Rumors (15 page)

A
FTER THE CRUSHING VISIT WITH PENELOPE
Hayes, Lina had hardly left her small, perfect hotel room. It was more perfect to her with every passing hour. She sat at the little polished lady’s writing desk and looked at the matching polished bed with its blue spread that went so nicely with the fleur-de-lys wallpaper. She thought with growing sadness of how soon she would have to fall asleep without the shelter of its gilt-edged ceiling. She shot poignant little looks at the elegant ceiling lamp with the U-shaped white shades, which looked like a bouquet of tulips with stems of brass. She had only left the room to eat breakfast and read the paper, but found that her name had not again been mentioned. To punish herself, she went to bed hungry. She had been reaching for too much, by fistfuls. If she had simply acquired the dress and manners of a lady and then gone straightaway to Will, none of this would have happened—but she had wanted to be seen and admired too, and that vain desire had caused her to let her guard down.

It was Wednesday. On Friday she would be homeless.

Now every sound seemed, however irrationally, to prefigure her swift expulsion from the hotel. Even the most gentle knocking. She looked up and blinked in the direction of the sound. For a moment she wondered why the management hadn’t already charged in to remove her, and then she realized that she was going to have to let them in. She went to the door and opened it cautiously. There was no one from the hotel staff out in the hall—just Tristan, looking at her with those warm hazel eyes. He took his bowler off so that she could see his light hair, which was overgrown a little and pushed backward rakishly. His height filled the entry and he was smiling at her out of the corner of his mouth.

“They just let you in?” She was unable to mask her surprise. How he had gotten this far unannounced was beyond her, though the affection in his face made it so that she didn’t care particularly. She had not wondered until that moment whether or not Tristan was the thief—but the look he was giving her, and the memory of his previous attentions, made her dislike that theory intensely.

“I thought I’d bring your bills in person.”

“Oh.” The despair was as plain in her tone now as surprise had been a few seconds before.

“That’s no way to greet a man who comes bearing gifts,” Tristan answered as he produced a long brown box with the
Lord & Taylor logo on its front. He had disguised it under his cloth coat, which he carried thrown across his arm.

This caught Lina’s attention and—feeling that desire for gorgeous objects rise in her again, despite all the degradations of the week—she reached for the box. Tristan smiled at her grab but let it pass into her hand easily. When she lifted the top she saw a pair of white suede opera gloves cushioned in deep red tissue. They were elbow length, with a row of small pearl buttons that extended from just below the wrist. “They’re beautiful!” she whispered.

“A gift from your greatest admirer; I thought you should have them now that you’re going to the opera.”

Lina looked up and met her guest’s eye. So he had seen the column, too.

“I assume you are the Miss Broad who was in the papers. Surely you’re not too fancy to let me in?” Tristan said, already closing the door behind him and tossing his coat onto the foot of her bed. “I hope you’re not in love with this old man,” he went on casually as he assessed her surroundings. “I got worried when I realized you had been away from the store for so long.”

Lina turned her body toward him but did not respond to his last comment. Her attention remained fixed on the gloves. They were such a wretched little reminder of everything she had muddied up, and a wave of self-pity came over her. All of a sudden she knew she was going to cry.

“What’s the matter?” Tristan’s voice had grown concerned, and he laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder. The kindness of this touch made her situation feel even more pathetic, and she put her face into her cupped hands to hide the hot tears that were now streaming involuntarily down her face. “Don’t do that, Miss Broad,” Tristan went on. “You don’t think your reputation has been ruined, do you? It hasn’t in the least. I was only kidding when I said that.
I
know you’re not in love with him, and so does everybody else. If you were seen often with different men of the kind, then you might be in danger, but one little piece like that won’t do any harm. And besides, everyone will be so distracted by your newness that they won’t even think about the propriety of it.”

“Oh, it’s not that,” Lina answered miserably through her sobs. She longed for Will, to be able to confess all of her imperfections and missteps to him. But it was Tristan who was there with her now.

“What, then?”

Lina caught her breath and looked up at the salesman. Her face was red and her eyes were puffy and bright, but there was still so much kindness in his posture that she couldn’t help but want to tell him everything. “My purse has been stolen.”

Tristan’s smile fell a little. “Your purse?”

“Yes, from my room, the night of the opera. It had over two hundred dollars in it, and it was taken—all of it!”

“You must tell the management then.”

“No, no,” Lina said quickly. She was too ashamed to look at him. “Not that.”

Tristan reached forward and took both her hands. The rare gentleness of this human touch only made her want to cry more. She had not been touched in a long time. “Why? Is it because you suspect someone close to you…or someone who would be severely punished?”

Lina shook her head firmly.

“But even so, so many tears over so little money.” He laughed awkwardly, clasping her hands with his own. “Of course, it’s a great deal of money—to someone like
me
. But to you, dear Carolina, that can’t be such a loss, can it?”

“It’s all I have!” she blurted. It felt almost good to have said so, to let someone in the world know how destitute she was.

Tristan stepped back. Despite the narrowness of the little room in hues of blue, he seemed to have gone a great distance. “But your inheritance…?”

“I’m not an heiress,” Lina wailed. The truth was coming out now, and there was no way for her to stop it. She looked into Tristan’s eyes, which were still solicitous under an increasingly furrowed brow. “I’m a maid, or I was until the Holland family fired me. That money was all I had. I got it by—never mind. But now I have nothing.”

The moment that followed was long and full of tension, and it ended when Tristan removed his hands. Lina hiccupped a final tear as he moved farther away from her and threw himself down contemplatively onto the small velvet settee by the window. “That’s why you hated Elizabeth Holland.” He turned back to her with a face that was entirely transformed. “You’re a maid,” he said disgustedly.

She blinked and put one of her hands into the other.

“I thought you were a lady!” he continued, his voice rising to an almost angry pitch.

“I…I…” Lina stammered.

For a moment she thought she was going to see Tristan in a fit of temper, but he surprised her by putting his face into his hands and starting to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she could scarcely summon the breath for even that question.

“Oh, you really fooled me, Miss Broad—
Broud
—whatever your name is. You really pulled one over on me.” For a moment she thought his eyes were wet, too, from hilarity or sadness, she wasn’t sure. He was smiling, though, and that seemed a not entirely bad thing. “Congratulations. You got me good.”

Lina went over and sat down beside him on the settee. She perched on the corner, not wanting to come too close, and
tried to meet his gaze. “Don’t be angry at me, Tristan,” she said in a quiet voice. “I couldn’t stand that right now.”

“I’m not angry at you. In fact…” Here he paused to laugh, as one laughs at absurdity rather than humor. “I have something to confess to you.”

Lina’s nerves were tender and her pulse was now frighteningly quick. She tried to draw her lips back in a smile to match his. “Oh, yes?” she prodded.

“You see, I’m not what I seem either.”

“Oh?” Lina was still attempting lightness, but she knew that her smile had gone brittle. “You mean you don’t work at Lord and Taylor’s?”

“No…no, of course I work there. But you see, I’m just like you. I’m from nothing, and I decided nothing wasn’t good enough for me. You aren’t the first heiress I’ve known—you’re just the first fake heiress I’ve known. There’s a lot to be gained from being kind to ladies like you—or the kind of lady you were pretending to be. That’s my racket, my pretty girl.”

“Oh” was all Lina could manage in reply. She was now feeling intensely stupid. It occurred to her for the first time that the fallacy of her claim to be an heiress did not protect her in the least from being preyed on, as true heiresses were. That would be funny someday, she imagined. “Well, good-bye, I guess,” she went on eventually. She didn’t want to be
alone, but she supposed it was what she deserved. “There’s nothing to be gained for you here.”

Tristan pushed himself up and looked out the window. Her view showed the façade of another hotel, with all its little picture windows into other peoples’ ambitions, and down below the carriages depositing the kind of ladies she’d aspired to be like on the walk. They would soon be off to yachts on the Mediterranean or weekends at Tuxedo, and their hats had all been imported from France. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

Lina flushed. “There’s really nothing more to take.”

Tristan’s hazel eyes moved slowly back to meet hers. “I don’t want to
take
anything from you, Carolina. But as far as I can make out, you’ve got quite a nice little con going already. You have the interest of Carey Lewis Longhorn, not to mention Mr. Gallant.”

Lina didn’t think the columnist’s surname was really Gallant, but she was in no position to correct anyone just then.

“You’d need my help, of course. For protection and guidance. You have been doing an all right job so far, but you would have tripped up and revealed yourself soon. For instance, you’re going to have to be careful about only being seen out with perpetual bachelors. If you don’t make friends with a girl or two, the ladies will never accept you, and that will mean certain social death.” Tristan paused and put his
mouth against a contemplative fist. “That’s priceless advice,” he went on in a moment.

“But for now what really matters is that Mr. Longhorn is rich and he likes you. This means jewels and presents will follow, and those are just as valuable as any inheritance….”

The beginnings of hope were branching through Lina’s mind, but she was still wary. She had believed recklessly before, and look where that had gotten her. “I wouldn’t have to…?”

“No! No, no, no.” Tristan moved closer to her on the settee and gave her a reassuring look. Down below, people who could not afford to stay in the hotel but still wanted to look grand were arriving for luncheon. “That would be a bit like killing the golden goose, wouldn’t it?”

Lina blinked thoughtfully, turning this over. It still seemed too wild. She had labored since childhood to win the attentions of a boy who worked in a carriage house—how on earth would she hold the interest of a man whose love life was the stuff of gossip columns? In a few days, no less. “But how can I go on without any money? The bills you brought me alone, not to mention I’ll be removed from the hotel on Friday when I can’t pay….”

“You are too easily defeated.
That
we will have to cure you of. I really should have caught you earlier and saved you from yourself—
nobody
pays on time. They must consider you a very eccentric heiress indeed here at the New Netherland!
This is one of the chief characteristics of rich people: that they don’t know what things cost and forget all the time that they are supposed to pay for them. With just a little gall you will be able to put them off long enough to find yourself in a position where Mr. Longhorn is footing your bill. And then you—and I—will really be in the money.”

Lina nodded, a little confusedly. She couldn’t help but feel somewhat nervous and exposed listening to this plot. But it was some kind of relief that Tristan was still there, even though he knew her real identity. She didn’t mind entertaining his schemes, however crazy they were, just for a little while. It made her feel not entirely destitute, listening to his ideas for her, and she began to feel that perhaps there was a way for her to get just a little of that money back. Not all of it, just enough to buy a ticket west. Then she would go off to find Will, and leave all of her mistakes behind her in New York.

T
HE WHISTLE BLEW, AND LOUD SHOUTS OF “ALL
aboard!” could be heard up and down the platform. Inside the simple wooden waiting room, in the small mountain town where Will and Elizabeth had disembarked, benches emptied and hats were clutched as travelers ran for the lumbering iron beast that was preparing to depart again. The table between Will and Elizabeth had uneven legs, and every time one of them put an agitated elbow on its unvarnished top, their glasses of lemonade threatened to spill over. Finally the train left the station, causing all of the windows to shake in their frames but bestowing some quiet on Elizabeth’s thoughts.

Will stood first and went to the window, where he took his time assessing the length of the platform and anyone who remained on it. He waited until the steam cleared and then he turned to where Elizabeth sat, folded into the camel wrap with flannel lining that she had worn the day she left New York. He stretched his long, taut arms over his head before
moving his hands to the back of his neck, where he collected his overgrown hair and tucked it into the collar of his plaid shirt.

Will made a whistling sound of relief and smiled so that his fine, strong teeth showed. “He’s gone, Lizzie,” Will called, “so you can stop looking so frightened.”

Elizabeth tried to smile. She stood and went to him, and then looked out the window as though Will’s statement needed some kind of verification. She did feel less frightened, but it hardly settled her mind. On the other end of the room the lunch-counter workers, who had been selling pie and sliced-chicken sandwiches, were closing up. The newsagent was counting his take.

“Thank goodness,” she said finally, wishing her relief didn’t sound so thin.

“And now we have twelve hours before the next train comes. Just time enough to find a little chapel and get hitched, I’d say.” Will laughed, although she knew he was at least partially in earnest. That moment back in New York when he had knelt to propose to her—this was just after she had become engaged to Henry—was still wincingly fresh in her mind. “You could be Mrs. Keller for real on the next car we ride.”

Elizabeth lowered her eyes and swallowed, the sound of which was unbearably loud in her own ears at least. A few days ago this would have seemed a very romantic suggestion, but at
the moment it brought back all the old feelings. The old guilt, from the days when Will was so desirable and true and she was the hypocrite favorite of New York’s ruling class. She put her hand into her pocket and folded it around the ring.

“Or we could go on living in sin.” His voice was softer this time, but had not entirely lost its humor.

“No, I—”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s that I don’t know what we’ll find in New York. Or how Mother really is or what kind of trouble Diana has gotten into.” Elizabeth had to close her eyes to keep herself from crying. She drew the wrap closer around her with one hand and tightened her fist over the ring with the other. “I’ve been imagining the worst. And I’m worried about money. What if we get there and they’re going to be thrown out of the house, and they can’t afford any medicine, and—”

“Hush. There’s no reason to think things are so bad. All we know is what the papers say, and you know that they exaggerate. And anyway, I have some money.”

“I know, but Will…” Elizabeth looked at him and then shifted her eyes to the rough-hewn floorboards. She ran her fingers along the table that they had just been sitting at. “I have something I didn’t tell you about. Something I was planning on selling, in Oakland. Something that might make all the difference to my family.”

She looked up at Will, who was watching her and waiting. Besides the faint chatting of the newsagent and the lemonade salesgirl, the room was silent.

“My engagement ring.” Her voice broke over the word. “From Henry Schoonmaker.”

Elizabeth had avoided even saying that name out loud to Will since they had left New York. She disliked doing it now, and it was plain on his face that he found the sound of it distasteful too. “Oh.”

Now she spoke fast, hoping to bring him away from that maudlin precipice he was surely now approaching. “Not because I want it, Will—because it’s worth a great deal of money, because I thought maybe we would need it and I didn’t know how I was ever going to find you and…” Her voice trailed off. “But I did find you.”

“I wouldn’t have let you get lost.” Will still hadn’t met her eyes yet, and his jaw was set so that it emerged prominently over his neck.

“I know,” Elizabeth replied. She didn’t like how small her voice had gotten, but she couldn’t help it.

“I’m not angry, Lizzie, don’t be like that. It’s just not a nice memory is all. I would have liked to have been the one to give you that ring.”

It was late in the afternoon and the light coming in from the windows on either side of the station was moody
and blue, but Elizabeth found that she was radiating in her old way despite all that. “I don’t even like that ring.”

“You don’t?” Will met her eyes now, and there was the suggestion of a smile just waiting to emerge.

“No.” She reached for his hands and took them both up, swinging her arms to lighten his mood. “I would have thrown it in the river with my old self if I didn’t have a practical streak. But I do—that part of me wants to sell the ring. Just in case my family really needs that money. Just in case.”

The arc of a line had emerged between the left corner of Will’s mouth and his left nostril. His large hands were holding on to her dainty ones, and they swung their arms back and forth a few more times just thinking of what they would yet do together. “Someday I’m going to buy you just the kind of ring you want.”

“I know,” Elizabeth whispered. “I know you will.”

“In the meantime, let’s go sell that ring, get it off both our minds.” Will dropped her hands and put an arm over her shoulder, drawing her toward the far door of the waiting room, which led away from the train platform and into town. “That way you can stop worrying, putting lines in that famous complexion of yours.”

“But how will we know where to go? We’ve never been here before,” Elizabeth said, even as they moved across the floor.

“All train stations are the same,” he answered, his jovial tone fully restored to him. “Surrounded by saloons and pawnshops, so that people desperate to get away can sell what they have. Or have a drink while they wait. We aren’t desperate, though, neither of us. We’re going to get a good price for that ring. It’s caused enough trouble, and now it’s going to give us something back.”

Elizabeth, tucked in under Will’s shoulder and headed into a snow-covered place she had never seen before, began to feel all right again. She felt truly calm for the first time since Diana’s telegram had arrived. They were wrapped up in their coats, which made them look a little put together despite everything, and they could already feel the bracing air just outside and the whole future just beyond it.