Rumors (19 page)

L
INA WALKED BETWEEN THE WHITE AND BROWN
patches of lawn and the sparsely leaved trees of Union Square at a pace that was neither hurried nor careless. She walked like a girl wearing a new fur coat, which in fact she was. It was made of broadtail, with a high chinchilla collar. Tristan had helped her pick it out that morning. And she was trying to walk as she remembered Elizabeth Holland walking: as though she were sublimely indifferent to the cold, and to the passing, bundled girls who looked in wonder at the rich pelts she wore when out for a stroll, trailed by an obedient maid. She wasn’t really a maid, of course. But Lina had instructed her sister to walk behind her today at a cautious distance.

“What if we see Mrs. Carr or one of the others?” she had explained, and Claire, giddy at the thought of her little sister socializing with such fine people, had agreed.

“That is a very fine muff,” Claire said now. She was referring to the Persian lamb muff that Lina had purchased,
what seemed a lifetime ago, with her Penelope money. Lina’s hands were protected by it now, as protected from the chill wind as a fine pair of white hands that had never seen a day of work might be.

“Isn’t it?” Lina replied over her shoulder. The muff didn’t seem so special to her now that she had the coat. She liked to think that, framed by the collar, her neck appeared longer, more imperious, like the neck of a girl named Carolina. At moments like these, her feelings for Will dimmed slightly, and she thought that she could stand to be in New York just a little longer, to practice her manners that much more. Certainly passersby, noting the quality enveloping her long body, would read her faint freckles as exotic and her sage green eyes as too aloof to be categorized as green or gray. But it was the muff that Claire had noticed—and Lina, sensing a way to begin telling her tales of all her fantastic new friends, had lied. She’d said that Longhorn had given it to her, like he’d given her the coat.

“You will have to be careful to take good care of it.”

“Oh, I will.” For a reason Lina couldn’t quite pinpoint, this comment gave her a little shiver. Claire could not have meant to, but her warning reminded Lina how tenuous her grandeur was, even now that she had accepted Longhorn’s proposal. Tristan had admonished her again that morning for a failing she was beginning to care more about; he had re
minded her how short-lived her social career would be if she did not win the friendship of some female other than Mrs. Carr. “I know how, after all.”

“That is true.” They were moving forward, past wrought-iron benches, across the octagonal stone pavement, and Lina could hear the crunch of the remains of the last snow under her feet. It was too cold that day for a stroll, and so there were few people in the park. “I only wonder what Mr. Longhorn will expect in return for such a present.”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to worry about that. Tristan says—”

“Who’s Tristan?”

Lina stopped walking and her irises rolled to the sky. The sound of his name was both confusing and pleasing to her. She hadn’t told her sister about Tristan when he was just a department store salesman, she certainly didn’t know how to explain now that she knew what he truly was. Or, rather, now she knew that he was more than he seemed. And also now that he had kissed her. When she imagined how she would begin such a story, she wondered if the whole thing didn’t sound a little mad. No, better not to bring up Tristan. She turned and took Claire—who looked almost surprised to have come face-to-face with her newly grand sister—by the arm.

“I’ve talked so much about me.”

“Oh, but I like hearing about all your new friends.” Claire,
who was wearing a black cloth coat and a hat that matched it in color and age if not in style, smiled through her shivers. Her nose had grown almost painfully red. Lina drew her toward one of the benches and removed her muff. Over the tops of the leafless trees, they could see the high stone roofs of the buildings on the east side of the square.

“Try it on,” she instructed. When Claire demurred, she continued with an “I insist.”

Two female servants in plain coats were passing with goods from market, and it was only once they had passed that Claire took the glossy black piece and considered it. She was slow to put it on, but once her hands had disappeared inside, a pleased expression began to take hold of her features.

“You should keep it,” Lina said impulsively. As soon as she had spoken, the thought of losing the muff, which now seemed sentimentally like one of the first fine things she had purchased for herself, was terrible to her.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t, Lina, it’s yours—and anyway, what will Mr. Longhorn say when he sees you’re not wearing it?”

Thus reminded of her lie, Lina began to feel that she didn’t deserve the stole to begin with. “He will wonder what’s happened to it,” she replied darkly, “and I will tell him that I must have been silly and left it somewhere, and then perhaps he will buy me a new one. Or perhaps he won’t. It will be a little test to see how deep his affection goes.”

“Oh, Lina! You mustn’t be like that.” Claire smiled through her disapproval. “That would be such a Penelope Hayes thing to do.”

Hearing that name out loud did not, at that moment, improve Lina’s idea of herself—in fact, it raised a glowering shame for being so recently in a position of peddling secrets—and so she brought the conversation in a different direction in the only way she could think of. “How is Diana? You know, I ran into her quite literally at the opera.”

“Oh, yes, I know. I didn’t believe the Carolina Broad in the paper could possibly be you, until she confirmed it for me.” Claire looked around her, at the small park in its shades of gray with the skinny trees casting shadows even at midday. There was no one near them, and those at a distance had wrapped scarves and hats around their ears to protect themselves from the cold. She lowered her voice even so. “But you know, I am worried about her.”

“About Diana?” Lina said. “I can’t imagine why—she never worries about anyone else.” Her sister gave her a look and she grudgingly added: “I only mean that she’ll be all right because she’s always been so good at watching out for herself.”

“Perhaps not anymore…”

“What could you mean?”

“Well, I’m not saying anything about
her
at all. It’s just
something I saw. Something that might not reflect well on the Hollands…” Claire shifted on the bench and curled forward a little as though she might somehow hide what she knew with her body. “Well, it was
one
of the Hollands, and I saw her with a young man. A young man who used to be very intimately involved with the family, so much so that he was likely to have married into it.”

Lina was irritated by her sister’s obfuscation, and couldn’t help but reveal a little of it in her tone. “You saw her
with
him?”

“Yes,”
Claire answered miserably.

“But what do you mean by ‘with’?” Lina experienced a tingle of interest now, although it would be too wild if her sister was saying what she seemed to be saying.

“Well, you know…
with
.”

Lina’s eyes had grown wide. “No, I don’t know. With each other in the parlor yesterday afternoon?”

“With each other this morning, in each other’s arms, with their clothes in disarray.” Claire put her whole face into the muff and made a distraught sound from the back of her throat. “What can I tell her? I just wish I had never seen it. I wish it had never been.”

Lina could scarcely believe the story—it was too audacious, really. But Claire would never have dreamed such a thing in a million years, and Lina found herself unable to stop
picturing it, as though she had come across an overturned omnibus in the middle of Broadway and was suddenly surrounded by a gawking and inert crowd, unable to look away. It was disgraceful but also romantic enough to make Lina’s heart turn. She pressed her lips together and watched her sister, who was quite visibly more ashamed of what had transpired than Diana Holland ever would be.

“I don’t think you need to tell her anything,” Lina began. She had not—for all her mixed emotions, for all her fascination, revulsion, jealousy—missed what acquiring this knowledge might mean for her.

“You don’t?” Claire’s features were scrunched together in a kind of moral agony.

“Surely just being seen will have made her realize how careless and dangerous her behavior has been.” Lina spoke slowly and tried to catch her sister’s eye, which she was unable to do. “Just knowing how easily she could have been caught by you or her mother or aunt will make her more circumspect.”

“Do you really think so?”

There was sudden moisture in the air. Lina observed her sister. She was so good with the Hollands, so selfless. It had always seemed wrong to Lina how they could spend all their hours treating Claire like their inferior and she could still behave toward them with the loyalty of blood relatives. That was why they showed her so much. That was why she
saw into their bedrooms early in the morning, when they were not at all the kind of family that the world believed them to be. Of course, Claire would never use such information. But Lina, sitting on a wrought-iron bench in a nearly empty park on a wintry morning, knew that she could. A few days ago, she certainly would have.

“I’m convinced everything will come out right in the end.” Lina touched her sister’s shoulder, indicating that she should go, and they both stood. It had begun to snow, and tiny white flakes were catching in Lina’s coat. She looked at her sister in the shiny black muff, and said: “You must keep that fur, though. It will be my Christmas present to you.”

The furrows in Claire’s brow disappeared, and she smiled down at her new possession. Lina’s mind was occupied by this latest, outrageous information, and as they walked—arm in arm this time—to the northern entrance of the park, she found that she no longer minded the loss of the muff at all. The story she had just heard had reminded her that there were far more important things that she should concentrate on acquiring.

T
HE VANITY MIRROR IN DIANA HOLLAND’S BEDROOM
, with its oval mahogany frame carved at the edges to evoke putti and seraphim, had sat in the same place for the better part of a decade, but it had never held such beauty. There, close to the mirror on the table, amongst combs and pins and powders and face paints, was a simple vase jar filled with purple hyacinths. They had arrived that morning with a reminder that the Hollands were wanted at the Schoonmakers’ Christmas Eve party, even though the families were no longer happily to be joined in marriage, and their fragrance filled the air. They had been a symbol that Diana had read in plain English, and she had claimed them for her room with an offhand comment about hyacinths being her favorite flowers.

In any event, it was chiefly her own beauty that filled the mirror on that particular Christmas Eve. Her pupils were as wide and black as midnight, and her cheeks had the sweet flush of a summer sundown.

The face of her lady’s maid, hovering in the background
as Diana’s dark curls were pinned upward, was looking a little gaunt by comparison. Her eyes flickered everywhere but did not meet those of her mistress. She was uncharacteristically quiet.

Diana pursed her round little mouth and let her own gaze rove about the room. All the details were the same as ever: the salmon damask walls, the white bearskin rug, the small mantel, the white chenille bedspread; and yet it was a room forever altered. Diana almost wished she lived in the kind of world where a plaque could be erected—small, subtle, definitely of weathered copper—that would record for posterity the momentous event that had occurred there. What had happened between her and Henry.

Diana decided that the only way to break the silence was all of a sudden. “I’m glad you saw us.”

Claire’s blue eyes darted to the mirror and met Diana’s before she went quickly back to her work. “I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“It’s all right, Claire, I’m not angry.” Diana paused to examine the swath of pale skin at her chest that the white gown, trimmed with dark green, left exposed, and how it caught the low light of her bedroom. The electric light in Henry’s ballroom was sure to be brighter, but she felt confident that that could only be in her favor. “I’m glad.”

Claire’s sigh filled the room. “Miss Diana, if anyone finds out they’ll—”

“But you won’t tell anyone. And me,
I
was bound to tell someone just to be able to talk about it. But now that you know, someone knows, and I won’t have to worry about blabbering on! Except to you, which I’m afraid I may be doing.”

Claire sighed again, although more softly this time—soft enough that Diana could sense she was ready to relent.

“Really, Claire, has anything so exciting ever happened in the history of this household? Me and Henry—”

“You and your sister’s fiancé.”

Diana brought her lips together. She had forgotten herself. She let her gaze float up and saw that Claire was looking her directly in the eyes now. “Oh, Di, just be careful. Be careful!” And then she allowed herself a little smile. She was weaving holly into Diana’s hair, and as she worked her smile grew. By the time all the holly was gone from the tray in front of them and Diana’s hair was festive with green, the smile had overcome her face, and she and her mistress met each other’s eyes like the giddy romantics they were.

They didn’t speak again until Diana had stood for Claire to give a final powder on her nose. “So you’ll be able to see him tonight?” she almost whispered.

“Snowden is escorting me, of course, so I won’t really be able to see him.” Diana’s heart sped at the slightest mention of Henry. She had tried not to think of him too often that day. “But just to be in the same room with him, Claire! I’ll be able
to look at him at least. I’m sure I’ll know how he is feeling from a single glance.”

From that moment forward she thought of nothing but Henry. As she went to her mother’s bedroom to bid her good night and as she walked down the stairs to admire the Christmas tree with Snowden and her aunt. Then they drove, in Snowden’s carriage, to the Schoonmakers’ limestone mansion on Fifth near Thirty-eighth Street, and by the time her father’s old partner had extended a hand to help her up the steep steps to that cheerily lit entryway, her thoughts of Henry were so all-consuming that it was a kind of miracle that she did not stumble on the new-fallen snow and that she did not respond to Snowden’s pleasantries with sentences that were composed of nothing but Henry’s name.

In through the greeting line she went, down the halls crowded out with potted poinsettias, thinking all the time that her heart was swollen to the point of bursting. The ballroom chandelier illuminated countless male faces bobbing on their standing white collars like soft-boiled eggs, but no matter how quickly her eyes darted, no matter how many smiles she shot to her familial acquaintances, still she could not locate Henry in the crowd. She felt on the verge of betraying herself by bringing up the distressing absence when Snowden saved her the trouble.

“Which one is young Schoonmaker? The man Elizabeth was to have married…”

Her aunt had been whisked up by one of the Gansevoort cousins, and a waiter had brought them glasses of warm winter punch. Diana sipped from the little cup to steady her nerves.
Why was Henry not there?
she wanted to scream.
And who is he with?
went the echo in her thoughts.

“I don’t see him,” she said, as indifferently as possible.

“Well, that’s very odd, that the young man of the house should be absent on an evening that is so important to his family.”

“Yes, I—”

Diana broke off. She had noticed how many eyes in the room were on her. The Misses Wetmore, in hues of lavender, were whispering to each other from the rust velvet causeuse at the center of the room, no doubt wondering about the stranger Diana had entered with and what his marital status was. Amos Vreewold and Nicholas Livingston stood in the shadows of the arched entryway to an adjoining gallery, watching her with fervid eyes that made her wonder if they weren’t comparing her appearance to that of the elder sister they had danced with so often. There was Davis Barnard, hiding behind his punch, his brows rising like two flying buttresses at the glimpse of the mystery person she had brought. And entering from the main hall was Penelope, preceded by a fluid skirt of deep red silk, looking Diana over once before she turned her face on the crowd. Penelope was also accompanied by a stranger—at least,
he was strange to Diana. Yet the tall man who held Penelope’s arm seemed entirely at ease in the room and nodded to a few people he evidently knew well, before turning in the direction of the younger Holland, where he was far less economical with his gaze than Miss Hayes had been.

Diana wasn’t sure she had ever seen Penelope not accompanied by that heavyset party-planning fellow, and wondered who the new arrival could be.

If she had been asked before that moment, she would have said that she was indifferent to being looked at. But she was the youngest of the family, and she had never borne the brunt of society’s proclivity for gawking. There, in the Schoonmakers’ ballroom, on the eve of Christmas, she experienced a revelation: Being looked at circumscribed one’s movements. It could really hem a girl in, she realized, as Elizabeth must have realized two years ago at least. She desperately wanted to seek out an explanation for Henry’s absence tonight, but her many observers, seen and unseen, made that impossible.

She couldn’t shake the feeling, either, that she had been so physically changed that her transgressions were plain on her body. She felt so much aware of her own beauty, it seemed inconceivable that everybody else wouldn’t notice the difference, too. And she also couldn’t help feeling that she was marked.

“He—” she began again. She hoped it wasn’t clear from
her tone that, to her, this was
the
he. “He took Elizabeth’s passing very hard. I’m sure it is difficult for him to think how this would have been their first Christmas as—as man and wife.”

Snowden nodded faintly at this explanation, and then he went on to ask her milder questions about the other guests, and what part of town they lived in, and what sort of structures they occupied, and Diana obliged as much as she was able. She did not bother trying to keep her thoughts calm, of course. It was far too late for that.

Living too much in one’s head can be dangerous, her father had liked to tell her. He had always said it lovingly and with some amount of pride, when he had occasion to compare his and his daughter’s personal traits. But Diana remembered it now, in the margins of a ballroom decorated with hundreds of little pictures in big frames and filled by a crowd of faces upturned grotesquely with holiday cheer, with a kind of dread.

The racket her heart was making in her ears was now drowning out all the rosy thoughts of Henry, and she began instead to fear that she had somehow or other been a fool again. That was the way love was, she guessed—it left you always unsteady on your feet. But something caused her to turn her head, before that feeling of vulnerability grew too strong, and that was when she saw Henry staring at her with
such affection and desire that it made her lips quiver open. He was across the room, near the entrance. There was nothing unsteady about his gaze, which she held for several seconds. By the time two large men moved to either side of him, blocking her view and drawing Henry deeper into the ballroom, she knew that she had not been a fool. She knew that the evening would be a success based on that look alone, and the shine came back into her eyes.