Splendor: A Luxe Novel (25 page)

Buck turned his smooth, larded face at an angle. “Shall I get Mr. Bouchard?” As soon as she nodded, Buck summoned the two lady’s maids with a flick of his hand. Claire did not meet the bride’s eyes on her way out the narrow, arched doorframe. The sisters had barely been able to speak, as there were always so many attendants about that week, but Carolina could see in her older sister’s glances that she was happy for this fairy-tale ending, even if she herself was still wearing a dress of plain black. She had done her red hair up in a braided and more ornate arrangement than usual; that was something. What was important, the younger sister told herself, was that Claire was on the premises, file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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that she would be present in a secret way, when her last remaining family member was married.

Since there was no father figure in Carolina’s life, her fiancé’s father had kindly offered to play that part in the ceremony. She thought, sadly, of Mr. Longhorn, and how he would have enjoyed doing her that service, and of her own father, who she could scarcely remember, and who surely would have been shocked by the news that his younger daughter would ever be wed on such a grand scale. All of a sudden she found she was in a hurry to begin the processional, and she felt that every moment separating her from that first kiss with her husband would be a kind of torture. The little smile she had given Buck now suffused her entire face.

“My, Miss Broad, you do make a lovely bride.”

Carolina’s smile fell when she realized it was not her future father-in-law who had appeared in the far corner of the reflection, but rather the unfortunately familiar figure of Tristan Wrigley. He was dressed in black tails and slacks, a gray waistcoat, and a dress shirt with an arrow collar, just like a guest at a very fine wedding. He wore the costume well, and with the handsome modeling of his face he probably did look to the ushers standing sentry on the church steps like the product of an august lineage and extensive breeding.

“How did you get here?” she whispered.

“Oh, Miss Broad,” he replied in the same cozy tone. “Everybody in New York knows that you and Leland Bouchard are getting married at the Grace Church today. I just walked in, along with the rest of your fancy friends. Or did you think you were really going to get rid of me with a twenty-dollar handout, as though I had just been some fellow you let hold your wrap one evening long ago?” His knowing, congratulatory smile did not fade once during this speech, but Carolina could hear the threat in his words. “You’re going to have to leave now,” she began a little shakily. “My father-in-law will be coming. It would be most improper if you were here when he arrived.”

“Indeed it would be. Although—he is not your father-in-law yet.”

“He will be shortly,” she snapped back, hoping he hadn’t noticed the unsteadiness in her voice.

“Well, all right. But I thought you deserved fair warning that I was here, and that if the reverend should ask whether or not any of the assembled knew any reason why the man and woman in question should not be wed, that I may feel compelled to speak….”

“No.” Carolina’s gaze broke with the reflection in the mirror now, and she turned to stare at Tristan.

“You can’t. Don’t.”

“Don’t?” Tristan’s fair eyebrows rose delicately. “But why would I do you the favor of not telling what, you must acknowledge, are the facts of the situation—that you are a former maid and an impostor and that your current wealth was derived from a most improper relationship—when you have been so very cold to me?”

“It was not improper,” she returned, heat rising to the skin of her cheeks. For there was one fact of her personal history that made her an ideal bride and also happened to be true, and that was that she would come to the altar a virgin. Some angry instinct reared at the thought that Tristan might somehow rob her of this.

“That is not for me to judge,” her tormentor replied with an easy shrug.

“What do you want?” All of her was ticking, and she tried to remind herself of the self-possession and resolve she had acquired along with those other jewels and paintings and stocks and bonds. He may have been hustling longer, but he was stupider than she was, and she knew that if she kept her head she could handle him.

“I am not greedy,” Tristan answered evenly. “I just want to be compensated for my part in making you a very rich lady.”

Carolina took a sharp breath in through her nostrils, and willed the color in her cheeks to fade. She spoke slowly and seriously, looking into those glittering eyes. “I swear, I will make it worth your while. Only, leave now, please—”

In the moment before the door to Carolina’s dressing room burst open again, she saw in his face that she had persuaded him. That he was ready to go peaceably and let her have her wedding. But before they could shake hands, loud voices closed in on them from the antechamber. Both froze in anticipation.

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“He is probably nobody, Leland, I will take care of it.” Her heart dropped when she recognized the older Bouchard’s voice. “Only, you must not see your bride!”

“Father, all due respect, she is my bride, and if I suspect she is being chased by some old beau…” Carolina’s lips parted. Perhaps, if she thought quickly, she could conjure a convincing story. But before anything came, Leland had charged into the room and grabbed Tristan by both lapels, pushing him backward, beyond her, against the huge mirror. It shuddered with the impact, throwing beams of light across the stone walls. Leland’s father and Buck hovered, silent and concerned, just outside the room.

“You bastard!” Leland shouted. His broad face had turned a shade of red not unlike his fiancée’s a few moments before. Carolina realized he had harbored a jealousy toward the handsome man at the opera all this time, that the idea of his girl belonging to another angered him. The drama in the capillaries of his face made his eyes appear especially blue. His dress and hair were more smoothed than usual, and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking, in the middle of it all, that he looked awfully handsome in his groom’s finery. “How dare you come here today—on our wedding day! How dare you harass my fiancée at all, much less in God’s house!”

Tristan’s face fell, unpleasantly, into confusion and fear. He glanced toward Carolina. Leland loomed over him—he was by far the larger of the two. She was distracted for a moment by the idea that the first man she’d ever kissed and the man she was about to marry were on the verge of coming to blows, and couldn’t help but feel a little exhilarated by the chest beating. Not bad for a girl who a year ago nobody paid any attention to, she couldn’t help but think.

“What are you looking at?” Leland was yelling at the Lord & Taylor salesman. Carolina glanced at Buck and old Bouchard, hoping they would intervene, but neither would meet her eye. Meanwhile, Leland struck Tristan across the face with the back of his hand, using enough force to split his lip. “Tell me why you’re here!”

“Miss Broad?” Tristan said, helplessly.

But she was distracted by the blood that had been knocked from Tristan’s lip and onto the perfect white front of her skirt.

“Don’t speak to her!”

Tristan had begun to struggle now, but Leland was too strong for him. They pushed back and forth against one another, but had soon toppled over, falling to the ground at Carolina’s feet. She watched, with horror, as more blood was smeared against white silk, and feathers and pearls began to come dislodged from the fabric.

“Please, Lina…,” Tristan said again. He had been fully overpowered, and his adversary was holding his head down against the stone floor; there was a truly helpless quality in his voice now, and something familiar, something that suggested how well they had known each other. Leland was shak ing him, banging his head against the hard gray surface of the floor. If he kept it up, she realized, Tristan would soon be knocked out cold.

“Stop!” She wailed, her hands rising to her cheeks.

Very slowly, Leland turned his blue eyes on his bride. All three parties were panting a little. It was not only her gown, but Leland’s white dress shirt that was now rumpled and bloody. They were no longer going to be married that afternoon, not with their wedding finery undone like this. For several seconds, he stared at her before quietly saying: “Why, my love?” When his question was met with silence, the softness left him, and he asked in the voice of dawning realization: “What is he to you?” Her hands crept over her eyes, but that did nothing to prevent the reality of what was going to happen, what had already happened, from settling into her consciousness like a winter chill. She asked her tears to hold awhile, and found that they obeyed.

“Mr. Bouchard, Mr. Buck, will you leave us?” she said, bringing her hands from her face to her corseted waist. Now, with the truth brimming in her throat, a strange calm overcame her. “Tristan, go—you have done your worst.”

Leland stumbled, slowly, to his feet. The man he had struggled so roughly with crawled in the direction of the door, and then pushed himself up and began to run. Leland’s father and Buck nodded to each other, and absented themselves from the room. All this time, Leland had maintained an intense and wary gaze in file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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Carolina’s direction. She could not bear to go on meeting it.

His face was full of questions, but all he said was, “Tristan…? When we saw him at the opera, you told me he was nobody.”

“Darling,” she began, casting her eyes down on the ruined dress and clasping her hands nervously together. The term of endearment echoed false in her ears; it was not the sort of word a girl like her used.

When she spoke again, it was in her own voice, and to tell the whole, messy truth. “There are a few things about me that I really ought to have told you sooner.” Thirty Four

Perhaps the heat has gotten to the city’s most well-heeled citizens, for it has been a month of rushed weddings, bizarre coiffures, and unforgivable behavior. In the final case I am speaking of Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker, of course, who has been seen all around town with the visiting prince of Bavaria, without the slightest attempt to feign even a modicum of subtlety about it. What peculiar cocktails has the demimonde been drinking?

——FROM CITÉ CHATTER, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1900

MRS. HENRY SCHOONMAKER WAS PERFECTLY content to step outside the gothic church on lower Broadway and into a brilliant afternoon. She wore a pert little smile, despite the whispering and hissing that followed her everywhere, and a hat that was as broad as her shoulders and festooned with cloth roses and other delights. The wedding of Carolina Broad had been called off most abruptly and unusually, but it was just as well, for the outfit she wore—a fitted ivory bolero with gold stitching, and a dress of pomegranate-colored crepe de chine, cut to best display her naturally tiny waist—was too flattering to waste on God. Although there was something faintly disappointing about having a girl whose reputation she had allowed to be associated with her own make such an embarrassment of herself, she wasn’t particularly bothered. Nor was she ruffled by the unkind stares of women who, a week ago, had considered her the wronged party in the Schoonmaker scandal. Soon she wouldn’t need any of their friendship, or even that hard-won surname, which had in the last few days begun to chafe.

They had been intoxicating days. She and the prince had dined together every night, and stayed up long past supper dancing wherever the champagne was cold and expensive. How many aspects of herself had she recognized in this strong, sparkling nobleman! For he was tall, like her, dark-haired and blue-eyed, and he knew with great certainty that his life should be about having the best of everything. She had dreamt of meeting her match in looks, in taste, in wealth—she’d thought Henry had been that match, but Henry didn’t have her vision, and anyway it didn’t matter anymore because even if he got it, at this late file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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date, he still couldn’t make her a princess. Not a real one.

“Now that old Schoonmaker is dead, the whole household has gone to pieces…,” said Gemma Newbold, exiting the church behind Penelope on the arm of her older brother, Reginald, and using a speaking voice that, despite its decorous quiet, was not meant to go unheard.

Penelope exhaled noisily, and shrugged in a way that ensured that Miss Newbold, who had not yet received any marriage proposals, despite her supposed beauty, would not miss it. Europeans, she had discovered in a few days’ time, were flashier in the way they cut their rivals, and did not fall all over themselves when a married woman had a little fun on the side. Let them talk, the prince had said to her whenever she put on a little modesty, and by Sunday she was beginning to think as he did. That was how she was going to live from now on.

Without turning back, she descended the Grace Church steps and let her driver help her into her polished phaeton. Then she told him to take her to the New Netherland.

Late last night, Frederick had been telling her about his family’s winter castle in the Alps, where he planned to spend that Christmas, skiing and exchanging rare gifts with his many cousins, and he suggested that it would be far more enjoyable if she were there at his side. December was soon, she’d thought, as the idea of how much bigger and fancier her life was going to be started to settle in; but then, she had never been a girl who was shy of working fast. On the ride to the hotel, she composed a note to Henry.

“Peter,” she said, once her driver had helped her down to the street, “please deliver this to Mr.

Schoonmaker.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said. They all referred to him as a boy, even though he was practically her father’s age. “When would you like me to come back for you?”

“Oh—that won’t be necessary.”

There was only one piece of her seduction left. Her dramatic red lips pressed up into a smile, as she passed Peter a fifty-cent piece. She was telling him good-bye.