By The Sea, Book One: Tess (20 page)

As it happened, the race was delayed for
some time while several aggressive steamers were moved well away
from the starting line. It was a slow, boring business, and Aaron
gave the order to have a light meal served on the afterdeck for his
friends who—like most of the fleet—were becoming fed up with
Dunraven's antics.

Aaron and Tess stood away from the guests at
the starboard rail, alone for the first time that day.

"See that single-stacker with the clipper
bow? A nice bit of work, that," Aaron said to her in a pleasant,
formal voice for everyone to hear. Then, in a whisper he added, "I
meant what I said last night, darling."

"It's a beautiful yacht," agreed Tess in
equally clear tones. Then, more softly: "I don't hold you to
promises spoken in passion." She wanted him to insist.

"It won't be easy," he murmured, which she
did not want to hear. "I have a quiet place on the South Shore of
Long Island. We'll live there. It won't be easy," he repeated.

To Tess it sounded faint-hearted. She moved
a little farther forward, away from the guests. "I've told you,
Aaron: I don't take your offer seriously." There was injury in her
tone.

"Tess, don't start," he pleaded. "I meant,
it won't be easy for
you.
You will be isolated. As for me,
I'll have all
I
want," he added with a burning look.

Tess, feeling manipulative, shifted her gaze
to the fleet around them. The
Enchanta
had been shepherded
out of the way with a cluster of other yachts, both sail and steam.
Their captain had throttled back to allow a poky gaff cutter to
creep to windward across the
Enchanta's
bow. A steam yacht
alongside them was doing the same. Idly Tess surveyed the elegantly
dressed group of young men and women lolling on the port deck of
the larger yacht. Women in white, men in blazers—a small handful of
Society, indistinguishable from other handfuls on other yachts.

But there was one, taller than the rest,
with a soldier's carriage, who caught and held her attention. He
was laughing at someone's remark and he looked far, far handsomer
than she had dared to remember.

She turned abruptly away, her blood draining
from her face. Aaron, of course, had turned to see the reason for
her paleness. "Well, well—Hillyard. You overreact, Tess; he isn't a
demon from hell," she heard Aaron say behind her.

"To me he is," she said faintly. "Can we
rejoin your guests?"

"Not until you compose yourself. Turn
around, Tess. Look more natural." When she hesitated he added, "I
must insist."

She did turn then, slowly, but her eyes were
downcast, her cheeks now flushed. "This is very hard," she said in
a choking voice.

"Tess, upon my word I do not like to see
this," murmured Aaron. "You were bound to run into him sooner or
later. How can your feelings run so deep?"

"I ... they run wide more than they run deep
... so many different emotions ..." She stared at her white shoes
so that he wouldn't see her eyes glazed over with tears.

"Look up, Tess," Aaron commanded, "and watch
me." He let go with a jaunty wave to Hillyard. "I could kill him
now, but you see I am still capable of the small civilized gesture.
That is what lets this world go round, Tess—the small gesture. You
cannot hope to survive in the world of Society without mastering
it, Tess. A mistress is permitted melodramatic behavior; a wife is
not. It will be bad enough for you. Don't make it worse
.
Look at him,
Tess
."

Tess lifted her gaze to the port deck of the
elegant steamer alongside. Hillyard had seen them. He was gripping
the rail with both hands, a stricken look on his face. His curt nod
in their direction was less an acknowledgment than a threat.

Tess sucked in her breath, then let it out
slowly. It cost her everything, but she managed a cool, offhand
look in Hillyard's direction.

His face flushed a deep red, and he turned
on his heel and left the small group of which he was part. One or
two stared after him curiously.

"Will that be all, sir?"
Tess said
under her breath to Aaron.

"There's the gun for the ten-minute
warning!" cried Landis behind her. "At last we'll see a contest!"
He sounded relieved. Landis, and everyone else, was ready to be
diverted by a well-fought race.

The contest of September 12, 1895, was not
fated to be that race.

There was, in fact, no contest at all.
Valkyrie
dutifully sailed over the starting line, but then
Dunraven brought the yacht back immediately and dropped its racing
flag. It was over; the Americans had won by default. Dunraven's
bizarre behavior had cost him the Cup.

History would show that the bad taste of the
1895 defense got more bitter still in the months afterward: charges
of fraud were published and refuted in papers and magazines, and a
committee of inquiry set out to investigate Dunraven's claims. It
took the New York Yacht Club five hundred and fifty-odd pages of
testimony to set the record straight. It would be almost ninety
years before the cry of "Foul play!" went up again quite so loudly,
and then it would be hurled by Americans—at the Australians.

But on this particular Thursday Jarvis spoke
for everyone when he said, "If ever a fox went after sour grapes,
it surely was that crybaby Dunraven."

The return trip from the last race was a
desultory affair, with little cheering and lingering confusion
among the spectator fleet; the sense of anticlimax was profound.
Jarvis threatened to write a letter to the Cup Committee, and
Landis predicted that diplomatic relations between the two
countries would sink to an all-time low. Aaron sat a little to one
side, scarcely allowing himself to look at Tess.

And Tess? Tess was still in shock. Her heart
had sprung open like a suitcase fallen off a train, and all the
feelings that had been packed carefully away lay scattered around
her like jumbled clothes. She could not separate love from duty,
passion from anger, hostility from hunger. One lone conviction
stood out, like a bright red scarf among drab greys:
Aaron has
just lost faith in me.

She stole looks at her lover, who had struck
a carelessly elegant pose in his wicker chair: legs crossed,
stroking his goatee, apparently immersed in Jarvis's amiable
babble. How would she convince him now that she loved him? Given
the tumult of her feelings, how could she be sure now that she
did?

"Miss Moran—I say, Miss Moran—you really do
look under the weather. Perhaps you ought to lie down."

Everyone became solicitous, and Tess took
herself below to escape their scrutiny. She flung herself into her
berth sick with tension. Whether it was the nausea, or some inner
mechanism designed for survival, Tess fell asleep immediately and
did not wake until she heard the clamor of chain running free; they
were anchoring somewhere. She opened her eyes, drugged with sleep.
The pillow beneath her lashes was wet.

A
few more minutes,
she thought,
and then I'll face it.

She did not know how much later it was when
she awoke the second time, this time instantly. Through the open
port came the call, "Ahoy
Enchanta
! Ahoy
Enchanta!"
There was no mistaking the voice: Edward Hillyard.

She sprang up to the brass-bound porthole in
time to see Hillyard tie up a small skiff to the gangway and dash
up it. Aaron was at the head. They exchanged a word or two, and
then both men disappeared from her view.

"No, no," she whispered desperately. "I
haven't worked it all out in my head yet!" It didn't surprise her
that Hillyard had invited himself aboard; nothing surprised her any
more. She ran to the stateroom door to listen. In a few seconds she
heard them making their way to
Enchanta's
library. It was
late afternoon; she had no idea whether Jarvis and the others were
still on board.

Something—the instinct of an eighteen-year
old girl, not of a millionaire's mistress—made her turn the key in
her door. If only she could be spared the pain and trauma of the
scene to follow. She began pacing the length of the small cabin.
Seven steps forward:
her feelings about Hillyard?
Seven
steps aft:
were of a woman scorned.
Seven steps forward:
it wasn't love, it was simple heartbreak.
Seven steps aft:
the heartbreak that comes from a first betrayal.
Seven steps
forward:
Aaron hadn't taken away her innocence.
Seven steps
aft:
Edward Hillyard had.

She went to the door, turned the key, and
tiptoed down the passageway to the closed door of the library
cabin. Hillyard's voice was loud, furious; Aaron's, controlled but
scathing.

"She's a
girl,
you bastard; a
child!"

"It can't possibly be that you're
jealous."

"That's far too noble an emotion to waste on
you!"

"Then I confess: I'm at a loss as to your
motive."

"Something you would never understand,
Gould: to right a hideous wrong!"

"My dear young man, that's what I did. When
first I laid eyes on Tess at the Servants' Ball, she was looking
very wronged indeed."

There was a pause.

"That was unforgivable of me. I had some
absurd idea of showing all of them up—"

"And instead you showed up only poor
Tess."

"Not by choice, damn you! I ... I'd had a
row with Mrs. Oelrichs at the Casino that afternoon. She got Henry
to send a note uninviting me and threatening to call in a little
loan if I had the temerity to show up at his place.
You've
never been financially embarrassed; your father handed you a career
in finance and a fortune to go with it. All I got was a
two-hundred-year-old name."

"—which you seem determined to make a
laughing stock of. What did you expect to gain by trotting out Tess
as one of them? If it was something as stupid as a slap at
Cornelia, then you succeeded. But the Hillyard name has become the
longest-running joke in Newport in the bargain."

"I don't know what you're talking
about."

"Of course you do. You proposed to Cornelia
on the night of the Breakers Ball, and she laughed in your
face."

"Because that fool Baron Lewandowski polka'd
onto the scene!

"Not because of the Baron, dear boy. Not
even because you're penniless—after all, Cornelia is looking for an
old name to graft her fortune to, and you have that. No, Cornelia
spurned you for the same reason that every debutante in town will:
because she has no great desire to catch you in bed with another
man."

"That's a filthy lie!"

"Is it? How old are you, Hillyard? Near to
thirty? Perhaps it's time you learned a trade. Perhaps it's time
you put aside your boyhood loves—and your love of boys—and settled
down. With someone like Tess, for instance."

"You're a pig. You've finished with her,
haven't you?"

"I said,
like
Tess—"

"And now you're throwing her bones overboard
to the sharks. You're an absolute pig—"

Tess heard a scuffle, and then the sound of
someone being thrown against furniture, and glass smashing to the
cabin sole.

"Stand away from me, Hillyard!"
came
Aaron's breathless voice. "I'll shoot without thinking twice about
it!"

A gun ... the small gun from his desk.

The library door was unlocked. Tess threw it
open and hurled herself toward Aaron, crying, "Don't shoot him,
Aaron!"

"Get out of here, Tess!"

But her mind, like a train, was locked in a
track:
Get the gun, get the gun ... gun, gun, gun.
With both
hands she lunged for it, clutched warm flesh and cold steel, as an
angry child grapples with a playmate over a coveted toy.

"Tess, stop it! Will you stop—"

The gun went off, a horrendous noise which
frightened Tess more than the sensation that a knitting needle had
been jabbed through her knee. A distressed sound almost of
embarrassment escaped her, as if she'd committed some
faux
pas
in Mrs. Astor's drawing room. And then the sense of
self-destruction: searing, crippling. Her knee became a fireball,
blinding her with bright pain, consuming her in itself.

And then black.

To the north and east of the colonial
section of Newport winds a road with a melancholy name: Farewell
Street. Cemeteries, including the Common Burying Ground, line
either side of it, and the casual traveler, finding himself
surrounded on all sides by gravestones, inevitably drives a little
more somberly in their midst. Sons and daughters of the Revolution
are buried here, and witches, pirates, and privateers. Slaves who
never got their freedom and dealers in the China trade are here.
Ordinary citizens have stopped on here, and many servants, and a
few masters.

Ball-boys are buried here.

Next to a mound of frozen brown earth, two
young women set their backs to the raw northeast wind and prayed in
silence for the soul of a skinny, cocky little boy who somehow
slipped through the cracks of God's great design. One prayer,
heartfelt and humble, was lifted straight to heaven on the wings of
angels. The other, just as heartfelt but utterly defiant, hovered
uncertainly over the grave and its mourners, like the smoke from
Cain's sacrifice.

After a while the women moved on, the
thinner one pinning her cape to her chest, trapping its heat to her
thin frame; the more beautiful one, picking her way cautiously with
a cane over the icy ground.

"Lean on me, Tess," begged the smaller,
black-haired girl.

"And knock you clean over? Don't be daft,
Mag. I'm getting quite used to hobbling over rock and ridge. I'd
better," she added grimly.

A cab was waiting for them on Farewell; the
horses stamped impatiently, eager to get back to their barn. In
December there is no twilight: only sun and no sun, and the horses
were aware, even if Tess seemed not to be, that another long, cold
night was at hand.