Rumors (22 page)

B
Y MIDNIGHT ON CHRISTMAS EVE HENRY WAS
entirely sick of the two goons who were now his constant companions. If there had been some absurd humor to these shadows early on, he could no longer see it. They had monitored his champagne intake, though not as carefully as they had his movements—he had had several glasses, and his tie was now a little off-kilter, and the strands of his shiny dark hair no longer fit so neatly together. That wild urgency to escape had faded, if just slightly, into a wincing, futile need. He knew Diana was in the room, and he felt desperate to catch whatever glimpses of her he could. He had, over the last hour, become obsessed with the idea that she dance with no one else.

And—it wasn’t his first thought—the realization was beginning to dawn that, wherever she was among the crowd that filled his family ballroom, she probably could have used a reassuring look or two. She had risked everything for him—this was something he was just grasping, the self-recrimination
rising in his throat—and he couldn’t even ask her to dance. It was not his finest moment. He knew that she was out there, along the wall somewhere, surrounded by all those social harpies with their expectations and narrow definitions, with their fans and cutting remarks, with their meager hearts. She would be looking about her with a certain trembling innocence. She would sigh in that way that moved her whole body.

When he saw her next, she was leaving. The man she had come with—it must have been the old business associate of her father’s she’d told him about—offered his arm to escort her out, and she managed only one glance across the ballroom in Henry’s direction. He stepped forward, from the place in the arched doorway where he and his father’s men had been loitering silently. There was the dew of evening in her wide eyes and a gloss on her lips. Before she left the room, his view was blocked by another woman whose hair was done up in festive green. Penelope Hayes was walking toward him. Directly behind her was his stepmother.

He tilted himself, trying to see around her, and then tried to pretend the movement had been a kind of bow in Penelope’s direction. She was holding two champagne flutes.

“Mr. Schoonmaker says that you fellows can have a ten-minute break if you like,” Isabelle said, as she swept toward him with all the metallic shimmer of a vault full of bullion. She paused, a blond curl bouncing against her cheek, and
straightened his tie. When the two large men had taken up her offer and headed for the door, she squeezed Penelope’s wrist and winked at Henry before taking up the arm of some passing matron with exclamations of her finery and slipping back into the main room.

Henry leaned against the oak frame that separated the main ballroom from the series of little galleries. He looked back into the room, with all its light and noise and shimmering headpieces, wishing that Diana were there but knowing she was already gone. “I can’t play any games with you right now.”

“No games,” Penelope replied lightly. She raised one glass up, gesturing that he should follow if he wanted it. Then she walked, as fluidly as she was able, given the restrictions of her red dress, which buckled in on her from all points, into the galleries. For reasons that he did not fully comprehend—though he hoped it was not for champagne alone—Henry followed. There was some terrible purpose in her posture, which he knew he could not afford to ignore. “Anyway, you should know by now that it was never a game for me, Henry.”

They moved from one gallery to the next, past old Dutch paintings of gleaming black grapes, skulls, and half-filled wine jugs. He looked back, where all the movement was, hoping nobody had noticed them slip away. He made himself look at
Penelope and then saw her eyes, fevered, over the rim of her glass as she sipped. “It was for me,” he said. If she flinched, it passed quickly.

“It was a fun game, for a while, and then all the fun went out of it. I haven’t been playing for a long time, Penny.”

Penelope’s lacy shoulders rose slightly and fell, and then she drained her glass. She tossed it over her shoulder, and when it shattered against the oak wainscoting, it jolted something in Henry, although he tried to keep the reaction out of his face. There was so little reaction in Penelope that it might as well have been rose petals falling against snow.

“I thought you might want to play again.” Her voice was low but decidedly not quiet, and there was something in it that made Henry’s stomach turn.

“I’m pretty certain not,” he answered definitively.

She gave a little laugh from the back of her throat and then stopped walking. She tilted her head in a number of directions; she was looking at her hands now, but that wasn’t what amused her. “Oh,
Henry,
don’t you know by now that when it’s me you ought to pause a minute and try to see what you’re missing?”

He was tired suddenly. He had never been so tired. He wanted to be anywhere but where he was. He could scarcely put the words together. “What am I missing?”

She put space between her words and let each one fall
with purpose. “I should have known it wasn’t Elizabeth you cared for.”

Henry looked at Penelope, but her lids were low and her gaze evasive. The room they were in had deep blue walls above the wainscoting and was full of paintings his father knew he was supposed to admire but in fact found too glum to look at very often. They both moved, away from the far-off view of the ballroom, colluding for a moment in a measure of privacy. “Pardon?”

“I should have known, as the whole town knows by now, that with you it’s always a brunette.”

Henry’s instinct was to reply with a joke, although he could not for the life of him have sounded amused at that moment. “I do have a type.”

“Yes, and a plan of attack.”

“If you’re suggesting that I—”

“Oh,
suggesting
. I’m not suggesting. I wouldn’t waste either of our time with suggesting.”

Penelope did now meet his gaze. She was looking at him with eyes a little rabid and very proud. There was a terrible defiance in them.

“I know about you and Diana Holland, Henry.”

“I have no idea—”

“The maid saw you, Henry, in the morning, in Diana’s bedroom. Rather compromising, isn’t it? You’ve gotten sloppy, Henry. You were never that sloppy with me.”

Henry could not nod at the veracity of this statement. He clung to his champagne glass, as he might have at any socially awkward moment, waiting for what would come next.

“The maid is in my pocket, you see. She’s a good girl and she doesn’t want to say anything, but everybody has a price and it’s a piece of information that some people would pay very highly for. Some people who put out papers.”

“They wouldn’t publish—”

“Oh, maybe they wouldn’t publish it. Maybe they would. But once they knew it, they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from talking about it. And talking is just as bad. Then, Henry, my friend, the fun really would be over for you. And for a little girl we both adore…” Penelope left off speaking and ended her threat with a subtle roll of her shoulders.

“You can’t do that, Penny.” Lines had emerged in Henry’s forehead where they had never been before. He was taken by the desire to find Diana, wherever she was, and hide her. “It would ruin her.”

Laughter came next. It was high and throaty and not very different from the laugh he used to hear when Penelope had seemed his ideal match and was more often in his days. “Oh, Henry, for someone who’s known me so well, you understand me very little. The ruination of Diana Holland! That would be
fun
.” Penelope clasped her hands. “Finally, a little entertainment. But I think you’ve already done the hard
part. It would really just mean letting everyone else in on your handiwork.”

“It’s my fault, Penelope, my doing.” He was as alert as one only becomes after full days of sleeplessness. He could see now, plainly, that this was his chance to do something gallant. He had Penelope here, and her secret hadn’t gone anywhere yet. He knew her, he reminded himself—he could figure out how to stop her. “It’s me you want to punish, anyway. Punish me.”

“Of course I want to punish both of you,” she replied with a blithe wave of her hand. “But I’m not a bad person, Henry. I know it’s your fault. I’ll let you be a man and take care of it.”

Henry’s whole body was taut with fury, and he had to close his eyes to hide all his violent feelings. It took him a few seconds before he even managed to nod.

“The first thing is that you won’t be seeing Diana anymore. But that won’t be difficult, because the second thing is that you’ll be proposing to me.”

Before he could think, he took an impulsive step, and all of a sudden he was very close to Penelope. His breath was coarse and furious. He was not prone to anger—not a very useful emotion, he might have observed in another mood—but when it came it was sudden and irreversible. It was hot, and he was now close enough to Penelope that he knew she
felt the rise in temperature. For her part, Penelope shrank back coquettishly against the wall, one shoulder rising and the other falling, although the sum of her reaction was the half-moon crease that emerged at the right corner of her mouth.

“Oh, you don’t like that, do you?” she whispered. There was a terrible light in her eyes, and her lips hung open as she watched him. Her blue irises moved right and left. “But consider a minute, Henry, how preferable it would be to marry a girl everyone wants to see you with already—how lovely and gay, how glittering and fine, how infinitely preferable that would be to the ruination of your
last
fiancée’s little sister. But I would oblige, if that’s what you truly want.” She shrugged. “I’ll give you a little time to think about it.”

When Penelope went out of the room, she took all the air with her. Over there, in the direction she had returned, under the coved ceiling of the ballroom, the voices had grown shrill, and the guests had forgotten that it was Christmas Eve, and now it was just like any party. But of course, it wasn’t Christmas Eve anymore, Henry thought darkly. It was Christmas Day, but for Henry, there was no joy in it: In a matter of minutes, his life had arrived at a crushing and impassable stretch.

I
T HAD NOT BEEN THE TRADITION OF THE GAN-SEVOORTS
to make Christmas a formal affair. They had always found it perfectly sufficient to prepare a large urn of hot buttered rum for whichever of their cousins might happen to call at their Bond Street house, and later on, they would send one of the young men out to bestow gifts on those family members who lived within walking distance. They treated it as a day to drink a little more than usual, in the Dutch way, and to remark on one another’s children. They were unlike the Holland family, who were known to “do” Christmas. That family held a musical evening with a Christian theme for a hundred or so, and later there would be broth served in a dining room so crowded with poinsettias that the guests’ faces would reflect the red glow. Everyone in New York knew that Louisa Gansevoort only kept those Holland traditions that she liked when she became one of them, and that their way of Christmas had not been among those that won her favor.

This was a rare point of agreement between Mrs.
Holland and her younger child, and it was perhaps for this reason that Diana’s memories of Christmas were fond. It had been a day when she was encouraged to recite her favorite poetry, when her appearance only had to be good enough for the family, when neatly wrapped boxes of bright new things were exchanged, and when her father—having not been asked to spend time with anyone but those he most wanted to spend his time with—was in high spirits. Perhaps it was for this reason that Diana woke, on the twenty-fifth, looked down on the sun beating on the new layer of snow in the back gardens, and felt a breath of optimism.

This despite the fact that she had been a very bad girl and still had no marriage proposal to show for it.

The previous evening had given her only a taste of what she most yearned for, but she woke with a sense of pleasant anticipation, which the holiday always brought, and she found that it stayed with her even as she put on a dressing gown and pinned up her curls. Although Snowden’s presence at the Schoonmakers’, and that of the two large men who had trailed Henry, had made it impossible for them to spend even a few minutes in each other’s company, still, they had exchanged glances, and she had felt loved. She even wondered if Henry wouldn’t find some way to be with her again later that day. She went down to the parlor with the idea that she might spend a few minutes by herself by the tree, breathing in the pine, and if
Claire happened by, she would ask her for a cup of chocolate. But when she entered the parlor she saw that the chocolate had already been made and that she no longer wanted to be alone.

“Elizabeth!” she cried at the sight of her sister, sitting in her same favorite chair by the fireplace, which held a few modest flames. Her hands fluttered involuntarily to the lace that was buttoned close to her neck and all the way up to her chin. More sounds came out of her mouth, although they were more or less unintelligible, and then she ran to her sister’s side and threw herself down at her feet and rested her head against her knee. Diana closed her eyes and just let herself feel that her sister really was there, body and all. It was a struggle to contain the news of what had happened with Henry, because Will was there behind her, sitting on a tasseled ottoman, still holding the iron poker, and his presence made her feel uncharacteristically shy.

“Diana!” Elizabeth brought her sister’s face up by the chin and looked at her. She bent and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

“I can’t believe you’re really here!” Diana now acknowledged Will, whose long legs in their serge trousers jutted outward so that his elbows rested on his knees. It was funny, but not unpleasant, seeing him here amongst the crowded antiques and layered Persian carpets of their family home. They both
looked thinner and like they’d taken a lot of sun. “But I’m so glad. Everything’s just a mess, Liz, and we need you, and I know it’s probably just terrible going all the way across the country and—”

Elizabeth interrupted her with a smile and a gentle “Aren’t you going to say hello to Will?”

“Oh, hello, Will!” Diana stood and went over to the family’s former coachman and kissed him on the cheek. “I
know,
” she said conspiratorially and felt her cheeks scorch a little. “And I think it’s terribly romantic.”

“Did you ever think you’d see me in your parlor?” Will’s mouth was stern and his eyes very, very blue. His hair had grown longer since the last time she saw him, and the baby-roundness had been rubbed off his face somewhat. The green branches of the tree behind him made his hair look a little reddish by comparison, and over the mantel Mr. Holland’s portrait stared down at him.

“Oh, of course I did! And…and…you must have been in here lots of times before, weren’t you? When we were little and—”

Will kept the corners of his mouth down, but the joke had broken in his eyes.

“Anyway,” Diana went on with a laugh when she saw that she was being teased, “I’m glad you’re here now. And you, Liz, you have to tell me what I can do, because things have
moved so very quickly with Henry that it’s a little frightening and—”

Patience had never been one of Diana’s virtues, and she was so eager to get her sister’s advice that she almost forgot herself and her shyness about Will in the moment. When Snowden came in through the pocket doors—which his men had not yet managed to oil, leaving them susceptible to loud catching in the groove—she quite remembered what she ought not to say. She spun away from her sister, and the pleasure drained clear out of her features.

“Miss Diana,” he said mildly as he crossed toward their little group. “Don’t let me interrupt you.”

“I…” The words stuck in her throat. Several irrational plans sprang to her mind: Maybe she could claim Elizabeth was someone else, and not the sister whose death she had so often lamented to her family’s guest. Or maybe he hadn’t noticed Elizabeth, and if Diana created some distraction, she might slip out of the room before he did. It was with this half-insane idea in her head that she went on, somewhat defensively: “You haven’t interrupted anything at all.”

“Oh, no?” For a man to whom she had so repeatedly lied, he seemed neither outraged nor astonished by the sight of the dead Holland girl in their midst, a fact Diana, still so totally stunned by the whole situation, was more relieved than confused by. His gaze went from one sister to the other, but
he waited patiently for an explanation, and this kindness only worsened Diana’s sense of having been caught in an enormous untruth. He must have also seen Will, but Diana was too terrified to look and see how
he
was handling this intrusion. Her fingers went to her reddening cheeks.

“It’s only that I’m hardly dressed for company,” she stuttered, still avoiding a fact that was becoming more obvious as the seconds passed.

“You must not stand on ceremony with me, who as you know has come to love your family as my own.” Snowden bowed his head a little in expectation and moved the heels of his scuffed, well-traveled boots together. Surely he must be feeling ill-used by this same family, who had so benefited from his largesse and who had misrepresented their woes to him.

But of course, Diana had been the only one who had known their woes were a falsehood.

Just when Diana was starting to feel a little desperate, wondering how she should handle this situation, Elizabeth stood behind her and came to her side. She placed a gentle hand on Diana’s shoulder, the touch of which seemed to encourage calm.

“Elizabeth, she’s alive!” Diana said then, waving her hands as though the illogical nature of the event had just occurred to her. Maybe, she thought in a moment of pure lunacy, if she seemed to have just realized herself, he wouldn’t
be so angry with her later. She punctuated this statement with a laugh that contained not nearly enough amusement and sounded unpleasant even to her own ears.

“Yes,” Snowden replied. “I can see that.”

A silence followed in which Diana fidgeted uncontrollably and then turned her vexed expression on her sister. Finally Elizabeth said, “I know it must seem very odd to you that I’m here, given the reports of my death.”

“Odd,” Snowden repeated. His thin lips settled slowly around the word. “It’s not odd. It’s miraculous! I’m so pleased that I was here for this tremendous moment. I knew your father very well, Elizabeth, and I owe him quite a lot. I don’t know if Diana has told you…”

Diana shook her head, feeling very ashamed. She found herself hoping that he wouldn’t mention to Elizabeth how indifferent to him she’d been, and how generally poor as a hostess.
Elizabeth
would never, after all, have let someone give the family so much without the return of great heaps of charm and attention. And what must he think of Will, standing back there behind Elizabeth, still in his workman’s clothes?

“…but I have some small holdings of your father’s that have been wrapped up for a time—I won’t bore you with the details, but I have just recently been able to liquidate them, and I have come to help your family put itself back together. I hope you won’t find me overly forward, Miss Holland, if I
observe that your family has found itself in financial straits and that such a situation ought to be corrected.”

Elizabeth went forward to the place on the carpet where Snowden stood and took his hand. Her sister could sense, even looking at her back, that she had summoned all her old warmth and radiance. The sun coming in through the high windows shot through her pile of blond hair, illuminating it. When she spoke, it was with the sweet, low tone of a much older girl. “I thank you for that, Mr. Cairns. It is unbelievably kind. I know how much affection my father had for you, and I can plainly see how much you want to repay that. My whole family and I are deeply grateful.”

“It is an honor.” Snowden held on to Elizabeth’s hand even as he made a little bow. “And I will continue my presumptuousness by telling you that my men have brought some presents that I would like very much to give you, and later on I hope you will allow me to provide your kitchen with what is necessary for a proper Christmas dinner.”

Diana looked back at Will, who was standing at attention with his hands behind his back and whose shirt of blue and black plaid was a handsome contrast to his suntanned skin. All of her embarrassment and confusion must have been evident on her face because he winked at her in a way that momentarily alleviated her tension.

“Oh, Mr. Cairns, such kindness.” Elizabeth’s hands re
mained in his, and her tone was full of honey. “I cannot imagine a better way to celebrate the holiday and—”

Diana saw the figure in the hall around the time her sister stopped talking. Her gaze drifted, and she noticed that the woman watching them through the partially open doors seemed to have tried to do her hair, although the effect was messier than if she had simply left it down. The long nightgown, which was fitted in the bust and neck but flowed outward from the elbows and the waist, gave Mrs. Holland the look—it occurred to Diana, before the gravity of the situation settled in—of a rather mad member of a Greek chorus. She was small of body, but she was watching the scene with eyes that were large, the irises like black pools in a forest, and rimmed with alert anxiety.

That’s what real surprise looks like,
Diana thought to herself a little regretfully, just before she realized that she and her sister were going to have a lot to explain.