Rumors (5 page)

L
INA BROUD TURNED HERSELF ROUND AND ROUND
, overcome with a kind of desire that was still new to her. Everywhere she looked there were objects edged in gold, finished with elaborate hand stitching, or festooned with feathers. They lay in neat piles on tables of mahogany that stretched as far as the eye could see, or at least far enough to reach one of the hundreds of etched mirrors that reflected the opulent scene within the Lord & Taylor department store over and again.

“Tristan,” she said in a high, clear tone. She had been working on her elocution, and had lately concluded that the acoustics within the grand department stores of Ladies’ Mile were ideal for such an endeavor. In her previous life she had only rarely caught glimpses within such stores, which lined Fifth Avenue and Broadway above Union Square, and attracted the kind of women Lina used to serve. This in spite of the fact that the row of grand retailers and little specialty shops was mere blocks from Gramercy Park, where the women Lina
used to serve still lived. Most of them, anyway. “I adore these gloves.”

Tristan Wrigley, who was a salesman at Lord & Taylor and the first friend she had made in her new life, came to her side—perhaps an inch closer than men were supposed to in public with women who were not their relations—and said, “Of course, Mademoiselle Carolina. If I may.”

Although Lina was not shy of being seen in public with naked fingers—she had lived most of her life with bare, working hands—she did feel a tinge of embarrassment as Tristan pulled off her gloves and began to draw the new pair on. She immediately noticed how superior in quality the hand-stitched, dove-colored pair were to her own. They fit to her fingers with an almost preternatural closeness, and the smooth softness of the silk against her skin gave her an instantaneous sensation of being very, very rich.

“Does mademoiselle approve?” Like all the Lord & Taylor salesmen, Tristan had been hired for his all-American good looks—the better to lure female shoppers—and he always spoke with an elaborate politesse. He seemed as good a person as any to practice her new persona on, which was why she occasionally let him take her for walks in the park or tea at the hotel. Only occasionally, though—she was merely practicing, and didn’t want him to get too close. Her affections lay elsewhere.

“Oh, yes.”

Tristan had a long face with an architectural nose and cheekbones that seemed to set him even above his peers. He wore a fitted brown waistcoat and an ivory shirt buttoned at the wrists. His hazel eyes were such a hypnotic color that Lina sometimes found it difficult to look into them for more than two seconds at a time. Looking away from him did not distress her, however. Regularly averting her eyes was in fact useful to the illusion she was trying to maintain: that she was a copper-smelting heiress from out west (Utah, if pressed, though she had not been) and recently orphaned.

At first she had been surprised at how easily Tristan bought her story. The day she had met Tristan had been in the most nascent stage of her new life, and it had included a terrific blunder. That had also been the first day she’d drunk beer or been in a saloon, and it had not ended prettily. The episode might surely have proven what a thousand little missteps suggested: that she was not a lady and that her origins were very humble indeed.

But she had since witnessed—both in her new home, the New Netherland Hotel, and on her visits to Lord & Taylor with Tristan—real western millionaires, and had seen that they were even coarser and more prone to gaffes than she. For Lina Broud—Carolina, as she was trying to refer to herself in her own mind—did know some things about comportment,
manners, and dress. She had learned them as the lady’s maid of the late Elizabeth Holland. Chief among her observations was how effective an aloof demeanor was in declaring one’s personal importance.

It was in fact Elizabeth, whose wealth and reputation for loveliness gave her advantages with which Lina could not compete, who had won the heart of Will Keller—he had been the Hollands’ coachman, and Lina had loved him in secret for a long time. This wound was one of the reasons that she had sold her mistress’s secret, the one that involved Elizabeth and Will spending nights together in the carriage house, to Elizabeth’s sometime friend Penelope Hayes. That information had garnered Lina five hundred dollars, what had then seemed a fortune but had since been reduced by more than half by the dinners and hotel rooms and dresses and trinkets that she hoped would differentiate her from the plain girl she used to be.

It had been a sore disappointment that such an extraordinary-sounding sum didn’t go very far in the lifestyle of a girl like Elizabeth. And Lina was not proud, either, that her life as a lady, or something like it, had been made possible by such a sordid transaction. But she had done what she had to do. Her object had not really been to make herself into a society girl—she just wanted to make herself enough Elizabeth-like that, when she was ready, she could go out
west, and then Will would see that it was Lina he’d wanted all along. Or at least, when he heard of Elizabeth’s death, that the new, shiny Lina could fill that hole in his heart.

Lina had never been above taking Elizabeth’s seconds, even if it was her mistress’s death that now allowed the passing down. She wanted to find Will as much as ever. She believed that that time was near—it had to be, or her money would run out first.

Tristan was placing the gloves she had chosen, the little lace shawl, the Persian lamb muff, the new pair of onyx hose that sold for two dollars and twenty-five cents—Tristan had introduced them to her, and now she could not live without them—each in its own box, with the same magical, crinkling tissue. Lina watched with dizzy joy and a vague sense of dread as these objects were folded and placed, wrapped, and then boxed. Once they were boxed, that meant they were hers and that she would have to pay for them.

“Shall I have these sent to your hotel?”

“No…” Lina paused and looked away. The late afternoon light was coming in through the high, Romanesque windows that faced the street. Already the day was getting away from her, and she couldn’t truly be said to be grander than when it began. When she stepped outside the weather would have dropped, and all the workaday people she so wanted to distinguish herself from would be massed at the store’s plate
glass windows to gawk at the Christmas display. At moments like these she couldn’t help but feel a little sad and recall how devastating it had been when, after years of secret longing, she had one night confessed her feelings to Will and then been sent away. She wanted to be sure that such a rejection wasn’t repeated, and reminded herself that she must perfect her transformation before she saw him again. “I’ll be taking a hansom, of course—I can carry them myself. But please do send the bill to the hotel.”

Lina had recently stopped carrying her new wealth on her person—which had been a kind of nervous obsession when she first went out on her own—and had cautiously begun to embrace the luxury of paying later. She kept her Penelope money in a small silk purse with a leather drawstring buried deep in her drawer of lacy underclothes. In her own experience as a maid, this drawer had possessed a taboo aura; she assumed the maids at the hotel would feel the same way and not go through it too carefully.

“Of course, mademoiselle.” Tristan paused and grinned in a way that a real lady probably would have deemed too familiar, and said, “I could accompany you, if you needed assistance.”

“That’s quite all right,” Lina said, looking away from him and subtly turning up her nose. “If you’ll just help me on with my coat, I’ll be going.”

Lina alighted on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Once she had firmed up her story and smoothed out some of the details of her performance, she had traded up from a rather seedy hotel on Twenty-sixth Street to the New Netherland, where the bellboys wore royal blue uniforms. It was a wide building of turrets and arched windows with a dignified brown façade, and it loomed over the buildings around it like a terrific sand castle. She had heard somewhere that the Netherland was the tallest hotel in the world, and that was why she had chosen it over the Savoy, its next-door neighbor, or the Plaza, on the west side of the avenue. The three hotels formed a corner around the southeast entrance of the Central Park, and below them stretched the mansions of Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and Hayeses. The thought that she lived so near people of that caliber still gave Lina a pleasant little electric shock.

Her room was not the best, and still it cost twenty-nine dollars a week. She couldn’t go on like this forever, she knew that, but it hardly mattered, since she would soon be with Will. Strong, capable Will—he would take care of her, and in the meantime, she hoped some of the elegance of hotel life would rub off. That, and she liked returning to her room to the surprise of a swept carpet and a bed remade by some
invisible mechanism. She liked stepping out and seeing that a cab was waiting on the street, as though her arrival had been anticipated exactly.

Lina looked at the driver, and gestured that he should help her with her purchases. She threw her shoulders back and walked, in her practiced way, toward the arched entrance. Despite her freckles—which spread across her nose and darkened her complexion even in winter—there was a natural dignity to her appearance. Her mouth had the effect of pouting, and her eyes were the color of lichen, and there was an upturn to her nose. She wore a fitted tan coat with dramatic lapels that flattered her waist and somewhat unfeminine shoulders, and a little matching hat with a black plume that bounced as she approached the desk.

“Miss Broud, good afternoon,” the diminutive clerk behind the massive mahogany desk greeted her.

As she usually did at such moments Lina concentrated on hiding the pleasure her new surroundings caused her. For the floor was an opulent mosaic with a shiny finish, and the electric light of the chandelier reflected off the marble stairway as though it were the entrance to a grand court in Europe. The lobby smelled of perfume and coffee, and it quietly suggested to anyone who entered that there was no place else to be.
If only Will could see me at just this second,
she would think when she was standing there, he would forget that he ever
loved Elizabeth; he would see the perfect girl who had been hidden right in front of him, disguised in the rough.

Lina tipped her head in muted acknowledgment. “My key, please, Mr. Cullen.”

It was when the clerk turned away that she became aware of the presence close behind her. She brought her head around sharply—she thought she had been clear that the driver should wait near the door until one of the bellboys came for her things—and came face-to-face with a far better-dressed man. He wore a burgundy velvet smoking jacket and black slacks, and his ivory collar came all the way to his carefully shaved chin. His features were fine, except for his nose, which belied a taste for the drink, and he was grinning at her in her in a way that might have been flirtatious. She couldn’t be sure of this, however, because he was older—too old a gentleman to be flirting with a seventeen–year-old girl, she thought. But then, there was so much she didn’t yet understand.

The clerk had returned with her key, but he was watching the man in burgundy deferentially and made no move to hand it over to Lina. She waited for the gentleman to speak, and when the seconds had added up, her heart began to pound for fear he knew her secret.

“Are those your things?” he asked, pointing to the driver, who had in fact been waiting patiently near the door with his hat in his hand and his eyes focused on the arched ceiling, ac
cording to her instructions and with appropriate awe. “Because the bellboys here—forgive me for saying so, George—are inexperienced and cannot be trusted with such finery.”

Lina had never been in a situation like this one and was without any idea of the proper response. The clerk wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“My apologies.” The gentleman inclined forward in a kind of bow without taking his gaze off Lina. “Mr. Longhorn, at your service.”

The full name was Carey Lewis Longhorn. She knew it from her sister, Claire, whose favorite pastime was reading society columns. He was older than she had suspected then, and richer too—the heir to a banking fortune, if Lina wasn’t mixing him up with someone else. He was known for a string of broken engagements in his youth, and a series of attachments to countesses and fashionable matrons in middle age, and for currently having a large collection of portraits depicting the beauties of the present day. Lina was amazed to see that he was still grinning at her. His eyes were a pale blue that suggested the liveliness of their owner, and his gaunt cheeks rose sharply with the smile.

“Thank you,” Lina finally replied. She knew her hesitance and confusion showed but there was nothing she could do to change it. Beyond Mr. Longhorn, she could see that his valet was already collecting her boxes and paying the cab
driver. The clerk offered the key to Mr. Longhorn—still with immaculate deference, and without even acknowledging that it belonged to Lina—and then she found herself following him away from the desk.

“Are you staying in the hotel with your parents?” Mr. Longhorn asked as they stepped into the elevator. The attendant was closing the mahogany and stained glass door. Lina’s gaze had floated upward to the iron lacework of the ceiling as the ornamented cage jerked and drew them higher. The movement of her eyes had more to do with a continual wonder at the mechanics of vertical conveyance than sadness, but she was not entirely displeased by what Mr. Longhorn said next. “No, I didn’t think so. I have seen you here several times, and always alone. The world is never easy, but orphans are a special case. I am sorry for your loss.”

Lina lowered her eyes to the black-and-white-tiled floor. “He died in the mines,” she lied. “A routine inspection. Father always insisted on doing them himself rather than trust an underling. Copper smelting, that was his business, and he had several mines of his own, too. My mother could not take the shock and her heart gave out within a month. They worked so hard so that I might enjoy this….” She paused to gesture at the gilded elevator, and let her lower lip just quiver. “And though it’s not always easy for me, I think they would want me to enjoy it still.”