The American Heiress (56 page)

He heard the hoot of the locomotive and the platform began to fill with steam as the Weymouth train pulled in. Teddy stood back as the passengers swarmed towards him, families returning from a holiday by the sea, two men wearing black hats with crepe streamers on their way back from a funeral, an old lady carrying a pug. The crowd began to thin. The doors to the firstclass carriages were, Teddy could now make out, all open. He thought he saw a perambulator being taken out on to the platform but as the steam evaporated he saw that the wheels belonged to a bath chair. He held his breath for a moment. If Cora wasn’t on this train, it meant that she wasn’t coming. His mouth was dry, all his doubts from a moment before now replaced by a lurching hollowness in his heart. And then he saw two women coming down the platform towards him, both of them wearing hats with travelling veils; one of them was Cora’s height, the other walked slightly behind with a porter who was pushing a pile of cases on his trolley. Teddy began to walk towards them, his step quickening until he was almost running. Then he stopped, his heart thudding in his chest. It must be Cora, he thought; she was stopping to speak to him and yet he had never seen Cora move so gracefully. The woman lifted her veil and then he saw with shattering vividness the sweep of blond hair.

‘Mr Van Der Leyden. What a pleasant surprise this is.’ Charlotte Beauchamp gave him a crooked little smile, acknowledging the fact that they were both the losers in this particular game. ‘But I am afraid you were not looking for me,’ she continued. He looked at her as she said this and she shrank a little from the full force of his disappointment.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t.’ She put a gloved hand on his arm. As she looked up at him, he could see that the whites of her eyes were touched with red. He could see his own pain and loss mirrored in her wide blue gaze. How strange, he thought, that this woman that he had disliked so much should be the only person who could understand him now.

She tilted her head to one side and blinked rapidly as if there were something in her eye.

‘I understand your despair, Mr Van Der Leyden. I know what it is to lose the thing you most desire. But you must be strong and wait. All you have to do is wait.’ With that, Charlotte Beauchamp nodded to him and walked off into the station, her maid following behind. Teddy looked after her, wondering how he could ever have mistaken her slippery grace for Cora’s urgent stride.

The platform was empty now, but he could not bring himself to move away from the spot where for a few hours he had had the future that he wanted. A pigeon flew down from its perch under the glass roof and began to circle his feet, mistaking him perhaps for a statue. With a great effort he started to move, feeling each step as a betrayal. Charlotte Beauchamp had told him to wait, but what, he wondered, was he waiting for? A quick stride on a platform somewhere one day or the morning when he would wake up without the band of misery that was already beginning to tighten around his chest.

In the nursery, Cora pulled her finger out of her baby’s fist. He was sleeping now. The sky was beginning to darken and soon she would go and dress for dinner. In her room, Ivo was also sleeping. She lay down on the bed beside him, putting her face next to his so that she would be the first thing he saw when he woke up. His features were soft now and although his eyes were shut, his countenance was quite open. Cora wondered if at last she had the measure of her husband. Whatever happened, she knew now, and the thought filled her with warmth, that he needed her. Then he stirred, a dream chasing behind his eyelids, and he stiffened as if he had been dealt some unseen blow. Perhaps she would never really know him. A year and a half ago that thought would have been unbearable to her, but now she had learnt to live with uncertainty, even to love it. Since she had come to England she had learnt to prize the rare bright and beautiful days which broke through the mist and murk, loving them all the more for their randomness. You could buy a more agreeable climate, she thought, but not that feeling of unexpected joy when a shaft of sunlight fell through the curtains, promising a sparkling new day.

Acknowledgements

The characters in this book are by and large fictional, but the circumstances they find themselves in are not. When it comes to the Gilded Age, the more fantastical the circumstance, the more likely it is to be true. There really was a magazine called
The Titled American Lady
and the gossip rags of 1890s New York were every bit as obsessed with celebrity as magazines like
Heat
are today. Here are a few of the books that give a flavour of that overheated era:
The Glitter and the Gold
by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsam;
The Mrs Vanderbilt
by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr;
The Memoirs of Lady Randolph Churchill
;
The Decline of the English Aristocracy
by David Cannadine;
The Duke’s Children
by Anthony Trollope;
The Shuttle
by Frances Hodgson Burnett;
The Buccaneers
by Edith Wharton;
Consuelo and Alva
by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart.

Anyone familiar with the Dorset coast will know there is a Lulworth Castle, which I have supersized, but the Duke of Wareham and his family are, of course, entirely fictional. Readers who know their nineteenth-century royalty will realise that I have taken one liberty with chronology – Prince Eddy was sent away to India in 1888 rather than 1894 – but I couldn’t quite resist borrowing this for my plot.

This book has taken me an age to finish, and I must thank the London Library and the South West Railway London to Crewkerne line for giving me some quiet space to write. Along the way I was encouraged by my faithful and perceptive readers, Tanya Shaw, Emma Fearnhamm, Ottilie Wilford, Richard Goodwin, Jocasta Innes, Caroline Michel, Sam Lawrence, and Kristie Morris. I am eternally grateful to Tabitha Potts for her plot suggestions, and to Paul Benney for his thoughts on portraits. Thanks to Ivor Schlosberg for the pre-orders, among other things. Georgina Moore is a heroine among publicists. Derek Johns is everything you could want in an agent and it was a joy to work with Harriet Evans, albeit briefly. But the real thanks must go to Mary-Anne Harrington who is as brilliant as she is patient and to Hope Dellon whose emails were like getting gold stars for homework. And my thanks to Marcus and Lydia for sending me away right at the end. It made all the difference.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel
are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE AMERICAN HEIRESS
. Copyright © 2010 by Daisy Goodwin Productions. All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodwin, Daisy.

[My last duchess]

The American heiress: a novel / Daisy Goodwin.—1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

Originally published as: My last duchess. London: Headline Review, 2010.

Summary: “Be careful what you wish for. Traveling abroad with her mother at the turn of the twentieth century to seek a titled husband, beautiful, vivacious Cora Cash, whose family mansion in Newport dwarfs the Vanderbilts’, suddenly finds herself Duchess of Wareham, married to Ivo, the most eligible bachelor in England. Nothing is quite as it seems, however: Ivo is withdrawn and secretive, and the English social scene is full of traps and betrayals. Money, Cora soon learns, cannot buy everything, as she must decide what is truly worth the price in her life and her marriage. Witty, moving, and brilliantly entertaining, Cora’s story marks the debut of a glorious storyteller who brings a fresh new spirit to the world of Edith Wharton and Henry James. “For daughters of the new American billionaires of the 19th century, it was the ultimate deal: marriage to a cash-strapped British Aristocrat in return for a title and social status. But money didn’t always buy them happiness.”—DAISY GOODWIN IN THE DAILY MAIL”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-4299-8708-0

1. Americans—England—Fiction. 2. Aristocracy (Social class)—England—Fiction. 3. England—Social life and customs—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6107.O6625M9 2011

823'.92—dc22

2010048539

First published in Great Britain by HEADLINE REVIEW, an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP, an Hachette UK Company