Heiress (13 page)

Not her. Not anymore.

She watched the pigeons alight on his statue, others pick at crumbs at his feet. Across the street, newsies scuffled their way to the alleyway to pick up their papers, a man wheeled an apple cart into the square. Inside the corridors of the office, the city desk began to stir with voices, stringers stopping in to sell their stories, the night photos of local crime.

No Oliver.

The truth began to settle in her bones, a pervasive chill that tasted of grief.

She closed her eyes, itchy and cracked, and leaned her head against the chair. No second thoughts.

Ma’am. Is it possible that God is giving you exactly what you want? You just don’t know how yet. Trust Him.

No, she was through trusting God. So far, with every step of faith, she’d found grief, instead.

From now on, she’d trust no one but herself.

Footsteps through the reception room stilled her and she drew herself up, not turning to greet him, staring a moment longer at the view.

“Who’s here?”

The voice shook her, the violence in it, as if he’d arrived to the
Chronicle
already churning the stress of the day.

You’re an amazing writer, Esme. Prove to him that you can write—better than any man in his city department.

She didn’t have to prove anything to anyone but herself.

She turned his chair around. “Hello, Father.”

He looked as if he hadn’t slept either, his eyes reddened, cracked, his face lined. She hadn’t before noticed the stoop in his shoulders, the way his hands shook when he took his watch from his coat pocket, checked the time.

“How did you get in here?”

“The night editor let me in. He remembered me.” She folded her hands on his blotter. He just stared at her.

“When did you get here?”

“After midnight, after watching Oliver burn to death.”

She clipped out her words without emotion, pushing the ball of flame deep inside her chest. Later.

Her father stared at her. “Has something happened to Oliver?”

She caught her voice before it escaped her. “His tenement caught fire last night. He was trapped in his attic apartment.”

“I’m very sorry, Esme, but I still don’t understand. What were you doing there? I thought…your mother told me you were unwell. Of course, that’s to be expected I suppose. And now…I suppose we will have to provide for you in your situation.”

She frowned at him. “Unwell? Why would I be unwell? What situation?”

He stared at her a moment longer, his eyes finally narrowing. “Aren’t you expecting…a child?”

His voice shuddered at the end and she saw what his words cost him. As if, with that question, everything flushed to the surface. Suddenly, she saw it all in his eyes. Hurt. Worry. Grief.

The truth settled on her. Of course.

“I don’t know what you have been told, but no. I have not been with a man. Including Oliver.”

He pressed his hand to his heart. Closed his eyes. Reached out to palm his credenza. “Oh no.”

It was the way he sagged, how he turned to her, horror in his expression that made her breath hiccup, made her want to rise, to rush to him.

Instead she watched him make his way to a chair, sag into it.

“Father, you’ve been lied to. But never mind. Oliver is gone, and I will do my duty for the family, on one condition.”

He had his face pocketed in his hands as if overwhelmed, despairing. She couldn’t agree more. But now wasn’t the time to grieve. “If you require me to marry Foster, then I want to write for you. Be a journalist for the city. I know I can do it, and you do too.”

He still hadn’t looked up at her.

“I saw those people at the fire last night, and they need a voice. Families without homes, living in squalor. Children dying of cholera. And high society sits by and lets it happen. We should be ashamed of ourselves, having dinners for our dogs and horses and going to Hell’s Kitchen on guided tours. Makes me ill.” She stood, picked up the notepaper she had put on his desk, and handed it to him.

He looked up at her.

“What is that?” His voice seemed to emerge from far away.

“My first article.” Somehow she held it without her hand shaking.

He reached out and took it.

And, as she lowered herself back into his chair, he read it. The clock ticked behind him. So, this was how it felt to have an editor read your material. She tried to study his face.

It shook her when he cupped his hand across his forehead, hiding his eyes.

“Father?”

He said nothing, finally sighing. “It’s very good. A few sentences I might change. Overdramatic.” “Thank you. I will return home and dispatch my apologies to Foster immediately—”

“He’s already married.”

The words clipped her, fast and hard.

“What?”

“He married last night.”

She leaned back in his chair. “I don’t—I don’t understand. Who did he marry?” But even as the question left her, she knew the answer. Heard the name in her head before he said it.

“Jinx.”

Of course, Jinx. Finally ascending to her birthright.

She spread her hand on his desk. Felt the smooth wood, with the other hand, the worn creases of his chair. Someday, she would sit here. Rightfully.

For Oliver.

Her father set the article on the desk. “I can’t publish this, Esme. You’re a talented writer, but it is not your place in society to write articles for my paper, like some stringer. We will need to find you another suitor—”

“No.” She got up, and picked up her reticule, the one holding the dog collar. It would buy passage somewhere, even to a new life. Oklahoma, or even Montana. She didn’t belong in New York. Not without Oliver.

She would go somewhere that allowed her to be the woman he believed in.

Her father looked up at her, eyes reddened. “I love you, you know.”

“I’m sure you did. Take care, father.”

He caught her arm as she passed by. She glanced at his hand, the strength of it, on her arm. “Love has many faces.”

“I know, Father. The one I knew was Oliver’s.”

She reached the door before he turned. “Esme?”

She pulled out her gloves, fought the tremor in her hands as she worked them on.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She turned and traveled back to Delmonico’s, to her father’s voice in her ears.
I expect great things from my Esme.
She found a smile.

“Keep an eye out for my byline.”

SECTION TWO

Jinx

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND

1899

News traveled too fast, even in the seaside town of Newport. Jinx should have had the right to tell Foster the news, should have been entitled to see his face.

Trace it for a hint of remorse.

“How long will you wait for him to come in from the harbor?”

“I don’t know, Mother.”

Jinx sat in the dining room, the bronze and crystal Doré-style chandelier dripping light like tears upon the table. Landscape panels depicting a dark and fertile French countryside suggested a more baroque existence than her own. A clock—a wedding gift from the Astors—chipped away the late hour. She should have ordered a fire in the marble-carved fireplace, for the early July breeze had a bite that had collected in the corners of the room before they’d closed it for dinner.

“You’ll just let him sit out there, scandalizing you with his boatloads of trollops, chorus girls, and cabaret singers.” Her mother put down her fork, letting it rattle on the Dresden china, a purchase from Jinx’s last trip abroad.

Upon her own plate, Jinx’s broiled quail had turned chewy. She had no appetite anyway and lifted her hand for the footman to carry it back to the kitchen.

“I won’t be needing dessert,” she said. Indeed, with Foster’s arrival in port three days prior, she’d sworn off all sweets, aware that since the miscarriage, she hadn’t yet fit back into her standard corset. In fact, she should probably reorder her winter season wardrobe, since she wouldn’t need the adjustments the maternal condition would have demanded.

Her throat burned and she drew in a breath, wishing for the tang of the salty air, to lose herself in the sultry night. She would have taken dinner on the terrace, but her mother regarded that sort of al fresco dining barbarian.

“He went to Paris to pick up his brother. I am sure they are simply friends of Bennett’s. You know his reputation.”

“Perhaps his reputation has infected his brother.”

“Mother—”

“I saw his sins with my own eyes as I rode with Mamie today down Ocean Avenue. A sloop setting out for the
Jinx
with a couple of strumpets on board.”

“Mother, please!”

“He’s as much of a scoundrel as your father.”

Jinx stared at her mother. One had to consider her closely, past the powder, the diamonds and pearls at her neck, the flourish of her dark, padded hair, to see the marks of despair, the finite lines troweled into her face over the past four years. But no one could miss the flashing dark eyes, the contempt barely veiled when she spoke of August.

Indeed, Phoebe had all but moved into Rosehaven the moment Jinx finally announced her renovations completed. Never mind that her father resided in New York—even during the height of the social season of Newport. Phoebe apparently couldn’t bear the notion of his belongings leering at her.

Jinx gladly gave her mother rooms at Rosehaven. She had no one else to fill them. And, her mother made for an adept party planner. She had stood beside her in the gilded ballroom for the past two seasons to host Jinx’s annual motor chase cotillion.

“Foster is most likely conducting business and is too busy to come ashore.” Jinx placed her hands on the table, and at the signal, the footman slid back her chair, too heavy with its brass finishing for her to move alone. “I no longer wish to discuss this.” She stood, smoothing her shirtwaist into her skirt, then rose and walked out toward the ballroom.

Without guests, the chandelier unlit, the massive room gathered the shadows, the windows dark, the electric lamplights outside illuminating the fountain. The place mocked her.

Four years without an heir. No wonder Foster had fallen out of amour with her.

Her shoes resounded across the parquet floor, and for a moment, she saw herself in Foster’s arms, the few times in the past two years when, for society’s sake, he belonged to her.

She opened the doors and stood on the veranda. The sky was dark with mystery, the nuance of the sea beckoning.

Her mother’s steps tapped across the floor, so she stepped out onto the terrace, past the potted ferns and ivy twining across the Corinthian balustrades that bordered the terrace. In two month’s time, she’d have the footmen erect columns, entwine them with silk and electric lights, perhaps sprays of hydrangeas from the gardens. Then, three hundred of her closest friends would dine alongside her and Foster, she in a new Worth gown, bedazzled with some diamond choker Foster had gifted her. He always found a way to soothe her wounds, and this night, these past two months of reading his name in the tattler’s pages of the
Newport News
would be abolished.

“You need to give him an heir.”

Her mother’s voice, kept low, cut through the swath of her assurances, and Jinx drew her arms around her waist.

She drew in a breath. “You know I’ve tried.”

Phoebe stood beside her, staring out at the fountain where two swans swam, their wings clipped. “You must keep trying. Your standing is insecure unless you produce an heir.”

Jinx closed her eyes, fighting the ache that swelled inside her, the one that could curl her into a ball in the wee hours of the night. Or cause her to walk out onto the grass, barefoot in her nightclothes, when she knew the house slept.

She didn’t bother beseeching God. After all, she had stolen her sister’s husband. Maybe she deserved the loss of three babies from her womb.

“I can’t make him come home. Can’t force him into my bed.” Couldn’t make him love her. “He doesn’t even know that I lost this child yet. Perhaps he won’t even…” Well, she had no illusions that he really loved her, but so far he hadn’t neglected his marital duty. Like he might be conducting a business transaction, an invitation appeared on her plate on the designated morning before their assigned meeting, an appointment designed to produce someone to carry on the Worth name.

“Then go to him. Certainly you are not ignorant to a man’s weaknesses.”

Jinx glanced at her mother. Phoebe didn’t look at her.

“Mother, I…no. Foster is not very…” Gentle. He’d never been overly amorous with her, not even on their wedding night. She’d almost suspected anger, although she couldn’t admit that. Brutal would be too harsh, but sometimes she slipped away from him feeling hollowed out, as if he’d stolen yet more of herself from her. “Affectionate.”

“A woman does what she must. It is part of the marriage contract.”

She had kept her part of the contract. Usually, however, she crept off before the dawn, unable to see his face when he awoke and found her sleeping beside him. She would never forget the morning after the wedding for as long as she lived, the smile upon his lips as he’d awakened, only to vanish as he’d looked at her in the light of day.

She blamed herself for their conjugal estrangement. She wasn’t, after all, beautiful like Esme.

The image of her sister bubbled up, stole her breath.

“What is it?”

Jinx longed to remove her shoes, run her toes through the blades of sweet, thick thatch. Wind stripped her hair from its bounds, tangled around her face. Beyond, in the darkness, waves pummeled the shore.

“I smell a storm coming.”

“Indeed. You should hurry if you intend to board the yacht tonight.”

Jinx glanced at her. “I will not. I hate the yacht. It makes me sick.”

“I thought you loved the sea. You spend more time in Newport than any other society woman. I feared you would be attacked by ruffians, coming down here without a full complement of house staff before the season opened last week.”

“I hoped the sea air would help me…would help the…” Baby. But she couldn’t say it. She had to stop thinking of the pregnancy as a child or she might simply fold into herself, let despair take her like the currents below the cliffs.