A Season of Secrets (19 page)

With her hopes of a romantic moonlit stroll on deck dashed, Rozalind went for a moonlit stroll by herself, confident that he would seek out her company the next day.

He didn’t do so.

By four o’clock in the afternoon, though she hadn’t purposely looked for him, she hadn’t seen him anywhere. When she was invited to dine that evening at the captain’s
table, she accepted, cross that the first day of her six-day seduction campaign had been so unproductive. That evening, knowing that as a single young woman at the captain’s table she would
be the focus of a great number of eyes, – not least, hopefully, Maxwell Bradley’s – she dressed flamboyantly.

Her drop-waisted scarlet silk and satin gown was decorated with panels of jet beading that complemented the glossy helmet of her raven-dark hair. The neckline plunged front and back, and the
mid-calf hemline was deeply fringed, fluttering about her legs as she walked. She was wearing flesh-coloured stockings, T-strap shoes and a long pearl necklace tied in a knot and worn so that it
dangled down her bare back, emphasizing her flawless skin. The
pièce de résistance
was an exotically beaded headband, worn low over her brow, and a jet slave-bracelet clamped
above one elbow.

Taking a last look in the mirror before leaving her cabin she was satisfied that when Maxwell Bradley saw her, albeit from a distance, he would be knocked for six.

She was one of a number of first-class passengers dining with Captain Charles that evening and was introduced as Miss Rozalind Elizabeth Duveen, daughter of Guthrie Clarke
Duveen, president of one of the country’s most prestigious investment banks.

America’s ambassador to Great Britain, Ambassador Alanson B. Houghton, was one of Captain Charles’s guests, as was his wife. Other guests were a famous movie actress and her rather
less famous husband; a steel magnate; an elderly, wizened French marquise; a British Member of Parliament and his daughter; an athlete who had won a gold medal at the last Olympic Games; a
silver-haired Washington newspaper proprietor and his very young, very beautiful wife. Last, and seated on her left at dinner, was a young man whom Captain Charles had judged to be the most
eligible bachelor that voyage, Bobbie Hunt, the twenty-eight-year-old heir to a rubber-tyre fortune.

It was an attempt at matchmaking that was doomed to failure because, aping Rudolph Valentino, Bobbie wore his poker-straight hair slicked back with Vaseline. It was not a look Rozalind
favoured.

Ambassador Houghton was seated on her right and, when Rozalind told him she would be interrupting her trip to England in order to visit Germany, he was immediately all interest.

‘I was head of the US Legation at Berlin from 1922 until February this year, when I was transferred to London,’ he said, giving her his whole attention. ‘Germany needs a lot of
financial help at the moment, but I won’t bore you with that. You’ve probably heard quite enough about war reparations from your father.’

Rozalind hadn’t had a meeting with her father for more than a year, and when they had last met it was her own financial requirements that had been under discussion, not
Germany’s.

Seeing no reason to make Ambassador Houghton privy to her bleak parental relationship, she said, affecting knowledge of the subject that she did not have, ‘Are all major investment banks
loaning to Germany?’

‘Oh, yes. It isn’t only Duveen’s. The money will enable Germany to expand industrially and give it a basis from which it will be able to pay its reparation debts –
especially its debts to Belgium and France.’

‘Which are how much?’ Rozalind asked, politely keeping the conversation going, as she scanned the chandeliered dining room for sight of a broad-shouldered Bostonian with stunning
grey eyes.

‘Pre the Dawes Plan, the reparation was fixed at an annual fee of one hundred and thirty-two billion gold marks.’

The amount was so stupendously colossal that it did what Rozalind would have thought impossible. It engaged her full attention.

‘
How
much?’ she asked disbelievingly. ‘One hundred and thirty-two
billion
gold marks?’

Ambassador Houghton chuckled. ‘Astronomical, I agree – and quite beyond Germany’s ability to pay. And we all know what happened when she defaulted. Though Great Britain’s
solution was to lower the amount of the annual payments, France and Belgium’s solution was to occupy the Ruhr and take in kind what Germany couldn’t afford to give. Such a volatile
situation couldn’t be allowed to continue, hence coordinated action by Great Britain and America, resulting in the present, very satisfactory solution.’

Interesting though it was, Rozalind had no desire to talk about it further. Once again she scanned the room and this time, by adjusting the angle of her chair, did so with success.

Bradley was seated at a table with five other people, two men and three women.

Her throat constricted so tightly that, even if she’d wanted to continue the conversation with Ambassador Houghton, she wouldn’t have been able to do so. Numbers like that meant he
was quite obviously paired with one of the women. But which?

‘. . . and did you see
Rose Marie
at the Imperial?’ Bobbie Hunt was asking. ‘What a swell show!’ He began humming the show’s title song.

Rozalind was unappreciative, for her thoughts were elsewhere.

One of the women at Bradley’s table had her back to her and, judging from her dowager’s hump and snow-white hair, was elderly. The other two women were much younger, possibly in
their late thirties or early forties – which made them approximately the age she judged Maxwell Bradley to be.

The constriction in her throat intensified. What if one of the two women was his wife? Why had she never thought to wonder whether or not he was married? Hard on the heels of that thought came
the impossibility of it. How could he have a wife, when the previous evening he had dined alone with her so publicly, and when he was well known to the officers on board ship? Congressmen had to
maintain spotless reputations. He wouldn’t have risked his reputation in order to chat pleasantly about Horace Mann.

‘What say we move on to the ballroom and shimmy, when dinner is over?’ Bobbie’s voice was low in her ear. ‘It isn’t the Cotton Club, but the band play great
ragtime.’

Rozalind didn’t reply. Her eyes were still on Maxwell Bradley. One of the women laid an evening-gloved hand proprietorially on his arm, laughing as she leaned intimately towards him. He
laughed back at her.

He hadn’t laughed once the previous evening over dinner. He had smiled occasionally, but that was all.

She decided that he was boring and that she didn’t give a jot if he preferred the company of a woman more his own age to hers. Finding him nerve-tinglingly exciting had been an aberration,
nothing else. She remembered their wine. It had been the first time she had drunk Château d’Yquem and although it had been delicious, she made a resolution never to drink it again. It
had obviously addled her brain.

‘I’d love to shimmy,’ she said. ‘And I’ve never been to the Cotton Club. It sounds huge fun.’

‘Maybe I’ll get the chance to take you there some day.’ Bobbie gave her a conspiratorial wink. ‘Let’s quit the table the first chance we get.’

Forty minutes later, with a cold, hard feeling in the pit of her stomach, Rozalind accompanied him into the ballroom. Bobbie was a good dancer and, as they Charlestoned, she almost forgave him
his Vaselined hairstyle. The music changed to a foxtrot to enable people to get their breath back, and she saw Maxwell Bradley lead onto the dance floor the woman he had been laughing with at
dinner.

As they danced they were deep in animated conversation, and Rozalind said tautly, ‘Is the woman wearing emerald-green with scarlet beading one of the Rothschilds?’

Bobbie followed her line of sight. ‘Nope. She’s the recently widowed Mrs Clancy, an Astor.’

They executed a smooth rise and fall and then went into a swing and sway. When they were again doing a chassis, Rozalind said, fishing for more information, ‘And is her dance partner about
to become husband number two?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. He’s a Congressman. Rich, but not Astor-standard rich, and you can bet your life Mrs C is on the lookout for a title, second time round.’ He led
her into another swing and sway, saying as he did so, ‘No doubt she’s hoping to bag a prince or a count while she’s in Europe.’

Out of the corner of her eye Rozalind saw Maxwell Bradley foxtrot his partner a little closer to them. When their eyes met unavoidably, she gave him the kind of faint smile she would have given
to someone she vaguely recognized, but couldn’t quite place. Though she was going to great lengths to ensure there was no expression in her eyes, she was thrillingly aware that, as one of his
eyebrows lifted ever so slightly, there was a great deal of expression in his.

Outwardly all ice-maiden
froideur
, inside she felt gleeful. He was interested, and not merely in order to talk about Horace Mann, or photography.

If she knew anything at all about men – and for a girl of nineteen she already knew a lot – then the game wasn’t over. Where Maxwell Bradley was concerned, she knew with
exciting certainty that all was still to play for.

‘And so the next day I acknowledged him with a little bit more warmth, but declined to have coffee with him in the ship’s garden room,’ she said to Thea as,
in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row, they slowed their horses to a walking pace in order to be able to talk and catch up on each other’s news.

‘Was he put out?’ Beneath the shade of her navy-blue riding bowler Thea’s eyes were avidly interested. She’d been pushing boundaries of her own of late, but not with
anyone a couple of decades her senior.

‘If he was, he didn’t let it show. An hour later he was strolling the deck with the happy widow.’

‘And?’

‘And as there were only another three days before we docked in Southampton I decided I couldn’t continue playing it ice-cool.’ Rozalind’s horse skittishly tried to break
into a trot. She reined it back to a walk and said, ‘The next day we had coffee together in the morning, and dinner in the evening. By the time we said goodnight we were on first-name
terms.’

‘Rozalind and Maxwell?’

‘Rozalind and Max.’

‘Did he kiss you goodnight?’

‘Not then, and I couldn’t understand it. There was enough of a sexual charge between us to light up London.’

They had reached a point on the tree-verged bridleway that gave a view of the Serpentine and they brought their horses to a halt. Looking through the trees to the limpid green surface of the
lake, Rozalind said, ‘The next night – the night before we docked – he told me the reason.’

‘He’s married?’ It was a suspicion Thea had had almost from the moment Rozalind had mentioned how much older than her he was.

‘No, he isn’t married, but he does have someone waiting for him in New York.’

‘So that’s it then.’ There was a disappointed finality in Thea’s voice. ‘Your romance is at an end.’

‘No, Thea. It’s very far from being at an end. I’m going to see him again while he’s in London, and I’m certain that he’ll write to whoever is waiting for him
in New York and end the relationship.’

Thea shrugged. ‘And then, Roz? What if he ends up asking you to marry him and you have to turn him down? Think how ghastly that would be.’

‘But I wouldn’t turn him down.’

‘Of course you would. He’s miles older than you are! When you are thirty, he’ll be fifty!’

‘Fifty-two, to be exact.’

‘And you don’t care?’

At the stunned disbelief on Thea’s face, Rozalind laughed. ‘No, Thea. I don’t care. I’ve never before met anyone I’m so crazy about, and although Max keeps his
cards close to his chest, I know he feels the same about me. This is it, Thea! The big one. The walk-down-the-aisle, happy-ever-after one.’

Thea swiftly averted her head before Rozalind could see the pain in her eyes. The big one – the walk-down-the-aisle happy-ever-after one – was how it should have been between her and
Hal. That it wasn’t caused her an agony so deep there were days when she didn’t know how she was surviving it.

She hadn’t seen Hal since the night of her coming-out ball more than a year ago, but she knew, via letters from Carrie, that he was courting a Richmond barmaid. ‘Courting’ was
the word Carrie had used, but Thea was certain he was sowing his wild oats and that, when he had tired of doing so, he would propose to Carrie.

‘Let’s get back to the stables,’ she said abruptly, unshed tears making her eyes overly bright. ‘Papa says he has something to tell us. Some kind of a happy
announcement.’

‘Perhaps he’s about to be made Foreign Secretary.’ Rozalind turned her horse around. ‘Or perhaps he’s going to announce Olivia’s engagement to Dieter von
Starhemberg.’

‘Perhaps.’ That Olivia was in love with a man who wanted to marry her wasn’t something Thea wanted to talk about, when she was beginning to doubt that she would ever achieve a
similar happiness. ‘The Row is practically deserted,’ she said, her face set and pale. ‘Let’s gallop back.’

She dug her heels into her horse’s flanks and, without waiting for a reply, set off headlong for the stables, her heart and mind full of Hal, and hot, tortured tears streaming down her
face.