Twain's End (32 page)

Isabel snatched Clara's fur from her wardrobe, yanked Clara up, and shoved her arm into a sleeve.

Clara looked up at her, limp as a rag doll. “I should have known that I would die before I could be happy.”

“You're not going to die, Clara. Please, help me here!”

“She won't give him a divorce.”

Isabel stopped fastening the hooks and eyes of Clara's coat front. “Divorce? Who?”

“He doesn't love her. He's never loved her. He only married her because he had to—she trapped him with those twins.”

“Who?”

“Will.”

“Will? Will Wark? He's married?”

Clara's face contorted into a sob.

Isabel hustled her out onto the deck, where men, women, and children buckled into linen cocoons waited below boats being lowered by ropes and creaking pulleys. Moisture from the cloud through which they were drifting beaded upon the white-painted bulkhead, upon the life buoys clutched by the passengers, upon the railings over which Isabel peered. Lifeboats from the other ship began to appear through the fog.

“All safe!” a crewman bellowed through a megaphone. “Passengers, please return to your cabins!”

In the chaos that ensued as the shivering survivors from the other boat were being hauled on board while the
Rosalind
's passengers were being urged to retreat, Clara grabbed a crewman rushing by with blankets. “Where's the captain? I demand to see the captain. Do you know who I am?”

The sweating crewman, whose face was as plain as a potato beneath the flat-topped sailor hat that had been knocked to the back of his head, squinted at Clara. He then glanced at Isabel, as if to reckon her ability to manage this madwoman.

“Tell him who I am!” Clara commanded Isabel.

“She's Clara Clemens.”

“Yes, ma'am!” He started to push past.

“Mark Twain's daughter,” said Clara. The sailor stopped. From within her bulky fur coat, she added icily, “I'd like to speak with the captain, please.”

After a word with the harried captain and an apology—not Clara's—and the ship had docked and the passengers had flooded down the gangway with cries of relief, an exhausted Isabel found herself in an inn on the main thoroughfare of Halifax, drinking tea with Clara. Although it was July, a fire crackled in the fireplace, most welcome. Clara huddled next to it as if she'd fallen into the harbor like one of the unlucky passengers of the other ship, instead of harassing the crew of the
Rosalind
from within the depths of her raccoon coat.

Sunken within her furry collar, Clara didn't bother to look up from the telegram that she was composing. “When did the man at the ticket office say we would be arriving in Boston?”

“Tomorrow night.” Isabel gazed outside the plate-glass window by their table. Across the street, a gigantic pair of eyes wearing golden spectacles hung from the three-story brick building, advertising the services of the optometrist in residence. The eyes seemed bemused, as if they recognized the humor in human frailties.

“I think I'll stay in Boston.” Clara still wouldn't look up. “I want
to see that strange collection of art that Isabella Gardner has put together. Will has seen it and says I mustn't miss it.”

Isabel understood that Clara's telegram was to arrange a meeting with Will. She understood now, too, that Clara had gone on the trip only so Will could settle his affairs with his wife, and was now cutting it short since he'd failed to do so.

“Clara, you must know that I sympathize with you in whatever you try to do, but I hate to think what your father will say when he finds out that Will is married.”

“Will is getting a divorce. He won't give up.”

“But he is still married now, evidently. You must know that your father is very sensitive about matters like that. He canceled a benefit for the Russian revolutionary Gorky when he learned that Gorky was traveling in America with his mistress.”

“Well, then don't tell him!”

“I don't plan to. But he will find out.”

Clara lowered her head bullishly. “I don't see how Papa can say a word about me when he has kept you under his roof all this time without the benefit of marriage.”

Isabel yearned to tell Clara of her father's tentative marriage proposal, but until firm plans were made, speaking of them made her nervous, as if she might make them disappear from wanting them too much.

“Here I was, worried about
his
reputation, trying to get you to live elsewhere to protect him.”

“I am in your house because I work for him,” Isabel objected.

“And Will works for me. See how nicely that plays out?” Clara laughed. “What's good for the gander is good for the gosling.” She grew serious. “Really, Isabel, don't tell him. I've never been this happy in my life. Please don't ruin it for me.”

Did Clara realize what she was asking? “I won't.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

She grasped Isabel's hand. “I'll never forget this. Thank you, Isabel.”

Just then a man in worn corduroy plus fours approached them, a pad of paper in his hand. “Excuse me, ladies. I'm Sean Lynch, reporter for
The New York Herald.
”

“The
Herald
?” said Isabel. “Here?”

He grinned at her as if he held some knowledge over her.

“We're rather tired,” Clara said with dramatic weariness. “We've been through a terrible ordeal.”

“You should be tired, ma'am,” he said to Clara. “I heard that you helped the passengers of the ship that sank.”

“You did?” Clara blinked.

“I also heard that you went to the captain on their behalf.”

Clara hesitated. “I did talk to him.” She put on a pained expression. “They looked so cold. One woman was shivering so hard that I could hear her teeth chatter—an older woman. She made me think about my mother. I wanted her to have my coat.”

“Mark Twain's daughter gave a victim her coat,” he said, writing it down.

“Clara Clemens,” she said testily.

“Thank you for your interest,” Isabel said, “but I believe Miss Clemens is exhausted.”

He crooked one side of his mouth. “So, Isabel Lyon, Mark's pretty little secretary: tell me about yourself.”

The realization that the reporter might be here for her, and not Clara, dawned on Isabel—unless he had gotten wind of Clara's affair with Will Wark. Neither could be good.

Isabel stood. “Miss Clemens and I must be going.”

“Traveling with Mark's daughter while he's in England—shopping for your trousseau together, are you? Does this mean there are wedding bells in the near future, Miss Lyon?”

Clara sat back in disbelief. “My father has no plans to get married.”

“Is that true, Miss Lyon?”

Clara's gaze bore down on her.

“Mr. Clemens would be as pained as his secretary to hear of any such report.”

Isabel regretted her words immediately. How would they sound to Sam? He'd feel publicly rejected. Even a less proud man would be humiliated, and Samuel Clemens, for all the fun he poked at himself, was the proudest man Isabel had ever met.

She smiled grimly. “Good day, Mr. Lynch.”

She left as Clara gathered her things. How had the
Herald
known that she and Clara were in Halifax? All she could hope was that Mr. Clemens would never see whatever foolishness this reporter put in print clear over the sea in England.

• • •

Two days later, Isabel was entering the Fifth Avenue house alone, Clara having joined Will Wark in Boston, when she saw the
Herald
on the table in the hallway, folded open to reveal an article. Her cases still in her hands, she bent down to read it, wondering who had left it there.

A quick scan revealed that Mark Twain had been asked to comment on the report from Halifax that his secretary claimed they were not getting married. She read closer:

I have not known, and shall never know, anyone who could fill the place of the wife I have lost. I shall never marry again.

Footsteps came from the parlor. Katy waltzed into the hall with her feather duster. Isabel's gaze wandered up from the print, which seemed to have scrambled into foreign symbols. She numbly registered a flash of brown turkey feathers as Katy swung the duster.

“Did you have a good trip?”

Isabel dropped a case, groped for the paper, and stuffed it into her coat pocket. She could read his hurt pride, his lashing out at her, between the lines. He had mistaken her deferment to his announcing their marriage and her avoidance of upsetting Clara for disinterest
in marrying him. How wounded he must be, especially sensitive now that his manhood was in question. And forgiveness did not come easily to Samuel Clemens.

Katy smiled as Isabel fled up the stairs, her cases banging against her legs.

September 1908

Stormfield,
Redding, Connecticut

N
O NUBILE ACTRESSES WERE
scheduled to come today, no little girls wearing hair bows that were bigger than their pretty heads, no famous scientists, no robber barons, no editors, no reporters. Her Brownie camera in hand, Isabel strolled around the empty fountain at the end of the walkway that hung like a long pendant necklace from the back of the house. She was looking for deer. She loved to photograph them, the does especially, with their large eyes and wet black noses, although their meek, hunted expressions disturbed her. Wanting to bring them closer, she had put out a salt lick for them when she'd moved to Stormfield three months earlier, until a neighboring farmer thanked her for luring them in to shoot.

Pain shot through her fingertip. She snatched her hand from one of the cedars overhanging the fountain. Such deceptive trees—the feathery leaves hid hairy barbs that were as sharp as needles. She should have had them cut down but they gave the landscaping an Italian air. She tucked her camera under her arm and, sucking her invisible wound, gazed at the mansion rising from the series of terraces.

That house. For nearly a year, she had nurtured, coddled, and coaxed it into life, all by herself. The King hadn't even wanted to see the plans. He said he wanted a house outside of the city—its conception was up to her. The gestation period alone had nearly broken her.
How nauseated she'd been when she had come back from one of her several trips with The King to Bermuda—trips that featured more friends and drinking and less intimacy than the first—and found that the foundation was being dug on the wrong site. Her vision had actually swum as she waded through piles of dirt to get to the operator of the steam shovel to stop.

The dozens of subsequent train rides out to oversee the construction after a full day's work in New York hadn't done much for her constitution in the following months, nor had Clara's announcement that she wanted major changes. Only by sheer force of will had Isabel managed to keep the project on schedule, even when she'd arrived with a wagon train of furniture three days before the grand opening and found the place in chaos. With one last push, she'd cajoled the workers to stay past midnight, promising them Scotch, cigars, and a concert on the Orchestrelle. They delivered, she delivered; The King arrived in June of 1908 to find his new home serenely waiting for him, complete with his pipes hanging on their rack and a cat dozing on the porch.

All the suffering she had endured in its formation had been worth it. When The King first examined every inch of it, his eyes shone like those of a father wondering at his newborn child's perfect toes. How proud she had been. This house, her progeny, was a glorious example of what she could do for the man she loved, if he would only tell her what he wanted. She would do it all again—she would do anything—if he asked it of her. And yet it wasn't enough.

He had not given himself to her since she had sailed to Nova Scotia last year and made the innocent blunder of saying that she wouldn't marry him. He stayed away from her bed, keeping so busy that there was no time for intimacy. She'd thought the house in the country would draw them closer but it seemed to have the opposite effect. They hadn't had a moment to breathe since they'd moved in. The beautiful, the famous, and the rich flocked to this palace in the middle of nowhere, willing to take the two-and-a-half-hour pilgrimage from
the city for a chat with The King—and for the inevitable write-up in the papers the next day. Isabel had hoped that out here in the wilds of Connecticut, The King could get off the endless, calliope-tootling carousel of appearances, speeches, and interviews that his life in New York had become. The world needed Samuel Clemens to eat fewer dinners and write more books. He needed to finish his autobiography, but he couldn't be bothered to sit still long enough to work on it. At an age when others were slowing down, her King was running faster, even out here in the country. It troubled Isabel to think what he might be running from. She feared that it might be her.