Twain's End (2 page)

“Were you able to polish all the silver yesterday?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am.”

She hated how he wouldn't look at her, as if she were some sort of fallen woman. “Are you enjoying your work here? Not everyone has a chance to serve so many interesting guests.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Perhaps teasing him would soften him. “You can't say that you didn't like when that pretty actress Billie Burke visited us the other day.”

Horace opened the lid of the sugar bowl and began to fill it from a paper sack, his face glowing like a horseshoe heating over a blacksmith's fire. An awkward moment passed. “Miss Clara sent word that she is coming, ma'am.”

The pressure in Isabel's sternum flared at the mention of The King's daughter. “Did she say when she would arrive?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Have Teresa make up Miss Clemens's room, please.” She worked on lightening her tone. “Our Clara does insist on fresh linen.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Horace still wouldn't look at her. Isabel told herself it was because she was his superior and a good two decades older than he was. He probably had difficulty with other adults. Surely that was it. He definitely lacked training in manners. In truth, he made a terrible butler, but since the night of the burglary in September, after which all the servants but the maid Katy had fled, experience was not the most important qualification one needed to join the Stormfield staff. The local farmers said that the staff had bolted because of the burglars, but that wasn't really the reason why. Clara had fired them because of what they had seen, then threatened to ruin them if they talked. They were afraid of her. Rightly so.

Isabel gave him a comrade's smile. “I had better go see if The King is ready to descend.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he mumbled, her smile wasted.

The smell of bacon accompanied Isabel up the stairs. She was halfway up, the thick strand of coral beads that she always wore thumping against her breast, when the doorbell chimed. She flinched, then chided herself,
Don't be silly. It isn't Clara yet.
At any rate, Clara did not ring; Clara barged in like she owned the place, which she would, as soon as she could shove her father off this mortal coil.

Isabel checked the watch pinned to her shirtwaist. It couldn't be Miss Keller already. Her train wasn't due in to Redding until 3:45, and Giuseppe still had to greet them at the station and bring them back in the sleigh. Another thought froze her footsteps:
Reporters.
They had been showing up lately without Isabel inviting them, hoping for some scandal, and not just because of the burglary. Bully the help all Clara wanted, she couldn't control every wagging tongue in the nation.

Isabel waited while Horace clomped in from the dining room to answer. A man's elegant voice, accented with a whiff of the British Isles, wafted up from the foyer. Relief flooded Isabel's chest: dear
Ralph. As The King's business adviser, Mr. Ashcroft was the head of the Mark Twain Corporation, the company formed to exploit the Twain name, and the only person in the world who began to understand the difficulties Isabel faced in managing The King. Just hearing Ralph's voice soothed her. She turned around to greet him.

A faint metallic clank drifted through the house: tap-tap-tap-TAP. Beethoven's Fifth. The King was knocking on a radiator, his signal for her to come. Ralph would have to wait.

Upstairs, she rapped on The King's door.

“Come in.”

She entered, releasing a cloud of cigar smoke. The world's most revered folk philosopher was sitting unselfconsciously on the bed, the hair around his ears damp from his bath. He wore white silk shorts and nothing else.

“You forgot me.”

She laughed in spite of herself. Her King could always make her laugh. “No chance of that. I just popped down to the Lobster Pot to see Mother. How is your story coming along?” He liked to work in bed, mornings.

The King's drawl was as unhurried as an African potentate. “Terrible. The well is dried up.”

How many times had Isabel heard that in her six and a half years with The King? “Dictating your autobiography usually unsticks you. I'll see if I can get Miss Hobby to return.”

“No.”

The abruptness of his tone startled Isabel.

More serenely, he said, “I want you to write it down for me.” He took a draw on his cigar. “Like we did in the old days.”

She glanced at him, then kept going toward the wardrobe. She knew the rules to this game. She kept emotion out of her voice, the hope, the love for him that burned inside her all the way down to her toes. “All right.”

Aware that no one else alive had the privilege of such an intimate view of the great man, Isabel took her prerogative of studying
him, albeit from her peripheral vision, as she opened the wardrobe. His head, crowned with a drift of silver and robed with a pelt of mustache that retained some of the orange and black of his youth, seemed overlarge for his body, as if it contained a brain larger than most men's. Beneath that beautiful head, his wiry body had a defiant virility, a scrappy knowingness that thrilled her. The slightly sagging chest flesh beneath its thicket of white curls spoke to her not of age but of his years of worldly experience. At seventy-four, he held himself with the amused confidence that a younger man could only pretend to, a confidence that invited you to let down your guard even though you knew he would not be doing likewise.

She kept her voice neutral. “I heard Mr. Ashcroft downstairs.”

The King's response was to teeter his cigar languidly between his fingers.

She took a shirt from the wardrobe and shook it out. From long habit, she inspected the garment, specially made for The King with the button in back of the collar. In one of his autobiographical dictations, The King had recounted the apparently hilarious incident of when he'd discovered the collar buttons missing from three such shirts and, bellowing curses, pitched them out the window of his Hartford home. Isabel had cringed. Too easily, she could imagine his roar and the offending items flapping to the lawn like swans that had been shot, his wrath far out of proportion to such a minor irritant. His shirts, indeed all of the objects scattered around Stormfield, held within them the potential of provoking a similar eruption, mines waiting to be set off by his terrible temper. She didn't know what would cause a man to be so volatile.

She looked up from her inspection. “Should I tell Mr. Ashcroft that you're busy today?”

“Tell Ashie—” He stopped. “Wait a minute, what's your pet name for that English bastard?”

She kept her expression cool as she brought over the shirt. The King himself had dubbed Ralph “Benares,” after the holiest city in India, where dying pilgrims went. If Ralph could bring new life to
The King's already robust bank accounts, The King would think him holy, indeed.

“Tell
Brazierres,
” The King drawled scornfully, “to go home.” He sucked deeply at his cigar, as if to draw sustenance from it. “Remind me to stop and think next time about hiring an Englishman to promote America's Sweetheart, will you? He creeps around like an English fog.”

“Oh, you're America's Sweetheart now?”

He smiled around his cigar. “The Belle of New York, America's Sweetheart—same difference.”

“I'll make sure it's on your next playbill.”

“My next playbill”—he blew out smoke—“will be for my funeral.”

“Please. You are outliving us all.”

“Not if Halley's Comet has anything to say about it.”

Isabel wished he had never read that article in the
Times
about the return of the comet next year. Even before the article came out, he made too much of being born under it, as if it held some kind of magical power over him. It disturbed her that he kept claiming it would take him with it when it soared through the skies in April 1910. He claimed that he and the comet were two “unaccountable freaks”—they came in together, and together they must go out.

“Put on your shirt,” she said.

Cigar in teeth, he shrugged on the shirt and turned his back for her to button his collar. She used her wrist to push his hair from his nape—she knew his mane's surprising weight, being the one to wash and rub it dry for him every day—and then fastened his collar. He smelled good, like a scented cake of shaving soap. By day's end, the smell of smoke would sheath him like armor.

“Clara is coming today,” she said.

Only the tightening of his jaw indicated that he had heard her. He took his cigar from his mouth and slowly tapped it against the ashtray on the bedside table. “Did you place the telephone call?”

“Yes.”

He took a languid puff. “You know, someone could have Wark killed, and who'd ever know who'd done it? Everyone would think that his wife was behind it.”

Isabel kept quiet. It was best in these situations to let The King get control of himself on his own. He did not really mean that he would kill his daughter's lover—the man couldn't bear to move a sleeping kitten from the pocket of his billiards table. The reality was that The King himself was the one in danger. He was increasingly suffering from pains in his chest, searing constrictions that would drop him into a chair and blanch his face to the color of an onion paring.

He smoked in silence as she moved on to the rest of his shirt buttons. She was getting his cuff links from the chiffonier when he said, “Miss Keller here yet?”

She returned to him and waited for him to raise his wrist. “We have plenty of time until her train arrives, or I wouldn't have risked going to see Mother.”

He watched her poke the stem of a link through a cuff hole. “How is the old dame?”

“Mother? The same.”

“I shouldn't call her that. I've got twelve years on her.”

“You don't look it.”

He kissed her cheek, brushing her with his mustache. “I knew I liked you.”

Isabel fastened the link. “Liked?”

Their eyes met. Let him look away first; she wasn't afraid. Let him see her lips, remembering their kisses.

He looked at her mouth, then back up into her eyes. His expression softened into affection.

Before she could respond, he switched hands with his cigar, then raised his other wrist for her to work on. “How long did Miss Keller say she was staying?”

“Three days. She leaves Monday.”

“I agreed to that?”

“You asked her to stay ten. Don't worry, I made nice for you.”

“Ha. Good. Well, Helen's a sweet girl. Think I should invite her to be one of my Angelfish?”

“Isn't she a little old for that?” Isabel busied herself with his cuff. “Anyhow, I suppose she's occupied with her new book just out.”

“I'm going to ask her anyway.”

This wasn't about his little club for girls. Who cared about them? They were like daughters to him—better than daughters, he said, because they did not cause him grief. They were not her competition.

“Don't be jealous, Lioness.”

“I'm not jealous.” She pulled back from him, finished with his sleeves.

“You are. I see it in your mouth.”

“I am not jealous.”

“Clara says you are.”

“Clara is a troublemaker.”

“You're damn right about that.” He pecked her again on the cheek. “Get my pants.”

January 8, 1909

Stormfield,
Redding, Connecticut

T
HE SNOW GLAZING THE
King's front lawn was blue in the gathering twilight. Shivering in a wind that held the stony smell of winter, Isabel aimed her attention not at the horse-drawn sleigh jingling its way up the drive, but at a large chip in the paint on one of the thick wooden spindles of the balustrade behind which she stood. The balustrade was supposed to have been made of solid stone, but in the last phase of building the house, Clara had suddenly demanded a large private suite, so sacrifices had to be made. The fountain on the rear terrace had been denied its statue of Cupid; the house faced with a thinner skin of plaster; the balustrade cheapened. Now this chip, the size of a silver dollar and roughly the shape of The King's home state of Missouri, served as Clara's smug agent, there to remind Isabel who really was in power.

Making a mental note to ask the caretaker to paint the spot immediately, Isabel changed her focus to the sleigh coming to a halt on the other side of the offending baluster. It was a new sleigh, two-seated, leather-cushioned, black-painted, and gold-trimmed, all to the lordly tune of $463. Isabel knew this because she had bought it. The King had said not to spare any expense. He always said not to spare any expense.

Although already sufficiently wealthy—he was the best-paid
writer in the world, the lord of the literary lions—The King had the habit of believing himself on the verge of striking it even richer. Not even his devastating bankruptcy in the previous decade, which had forced him on a worldwide tour to pay off his debts, had cured him of this belief. His very well-being seemed to hang upon his expectation of a forthcoming financial bonanza. He could never get enough.