Splendor: A Luxe Novel (6 page)

A fresh-faced soldier appeared behind the mustachioed man, who was still leering at Diana with rummy eyes, and called out for a beer in a timid voice. He seemed as young as she was, and apparently all his politeness had not yet been rubbed off by his colleagues, because he could scarcely look her in the eye.

She gave the boy an appreciative wink before turning to fetch a bottle from the icebox. Winking had become a kind of flirtatious compulsion with her, and as she reached into the cool darkness, she decided she was going to have to cure herself of it before she found Henry. When she turned back around, the boy was gone—as far as she was concerned, anyway. He had become as invisible to her as the rest of the bar.

Diana’s mouth dropped open and a wild energy played in her chest. She had forgotten all the tasks that constituted her job, or how to perform them. The only man in the entire bar that she could now make out was darker than when she’d last seen him, and his skin looked especially tawny against the collar of his white linen shirt. The bridge of his nose was a color that suggested he had been out in the sun that day, and the expression disappearing from his face indicated that moments ago he had been having a careless good time.

“Hello, soldier,” she managed at last, with what she could gather of her breath.

“Diana?” Henry said, as though the sound of her name might confirm her unlikely presence in front of him. “How—” he stammered, “how did you come here?”

“I was looking for you.” All the sentences she’d imagined saying to him since that day at the end of February, when he’d entered a doorway and seen her wrapped up in another man, had escaped her. The only sentence she could think of was the one she’d just uttered, and it seemed to her, at that moment, to contain the only relevant information.

“You were?”

“Yes.”

“I mean—you got my letter?”

Diana nodded. She had received it indeed. The pages were sewn into her suitcase; she had read them a hundred times.

“You don’t hate me?”

There was no gesture that could have communicated how far her feelings were from hatred, but she shook her head in a kind of attempt anyway. Whatever emotion she was experiencing—was it shyness, or trepidation?—was new for her, and she was a little surprised at herself for being unsure in front of Henry after everything that had happened between them, and all she had done to bring this moment about. He was staring at her with those inscrutable black eyes. Her heart had begun to tick with the fear that their meeting was almost over, that her quest would end here with both of them tongue-tied. After all, he was older than she, and more experienced, and perhaps now that he was a soldier, and not just a rich playboy with nothing else to do, he no longer had time for little girls.

The touch of Señora Conrad’s thick fingertips on her shoulder shocked Diana back to the present. The file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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room was still full of people, noisily talking up the working girls or clambering toward the bar and banging their glasses against its worn surface. She glanced at them, at the row of faces red with joy, and then back at Diana. A surprised and knowing light shone in Señora Conrad’s eyes, and after a watchful pause she drew her young employee away from her post by the elbow.

“Come.” The lady gestured to Henry. Then she led them to the rear of her establishment, opened the door to the storeroom, and pushed one and then the other inside.

The room was lined with crates, and the closed door protected Diana and Henry, if just barely, from the racket of an advancing evening. Both were bathed in the honeyed light of a single bulb muted with paper.

Diana turned her chin up toward Henry, expecting a kiss, but for a while he could only manage a few disbelieving blinks. Relief, along with a kind of euphoria, had begun to seep into her chest, although Henry’s presence had not yet begun to seem real. He stepped forward, and she parted her lips, but he did not put his mouth to hers. Instead his arms went around her torso, and he lifted her up above him, squeezing her tight. A deeply buried instinct told her to rest her face against his shoulder.

Sometime before the dawn they would begin talking and be unable to stop, and then their hands would roam all over each other. But for right then there was nothing she wanted but to hang like that, her feet suspended a foot from the ground, breathing in the smell that for her had ceased to be like anything but Henry. Not even her most fervent imaginings could have rendered him as good as this.

Seven

Those of us who thought that Elizabeth Holland—a girl most artfully groomed to be a bride—took a social step down in marrying her father’s former business partner, Snowden Trapp Cairns, must now admit that she did not, in any event, grow poorer in the exchange, for she was spotted over the weekend directing new furniture to be carried into a very handsome Madison Avenue brownstone….

——FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF

THE WORLD GAZETTE, SATURDAY, JULY 7, 1900

BY FOUR O’CLOCK ELIZABETH WAS FEELING RATHER fatigued, for she had risen at dawn to oversee the arrangement of antique sofas in her parlor, and the lighting of fires in her kitchen, so that something approximating an acceptable tea could be served to a few ladies who stopped by to wish her well at her new address. Among her guests were Agnes Jones, who turned over all the china to see if the stamps were authentic, and Penelope Schoonmaker, with whom she maintained a delicate façade of friendship in public, and who dropped by on her way to the department stores. It had been a lovely afternoon, but Elizabeth was glad when they were gone. The baby was restless inside of her, and there file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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was still so much to do.

The house was arranged not unlike No. 17 Gramercy Park, where she had spent her first eighteen years.

On one side of the main entrance was a large parlor with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the street, and on the other a dining room of similar proportions. There was a more private drawing room in the back of the house, along with the kitchen and other quarters that only the servants used. The foyer was large enough to properly greet visitors, but it did not pretend to be the antechamber of a royal court, as in some of the ostentatious new constructions. A handsome flight of stairs was built against the north-facing wall, which turned onto a second-floor landing that offered a fine vantage of the bedrooms as well as the two social areas downstairs, when their pocket doors were drawn open. The house gave her tremendous satisfaction; just walking through its spaces made her feel that she was finally going to do right by her child and, by extension, her Will.

It was this sticky fact—that Will, the real father of her child, was never far from her mind—which made her resist lying down on one of the new chaises in her parlor, or in the frilly confines of her upstairs bedroom. For though Penelope had been perfectly gracious all through tea, Elizabeth could sense that she still remembered her old friend’s queasiness when they had vacationed together in Florida over the winter, when it had only just been occurring to Elizabeth what she might bear within her. She suspected that the newest Mrs. Schoonmaker probably doubted the child’s paternity, which was not a nice thing to be thought of any man, especially one who cared for his wife so well. And Snowden did care for Elizabeth well. The evidence was all around her, in the sturdy walls, the hammered black leather panels decorating them, and the polished birch wainscoting below.

That sensation of guilt, combined with her native orderliness, sent her rather heavily up the stairs and into the room that had been assigned as her husband’s study. It was in the back of the house, where he would be less bothered by the noise of the servants or the noise of the street and, very soon now, the noise of a little child. She stepped into the masculine space somewhat timidly, for she had a strong sense that it should be his refuge. But Elizabeth, in her lacy, high-necked smock and black linen skirt, her blond hair rising like a hazy pillow over her fine forehead, was the product of a decade of assiduous grooming. The man whose proposal had saved her and her child deserved to benefit from her well-honed feminine abilities, too.

“Can I help you, Mrs. Cairns?”

The housekeeper, Mrs. Schmidt, a fastidious widow in middle age whose late husband had been for many years an employee of Snowden’s, had come up behind her and was now lingering in the doorway. She appeared just slightly displeased that the lady of the house would be poking about.

“Mr. Cairns said I was to see that you don’t overexert yourself, and to make sure that all of your needs are met while he is out on business….”

Elizabeth rested her hand on her considerable belly and tried to let a certain glowing kindness light up her heart-shaped face. Excepting the case of Lina Broud—who had been the final lady’s maid of her life as a debutante, and with whom she had sparred mightily—she had always had a nice way around the help.

With Mrs. Schmidt her gentleness seemed to hold no special power, however; the two women had yet to strike a natural ease in their relationship.

“No, I’m all right, but thank you.” When the older woman did not budge, Elizabeth added, almost apologetically, “I wanted to put Mr. Cairns’s study in order myself.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Schmidt replied, although still she hesitated until Elizabeth gave a firm gesture of dismissal with her pointed chin.

When she was gone, Elizabeth busied herself with the arranging of pens and paper on her husband’s broad desk and the placement of several objets d’art. She turned over in her mind which of the taxidermied heads lining the walls she could persuade him to do away with, for though Snowden was an outdoorsman, and though she did not want him to abolish that aspect of his character, she felt that as his wife, she owed him the benefit of her rather excellent eye. The animal trophies did not, in her opinion, belong in such a genteel home. When the room was finally starting to appear tended to by a steady feminine hand, she turned to a box of papers that needed sorting.

The ordinary activity of putting a house together had calmed Elizabeth, but that steady, neutral feeling file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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evaporated when, after carefully filing several bank statements and business documents in the drawers of the large walnut desk, she glimpsed her own name as it had been written during the first eighteen years of her life. And not just her name, but along with it the name that she chanted in her thoughts each night before going to bed—the name that she still thought of as hers, too. Her brown eyes grew large.

A letter to Stanley Brennan, who had once been her family’s accountant, was clipped to the document, and the bit that caught Elizabeth’s attention read: Please have the deed for the California property transferred—immediately and jointly—into the names Elizabeth Adora Holland and William Keller. The signer of the letter was her late father; it was dated a week before his death, and posted from the Yukon Territory. Her heart had begun to thud and her vision was growing blurry with tears. Still her eyes lingered there. Even the sight of Will’s name brought to mind the picture of him in a new brown suit on the day they were married, the last time she remembered feeling anything like pure joy. It was another few moments before she was able to collect herself and read the rest, and thus to realize that the paper she held was in fact the deed to a bit of land she knew quite well.

She could not begin to understand why her father would have put her and Will’s name together on any document, much less one that connected them to the land that they had in fact lived on, quite happily, far, far away in a place called California. She had known that her father had told Will it might be a lucrative territory, but that he had owned it, much less deeded it to his oldest daughter and former valet, confounded her.

She rose to her feet with some difficulty, and then went as quickly as she could down the stairs, calling for Mrs. Schmidt.

“When did Mr. Cairns say he would be returning?” she demanded when the wide, flat face of the housekeeper emerged below her in the foyer. Elizabeth clutched the curved railing for balance. From below, her swollen figure must have appeared tremendous.

“I expect him home any moment now….” The housekeeper was wiping her hands with a cloth. “What can I do to assist you in the meantime, Missus?”

“Please tell him that I am in the second-floor sitting room when he returns.” She covered her mouth with her hand and tried not to feel woozy. “Tell him I must speak to him as soon as possible.” She did not know how long she waited. It might have been several hours or only a part of one that she reclined in the ivory wingback chair in the sitting room next to where she slept, and felt her heart rise and fall over recollections that she could not keep at bay. They were a deluge. By turns they washed her onto high, dry land and then back to rough waters. In moments she was there—making dinner for Will while he searched for the oil he believed would make them rich, her skin a little browned in the sun, her body warm—and in the next, she was on the platform at Grand Central Station with the sound of bullets ringing horrifically in her ears and the smell of blood turning her stomach.

“What is it, my dear?”

Snowden came rushing through the door, as though she really were his wife and it really was his child whose birth he was nervously anticipating. Elizabeth’s pale lashes fluttered. But of course she was his wife, she reminded herself, as he knelt by her side. He grasped her hand, and she realized that he had scarcely touched her since kissing her in the carriage after he’d first shown her the new house.

“Please—can you explain this to me?” Her voice broke over the words as she thrust the peculiar document in his direction.

Snowden’s small mouth twitched. Slowly it became a gentle smile. He wore a waistcoat of striped brown silk, which had not in the past been a fabric he favored. He took the paper, glancing over it before folding it away in his pocket.