Rumors (18 page)

Breath returned to Lina’s body, although she was still unsure whether to be relieved or devastated. She felt sure that Tristan’s appearance had broken her spell. Mr. Longhorn
turned away from the door, and she could see that he had been angry—really, truly angry. He brought his balled fist to his mouth and coughed into it violently several times. As Tristan backed into the hall, he winked once at Lina and then turned.

“Thank you, sir,” he called before he disappeared down the far stairwell, with Robert following watchfully behind.

When Mr. Longhorn’s fit of coughing ended, he paused and let his eyes linger on his young guest.

“That was so…odd.” She was stumbling over her words, and she could not look up from the table. “I can pay you back, of course, just as soon as—”

The old gentleman made a gesture with his hand as though he were batting away a moth. “I don’t want you to pay me back, my dear.”

“But I
could,
” she persisted stupidly.

“No, you couldn’t. I know what you’ve been up to, or do you think I made all my money by trusting every huckster that came along?”

“No.” The truth of what he said set in for Lina a few minutes too late. She had been anticipating those words, “I know what you’ve been up to,” and it was almost a relief to hear them. “I suppose you didn’t,” she offered finally.

“No, I knew just what you were up to that first day in the lobby.”

She began to fidget with the lace detail of her dress. The shame was almost overwhelming, but in a few minutes, she told herself, it would all be over.

“And I thought to myself, A girl that lovely shouldn’t have to degrade herself just because she wasn’t born into anything. It’s different for a man with talent. A man with talent can work hard and make some money and marry himself a name. Not so a girl, not unless her pa works hard. And I suspect you never had much of a pa.”

Only now did Lina allow her gaze to rise a little up. “No.” Her voice was a cautious whisper.

“Don’t look so scared, dear. I don’t want anything more from you than your company, and you don’t need to worry about my being a lecher like they say. I don’t want to take any of the glow off you. I waited too long to marry, and now it’s too late for me, but I’d still like someone to go to parties with and to tell me how the young people do things. If you’d be that girl for me, I’d see that the department stores and the hotel clerks don’t bother you anymore. Your bills would go directly to me—you could hire yourself a lady’s maid and your own coach. I would see that they give you the best.”

Lina was so stunned with gratitude she hardly knew what to do. So she was worth immortalizing, after all. Or at least dressing up. A calming warmth was spreading all over her body, and she had to remind herself to smile. “Thank you,
Mr. Longhorn,” she said as the smile suffused her face. “That sounds nice.”

“Good. Tomorrow you’ll go get yourself some new things. I want you to attend the Schoonmakers’ annual Christmas Eve party with me, and you’ll need a gown nobody has seen before for that.”

Lina knew her nodding was a little profuse, but already she was picturing the cut and hue.

When he spoke again, there was a new gentleness in his words. “I’m sorry for that ugly little scene, my dear. We needn’t dwell on it anymore.”

“Oh, I am, too,” she said softly. But Lina wasn’t sorry at all. For Lina, the waters had unexpectedly turned tranquil, and she found herself floating under a bright, warm sun.

S
ATURDAY WAS THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS EVE
, and it passed quietly for smart New York. The sun went down early and, for Henry, it was as though daylight never happened. He brooded all night in his own room, slept fitfully but late, and by five o’clock darkness had completely fallen. It seemed one continuous night, for here he was again, in the same drawing room with the same people. There were a few extras, too—Lucy Carr and Mr. Gore. Apparently, Isabelle couldn’t go without entertainment for two nights together and had put her foot down, since ordinarily old Schoonmaker would not have let a divorcée into his house twice in one week, and especially not at the same time as a man who was seen so regularly without his wife. They were playing bridge, the four of them—Mrs. Schoonmaker, Mrs. Carr, Gore, and Penelope Hayes, who was watching Henry, bird of prey–like, without ever seeming to turn her eyes in his direction.

“Bridge,” said Henry without moving his nose too far
from his waiting cognac. “Isn’t that one of the unladylike pursuits?”

“Only when you do it in large parties or the big hotels or in foreign places,” replied his father, who had been sitting next to him getting red-faced on his son’s favorite after-dinner drink and saying very little.

“In other words, only when you get seen?”

“Exactly. Not everybody is so pathologically
seen
as you, my boy.”

Henry nodded and drank. He tapped his fingers on the ormolu-encrusted arm of his chair and considered the fact that if he had not been seen on one recent evening in particular, he would be free to go find out exactly what had happened between Teddy and Diana. Instead, he sat in the parlor of his family’s Fifth Avenue mansion, growing older by the minute just like everybody else.

He could hear, in the adjoining galleries and parlors, the servants preparing for the Christmas Eve party Mrs. Schoonmaker was planning—she had complained of the ruckus, and of the strain the preparations put on her nerves, several times already. It occurred to Henry that he was sitting in that same enfilade of rooms where his engagement had been announced, some months before, and it seemed to him that from that original act of cowardice came all his current misfortunes.

“Miss Hayes is such a lovely good girl.” His father took
a drink when he had finished speaking but did not otherwise pretend that this was a random observation.

“You didn’t used to think so.”

“Tragedies change people.” Henry’s father shifted his bulk in his antique chair, which sighed, and moved his snifter from one hand to the other. “Some people,” he added pointedly.

Henry took a bitter sip and propped his head against his fist, shifting his body as he did away from his father’s. He looked across the floor, the polish of which was obscured by the dark carpets, at Penelope, who was posed against the little card table in her pale yellow dress with the gold beading around the bustline. Her dark hair was swept up into a high sculpture, and the glow from the next room gently outlined her long, curved neck. He had kissed that neck, but he felt very far away from a desire to do so now. It was arched just so for him, he knew, but also for his father, and this thought gave him a deep feeling of disgust.

Henry’s attention was sharply diverted when the butler appeared in the door and announced a name that had been much in his thoughts. Before the final syllable of the name “Teddy Cutting” had been uttered, Henry was out of his chair and across the floor. He met Teddy as he entered, looked him in the eye and stated a sharp and simple: “You.”

“Hello to you, too,” Teddy replied with mild amusement. “I was just dining at Delmonico’s. Everybody missed you.”

“I’ve got to talk to you.” Henry’s eyes flashed around the room even as he roughly linked his arm through Teddy’s. To his great irritation, Teddy released himself and moved to the card table, where he made his hellos. Only after he had gone around the circle did he allow himself to be drawn forward into the galleries. He wore a bemused twist to his smile and a dinner jacket that Henry noticed as being distinctly borrowed from his own style. His blond hair was darkened with the pomade that held it parted on the side.

“I saw the paper,” Henry hissed when they were out of earshot from the others. The walls of the room were deep red, and copper pots in the corners overflowed with ferns.

“What paper?” Teddy asked. He was maintaining a stance of vaguely amused innocence that did nothing to calm Henry’s ire. He tapped his top hat, which he was still holding, against his thigh as though he were bored. “It’s really a shame you’re on house arrest so soon after you ended your mourning period…” he went on. “The fellows miss you.”

“The paper with the item about you and Diana Holland.”

“What are you talking about?” Teddy said, halting by a marble nymph and finally looking his friend in the eye.

“That ‘Gallant’ column,” Henry replied hotly. “The one that mentioned you being intimate with my—with the young lady with whom you thought I shouldn’t be engaging in a romantic relationship at this particular historical moment.”

Teddy paused and his gray eyes shifted back toward the room where the others were laughing over something or other. All amusement had washed out of his face. He tapped his foot against the parquet floor and considered for a moment how best to reply. “Oh, Henry, you can’t believe—” He broke off, shaking his head. “That thing that had Florence so upset? Did you read what it said about
her,
Henry? How could I have been concerned about what it said about
me
, when…”

Henry’s face was stuck in a furious frown. His rage had built up without his control, and it had no route of escape. Teddy was watching him in that quiet, serious way he sometimes had late at night after too many drinks had been spilled, and Henry could almost see his own frightful visage reflected in his friend’s. The fun that was being had down the corridor of rooms seemed a thousand miles away.

“I didn’t notice about Florence,” Henry said finally. His throat was tight.

“Henry…it was arranged by my sister’s mother-in-law and Mrs. Holland that I would escort Diana to a little dinner. I enjoyed her company very much, just as I always enjoyed her sister’s, but you know there is nothing between us.” He kept on with those eyes, and Henry felt his rage subside an inch. “Don’t make yourself ridiculous with accusations,” Teddy concluded sharply.

“All right, all right.” Henry sighed and covered his face
with his hand. He was about to ask why then, if there had been nothing between his friend and Diana, she had not come to him last night, but stopped himself—not because he was afraid of shocking Teddy, but because he felt suddenly protective of her again. And of her sister, wherever she was, guarding her secret just as he should.

“You love her,” Teddy observed quietly.

Henry replied with an uncharacteristic lack of irony: “Yes.”

Teddy’s eyes shifted to the plaster interlacing that decorated the ceiling in curlicues. “Lord, you never make it easy, do you.”

“No.”

“You are aware of that.”

“Yes.” Henry paused. He had known Teddy a long time, but he had never had a conversation with him quite like this one. “But I’ve never felt like this, either.”

His friend regarded him. Moments passed, and for the first time Henry was afraid to hear his friend’s assessment. “You’ll have to get her, then.”

Henry let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “I can’t even leave the house.”

Only now did he move his hand from his eyes, and saw that his friend was nodding. Teddy touched his arm and leaned in for a view of the room where a fire was crackling and cards were being loudly played.

“Your father’s gone out for a minute,” Teddy observed.

The two men looked at each other and then turned and started back toward the others at an inconspicuous pace.

“What a bore he is,” Teddy mocked, with a little jab in Henry’s direction, when they were again beside the card table.

“Oh, I know!” Isabelle spoke with enthusiasm but barely glanced up from her hand. Cards were, as his father had observed several times—erroneously, in the son’s opinion—her only vice.

“I rather like our new Henry,” Penelope said in a soft voice that, if Henry had heard it from behind a door, he would have sworn belonged to some other girl.

“I’m going to bed,” Henry went on, trying not to betray the new energy that was already making racehorses of his thoughts.

“And I’m going to see what the city at night has to offer a young man like myself.”

Both men stepped away from the marble-topped table across the deep purple carpet. The light from the fire played across Penelope’s slim, yellow torso and on her stunned features.

“Good night to both of you then,” Mrs. Schoonmaker said, only now turning her focus away from the cards. She shot a look at Penelope. “Apologies from Mr. Schoonmaker; he was called to the club unexpectedly. Some political bore or other.”

“Good night,” chorused the others.

The two men walked toward the door. Once they were out in the hall, Henry turned to his friend as though he were bidding him farewell. Teddy risked a look backward and nodded as he handed Henry his hat. The two men shook hands and then walked past each other, Teddy moving in the direction of Henry’s rooms and Henry, the hat pulled down over his face, toward the Cutting carriage that was waiting by the curb.

“L
ADIES USUALLY DO NOT BELIEVE ME, BUT THE
Yukon can be quite lovely in summer,” Snowden Cairns was saying as the remains of the broiled squab were being removed from the Hollands’ table. “The drifts of fuchsia fireweed, the lavender lupins, the daisies, the arnicas, all of them giving off their pungent perfume…and meanwhile the robins and woodpeckers making their music…”

Diana’s softly rounded cheek was rested on her balled fist, and her lids were heavy. Her drowsiness was not, she was vaguely aware, what her mother had meant when she asked her to be nice to Snowden. But drowsiness was the only alternative she currently knew to a kind of wild agitation. She could hardly swallow a bite of food, her skin felt cold despite the many fires now burning in the hearths of No. 17, and her head was encircled in feverish heat. She was lovesick for any sign of Henry, and she now understood—as she had never before understood—how literally true that phrase could be. Snowden, her constant companion, did not make not seeing
Henry any easier. He was a dull and repetitive conversationalist, she had decided over dinner the night before, and she had not yet revised her opinion.

“Of course, that was before the stampede, before the boomtowns started appearing and the unsavory characters spilled off the ships in droves….”

Snowden’s man had finished clearing the dinner things, and Edith, who was positioned on the other side of the table from Diana, was giving her a look. There lay between them new candles and piles of oranges and the old crochet table linens and what was left of the family silver.

“Are you tired, Di?” her aunt asked her, interrupting their guest’s soliloquy. They had tacitly agreed to let him speak, since his retinue had gone about repairing the house, securing the kind of fare the Hollands had not consumed in months and positioning a decorated tree in the parlor and locating new pictures to fill the unfaded squares in the wallpaper. It would have taken something more than indifference to politesse not to listen to whatever he wanted to say.

“Yes, Miss Di, you do look weary,” Snowden seconded with a tone of concern that she would have given many things not to be the beneficiary of.

“I am,” she lied. “I am entirely fatigued. Perhaps it is the weather, or perhaps I am worn down by my gratitude,” she said with a sincerity that was strong but not strong enough to
escape Edith’s notice. “So many things you have done for us!” she added quickly. “It rather overwhelms.”

“Then you had better go to bed,” her aunt went on with a warning eye. Diana could never tell if it was the facial resemblance between herself and her aunt that made her feel understood at moments like these, or if she really was being empathized with.

“Indeed, you have listened to enough of my boring stories.” Snowden gave her a smile that she supposed she might have found generous if she did not find his every gesture a tiresome intrusion on her thoughts. “Please don’t weary yourself further on my account. You were such a pleasure to dine with last night and tonight. I hope you will have the strength for many more meals in my company.”

Diana managed a kind of smile and left the low-lit dining room with lowered eyes bearing only a lazy implication of regret. Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty, she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep, and that if she dreamed, she might then finally be with Henry. Earlier in the day, when Snowden’s retinue was carrying in crates of produce and bundles of firewood, she had managed to slip a bottle from one of the cases of wine. When she reached her own room, she thought, she would have a glass of it, and then she would become giddy and then hazy, and she would drift off soon enough. It had not occurred to
her that she had no means of uncorking it, or that she didn’t even know how.

She climbed the stairs indifferently, holding back her skirt. She paused with her hand on the brass knob and considered going back for a corkscrew but decided against it. If she ran into Snowden, there would be more odious conversing, and then she would never get back to her safe little room. When she opened the door she saw that such a trip had already been made unnecessary.

For there Henry sat next to the opened bottle of wine. He had been so present in her thoughts that it seemed entirely rational for him to now be present in reality. It was only how much better he looked in person that needed getting used to, and that she absorbed soon enough. His face was set in a subtle, familiar smile, and his eyes were full of fire. He was wearing a black dinner jacket, and a shiny top hat rested in his lap. He was still, watching her, and yet every inch of him was animated. Diana leaned against the door behind her to close it and felt for the lock without diverting her gaze. She would not have trusted him to stay there if she had looked away.

The light in the room came entirely from one lamp by her bed and the dying flames under the mantel. Henry was sitting next to the fireplace, in the wing chair with the worn gold upholstery, where she had imagined herself reading a few verses before that hopeful sleep. The embers lent his skin even
more of a metallic glow than usual. She did not think that his dark eyes had blinked even once since she entered.

“You’re in my chair,” she whispered.

Then she gave up the support of the door and crossed to him, her feet falling across the white bearskin rug. She plucked the hat from his lap and placed it on her head, jauntily, and then she sat across Henry’s legs sidesaddle. He brought an arm around her and fixed his palm on the high, flat part of her thigh, his gaze unwavering. When she realized that she could smell him, she finally knew he was real.

“I’d like to reply that you’re wearing my hat,” he said, “except that it’s not mine.”

“Oh?”

“It’s Teddy Cutting’s.”

His expression was unchanged, but she could hear the difference in the way he pronounced the name. It was not how he ordinarily would have pronounced it. Diana’s confusion was momentary, and then she remembered, in a rush, a room on East Sixteenth Street, a desperate feeling, and a gossip item that she herself had spitefully composed. She took the hat off.

“Oh, you can’t
think
—”

“No, but still I’d like you to tell me.”

“That was a silly prank, Henry.” She tossed the hat toward the bed and fussed with her long, white skirt. “There’s nothing. It was when I thought that you and Penelope—”

“Enough.”

She watched the play of light in his eyes and decided that if Henry had felt jealousy over the Teddy incident, then she could truly let go of the emotions his past involvement with Penelope had caused her. She bent her face toward him and waited until his lips met hers. He brought his mouth to hers again and again, slowly and softly at first, but then with a growing urgency. His hands were in her hair, they were at the most siphoned part of her corset. She was only vaguely aware of the sound her heeled slippers made when they fell to the floor, one and then the other. It seemed very natural that, as she knew somewhere in the margins of her consciousness, her hair was spilling down around her shoulders. Minutes had passed, but she had no idea how many, when he pulled her face back from his.

“I love you.”

He said it simply, quietly. He didn’t say those words as she had imagined them said so many times by characters in novels. He didn’t say them with desperation, with pleading, with futile rage or florid persuasion. He spoke without lasciviousness; he spoke only with the intention of being understood.

Diana’s response was a smile that was radiant and beyond her control.

“You know I never loved Penelope, and I never will.” She
wasn’t sure she had ever seen his black eyes so devoid of mischief, so sincere. “It won’t seem right to people, you and me. They don’t know Elizabeth is alive—they’ll just think that I’ve replaced her with another horse from the same sire. Whatever position your family is in now, our affair won’t make it easier.”

Diana raised her chin and held his gaze. “It’s right to me.”

“I wouldn’t want you to do anything that made you feel—”

But Diana had heard enough. She stopped Henry with a lasting, humid kiss. When it was over, she drew him down backward onto the bearskin rug. He propped himself on his elbow and looked at her for a long moment, in which she felt she knew what it was to be an artist’s model as she was studied. He reached for the open wine bottle, which had been sitting beside the chair, and took a long sip. Diana took it from him, and she too sipped, and after that there was no more discussion.

Henry rose over her with careful hands and watchful eyes. He took off his jacket, and then he rolled back her stockings and examined her small feet. He kissed her on the ankles, and then he planted kisses up to the insides of her knees. She was trying to keep herself very still, and she found she had to remind herself to breathe. By the time their mouths met again she had lost all sense of the outside world, but she hardly cared.

He asked her once more if she was sure, and she nodded that she was. She told herself she was.

There was a stabbing kind of pain at first, and Diana briefly wondered if she were perhaps the first human woman born physically unable to commit original sin. But then Henry whispered to her and time passed—she would never know how much—and she found her body wanted to move against his in a way that she had never, even at her baddest moments, imagined herself moving.

Later, at some remote part of the night, she woke to find Henry examining her naked shoulder. He watched her and she watched him back. She went down to the kitchen to get them water, but she mostly spent the rest of the hours before morning curled against his chest as tightly as possible.

She couldn’t remember when her thoughts merged into sleep, but she knew exactly when she was awakened. There was the sound of the door handle turning in its groove, and then she opened her eyes to see her own bedroom bathed in morning light. It was sparkling white all around her, but all Diana could think was:
I am not a virgin anymore. I am no longer a girl.
Her body was different, too; it felt sore but experienced, like a body prepared for everything the world had to offer.

Then the door swung against the warped wood planks and she looked up and into the face of her lady’s maid. Claire was holding a blue-and-white porcelain pitcher. Diana turned to where she was looking and saw Henry’s handsome, sleeping face beside her on the bearskin rug. His face looked even better in the morning, at close range. The fire had died down in the night. By the time she looked back at the door, it had been drawn shut. Thank goodness it was only Claire, she thought, and moved back into the warm, sleeping form beside her and let her eyelids flutter contentedly shut.