A Season of Secrets (18 page)

MAY 1925

Rozalind strode up the gangplank of the
Aquitania
with a spring in her step and a large hand-stitched leather camera-case slung over one shoulder. She passionately loved
the city that she was yet again leaving behind her, but she also loved crossing the Atlantic to stay in London or Yorkshire – and this time she had something extra to look forward to, for as
well as England she was also going to Germany, where, in Berlin, she would be shown around by Olivia.

Though the first-class gangplank was crowded, at five foot eight and wearing lizard-skin shoes with teeteringly high heels, Rozalind was effortlessly turning heads. Her bobbed night-black hair
was crowned by a brilliant orange cloche hat, and the light tweed of her Poiret tailored suit – bought nearly a year ago when she had been in Europe for Thea’s coming-out ball –
was a vivid chartreuse. She exuded youthful vitality and
joie de vivre
and something else as well, for her luxuriant eyelashes were darkly mascaraed and her generously curved, voluptuous
mouth was painted a glossy garnet-red.

As she neared the point where a uniformed officer stood at the top of the gangplank, welcoming the wealthy aboard, she was jostled on her left-hand side by a heavily built woman wearing a
foxtail cape. As a consequence, Rozalind was thrown off-balance and her camera-case bumped the hip of the gentleman on her right-hand side.

‘Sorry,’ she said automatically, flashing him an apologetic smile.

‘No problem,’ he said, smiling in return. He looked down at the offending camera-case and, on seeing the name embossed in the leather, quirked an eyebrow. ‘A Leica I? Would you
mind my asking how you got hold of one of those so fast? I was at the Leipzig Spring Fair when it was shown for the first time. I didn’t know they were on sale yet in the States.’

His accent was that of a cultured Bostonian and, side by side, they moved a few steps nearer the welcoming officer.

‘My father read about the Leica I in the
New York Times
and asked my cousin, who lives in Berlin, if she would send me one.’

She looked at him properly for the first time and liked what she saw. Wearing heels, she generally towered over most men, but he was well over six foot tall, which meant she didn’t have a
bird’s-eye view of the top of his head. He was wearing a camel-hair coat with a beaver collar and a homburg. Lightly moustached and broad-shouldered, he looked to be in his late thirties or
early forties – which to Rozalind was middle-aged – and, despite deep, humorous lines around an attractively straight mouth, seemed a man accustomed to authority and the use of it.

She was proved right in her assumption a few moments later, for as she stepped away after being courteously and admiringly welcomed aboard, she overheard the officer say, ‘It’s a
pleasure to have you sailing with us again, Congressman Bradley.’

Idly wondering why a US Congressman was making regular trips across the Atlantic and whether he was a Democrat or a Republican, Rozalind made her way to her cabin in the happy certainty that her
trunks would already be there, waiting to be unpacked.

The Atlantic crossing was one she had been making regularly ever since she was a child, but she never tired of it, especially now, travelling unaccompanied by any kind of minder or chaperone.
Because her father took little interest in her, soothing his conscience by ensuring that she had easy access to his vast wealth, and because her stepfather didn’t regard her welfare as being
any of his concern, she enjoyed a startling amount of freedom for a girl of nineteen and, travelling by choice without a maid, it was freedom she was accustomed to making the most of.

After checking that everything was as it should be in her cabin, she set off for the boat deck, eager to take photographs of the New York skyline. Until the arrival of her new Leica, doing so
would have been a near-impossibility because all previous cameras had not only been too bulky to be easily carried, but had required the use of a heavy tripod. The Leica I was the first camera to
be easily portable, and that she was now able to take outdoor photographs with true spontaneity filled Rozalind with a dizzying euphoria.

From the vantage point of the
Aquitania
, New York’s skyline was a vista of soaring, needle-thin spires etched against the piercing blue of a late-afternoon sky. All the buildings
she knew so well – the crystalline-white Singer Building, once the tallest in the city, the Gothic-inspired Woolworth Building, one of the earliest, and the gold-trimmed American Radiator
Building, one of the newest – looked dramatically different when seen from the Hudson and through her camera lens. Instead of the reality of towering gigantic solidity, what she was capturing
was image after image of buildings that were ethereal in their shining beauty.

From a yard or so away a voice she instantly recognized said, ‘Do you mind my asking if you do your own developing?’

She was screwing a different lens into the Leica and, without looking up, said fervently, ‘You bet your life I do.’

He didn’t move away, and she didn’t mind his not doing so. With the new lens safely in position, she turned towards him.

He said affably, ‘As there is no one to introduce us, perhaps we should take the task upon ourselves? My name is Bradley. Maxwell Bradley.’

‘And mine is Rozalind Duveen.’ She liked it that he hadn’t prefaced his name with the title of ‘Congresssman’ and that he wasn’t using his self-introduction
as an excuse to stand closer to her. If it was a pick-up, it didn’t feel like one, and if all he wanted was to talk photography, then she was quite happy to oblige him.

He watched her as she returned her attention to her camera, saying, ‘Most amateur photographers take photographs of people, Miss Duveen. You seem to be concentrating on
buildings.’

‘I’m not an amateur, Mr Bradley,’ she said, looking into her viewfinder. ‘I’ve sold quite a few of my photographs to provincial magazines.’

‘And were they photographs of buildings?’

For the next few minutes she was concentrating too hard to reply. It was nearly five o’clock and the light wasn’t good for the kind of photographic effect she was aiming for. When
she’d finally taken the shot, she put the Leica back in its case and said, ‘Most of them, but not all. One was of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park.’

‘The Bethesda is one of my favourite New York landmarks.’ It seemed quite natural that they should begin strolling down the busy deck together. ‘Was it the stupendous bronze
angel that attracted you?’

‘That and the fact that the angel is the city’s first public artwork by a woman.’

‘Emma Stebbins,’ he said, as it became obvious from the excitement of people now crowding the deck rails and by the frenzied activity on the dockside that the
Aquitania
was
about to get under way. ‘Have you seen her statue of Horace Mann? It overlooks the lawn at the Old State House in Boston.’

The
Aquitania’s
great engines were throbbing. Ropes were being cast off. The people standing at the deck rails were shouting goodbyes to the friends and relatives waving to
them.

Raising her voice in order to be heard over the din, Rozalind shouted, ‘I don’t know as much as I ought about Horace Mann!’

The
Aquitania’s
whistle blew – and blew again. Over the cacophony, Maxwell Bradley shouted back, ‘Mann is a hero of mine! Why don’t we have a coffee and I’ll
tell you whatever it is about him you still don’t know?’

It was a tempting proposition, but Rozalind wanted to be taking photographs as they steamed down the Hudson and into the Bay, not drinking coffee.

‘Another time!’ she shouted, patting her camera-case to indicate what it was she would be doing instead. He gave a slight nod of his head to show he had understood and then, as he
came to a halt, quite obviously about to take his leave of her, she said impulsively, ‘Perhaps you could tell me more about Horace Mann over dinner, Mr Bradley?’

It was an outrageously forward suggestion for a respectable young woman to make to a man she had not been properly introduced to, and about whom she knew next to nothing, but Rozalind
didn’t care. Shipboard life was removed from the normal run of things; and besides, it was 1925, not 1905, and she was a modern young woman and he was a cultured, intelligent, personable man.
Dining with him – even though he was probably old enough to be her father – would be far more interesting than dining alone.

‘Of course, Mann is remembered primarily as being the father of American public education,’ Maxwell Bradley said a few hours later as they were served pan-fried
foie gras in the
Aquitania’s
chateau-esque Louis XVI dining room. ‘But he was also much more. When John Quincy Adams died of a stroke on the floor of the US House of
Representatives in 1848, Mann was picked to fill his seat. He then crusaded against slavery with the same zeal he had exhibited in his fight for public schools.’

Rozalind took a sip of her wine and decided it was time to find out if he and Horace Mann had something in common. And do you also sit in the House of Representatives, Mr Bradley?’

As a matter of fact, I do.’ The tough, straight mouth twitched in amusement. ‘How did you guess?’

‘When we were boarding I overheard the welcoming officer address you as Congressman Bradley’ She tilted her head a little to one side and an amethyst drop-earring danced against the
side of her neck. And do you occupy a seat to the left in the House of Representatives or to the right?’

‘Will my answer determine whether our dinner together will, or will not, be repeated during our crossing to Europe?’

She flashed him her wide, easy smile. ‘I’m not rabidly political, so you’re on safe ground. Now which are you, Congressman Bradley? An out-and-out Democrat or a
dyed-in-the-wool Republican?’

‘I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, Miss Duveen.’

‘Unlike your hero.’

He quirked an eyebrow. ‘It would seem you know far more about Horace Mann than you led me to believe.’

‘I never said I knew
nothing
about him.’

Rozalind was unfazed at having been caught out so easily. What did it matter now that he knew she had deliberately angled to pursue their acquaintance? The bottom line was that if they
hadn’t been seated together as they were, she would have been dining on her own – and that would have led to half a dozen well-intentioned matrons protectively insisting that for the
rest of the voyage she dine with them. She wouldn’t have accepted such invitations, but they would have been an annoyance.

‘Are you disembarking at Southampton or going on to Cherbourg?’ he asked as hors d’oeuvre plates were removed and a first course was served.

‘Southampton. Then I will be visiting family in London.’ She speared a button mushroom with her fork. ‘I have three English cousins, and though I’m very fond of all of
them, I’m particularly close to Thea and Olivia, who are closer to me in age than Violet, their younger sister.’ She laid her fork down. ‘Olivia is living in Berlin at the moment
and so I’ll be joining her there for a week or two. And then, when I return to London, I’m hoping there’ll be an opportunity to visit Yorkshire.’

‘Yorkshire? Is that somewhere near Scotland?’

Laughter fizzed in her throat. ‘Give or take a couple of hundred miles. It’s Britain’s biggest county, and I adore it. My cousins’ family home is on the outskirts of
Outhwaite, a small village in the Dales and – apart from the war years – I’ve been visiting it every summer for as long as I can remember.’

‘I envy you. The kinds of visits I make to England are never long enough for me to visit anywhere but London – and I rarely get to meet anyone who is not a politician or a civil
servant.’

She didn’t ask why. She wanted him to think her sophisticated, not schoolgirlishly predictable. The realization that what he thought of her desperately mattered came with a slam of
shock.

When had Maxwell Bradley metamorphosed from a personable middle-aged man who took an intelligent interest in photography and who was pleasant company into a man she found so devastatingly
attractive that, even though she was seated, her knees were now weak?

That he was wearing white tie and tails helped, of course. Most men looked devastating in white tie and tails, but there was far more to it than merely what he was wearing. It wasn’t
anything obvious. He didn’t, for instance, look any younger than she had first thought him; if anything he looked a little older. His dark-brown hair, hidden at their first meeting by his
homburg, was lightly flecked with silver at his temples. There were creases at the corners of his unusually dark grey eyes. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the effect he had on her. No
one else she had ever met had caused her heart to beat in short, slamming little strokes that she could feel even in her fingertips.

She also realized that she absolutely couldn’t allow him to disappear from her life when they docked at Southampton. Somehow, some way, she had to make the kind of impression on him that
he was making on her.

She was accustomed to dazzling men. Until now, though, all the men in question had been a good decade – and in some cases a couple of decades – younger than Maxwell Bradley, and
nothing so far in his manner indicated that he was in the process of being dazzled by her. That he found her agreeable company was obvious – otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted her
suggestion that they have dinner together. It hadn’t, though, turned into a romantic dinner
à deux.
His attitude towards her was no different than her Uncle Gilbert’s
would have been, if he had been dining alone with her.

It was something Rozalind was determined to rectify.

She picked up her wine glass, excitement at the prospect of success singing through her veins. There were six more days before England hove into view – and a girl of her allure could
achieve a lot in six days.

She’d hoped to kick off her seduction technique later that evening over coffee in the Adams-style drawing room, but the opportunity didn’t arise. He ordered coffee
for them at the table and a little later, when other diners began strolling out of the ornate dining room and heading towards the drawing room, smoking room or the ballroom, where a big band was
playing Dixieland jazz, he courteously brought their evening together to an end.