City of Secrets (3 page)

“Oh, look there, ma’am,” Louise said, pointing up the street on Maddie’s side.

On the pavement in front of Charing Cross Station, a young man with an old-fashioned folding-bellows camera on a tripod was attempting to take a photograph of a child with a dog, neither of whom seemed either eager or able to sit still for the operation.

The young man’s task was further complicated by a growing collection of friends of both the child—a girl, judging by its pinafore—and the dog. The other children scampered about, trying to examine the camera at closer range; the dog barked, setting up a chorus of doggy commentary; and the camera began to wobble on its tripod. The dog, which was a mangy specimen but of a formidable size, then leaped up on the young man’s waistcoat. The camera toppled over, caught just in time by an urchin in a ragged jacket, and the cameraman fell onto the pavement.

Maddie laughed aloud, and although the young man could not have heard her above the surrounding din, his eyes caught hers as he picked himself up, and his bemused gaze followed her as long as he could see her face framed in the cab window.

For some reason Maddie could not define, the incident raised her spirits. She supposed it was simply the merriment inherent in the little comedy, but she was sufficiently self-aware to know that the innocently adoring look given her by the young man had something to do with it. For whatever her gentlemen admirers might think, she had never been able to take male adoration for granted.

When she arrived five minutes later at the entrance to the Savoy, the smile lingered, dazzling the young footman who opened the door for her as she entered the hotel lobby with her graceful long-legged stride and a confident swish of her skirts.

Her smile widened a moment later when a voice called out,
“There
you are, my dear! Ah’ve been lookin’
every
where for you!”

The voice belonged, unmistakably, to Florence Wingate, who swooped down on Maddie from the other side of the lobby and enfolded her in a jasmine-scented embrace. The white lace all down the front of Florence’s bodice and the velvet trim on her pale suit-jacket whispered against Maddie’s cheek and hands as she attempted to subdue Florence without seeming to reject her very public welcome.

Mrs. Geoffrey Wingate was a fellow American, although she never ceased to lament that the British simply would
not
comprehend the difference between Missouri and South Carolina. She had taken “poor,
deah
Mrs. Malcolm” under her wing when, on Maddie’s first night in London, Florence had spotted her over her lobster dinner with only Louise for company and had declared that such an absurd situation must be rectified at once. Maddie had attempted to explain that she was perfectly content with her own company, being accustomed to it as an only child, brought up in a sheltered environment, but to persist in her protestations, she soon realized, would be churlish. Besides, Florence would dismiss them out of hand.

 Maddie had then become concerned that Florence would take it into her lovely blond head that it was masculine companionship Mrs. Malcolm needed and would dredge up an endless parade of gentlemen with dubious titles and antecedents for her to choose from. Florence was three or four years older than Maddie’s twenty-eight, and her husband, Geoffrey, was nearly twenty more than that, but theirs seemed to be a match of affection, if not deep passion. They were not constantly in each other’s company, as an infatuated young couple might be; yet they displayed an easy familiarity, as well as discreet indications of physical attraction, when they were together.

Florence lost no time—as she had lost none in making
herself intimate with Maddie—in extolling the virtues of such a union, not the least among them being each partner’s privilege of enjoying the attentions of any other 1ady or gentleman without having to justify it to the other or anyone else. In this, Maddie reflected, the Wingates were much more “European” than she ever expected to become. Fortunately, Florence had accepted unquestioningly Maddie’s explanation about Teddy’s “business trip” and sighed over the romance of the Malcolms’ forced separation. She assumed that Maddie looked forward longingly to a loving reunion in Naples, and she had not attempted to alleviate Maddie’s period of loneliness with any other than her own and Geoffrey’s company.

Maddie, who began to find Florence a comfortable sort of companion despite her frivolous interests and her volubility, went along with her assumptions. It was nice, now and then, to be just Maddie and not “the rich Mrs. Malcolm,” who felt far too often like the star turn in a gaudy circus. Florence, who was “home folk,” as she herself put it, was just the kind of companion who would allow her to be herself.

“Darlin’ child!” Florence gushed as she led Maddie to an overstuffed armchair in the tearoom, “you will never guess! My clever Geoffrey has snagged a box for us at Newmarket on Tuesday—right next to the Prince of Wales’s! Or at least, close enough so mat we can ogle to our hearts’ content. You will come, my dear, won’t you?”

“Of course I will, Florence.”

Maddie did not know how to refuse—any more than she could refuse the lavish tea Florence proceeded to order—and so she accepted both. Florence chose the creamiest cakes and the fattest little sandwiches on the cart, saying that since Geoffrey had never taken to tea and liked cream cakes even less, she depended on Maddie to approve her indulgence in them.

“What-all have you been doin’ since this morning?” Florence asked, and Maddie, having had time to think of something, replied that she had been to the City to draw on her letter of credit with Coutts’s Bank.

“Oh, good!” Florence exclaimed artlessly. “Then you’ll have plenty of cash to bet on the races.” Maddie smiled at Florence’s utter lack of subtlety. She was like that about most things, but especially about money; she so openly enjoyed being lavishly provided for by her indulgent—and apparently lavishly endowed—Geoffrey.

#

Maddie, too, had always taken money for granted. She knew that her father had struggled as a young man to build his fur business in St. Louis, but by the time his only daughter was born, relatively late in John Jerome Osborne’s life, it was thriving, and Madeleine Osborne had come into the world in the well-appointed master bedroom of a mansion in the fashionable part of town.

She had grown up much cosseted, particularly by her father, for whom nothing was too good for his beautiful little girl. Her birthdays were extravaganzas of hand-carved rocking horses, dollhouses the size of the piano in the parlor, organdy dresses with real pearls sewn on them. She was saved from being spoiled only by the fact, obvious to everyone but her father, that she was not really a very attractive child. She was too thin, her nose was too long for her small face, and her feet were far too large for her stick legs.

Secure in her father’s love, Maddie had not been troubled by her plainness, except that her mother’s beauty made her only too aware of her own lack. Maddie adored her ethereally lovely mother and wanted nothing more of life than to be just like Constance Osborne. She sat beside her mother’s dressing table in the morning watching the maid arrange her pale blond hair, then begged to be taken along when Constance went off on her missions in behalf of the charities which, as a leading matron of the town and chairwoman of a half-dozen committees, was how she passed her time.

Most of all, little Maddie loved to watch her mother dress for evening occasions, when she wore exquisite lacy, pastel gowns and delicately set jewels, usually the sapphires her husband had given her on their first anniversary. When she was ready at last to go out and stun the world, she first did a little parade around the room for Maddie’s benefit, pretending to dance or to speak to the mayor or to do whatever that night’s occasion might call for, which Maddie was not yet allowed to stay up to witness.

Constance was pleased that her daughter adored her. She had not particularly wanted to have a child, fearful that the birth would spoil her figure and that the growing child would be a continual reminder of the passing years. She was happy to discover that the first fear was groundless—despite the pain, which she did not forget as she was assured she would in the joy of holding her baby.  But when the doctor told her that she would have no more children, her recovery was remarkably swift. And because her sole issue grew into so unprepossessing a child, her own beauty could only grow by contrast.

But then Maddie turned thirteen, and almost overnight, it seemed, she shot up six inches to tower over Constance, a disaster that affected Maddie even more than her mother. She felt clumsier and uglier than ever. But worse was to come—for Constance—when Maddie’s body almost immediately caught up with her height. Her face filled out, her hands
and feet assumed a grace they had hitherto lacked, and her hair turned darker, from a nondescript red-brown into a magnificent chestnut. Her hips became gently rounded, instead of having to be hidden beneath layers of petticoats, and her breasts were so perfectly shaped that she had no need of any padding in her bodices.

John Jerome was delighted, which was just as well, since it now fell to him to show Maddie off to the world. Constance refused to be seen with a daughter who threatened to outshine her, even if the pastel gowns and sapphires Constance lent her were so unlike Maddie that they did nothing to speed the process of marrying her off and getting her out of the house. But Maddie’s father bought her silks and rubies instead and praised his “little girl”—he chuckled when he said it—more than ever. Still, Maddie was sixteen before she began to believe that she was, at long last, beautiful.

This came about when one of her mother’s many admirers—who were usually young men delighted to be invited to take tea with the lovely Connie Osborne so that they could boast about it at their clubs afterward—almost literally ran into Maddie on his way out of her mother’s parlor. Constance had never invited her daughter to her little teas, and Maddie had no interest in being present, for she would have had to share her mother’s attention with other people. So she made a point of being out of the house between three and five o’clock on Thursday afternoons. This Thursday, however, she had twisted her ankle while at the skating rink with her friend Julia and come home early, only to find young Richard Brokmeyer gazing raptly at her in her own front hall and forgetting remove the hand he had used to steady her when he clumsily knocked into her.

Maddie had assumed all the clumsiness to be on her side until she saw the look in Mr. Brokmeyer’s eyes, and somehow drawing the knowledge from some ancient feminine source, she had smiled at him in a way that made him her devoted slave from that day forward ... or at least until he met Julia two months later. But by then, Maddie had discovered the joys of being a belle. Richard was only the first in a long string of beaux who picked up where her father had begun and plied her with flowers, lace handkerchiefs, chocolates, and professions of love. Even her father had not succeeded in making Maddie feel desirable as well as loved, and now the power that went with desire seemed to her to be even headier than the gentler power of love.

The real source of her power Maddie only discovered at seventeen. Despite her mother’s somewhat impatient explanation that the handsome young men paying her such extravagant court cared less about her “bottomless velvet eyes” than her father’s bottomless purse, Maddie had been too much in love with love to believe it. One of these young men would prove to be
the
one. She was certain of that and had no objection to enjoying the others until he came along.

But then the one she thought—that week—might prove to be
the
one proved to be something much less delightful.

Having spotted him across the street when she was out shopping, she thought she might tease him by sneaking up unseen behind him to surprise him.  But when she did, she discovered that he was talking to one of the other candidates of the week and, like most eavesdroppers, Maddie did not like what she heard. The young men were laying a wager over which of them could get the heiress to say yes first, the winner to stake the loser, after the wedding, to a trip to Hot Springs in pursuit of a substitute heiress.

Neither suitor got past Maddie’s front door again, and she never found out if they got to Hot Springs, singly or together. After that she began to more carefully scrutinize her potential beaux, whose very number was becoming suspect by her eighteenth birthday. By the time she was twenty, she had become such a cynic about male sincerity that Teddy Malcolm’s careless assurance that he adored her money almost as much as he did Maddie herself sounded so refreshingly honest to her jaded ears that she encouraged him despite her mother’s warning that he was no better than any of those other, less charming fortune hunters. But her father understood, and when Maddie fell in love with Teddy in earnest, he indulged her yet again by not only accepting but welcoming Teddy Malcolm as a son-in-law.

#

It was not until Devin Grant pointed out something Maddie was well aware of but had never before felt any embarrassment about, that the matter of money forced itself back into Maddie’s consciousness—so forcefully, indeed, that she had not hesitated to use it as a weapon against Grant. Yes, it was true that she controlled the purse-strings at home, but what did that matter? It had never mattered to Teddy. She had never used her control against him.

Do you have a larger stake in this marriage than he does?
Grant had wanted to know. Maddie was still not sure what he had meant by that. Indeed, she was struck now by the uncomfortable suspicion that she had not fully understood anything Devin Grant had said to her. He seemed to have been in possession of some secret about her that even she was unaware of.

The only thing she was sure of was that it was not safe to trust anyone just now—least of all the disturbingly attractive Devin Grant.

“There is a young man making eyes at you,” Florence said, intruding herself suddenly into Maddie’s train of thought. “He looks rather a lamb, too. Wherever did you find him?”