City of Ash

Geneva

C
HICAGO
, 1888

I
remember very well the night that changed everything, although of course I could not know it then. One could not tell at the start that it would be different from any other night, because even the lavish display of Louise Berkstad’s ballroom could not disguise the fact that the same faces wandered among the vases of blooming night jasmine perfuming the air, nor that the same musicians played the same tunes beneath a ceiling painted deep blue and spangled with stars of phosphorescent paint, nor that the same matrons with their judging glances—my grandmother included—sat pretending not to gossip beside the huge stone fountain dripping into a “pond” decorated with moss and lily pads sprinkled with gold dust.

I was twenty-three and self-assured in that way only favored daughters could be, the heiress to Stratford Mining, who was fondly chastised for racing carriages in the park and forgiven for flirting too obviously with boys at dances. My father encouraged my high spirits. He was my first and best audience; he laughed when people worried over the way I pushed at convention and said, “Let the young be young. As long as it doesn’t interfere with my business, I don’t see the harm.”

I was conversing with artists and philosophers at his suppers before I was fourteen. By fifteen, I served as his hostess along with my grandmother, my mother having died when I was nine. At eighteen, he made me the trustee of his art patronage, which
was extensive—my father loved art as I did; portraits of him hung above nearly every mantel in our house, and he had a room devoted to sculpture: classical nudes, Grecian beauties, muscled Roman youths. And though I had no artistic talent of my own, I did have a talent for introducing artists to the society that would support them. By the time I was twenty-one, I had gained a reputation for taste and originality that belonged to a woman twice my age. I thought I knew everything.

There’s the challenge fate loves best, isn’t it? I was ripe for a fall and so … the apple.

Nathan Langley was the scion of an old society family that had lost everything in the crash of Jay Cooke & Company. His father had committed suicide; his mother died soon after. Everyone knew she’d ended her days in an asylum, though her son refused to speak of it. Nathan had been forced to go into trade, and he proved to be good at business—something society never quite forgives, preferring destitute gentility to ambition, but Nathan had enough of a pedigree that we could afford to be gracious.

I had known him for some time, though we had never been formally introduced. Rather to say, I knew
of
him. He was older than I, and off to a university in Boston before I was out of short skirts. By the time he returned to Chicago, I was fully grown, and as aware of my own charms as a woman could be. He was sandy haired, blue eyed, finely muscled in the way that meant he worked at it. And he had the advantage of not being one of the feckless, spoiled, and barely grown young men of my circle. He was someone new. Someone … intriguing.

He seemed equally intrigued. “Ginny Stratford,” he said, eyeing my décolletage with a practiced eye as we danced. “How you have grown.”

“I could say the same for you,” I said.

He leaned close to whisper, “How well we look together. Look at how they watch us.”

“It’s because they’re afraid I’ll do something outrageous,” I teased.

“Ah yes. I’ve heard rumors about you.”

“Interesting ones, I hope.”

“Interesting.” He laughed—I liked his smile, his straight white teeth. “Yes, I should say they are at least that.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I told him.

“No? Oh now, that is a pity.” He pulled me closer than was proper, and I let him. “Don’t tell me you’re as staid and traditional as the other girls in this room after all.”

“Would you be disappointed if it were true?”

“Devastated,” he said

I laughed. “So tell me, Mr. Langley, which is the most interesting rumor you’ve heard?”

“Hmmm … which one? There were so many,” he teased. “I think it must be that you were the muse for that poem of Jonathan Hastings’s. I can’t remember the name of it.”

“
Lilith in the Garden,
” I said. “And that happens to be true.” What was true as well was that I’d lost my virtue to Hastings when I was eighteen, in the guest room of my father’s house while Papa waited tea for him in the parlor.

Nathan Langley raised his eyebrow at me as if he’d guessed that as well. “Well, then, I suppose I should read it.”

“If you like.”

“Yes, I should like. I wonder what secrets are to be found within it?”

“I have no secrets, Mr. Langley. Ask anyone.”

“I beg to disagree. I rather think you have a great many secrets, Miss Stratford.” His smile said that he wished to be one of them, and I felt a little shiver of the kind I’d never felt before.

He was not anyone’s choice for me, which is why he became the choice I made for myself. But it was more than that. Nathan was as impatient with social niceties as I. That night I danced with him three times, much to the dismay of my grandmother, who shook her head at me from where she sat talking with her friends. I would have danced with him again but for the fact that my card was nearly full before I’d met him. I was … entranced by him, I suppose. By the things he said, by the way he talked to me, as if I were an experienced woman—which I was not, Jonathan Hastings notwithstanding, as it was only the one time, and not as I’d dreamed passion would be. The way Nathan looked at me was the way a man looked at a woman he wanted,
and it made me realize how badly the other men I’d known compared. My experience with Jonathan Hastings had been quick and soon over. I had thought it love, but I’d been too young to understand how to be a lover, and he had not bothered to teach me. And here was Nathan Langley, who it seemed increasingly did wish to teach me … something. He made me feel as no one else had ever done.

Our first kiss was in the night garden at a soiree celebrating the newest sculpture by one of my father’s artists, a man of great talent though little grace and charm, whom I’d managed, with no small effort, to make the most coveted guest of the season.

“Tell me why you like his
Leda,
” Nathan said and then listened with an intensity I’d never known as I spoke of sublimity and the purity of love, and when I asked him what he’d thought of it, he looked at me consideringly and said,