Rumors (12 page)

“D
ID YOU NOTICE SOMETHING DIFFERENT?” ISABELLE
whispered to Penelope, seated beside her at the long Schoonmaker dining table, just as the venison in port wine sauce was being served. She was wearing a dress of pale yellow tulle finished with antique lace that flounced around her shoulders and came, once or twice when she was bending forward to whisper girlishly, a little closer to the buttery platter of pommes parisienne than Penelope would have wanted her own dress to. “A little rule I’ve broken?”

Penelope had in fact noticed that all of the ladies were seated in a row, and though she would have preferred to have been sitting right next to Henry, she saw the genius of having them all on display. There were few comparisons that did not flatter the young Miss Hayes, and sitting next to Prudence Schoonmaker certainly set off her attractive qualities as sitting next to a gentleman might not have. Isabelle, on her left, had kept her engaged in a conversation about dresses through the early courses, which was a subject that Penelope
found acceptably diverting on any given day, but particularly enlightening when it turned to Henry’s favorite cuts. Prudie, on her right, happily had not been moved to say anything as yet.

“It’s
so
much more fun this way,” the hostess went on, gushing.

“Divine,” Penelope replied, sipping her champagne. “Soon all the other hostesses will be imitating you. Of course, you must be careful, or all the men in New York will blame you for having corrupted their wives.”

Penelope gave the full benefit of her sharp white shoulder to Prudie—who had just made an unattractive noise in response to this comment—and offered up a discreet laugh in Isabelle’s direction, who in any event had already turned to her friend Lucy Carr, the wraithlike divorcée who was seated on her other side. “Lucy, you’ve got to hear what Penny just said. She just said that all the men in New York will say I’ve corrupted their wives and…”

Across the table, through a bower of orchids, Penelope glimpsed Henry. He was talking more than usual, perhaps because he was seated next to Nicholas Livingston, who could be expansive on the subject of yachts, and he had not looked at her all evening. This had provoked a dull ache in the back of her throat but did little to dim the sense of mission that she had brought with her to the Schoonmakers’. Indeed, her
whole body tingled with it. She had dressed for triumph in a garment of gossamer, which framed her bustline in filmy layers, and crepe de chine, which cascaded down toward her high-heeled slippers and overwhelmed her toes. The dress was so pale a pink it was virtually white, though her favorite color was represented in the small red medallions at the shoulders and a hundred little bows down near the hem. It fit her exceptionally well; Penelope had spent all of yesterday at the dressmaker’s making sure that this was so.

The waiters were still fussing around the epic table, and the smell of the venison was turning Penelope’s stomach. She wrinkled her nose, despite the risks this posed to her skin, at its rising fumes. She’d never imagined she’d agree with the old hostesses and their draconian dining rules, but she had begun to conclude that it really was more proper to alternate the sexes—being so completely in the company of women was not a thing Penelope had ever been fond of. The only one in that row of ladies whose friendship she cared about just then was Isabelle. She could not complain of Isabelle’s efforts to bring her close to Henry. Complain she did of course, if only in her own head, for though Henry was ideally positioned to make eyes at her, his attentions remained stubbornly elsewhere.

Penelope waited patiently through the cheeses. She checked her reflection in the polished silver ice bucket that lay amongst all the flowers and heaping serving trays, gently
evening the line of small dark bangs on her high white forehead. She moved the food on her plate around, and turned her denuded shoulders so that they most ideally caught the light. She squeezed the hand of her hostess once or twice and allowed Mrs. Carr to go into raptures about Penelope’s bright future in society and what a lot of good it did everybody to see a fresh face.

“Wherever has that brother of yours been?” Mrs. Carr asked, segueing awkwardly, as though the question had been on her mind for some time.

Penelope noted Isabelle’s blush, and then gave her the abridged version of what she had told her hostess on Monday. She had just received a telegram from Grayson that afternoon, however, and so she was able to add, “He’s on his way back to New York now, though, so you’ll soon be able to ask him all these questions yourself.”

At last the dinner was over, and the whole party—forty or so stuffed and tipsy people—moved to the ballroom.

“How ever are you going to cheer your stepson up?” Penelope asked, with a little sympathetic waver in her voice, once she had settled herself between Mrs. Schoonmaker and Mrs. Carr on the rust velvet causeuse at the center of the ballroom. Her position in the middle was calculated, for the divorcée—with her ringing laugh and head of lioness curls—could only accentuate the younger woman’s virginal façade.
She risked a look out of the corner of her eye at the elder Schoonmaker, who was standing just below a large, Gallic-looking mural and talking with a man of too advanced an age to be of much interest, and concluded that he had taken note. Dull Spencer Newburg was standing in their vicinity, and Penelope noticed that his sister Mrs. Gore had been watching her as though she were considering her for a part in a play.

“I don’t know! Lucy, how are we going to cheer him up?” Mrs. Schoonmaker leaned across Penelope’s lap as she spoke, resting her silk fan against Penelope’s skirt.

“If I were you,” Mrs. Carr answered confidentially, “I’d contrive to have him dance with Miss Hayes.”

Mrs. Schoonmaker clasped her hands at this suggestion, which was just the one—Penelope felt sure—she’d been fishing for.

“Oh, but if he isn’t in a dancing spirit…” she demurred.

“Nonsense.” Mrs. Schoonmaker gave her a look that indicated they understood each other and then rose and went, with casual purpose, toward her husband, yellow flounces rustling in her wake.

Penelope watched as the hostess brushed aside the older man—it was Carey Lewis Longhorn, she saw now—and said a few pointed words to Mr. Schoonmaker. Then she shifted her eyes to the many large paintings in huge gilt frames, which were arranged salon style on the opposite wall, in time for her
host to look over and note her discomfort at being left alone with a gaudy divorcée in the middle of a public room. She brought Isabelle’s abandoned fan up to shield her mouth.

“I wonder what Schoonmaker has to talk about with Carey Longhorn. Mr. Longhorn’s my friend, of course, but they’ve never been in the same circles…” Mrs. Carr was saying, but Penelope hardly registered it, for she was keeping careful track in her peripheral vision of what Henry’s father and stepmother were doing. They had come to an agreement, and they were excusing themselves and then going jointly across the floor to the corner where Henry was, somehow or other, still engaged in a conversation with Nicholas Livingston. Penelope steeled herself. She willed the full, dewy, attention-getting affect of her physical appearance. She batted the fan and waited.

“He was seen with some young thing at the opera the other night—can you imagine? It would be something if he married at this point, and to a girl who might be his granddaughter!”

Penelope was only half listening. She had become aware of the music, which emanated from a quartet in the next room. She took a breath that brought composure into all corners of her body. She let her eyelids quiver shut, and when she opened them, Henry, dressed in the usual tailored blacks, occupied the central position in her view. Over his shoulder Mr. and Mrs.
Schoonmaker were visible, watching; Mrs. Carr rose, winked showily, and allowed herself to be taken into conversation by Mr. Longhorn. All around the room, Penelope thought, people were aware that Henry Schoonmaker was about to ask Penelope Hayes to dance.

“Hello,” Henry said simply.

Penelope kept her chin down even as her lake-blue eyes rolled to meet his. “Don’t nights like these make you miss Elizabeth so?”

Henry shifted his jaw and appeared to consider how best to answer this. “It’s not nights like these that do it.”

“Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have her back,” Penelope sighed, putting a little misery into the rise and fall of her shoulders.

“You forget, I know you,” Henry replied quickly. There was a certain fire in his eye. “And I think honesty becomes you much better.”

The reference to their former intimacy felt nearly as good as the touch of his hands on her would have, and she looked back at him baldly.

“That’s better.” Henry wore a smile of knowing resignation as he reached for Penelope’s hand. “They say we should dance.”

Then she really did feel his hands, ever so lightly over her gloved fingers, as she allowed herself to be helped up and
swept through the polished oak archway and into the adjoining room, where three or four other couples moved in subdued circles. Henry was looking at her as though he were trying to figure her out, and after his last comment she made no effort to disguise anything in her reciprocal gaze. There was a woodenness to his movements that was new since the last time they’d danced, so many months ago, but still she could feel the distant press of his leg through her skirts.

“I think you really are broken about it,” she said finally. She tipped her head thoughtfully to the side as they turned.

“About Elizabeth?” Henry closed his eyes and lowered his voice, although there was no real need. The musicians in the corner played loudly enough that the other couples would not hear them as they moved, their bodies rising and falling, across the room. “How could I not be, over something so awful. But I suppose it would be like you,” he went on, almost affectionately, “to be black-hearted about it.”

“On the contrary, I miss my friend tremendously. But you forget how she betrayed me.”

“Oh, Penelope,” Henry answered, in a veritable whisper. The room, with its peach-colored flocked wallpaper, moved around behind him. “It hardly matters now.”

“No, what matters is that she’s dead. Which is a tragedy.”

Henry was silent, considering his answer. “Yes, that’s exactly it,” he said eventually.

“That’s why you don’t flirt anymore? Why you never look for fun like you used to? Why you don’t look at me in that particular way?”

“It just wouldn’t be right,” Henry responded with quiet intensity. The touch of his hand at her lower back was so faint she could hardly stand it.

“Ah, no.” Penelope felt the low light of the room landing on her high cheekbones like so many particles of gold. She tried to tell herself not to say it all at once, though already her lips burned pleasantly with the information. “But it wouldn’t seem that way if you knew what I knew.”

They were now speaking in such low voices that they were by necessity drawn closer into each other. “What do you know, Penny?”

“That Elizabeth is alive.” Penelope was surprised, even after all the planning, by how much pleasure that phrase could give her.

Henry’s left eye twitched and his grip on her tightened involuntarily, but he managed to keep dancing as before, if a beat faster. “What are you talking about?”

“She faked her death to escape marrying you.” Penelope’s smile had achieved its most full and glorious expression. They were moving faster now, across the floor, without any thought to Adelaide Wetmore and Regis Doyle, whom they nearly cut when they turned. “I
helped
.”

“You…where is she?” Henry’s eyes were wide and full of fire. He was watching her, trying to decide what to believe.

“In California. It seems she wasn’t in love with you at all, Henry. It seems she might have been—”

“You mean she didn’t fall in the river?” Henry interrupted. He was blinking rapidly and speaking in a slower, stupider voice then Penelope had ever heard him use.

Penelope gave a slow satisfied shake of her head.
There,
she thought.
I have really stunned him.

“You mean she’s all right?”

“
Yes
, she’s—”

But if Henry had registered the irritated tone creeping into Penelope’s voice, he did not have time to show it. The world-weary face he had been wearing around for months was gone and the old roguish gleam had come back into his eye. He stopped dancing and let go of her, which caused everyone else in the room to stop dancing too—to Penelope’s great horror—the better to watch what was unfolding. Henry looked briefly at the other couples and did not bother to hide the smile on his face. He reached for Penelope’s hand and kissed it. “I am needed elsewhere…” was the only excuse he gave, before quickly exiting the room.

“Oh,” said Adelaide, her right hand still held aloft by her partner, Mr. Doyle. “I hope he’s all right,” she said out loud, but the way she looked after him indicated she was
more concerned with losing her chance to dance with the young man of the house over the rest of the evening.

Penelope’s dark lashes fluttered and her irritation rose up. All around her people were staring in amusement. She couldn’t remember a time when her wishes had been so continually thwarted. There was still the smell of Henry, his cognac and cigarettes and a slight whiff of the cologne he wore, and the faint impress of his hand at her back. But what she felt most acutely was the humiliation of being left on the dance floor, amongst her inferiors, with only a smarting heart and the ruins of a grand plan.