The American Heiress (16 page)

Cora noted the way the Duchess’s eyes lit upon the brooch her mother wore pinned to hold down her veil; it was a huge ruby in a nest of diamonds. Perhaps for the first time in her life, Cora was grateful for her mother’s sense of her own magnificence. She looked at Ivo and thought she saw his lips twitch, but before she could catch his eye properly there was a flurry of introductions and they were being ushered into the dining room.

The Duchess made a great display of hesitating before she took the seat that had once been hers at the opposite end of the table to her son. Cora saw that this uncertainty was aimed at Ivo but he refused to rise to the bait. When, in desperation, the Duchess said, with a quaver in her voice, ‘How charming to find myself once more at Lulworth at my end of the table, and yet of course how poignant it is when I remember how things were,’ Ivo simply nodded and without looking at his mother asked Mrs Cash whether her private train had loose boxes.

Cora was seated between Reggie and Father Oliver, with the Duchess on Reggie’s other side. She could see that Reggie was to be monopolised by the Duchess so she began to ask Father Oliver about the history of the Lulworth chapel. As the priest recounted in detail the various vicissitudes of Catholicism at Lulworth, Cora was able to watch the Duchess talk intimately to Reggie and the effect this was having on her stepdaughter Lady Sybil. Cora thought that Sybil was quite good-looking for an English girl, despite her dowdy clothes and miserable hair. They must be about the same age. Cora wondered how the girl liked having the Duchess for a stepmother.

At the end of the meal Cora observed a curious ritual which had puzzled her the night before. One of the footmen was scraping all the contents of the serving dishes into a series of tins. This was quite indiscriminate: fish, eggs in aspic and trifle were all piled into the same receptacles which were then stacked on top of one another in a wicker basket. She turned to Reggie and asked him where the food was going.

‘Oh, I suspect it must be for the poor and infirm of Lulworth. Is that right, Duchess?’

The Duchess turned her blond head. ‘Yes, there is such a tradition of charity at Lulworth, the poor man at the gate and so forth. Really quite a lot of work for the servants, but it is so counted upon…’

Cora looked at the Duchess. ‘But is there any reason why all the food is jumbled together? I just saw the remains of a raspberry soufflé being thrown into the same dish as the mutton. Surely it would be no trouble to put the food into separate dishes?’

Duchess Fanny put down the spoon she had been holding with a clatter. At the other end of the table her son looked up.

‘My dear Miss Cash, the villagers at Lulworth are not gourmets. They are quite happy to have a meal even if it isn’t as cooked by Escoffier.’ The Duchess’s tone was light and there was a hint of a laugh in her voice, but her eyes were cold.

‘But it would take so little to make the food more palatable,’ Cora protested. ‘There is no reason why charity should be indigestible.’

Before the Duchess could reply, Ivo spoke.

‘Indeed there isn’t, and when you are chatelaine of this house, Cora, I suspect that we will have the most contented parishioners anywhere in the kingdom.’

The table fell silent. Mrs Cash, who was raising a glass to her lips, froze. Ivo rose to his feet.

‘Mother, Mrs Cash, I apologise for the scant ceremony, but this morning I asked Cora to marry me and I am delighted to say that she accepted.’

There was a pause. Even the servants stopped weaving around the table.

Then the Duchess put her head on one side and smiled at her son. ‘Ivo darling, how perfectly romantic. Dear Mrs Cash, you must forgive my impulsive son. He, of course, needs to consult with Mr Cash.’ Then her blue eyes opened wide and she said in mock dismay, ‘Oh, I hope there is a Mr Cash?’

Mrs Cash moved her head by a fraction. She could find no words to express her feelings; shock, pleasure, outrage mingled in equal measure. ‘My husband is in New York.’

‘Then, Ivo, you must telegraph at once.’ With a great swish of satin, the Duchess rose to her feet. A footman scurried to pull back her chair. She ignored her son and looked at Mrs Cash. ‘Ladies, shall we?’ And with her blond head held high, she moved towards the door. As she walked the length of the table, the ladies got up one by one to follow her; even Cora was pulled to her feet. Only when she reached the door did the Duchess stop and look back at her son.

He stood up and opened it for her.

As she walked past him, she laid one gloved finger against his cheek. ‘Dearest Ivo, I should have come sooner. I never realised how much you minded.’

It was much later before Cora realised what she meant.

Part Two

LORD BENNET.

Eldest son and heir of the sixth Earl of Tankerville.

The entailed estates amount to 31,00 acres, yielding an income of $150,00.

The Earl owns the only herd of wild cattle to be found in Great Britain.

Lord Bennet, who at present has nothing but a very small allowance, has served in the navy and the army, and is thirty-six years of age.

Family seat: Chillingham Castle, Northumberland.

Excerpt from ‘A carefully composed List of Peers, who are supposed to be eager to lay their coronets, and incidentally their hearts, at the feet of the all-conquering American Girl’

Titled Americans
, 1890

Chapter 10

Mrs Van Der Leyden Pays a Call

New York, March 1894

M
RS VAN DER LEYDEN LOOKED AT THE LETTERS
lying on the silver salver. She recognised her sister’s handwriting, the quaver in the way she wrote the words ‘Washington Square’, and her heart sank. Poor Effie, her husband’s ‘accident’ had been so unfortunate. To clean your gun with fatal consequences at the moment when there were widespread rumours about the bank was an unhappy coincidence. She knew that Effie’s letter would pain her. Her sister had let herself go and she dreaded the covert appeals for money on every page. She would help, of course, it was her duty; but it would be in a time and manner of her own choosing.

Mrs Van Der Leyden put her sister’s letter aside and picked up a thin envelope that bore a foreign stamp. She recognised her son’s handwriting and duly picked up the silver paper knife that had been a gift to her from Ward McAlister on the occasion of her marriage. Her son’s letter was affectionate but brief. He would be returning from France on the
Berengaria
which docked on the fourteenth; he vouchsafed nothing about his plans for the future or the reason why he was returning months earlier than he had originally planned. She hoped that he had finished with painting and had come back to claim his rightful position in the family law firm, but Teddy had always been such a stubborn boy and she doubted whether, having fought so hard, he would give up so easily. And then a ghastly thought came to her and she rapidly scanned the page again. No, he made no mention of a companion, nobody that he was anxious for her to meet. That, at least, was a relief. A foreign daughter-in-law from God knows where would be a drawback even for a Van Der Leyden.

Still wondering about her son’s state of mind, Mrs Van Der Leyden picked up the last envelope on the salver: a heavy slab of pasteboard – an invitation of some sort. She picked up the paper knife. Mr and Mrs Winthrop Cash request the pleasure etc. at the marriage of their daughter Cora to His Grace the Duke of Wareham at Trinity Church on 16 March. So Nancy Cash had found a title for Cora after all. Personally, Mrs Van der Leyden found the desire to link American money with European aristocracy rather vulgar, but then if you were fortunate enough to bear the name Van Der Leyden, a title was superfluous. She couldn’t really blame Nancy Cash for wanting a duchess for a daughter. The Cashes were rich all right and Nancy, of course, came from a fine old Southern family, but they weren’t quite the thing. Cora had only been chosen to dance the quadrille at the Patriarch’s Ball after one of the Schoonmaker girls had fallen ill with rheumatic fever. Isobel, of course, had been in the original eight, which was her birthright as a Van Der Leyden. It didn’t hurt Nancy Cash to be reminded once in a while that money couldn’t buy everything.

It could, however, secure a duke. Martha Van Der Leyden had never heard of the Duke of Wareham. But that was probably to his credit: last season there had been quite a clutch of English lords looking for heiresses. There had been the Duke of Manchester who had made quite a play for Isobel at first but had married a sewing machine heiress from Cincinnati. It was quite clear what he was after. No, she had never heard of Wareham, but no doubt he had a crumbling mansion in need of repair. Still, Cora was a handsome girl, who would make a perfectly creditable duchess. She was headstrong and perhaps a little fast (there had been that business with Teddy at the Cash ball in Newport – Teddy had never explained to her satisfaction why he had been alone on the terrace with Cora). No, Cora Cash would do very well and really the family was not an embarrassment. There was that business with Nancy Cash’s father killing himself in the asylum but, after all, thought Mrs Van Der Leyden looking at poor Effie’s letter, these things could happen in the very best families.

It was only when she rang the bell to have the breakfast things cleared away that it occurred to her that there might be some connection between her son’s arrival and the Cash girl’s impending nuptials. But surely Teddy would not be foolish enough to imagine that he could prevent Cora from marrying this duke. Mrs Cash would let nothing come in the way of that marriage and for once Mrs Van Der Leyden agreed with her. Cora Cash might make a passable duchess but she was not a suitable candidate to be Mrs Van Der Leyden Junior. Really, she hoped Teddy had not come back with romantic notions. She would turn a blind eye to his artistic ambitions; she had heard some quite shocking things about artist’s models but she was prepared to ignore this, provided it was all safely in a foreign country. But to pursue an engaged girl, that would be a scandal that even a Van Der Leyden would have difficulty rising above.

She put the paper knife down on the salver and noticed, to her disappointment, a speck of tarnish in the moulding. Pursing her thin lips, she went up the stairs to her bedroom and told the maid to fetch her hat and cloak. Her visiting dress was very much in last year’s style but she was of the generation that thought it was vulgar to be in fashion and she regularly packed away the new season’s clothes until the moment when to wear them would not be seen as ostentatious. It was time to pay a call on Mrs Cash. For a moment she considered walking the half mile or so to the Cash mansion at 660 Fifth Avenue – really, it was barely civilised up there – but when she thought of the marble entrance hall and the footmen in their matching livery, she decided to take the carriage.

Fifteen years ago the Winthrop Cashes had been universally mocked for their audacity when they unveiled their plans for a town house in the far north of the island. But now the Cash mansion that occupied the whole block at 60th and Fifth was at the beginning of a strip of fashionable buildings that stretched as far as 70th Street. Although the Cash mansion no longer stood in isolation, it was still the most magnificent. In a city of brownstone houses, 660 Fifth was built of honey-coloured stone. It was Mrs Cash’s first house and she had, in her youthful enthusiasm, asked Spencer the architect to build her a castle, and had been delighted when he showed the plans complete with turrets and gargoyles. His designs for the interiors had come complete with tiny figures wearing doublet and hose and farthingales. Mrs Cash, who had visited the Loire Valley on her honeymoon in Europe, adored the whimsicality of his design, so different from the neoclassicism of the South or the drab narrow town houses of her adopted city. Winthrop had raised a few objections to living in the ‘wilderness’ above 44th Street but he soon realised that his bride was not to be deflected. She had shown the plans to his father the Golden Miller, who had goggled at the turrets and the eighty-foot dining room and had asked who was going to pay for all this. Nancy had turned to him, put one small white hand on his arm and, looking him straight in the eyes, had said, ‘Why, you are, Papa.’ There had been no more discussion. The house had been built and Nancy’s campaign to become ‘the’ Mrs Cash had begun.

As the tall footman in the full Cash livery of purple and gold held the door of her carriage open for her, Mrs Van Der Leyden felt a shiver of irritation. She had grown up in a house where the door was opened by maids in stuff gowns and white aprons. This fashion for male indoor servants dressed up like peacocks was one of the many things brought over from Europe by the new rich of which Martha Van Der Leyden disapproved. To her Knickerbocker mind, men did outdoor work looking after the horses or tending the garden, they did not prance around in knee breeches doing the work of housemaids.

A moment later Mrs Van Der Leyden sat erect on one of the Louis sofas in Mrs Cash’s drawing room. A lesser woman might have been intimidated by the sheer scale of the room with its original French
boiserie
, Flemish tapestries and an Aubusson carpet that was reputed to be the largest ever made. But Mrs Van Der Leyden sat secure in the knowledge that without her presence, no social gathering in this city was considered truly respectable. She had no fear of finding Mrs Cash ‘not at home’.

Her hostess sailed across the Aubusson towards her. Mrs Cash did not, as a rule, receive callers so early (it took so long to arrange her veils and gauze to her satisfaction) but this was an exception. She was looking forward to seeing her new status as the mother of a future duchess acknowledged by the redoubtable Martha Van Der Leyden.