The Counterfeit Heiress (34 page)
“I have grown tired of Estella Lamar, tombs, Bainbridge, telegrams, anything, in fact, that might distract me from giving you the very thorough seeing-to I have had in mind since I saw you this morning.” He shifted me so that he could open the door. The sight of us startled the footman on duty in the Great Hall, but he managed to more or less maintain his composure. Colin nodded as we passed him and then carried me up the stairs.
Who could think of telegrams at a time like that?
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel was inspired by two pieces of research that I had done years ago. The first came when I was writing my second book,
A Poisoned Season.
While searching for information about the London season, I came across a magnificent cache of photographs, taken at a fancy dress ball given by the Duchess of Devonshire in 1897—six years too late for me at the time. I took copious notes, tracked down a copy of an out-of-print book written on the subject, and filed it all away. Seven years later, as I was mulling over the plot of
The Counterfeit Heiress,
I decided that the book had to open at a masquerade. I remembered the photographs, and, figuring they would now be useful, pulled out my book, only to realize that the ball, given on 2 July 1897, coincided perfectly with the time my novel was set. Kismet!
I have endeavored to describe the ball as accurately as possible, this made easier by the photographs of so many of the guests. The duchess hired Mr. Lafayette to record the event, and as he explained, “I created a temporary studio in the garden, with a powerful installation of electric light; and though it may sound immodest to say so, the appearance of ‘a gay photographer’ at such a function was considered highly original, and was openly spoken of as a feature of the historic occasion.” These pictures (and the ones taken in his studio—many of the attendees chose to pose formally before or after the ball) would have been lost, had a collection of eighty thousand negatives not been discovered in a London attic in 1968. This astonishing archive of the Lafayette Studio from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was saved, but no one did anything with it until 1988, when they were divided between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and subsequently made available to the public.
The ball was a spectacle that London would not soon forget. The elaborate costumes, many fashioned by the top dressmakers of the time, including the House of Worth, were exquisite. Jean Worth commented that the jewels sewn into one “kept several girls busy for almost a month.” The queen herself did not attend, but the Prince and Princess of Wales led the royal party, and were seated to watch a series of processions, in which the guests marched by, divided into courts, as dictated by their costumes. First came the English Court, which included, among many others, Lady Tweedmouth dressed as Queen Elizabeth and Lady Edmonstone as Mary, Queen of Scots. The Austrian Court of Maria Theresa, the Russian Court of Catherine the Great, a group of Orientals (replete with the Queen of Sheba, a snake charmer, and any number of Cleopatras), then Italians, and, finally, those in allegorical costumes followed. The final person to parade by was Lady Wolverton, dressed as Britannia.
I based Emily’s dress for the occasion on that worn by Lady Archibald Campbell. I did not, however, give her the lady’s crescent-moon headdress glowing with electric light. That seemed better suited to Mary Darby’s version of Artemis.
All this wonderful information about the ball did not become necessary until I had first settled on the basic story of the book, and that was inspired by Huguette Clark’s obituary in the
New York Times
on 24 May 2011. Miss Clark, who died at 104, was the youngest daughter of a copper baron, and heiress to a $300 million fortune. She was a child of her father’s second marriage, and was unusually close to her mother. She collected dolls, was in possession of magnificent works of art, and was married, briefly, in 1928. Her former husband claimed the marriage was never consummated. When she died, she had been living in hospitals for more than twenty years, despite the fact that she had three homes, including a forty-two-room apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, and two estates, one in Connecticut and one in Santa Barbara, California. Each of these residences was fully staffed and in tip-top shape, ready for Miss Clark to arrive at any time, but she had not been in any of them in decades. It was this last detail that grabbed my attention. Three magnificent homes, and Miss Clark chose to live in hospitals. Yet despite that choice, she maintained all of her residences. Why?
Estella Lamar is not Huguette Clark, but I used Miss Clark’s story as a stepping-off place for the character. A few weeks after I had finished writing the first draft of the book, I started reading more about Miss Clark, and learned that Au Nain Bleu, the shop I had chosen from a nineteenth-century Baedeker guide to Paris as Estella’s preferred source for dolls, was also where Miss Clark had bought many of hers. More eerie was the information that, before she started living in hospitals, Miss Clark had retreated into a single room in her New York apartment, lit only by a single candle. Perhaps she was more like Estella than I had imagined.
The details concerning Père-Lachaise and the Paris Catacombs are all factual. Any mistakes are my own.
Finally, I must give credit to Barbara Mertz, writing as Elizabeth Peters, for one bit of
The Counterfeit Heiress.
Like many of my readers, I am a huge fan of the Amelia Peabody series, and while writing this novel, I decided to include an Amelia reference. The Baroness von Hohensteinbauergrunewald, whose name Emily and Cécile discuss at Le Meurice, is a character in the second Amelia book,
The Mummy Case.
Cécile, naturally, is aware of the baroness, having read the newspaper coverage of Amelia’s numerous adventures in Egypt. The astute reader will also recognize my reference to the
Daily Yell.
Sadly, there is no redheaded reporter. If you are not familiar with Amelia’s numerous adventures, you should remedy the situation at once; I promise you will be delighted.
Two days after I wrote that scene, Barbara Mertz passed away. I am quite confident her heart balanced perfectly with the feather of Maat, and that she was sped along to a most pleasant eternal life. Would Osiris stand for anything less? Amelia certainly would not.
ALSO BY TASHA ALEXANDER
And Only to Deceive
A Poisoned Season
A Fatal Waltz
Tears of Pearl
Dangerous to Know
A Crimson Warning
Death in the Floating City
Behind the Shattered Glass
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tasha Alexander attended the University of Notre Dame, where she signed on as an English major in order to have a legitimate excuse for spending all her time reading. She and her husband, novelist Andrew Grant, divide their time between Chicago and the UK.
THE COUNTERFEIT HEIRESS.
Tasha Alexander
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2014 by Tasha Alexander.
All rights reserved.
First Edition: October 2014
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photographs: woman © Katya Evdokimova/Trevillion Images; cemetery ©
www.betweenstrap.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-02469-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02468-8 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250024688
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.