Rumors (16 page)

“W
HO IS THE NOTE FROM
?”

Diana, who was sitting too close to the fire in her family drawing room, raised her eyes as though she were coming out of a daytime sleep. For a few moments her thoughts had been entirely elsewhere, further uptown, in the greenhouse where she’d once spent the night, in that perfect presence. The most exciting presence she’d ever known. Her lids fluttered and she realized that the side of her body facing the flames had grown hot and red. She folded the note hastily and put it in the pocket of the honeydew-colored dress she had worn only the week before. The dress, which had been a witness to feelings entirely opposite of what she was experiencing now, had been her mother’s decision that night and this evening, as well.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she told Snowden, who was sitting across from her in a dull black jacket that seemed deliberately chosen to accentuate his less urban qualities. “What were you saying…?”

“I was saying that the ways in which I am prepared to help you and your family are not a charity…” Snowden went on, looking vaguely pleased with himself. It was a point he seemed at pains to make, and to which Diana was surely obliged to listen, as she feared Edith, stationed in the near background and pretending to read from a book of sermons, might remind her if her attention lapsed. For he had bought more wood than they could burn all winter, and stocked the pantries, and erected in the corner of the room a Christmas tree that brought a sense of festivity to the Holland house that would have been unthinkable the day before. “Your father and my business interests were of course entangled, and our holdings in the Klondike were for a time difficult to decipher….”

Diana smiled mistily and focused her eyes on the dust brown collar of Snowden’s shirt so she would appear to be paying attention even as she allowed her thoughts to drift. She had been dreamy and agitated since their guest had arrived, trying not to seem rude or dismissive but unable to banish the image or idea of Henry for even a moment. Of course, when he had not come to visit on Wednesday and then again on Thursday—as he had so clearly promised on Tuesday night—her yearning had grown and she had not been able to eat, and by evening she had felt tingly and weak. It had been a sweet, almost unbearable state of confusion. She was certain that this time she had not misjudged Henry, however, and his note—
which had been delivered by some anonymous man, just as darkness was falling, and then brought to her by a distracted Claire—had finally vindicated this assumption.

She was lucky in a way that Snowden was there, because all of his projects to make the house better kept her busy and prevented her imagination from wandering too far in any direction, although she did not in truth want to be distracted.

“What a time we had on the Klondike, though…” Snowden was saying.

She did not ask herself why Henry’s father had put him on house arrest. She only imagined that he must be experiencing a kind of torture, as she was, and that his intentions and desires were also shifted to the greenhouse with the simple brass frame bed. Diana wondered if there were a way to calculate this division of self—what percentage of her body and spirit was there in the drawing room of No. 17 Gramercy Park South, what percentage was transported to that perfect place with the arched glass ceiling where she was close enough to Henry that she could smell his clean, faintly cologned skin. Certainly more than half. The arrival of that note, which was now safely hidden in her pocket, had so captured her senses that she could almost feel the delicate play of Henry’s fingertips along her arm.

“Of course, that was only one of our adventures. We went looking for fortunes in South Africa and Cal-ee-for-nye-ay.”

Diana shifted in her seat and nodded vaguely. This weak attempt at humor did not please her. Meanwhile, the line of Henry’s chin was as clear in her mind as the white line of the mantel on which Snowden rested his stubby elbow. She could see the exact shade of his eyes, although she would not have been able to answer whether Snowden’s were blue, green, or brown. The objects in the room she occupied—a room she had seen daily for all of her life—were indistinct, but she was already mentally mapping the route she would take out of the house, the route that would take her to Henry. She had already planned what she would wear and what she was prepared to give him.

“Diana, are you well?”

“Yes,” Diana answered, startled. She decided she should appear convincing and so reiterated the sentiment. “Very well.”

“Good. You looked faint for a moment, but if you are feeling well, then there is something your mother and I have discussed. We have talked about how well I knew your father, his affections and hopes for his daughters—hopes that now fall exclusively on you. We have discussed what Mr. Holland thought appropriate and true, and we decided that at this juncture it would be wise to show the world how lovely—and how well—you are. We shall dispel the rumors about the Hollands having to hide in poverty. You and I will thus have
dinner tonight at Sherry’s, with your aunt Edith as chaperone. The world will see how beautiful you look—have I told you, by the way, how beautifully you wear that dress?” Snowden reached inside the breast of his jacket and removed a small oblong box. “It will go very well with this, don’t you think?”

Diana watched as he pulled back the black velvet lid and revealed a delicate pearl choker that, on another day, she might have readily agreed would go very well with her dress.

“But—tonight?” she started, her cheeks slackening. She was all of a sudden back in the parlor with all the dark woodwork and the olive-colored walls. Her skin was being scorched by the fire, and, try as she might, she could not recover her flight of fancy. She was only, horribly, here. A quiver of disappointment shot through her. Tonight she was supposed to be with Henry, in his greenhouse, but she would not even have time to send him a note explaining her absence.

Snowden, if he noticed, was not deterred. “Yes—has there ever been a more perfect time for it? The reservation is for nine o’clock,” he said as he moved to hook the double string of pearls at the nape of her neck. Diana’s face was cast into shadow as Snowden’s torso moved in toward her and she took the opportunity to grimace for all the things she would miss. The pearls were cold against her skin, and the clasp made a sound of sick finality as it snapped shut.

H
ENRY CROSSED HIS LEGS AND SHIFTED IN THE
wooden rocker that was positioned so as to casually access a view into the long main room of the Schoonmaker greenhouse. He was wearing trousers with whisper-thin pinstripes and a cream shirt fastened at the wrist with cuff links that bore his initials. Dressing well was a habit for Henry, but he had put extra care into what he wore that particular Friday evening. This despite the fact that he was on house arrest, after celebrating his renewed hopes for a life with Diana Holland with a group of drunken Christmas carolers. He had brought extra blankets to the gardener’s old bedroom himself and lit the small wood-burning stove, but still he was concerned that Diana, when she came, would not be warm enough.

He had been stuck inside the house for two days, during which time he had done little but experience a building frustration and dream of Diana. He had rallied all his ingenuity to find a way to slip her a note without his father getting mind of it.

Of course now it was well past the appointed time, and there was still no sign of her. He had gone out twice to sneak along the gate and look for her, but a prolonged presence there would only have given him away. Since then he’d had a good hour to contemplate whether this was the longest he had ever waited for a woman. While it far outdistanced the third occasion, it only came in second, after an evening one summer in Newport when he waited for a woman whose smile gleamed with the same pristine glory as her wedding ring and who, the hours finally proved, was never going to show up. He had already known in his heart that she wasn’t coming, and as such was so thoroughly boozed up that he wouldn’t have been allowed to return to gentle company anyway. He instead lay back in the grass and thought maudlin thoughts about love and matrimony and how he would never engage in either.

His mood was different now. He was entirely sure that Diana was on her way to him, that he was in her thoughts as she was in his, and that the time before they were again together was finite. Quite finite.

Still, waiting was not something he was used to; he was not, in any event, doing it very gracefully. He stood, walked around the bed, arched his neck to look at the curved ceiling with its glass panes in their white iron web, which hung over the simple bed buried in quilts. He breathed in the rich, earthy air and straightened his collar. He checked the smoothness of
his vaguely golden skin over his high cheekbones in a small mirror and wondered if he had time to get a bottle of wine from the cellar. He turned, finally, back to the chair, where he crossed his legs in the other direction and then began rustling through a pile of newspapers on a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. He supposed the gardener brought them there so that he could read something while he was taking lunch. Henry reminded himself that he should check with the gardener, who was now living with one of Isabelle’s seamstresses in the main servants’ quarters, to see how much time he spent there before he planned another rendezvous, as he was already planning for many more.

Of course, that was an attitude he had before he began idly flipping through the old newspapers in a vain attempt to pass the time. Henry was not naturally interested in world events or stock crises or theater reviews or the problem of public drunkenness amongst the city’s coachmen and cabdrivers. He was interested in yachting and horses, topics amply covered by that week’s papers and that he might have read about on another occasion. At that particular moment, with the stars positioned as they were, he was only really prepared to read to the bottom of a sentence that contained the words
Diana
and
Holland
. And after a few moments of shiftless reading he did find one.

The paragraph began innocently enough with some ac
count of a dinner party of Florence Cutting’s—she was Mrs. Darroll now; a few other details followed, but Henry wasn’t reading that part so carefully—which apparently Diana, his Di, had attended. Not only attended, but spent in the company of his friend Teddy. The “intimate” company. This word conjured for Henry all the irritating ways his friend behaved when he took a special liking to a girl—stroking her hand and fetching anything she might have a vague desire for and generally being overly solicitous in a way that no man in his right mind would ever have the patience to be. Henry read the item again four times but found the account unchanged.

Now he saw why Teddy had been so against his relationship with Diana. It was because Teddy wanted her for himself. Henry balled up the paper and threw it onto the bed.

He walked through the long central passageway of the greenhouse, surrounded by year-round hyacinths and orchids, and into the main house with a single thought. He must find Diana and demand to know what had happened. Before she told him too much he would explain how insufferable Teddy was, what a do-gooder, how often—against his own sense of style and his best friend’s frequent cajoling—he succumbed to decorum. He would tell her how Teddy, like an old matron after too much tea, had discouraged their love…. But of course, this line of thinking only made Henry realize how much his friend had gained by stalling him.

Henry continued through the small first-floor galleries with the idea of finding a servant who might be able to help him locate a coat. It was cold, he knew that much, and he had no time to ascend the stairs to his own suite of rooms. He was thinking about the coat and whether he should in fact go to Teddy first when he stumbled into one of the private drawing rooms and saw that it was occupied. By his father, stepmother—though he still had a hard time thinking of her that way—and Penelope Hayes.

“Oh, Henry!” his stepmother gasped, turning in her chair and batting her fan with some mixture of cunning and glee. She was wearing a dress of black chiffon that gathered in folds at the bust like a Grecian gown and cascaded from her shoulders like wings. White lace covered her slim arms and her neck all the way up to her chin. “So glad to see you. We are having one of these private little quiet evenings, which we fashionable people are being said to prefer this season, and it’s boring me half to death. Since
you
were the last one to bring shame on the family, the very least you could do is join us.”

“Oh,
do,
” Penelope seconded in a voice that subtly contained—he knew it well enough—the intention to seduce. She was clothed all in off-white. It was not her color. She was cold, and there was something about her skin that suggested death.

“You must excuse me,” Henry began, backing for the
door. Isabelle arched a blond brow, and Penelope’s fan came down to her lap in a swoop. He saw in an instant that the women were colluding with each other. “You see, it’s that I’ve got to—”

Henry was cut off by the sound of the carved and polished legs of his father’s chair as they screeched backward against the floor. The man’s solid frame came to standing and then crossed the parquet, where he grabbed Henry by the arm and said coldly, “Oh, no. You’re not going anywhere. Or have you forgotten the fact of your house arrest?” Henry looked at the roaring fire and the ladies by it as he was forcibly brought back into the room. “How poor your memory is,” his father continued, almost as an aside, as he pushed him into the settee by Penelope.

This closeness to the Hayeses’ finest product was a thing he once sought out, but he felt a strong disinclination to it now. She had seemed, then, like the perfect partner in crime—a girl who shared his contempt for all the rules everybody else was so terrified of breaking. Now he saw that she was happy to break them only when it aligned with her other calculations. She might have shared his contempt for everybody else, but she still wanted their adulation. This seemed a very bloodless, unimaginative kind of desire now that his heart was so full of Diana Holland. He clenched his fists and glared at the people who were keeping him from her.