Heiress (2 page)

Jinx’s room, however, overlooked the private garden. She would have enjoyed seeing the street instead, with its parade of traffic—the landaus, motorbuses, delivery wagons, automobiles, and bicycles. She loved watching the mounted policemen directing in the middle of the street, the drivers attired in livery colors and seated on the high boxes. The clanging trolley bells, shouts from the cabmen, clatter of horses’ hooves on the cobblestone, the growl of motorcars, and the shriek of railways made the city sound alive.

And, at night, sometimes Jinx retired with her mother in Phoebe’s third-story room, watching the stars sparkle over the park, a thousand diamonds almost within her grasp.

As soon as Esme was married, Jinx planned on moving into her boudoir.

“I hope the ball doesn’t last all night. I’m in the middle of Jules Verne’s
Around the World in Eighty Days,
although journalist Nellie Bly’s true-life account is vastly more exciting,” Esme said as Bette straightened the dress on her frame.

“You can’t be serious. You have an invitation to the most exclusive ball of the season, and you are pining for a book?” Jinx turned away, staring at the lacing of frost creeping up the sill. Despite the central heating and the fire in Esme’s marble fireplace, the winter crept through the windowpane, chilling the room. By the end of winter, the frost could choke out the view entirely, except for a breath blown into the middle. “You shouldn’t spend so much time reading. You know it’s simply fantasy. I don’t know why Father allows it.”

“He fancies that I might be like him, a newspaper man. That’s why he allows me to visit him at his offices. He knows I like the smell of the ink, the hum of the presses, the clicking of the typewriters. I would love to be a journalist like Nellie Bly, to see the world, to research asylums and sweatshops. To see my name in print on the front page of Father’s
Chronicle.”

Jinx rounded on her. “Are you mad? You are not Nellie Bly. She is a working woman! You are a debutante, destined to marry William Astor, or perhaps a Fish, a Morgan, or a Rothschild. What a shame society doesn’t yet have a Vanderbilt within marrying age. But you will have a fashionable seaside estate in Newport, a home on Fifth Avenue, a life in the social court. You will live a life of prominence and influence. A life of blessing.”

Esme’s mouth opened.

Jinx stood and walked to the dressing table. “Don’t appear so offended, it doesn’t become you.” She ran her fingers over her sister’s jewels—a dog collar strung with a cascade of diamonds and pearls on silken threads that would cover Esme’s décolletage, a cluster of diamond and pearl earrings, and a filigreed rosebud tiara, encrusted with diamonds, pearls, and shimmering emeralds.

Drawing in a breath, Jinx schooled her voice. “Nellie Bly is a disgrace. She travels unchaperoned around the world, often lunches with men, and pretends to be insane to secure a berth in a psychiatric hospital. Some might call that living a life of deceit. She will marry poorly, if at all, and die without acknowledgment.”

“She’s made her own way. And spoken the truth. Perhaps she doesn’t need to marry.”

Jinx met Esme’s blue eyes in the mirror, so naive for all her bookish ways, her fluency in French and German, her ability to dance the quadrille. “Father would never let you write for the newspaper.”

Esme stiffened as Bette touched up her hair. The maid had parted Esme’s hair in the center, heated the front into the shape of water-waves, padded the rest of it with matching blond rats, then swept the loose tresses up into tight curls atop her head, secured finally with diamond-encrusted barrettes.

Jinx had already required her maid, Amelia, to begin experimenting with her own—sadly unremarkable—dark hair, and collecting and washing the loose strands that would create her hair rats.

“Perhaps he doesn’t have to know,” Esme said quietly.

Jinx froze. “What are you talking about?”

Esme lifted her creamy shoulder, mischief flashing through her eyes. She blinked it away. “I am simply suggesting that there are other ways for a woman to have her voice heard.”

“The way to be heard is to influence your husband, give him a voice in society,” Jinx said. Oh, she knew it. Her sister had always been out of hand, too vocal. Now, she’d even begun to believe the things she read in
Godey’s
Lady’s Book
.

“For now. But soon, perhaps, we’ll have a real voice. One in politics and the workplace.”

Jinx walked to Esme’s desk, picked up a copy of the magazine, and opened to where a piece of writing paper marked the Employment for Women section. She could have guessed. “I thought mother cancelled our subscription.”

“I’m twenty years old, with my own allowance. I ordered it myself.”

Jinx closed the magazine, tempted to throw it in the trash receptacle. It only filled her sister with rebellious, untoward thinking. Someday she would be forced to reveal to their parents where Esme hid her stash of dime novels, everything from
Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter
to a stack of DeWitt’s Ten Cent Romances. It was time her sister started behaving as her status demanded.

She easily found her mother’s tone. “You have fooled yourself into the world of your dime novels, where women decide their own futures, choose their own husbands, and pursue careers. Continue this, and you will disgrace us, cause us to be ostracized from society, and ruin any chance of either of us marrying someone with the proper name.”

“I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t want to marry. I’m a journalist—”

Jinx rounded on her. “You’re the
daughter
of a journalist, born to wed, not become some stringer, rooting around dark alleys for a story. You have been trained to be a wife, to run a household, to keep your husband’s name in the conversation of good society. Father and Mother are—
we
are—expecting you to make a match this season, to marry well. To usher the Price family into society’s elite, to behave in a manner befitting the heiress of the Price family.” She drew a breath, cut her voice low, glanced at Bette. It mattered not that the servants were handpicked for their discretion. Of their thirty-five house staff, not everyone could be trusted.

“We must marry up if we want to continue our ascent in society. Father has bought us that opportunity, and you owe it to him to honor his wishes. If Father—or any eligible men—caught you writing something, even anonymously…” She closed her eyes, her frustration huffing out of her. “I should have been the firstborn.”

Yes. Then Esme could have done as she wished, the requirements of the firstborn—acquiring a man with a pedigree—happily borne on Jinx’s shoulders. She opened her eyes, held up her hand, as Esme made to speak. “It doesn’t matter. I suspect Mother has already found you a match.”

Esme drew in a breath then rose from her chair. She stared at herself in the mirror, submitting to Bette’s adornment of the dog collar, the earrings. Finally, she bowed her head for the tiara. Certainly she appeared regal as the jewels captured the light. A Price, waiting to be won.

Esme turned to Jinx, her blue eyes cool, glittering. “It doesn’t matter. I will not submit to their arrangements and marry for the sake of society, for the sake of privileged invitations to teas filled with gossip and insufferable dinners where I must choose my fork correctly or be cut from a Vanderbilt matinee. Or balls where the incorrect flutter of my fan condemns me to a dance, or even more. I loathe this life and all it requires, and
if
I marry, it will be for love.”

“Love? Please. How will you tell the difference? You’re a Price, not some scullery maid. You will never know whether you are loved for your money, or your beautiful mind.”

The words seemed to slither out, and Jinx tasted in them the poison she intended.

Indeed, Esme flinched, as if afflicted. “I will know because my husband will respect me, hear my mind, allow my freedom.” Her words emerged stiff, with an edge.

Even as Esme said it, her maid had begun to sheath her fingers into her kid gloves, ordered a size smaller so as to curve the hand into a delicate pose. Jinx had tried on the gloves and lost the feeling in her fingers within an hour.

Jinx picked up Esme’s vellum dance card and pencil. She handed it to Bette, who slid it to Esme’s gloved wrist. “Power, wealth, prestige—all give us freedom. You’re blind not to see that,” Jinx snapped.

“That is prison. And you are blind not to see that.” Esme allowed Bette to drape upon her shoulders her silk brocade evening cape, trimmed in mink. Her lady’s maid tied it in front then moved behind her to valet her charge downstairs.

Esme stood for a moment, towering over Jinx. “And you weren’t born first, I was. You must wait until I marry.”

“Only until you are shipped off to Europe and married to some titled, decrepit baron in need of an heir and a spare. Don’t forget your fan.”

Esme’s face knotted and she scooped up the fan from her dressing table. She found her retort, however, by the time she reached the door. She turned, smiled, her voice sweet. “If I tarry in marriage, perhaps father will delay your debut yet another year. Sadly, by then, Mrs. Astor will most likely be too senile to host her annual soirees. Shame. Have a lovely evening.”

Jinx wanted to throw one of Esme’s dime novels at her, or perhaps the array of gifts on her bureau—fans and cigarette cases and even a pearl-inlaid broach, received from too many adoring suitors who hadn’t a clue they were courting a budding suffragette.

But her throat tightened, her chest burning. Esme just might refuse a match. Turn down the hand of a blue-blood. Then she’d see her name in print, all right, right on the front page of
Town Topics,
or on Page Six of their father’s
New York Chronicle
.

Jinx might as well begin packing for their trip abroad to escape the scandal.

She walked to the window, watching as Esme and her mother exited the front doors of their home, across the carpet rolled out by the footmen, liveried for the evening in eighteenth-century style with knee breeches, silk stockings, and shirts, their royal blue waistcoats and tailcoats rich with golden embroidery.

Her mother knew how to make a Price entrance. Tonight, she’d even required the footmen to powder their hair.

The group waddled out to the street where first her mother, then Esme, and finally their father, regal in his top hat, his ermine-trimmed greatcoat, white silk scarf and gloves, disappeared into the closed carriage, their lady’s maids and Father’s valet following in the carriage behind them to attend them at the ball.

Across the street, electric lights from Central Park twinkled through the trees, winking. Snow began to drift from the sky, like flakes in a globe, bedazzling the wonderland of New York.

Jinx pressed her palm to the window, letting the chill seep into her skin. When she pulled it away, her handprint remained.

She watched it fade slowly into the night.

* * * * *

Esme might be playing a game, but she’d do well to play by her own rules.

She was like Nellie Bly, undercover journalist.

She stood at the edge of the ballroom, filing away every detail. For tonight’s article, she’d start with overstuffed and snobby Mrs. Astor greeting her four hundred ball guests, affecting the air of a royal in her black velvet dress with lace appliqués and tulle, bedazzled in a diamond tiara and an armada of diamonds. Then she’d catalog the ostentatious bevy of flowers and decorations, from the holly and ivy dripping from the standing chandeliers, the snowballs of white carnations eclipsing the candelabras, to the thirty-six red satin stockings stretched across the white marble fireplace, filled with toys and bonbons. A giant bough of mistletoe centered on the balcony, tempting would-be dancers while the orchestra warmed up for the after-dinner cotillion.Esme wouldn’t soon forget the buffet dinner, either, the way her stomach now gurgled. She tasted the sweetbread climbing back up her throat, although it might not have made it all the way down to begin with, what with the competition with the consommé, the pâté de foie gras, and the bonbons. She pressed her hand against her stomach, although it would hardly move, given the way Bette had strapped her into her corset.

She had even managed a glimpse of the fellow dancers, from J. J. Astor Jr., to Mr. and Mrs. F.W. Vanderbilt, to Mr. and Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, names among names in society.

She’d catch it all, just like Nellie Bly, in a tell-all article, betraying the dalliances and follies of society.

She hoped Oliver caught their pictures. She spied him, assisting Joseph Byron and his son, Percy, as they posed society’s finest, capturing their images for
Town Topics
and their own prideful posterity. Oliver had taken her picture at her debut ball, and perhaps the truth had hit her at that moment, when she’d seen herself reflected upside down.

She didn’t fit in this world.

But she wasn’t sure, exactly, where else she might belong, who indeed she was supposed to be.

She heard Jinx’s voice, an echo chasing her to the party.
Behave in a
manner befitting the heiress of the Price family.
What, exactly, might that be? She certainly didn’t feel like an heiress.

And, if Mrs. Astor’s high society knew who penned the articles featured on her father’s Page Six, highlighting their escapades, they wouldn’t treat her like one either. They would feel betrayed, and stamp her an interloper.

“There you are, Esme. Were you hiding from me?” Her mother appeared, her skin flushed, the sour hint of wine upon her breath.

“Of course not, Mother. I’m simply blistering. And tired. And, like I said, I believe I am allergic to tulle. Please, must we remain?” After all, she’d already seen enough to detail this night in her anonymous submission to her father’s paper.

“Bite your tongue. We are staying until Caroline Astor turns out breakfast.” Phoebe lowered herself to the settee beside her, her gown less cumbersome than Esme’s, a simple yellow satin edged in French lace with diamonds stitched into the bodice.

Across the two-story ballroom, in an alcove opening off the second story, the musicians in the gallery began to play an opening number. They played under the view of the gods and goddesses sculpted into the coved ceiling. Guests from all corners of the house returned to the dance floor.