which was cause for Gemma Newbold, who people used to say was old Mrs. Cutting’s first choice to become her only son’s wife, to wear a smile yesterday, along with a very fashionable bonnet, even though the occasion upon which he reentered society was the solemn burial of Mr. William Schoonmaker….

——FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE

NEW YORK IMPERIAL, THURSDAY, JULY 19, 1900

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“THE PUBLIC DOES LIKE THIS SORT OF THING,” Davis Barnard said from the sideboard where he was pouring whiskey into coffee cups. The newspaperman was referring to the funeral tidbits Diana had fed him the day before. He had a dark, dramatic brow, a rather pinched nose, and he filled out his waistcoat in a way that, from his own, oft-expressed point of view, symbolized good living. “But it is my personal belief that at this point they would be far more interested in the personal diary of Diana Holland, avec illustrations. You, my dear, could sell papers.” Diana smiled distantly from the daybed by the window, where she lounged in a long navy skirt and a shell-pink blouse that fluttered around her small, curved frame. She had come to know Mr. Barnard’s narrow quarters, on the third floor of an apartment building on East Sixteenth Street, quite well: the cracks in the twilight blue paint; the rows of framed prints covering the fissures as best they could; the large cut-glass punch bowl on the cabinet; the boxing gloves strung up over the fireplace, which, in the summer, was used as a storage place for books. There were several books in that pile that she had a mind to rescue before her departure on Tuesday. “Ah, but that is all talk,” she replied, and turned toward the window, where great puffs of white clouds were wandering across a devastatingly clear sky.

Davis gave her a look and then brought her and his friend—George Grass, the writer, sitting on the cane-backed chair on the other side of the window from Diana’s daybed—their coffee. “I don’t believe a word of it, do you, Grass?”

Grass put his long, horselike face close to his mug and drank. All of him was long and horselike, and his far-reaching legs were crossed in the manner of a seasoned flaneur. Upon his arrival half an hour ago, Diana had determined he was ugly, but interesting.

“I have no idea what you two are talking of.” He extended his porcelain cup, in a congenial gesture, so that it made a clinking noise against Diana’s. “Gossip is just a tool to distract people who have nothing better to do from feeling jealous of those few of us still remaining with noble hearts.” Diana tossed her head of abbreviated curls and laughed; Davis made a sour face. “It is the tool that bought the whiskey you are enjoying,” he retorted, but Diana could see that he didn’t really mind. That he was a hack was one of Davis’s favorite jokes.

“Don’t think I am not grateful.” Grass smiled, revealing his brown teeth. “Art never paid for anything.”

“Come, though, Miss Holland,” Davis went on, ignoring the sad turn of his friend’s comments. “The next time you run half way around the globe, I don’t want to find out via a telegram asking for money, and demanding that I print your official alibi in the papers.” In days she would be gone again. She could hardly wait. To her, it felt like years since she had been alone with Henry; it was a special kind of agony, being so long removed from their secret society of two. At night, she fell asleep imagining just what kind of kiss would join them together again. Plus, disapproving eyes and vitriolic murmurs followed her everywhere these days, and her mother charged around the house in silent fury, waiting for the story to officially break and for her family to be ruined once and for all. It was not a situation in which she longed to linger.

“I can see the joke, Miss Holland, playing just under the surface.” Grass’s piercing gaze was on her, not unkindly. Diana tried to put on an enigmatical expression, but a glowing quality gave her away. “You’re up to something!”

“Don’t be angry, Mr. Barnard.” Her eyes darted to her old friend, standing just beyond the cane-backed chair. She sank her teeth into her plump lower lip at the thought of what she was confessing. “But I do have an escape plan.”

“Where are you going?” Davis asked sadly. She had long suspected that his affection for her was too large to be based solely on her ability to collect stories about the doings of the well-heeled classes, and tried her best to be not quite so lovely.

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“To Paris, this time for real.”

“Alone?”

She blushed.

“Don’t ask her that,” Grass put in. “We will know soon enough,” he added philosophically.

“Will you still send me telegrams, when you are eating snails and trading romantic secrets with the viscomtesse de blah-bitty-blah?”

“No, she will not.” Grass’s voice had grown excited with the picture he was conjuring. “She will be busy writing novels. As soon as she has gotten far enough away from this frighteningly puritanical country, her mind will be set free, and she will be able to turn all of her observations into richly drawn characters and intricately themed stories.”

“But what will she eat, dear Grass?” Barnard leaned against the wall, his arms crossing his chest skeptically.

“Baguette and red wine, pure art, filthy air. Look at her, she is made of rose petals, the world will take good care of her. And if it does not, we will have our hearts moved by such an exquisitely gorgeous tragedy.” He put down his cup and leaned toward the young lady in question. On his breath, there was the hint of a tooth going rotten. She was surprised by the urgency with which he addressed her case, although she knew she should be flattered, and after all, it was a very lively life. “My dear, you have made a good decision. Here you would be a pretty wife who everyone would forget in time. There—there you will become some ultimate version of yourself. Take it from me, no American can really see himself, or understand his country, when he is here, in the middle of all the brutal hubbub and hectic commerce. It effaces everything. You will see when you go. France is a very different country—each and every cobblestone there has played its part in history. Your eyes will be wide open.” When he had finished, his mouth remained open a few seconds, and his eyes were shining with the intensity of his words. She tried to appear worthy of such an impassioned speech. She wished Henry were there, to hear about their future home, to grow excited about the cobblestones and baguette and red wine.

Then her head filled up with Henry, and she began to wonder if he was too miserable, if Penelope was being really horrible, and how many times that day he had paused to imagine Diana disrobed. “To wide-open eyes, then,” she said, raising her coffee cup.

They all toasted again. “To wide-open eyes,” Grass and Barnard repeated in tandem.

“But you must promise you will miss me, Mr. Barnard, or I shall cry myself to sleep all across the Atlantic Ocean and doubt my choice,” she went on gaily.

“Ah, Miss Di, we will all of us miss you more than words can convey.” As Barnard and Grass turned to other topics, she found that her imagination kept drifting to a small window, above a twisting little street, which she pushed open in the early morning, when her body, like Henry’s beside her, was still soft with slumber.

Thirty One

When a lady is in a family way, she keeps her name out of the papers and her person out of sight. In recent years, some women have welcomed visitors when they were quite visibly with child, but it is not a practice I look very kindly upon.

——MRS. L. A. M. BRECKINRIDGE, THE LAWS OF BEING

IN WELL-MANNERED CIRCLES

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THE WALLS WERE DEEP RED. A LACY WHITE CANOPY obscured the ceiling above her. There was the framed mirror with the decorative bow, the chest of drawers with a high shine. She felt with her hands: Her belly was still swollen under the dressing gown she wore. It was summer. It was hot. A light sheen of sweat clung to her forehead and underneath her lower lip. Elizabeth opened her mouth, and tried to make a sound with her dry throat. She was exhausted; she had been in bed for days. Then the rest of it came flooding back.

In her dreams, Snowden preyed on her family. He snatched coins from their pockets and made off with her child in the night. But when she came to and saw the real him, he never had that air of lecherous, crouching evil. His humble features assumed a calm expression, and then he would douse a white hankie with a clear liquid, and put it over her mouth and nose, and in a few moments everything would go black.

Occasionally he would leave her conscious long enough for Mrs. Schmidt to bathe and feed her. Then it was back to sleep, where Will would sweep from heaven, as strong as ever and now winged, and scoop her up and take her to see her father, who was sitting on a cloud, watching over them, smoking a pipe and reciting long-forgotten poems. Sometimes the Will role was played by Teddy, the concerned eyes gray instead of pale blue, but it was always with the same tenderness that the male angel lifted her out of the white coverlets and carried her away.

Perhaps it was for this reason that she was unsurprised by the sound of a familiar voice in the hall quietly insisting upon seeing her.

“But, Mr. Cutting, as I said, it is highly irregular for a gentleman to visit a woman in her condition, especially when she is not well enough to receive in her parlor. If Elizabeth were awake, I am sure she would be mortified by the idea of you seeing her in her bedroom….”

“Mr. Cairns, I am sensible to your concerns, and believe me I have no interest in offending you or your wife. But Elizabeth is one of my oldest friends, we have known each other since we were children, and I am only here in the city for a short time. I am familiar with her tremendous sense of virtue, but I know she would make an exception this time. And with her own husband as chaperone, I think even Mrs.

Hamilton Breedfelt would approve.”

Elizabeth’s eyes were huge. Her breath was short. She waited, listening for more. When she heard nothing she tried to scream, but her unused vocal cords failed her. Then the door opened, and into the deceptively sunny room walked Snowden, followed shortly by Teddy. The simple sight of him at that moment was the kindest thing she could have hoped for herself. She gazed at the slender but pronounced facial features, which were the hallmark of his class, the sad gray eyes, his blond hair greased as usual but trimmed shorter than before, his cheeks soft, recently shaved. There was that patient, almost polite quality in his pose, and she saw—even from across the room where, for propriety’s sake, he lingered—that he was wounded by the sight of her sick bed, or maybe by the idea of her now being married to someone else. It made her want to cry, seeing him like that—even though she knew she should be begging him to help her—and she felt her throat constrict.

“Hello, Lizzie,” he said quietly. He was wearing his uniform, and he looked so solid and capable in it that her body relaxed a little. He’d come for her. He had made it through the door. Her state of duress would be easy for him to read; he was going to save her.