The Luxe (10 page)

T
HERE WAS A STRANGE AND SUBDUED MOOD HANGING
over the Holland household, but Lina didn’t care to think much of it. Her mistress, sitting in front of her at the shiny mahogany dressing table in her bedroom, was perfectly quiet and erect. Elizabeth stared impassively at her own reflection and never once let her gaze rise to meet the eyes of her childhood friend. It was only the second day of her return, and Lina was once again nothing but a maid.

It was still difficult to believe that Elizabeth—that perfect American girl, so celebrated for her lily-whiteness, so seemingly pure and helpless—would soon be sneaking toward the carriage house to do forbidden things with one of
them
. One of
us
, Lina corrected herself. She kept the silver comb going slowly over each pale strand, and pitied herself for the fact that the girl whose hair she arranged was her rival in love.

“All right,” Elizabeth said impatiently. “You may braid it now.”

Lina looked at Elizabeth in the mirror, and anger flashed in her eyes. A long moment passed, and before she could think about how to react, there was a knock on the door.

Elizabeth remained immobile, except for raising her chin ever so slightly. “Yes?” she called.

The door opened, and Lina twisted around to see her sister. She wore a black dress like the one Lina wore, and her red hair was pulled back from her face. A laundry basket was propped against her hip.

“You’re not done yet?” Claire asked, looking from Lina to Elizabeth.

“Oh, Claire, I’m glad you’re here. Would you mind braiding my hair?” Elizabeth asked, fixing her eyes on the reflection in the oval mirror. Lina drew her hands back from Elizabeth and stepped away to make room for her sister. Claire bent wearily to put down her basket, then advanced across the rich carpet, giving her sister an admonishing look as she did.

Lina hated Elizabeth for making her feel this way, and looked on in quiet anger as Claire quickly and skillfully separated her hair and wove it together into a tight, neat braid down her back. When she was finished, she stepped back and said, “Is there anything else?”

“That is all, but let your sister practice a little with your hair. She seems to have forgotten a few things during my absence.”

Lina stood, stung and silent. She was reminded of those painful feelings from her early adolescence, when Elizabeth the aloof perfectionist first began to emerge. It wasn’t until Elizabeth turned sixteen that Lina became her personal maid, but it was watching her friend’s transformation into a fashionable society girl while she remained plain old Lina that hurt the most.

“Of course,” she heard Claire say, before nodding and walking to the mahogany sleigh bed where Lina had laid Elizabeth’s dress. She scooped it up carefully and put it on top of her basket, and then grabbed her sister’s hand. Lina wanted to snatch it away and demand that Claire not patronize her, but she was too cowardly to speak out. “Good night, Miss Holland,” Claire called as she pulled Lina out the door.

“Good night,” Elizabeth said, and Claire widened her eyes at her sister warningly.

“Good night, miss,” Lina mumbled in a grudging tone.

When the door had shut behind them, Claire dropped her sister’s hand. She proceeded down the hallway, which, like the rest of the house, was decorated with low-lit paintings of a Manhattan of farms and hills and of the people who had settled it. Both the Holland sisters’ rooms were on the west side of the house, on the second floor, far enough from the master suite—Lina now realized—that one could come or go down the servants’ stairs without ever being noticed. Diana’s
room faced south, and Elizabeth’s north onto the street. After a few moments, Lina followed Claire up the narrow wooden staircase, with the ceiling so low that they had to bend their heads, to the third and then the fourth floor.

The garret room that the Broud sisters shared with the other young female servants was impenetrably dark. They still used candles for light, and so when the sun went down, the room seemed to go on forever—miles and miles of rich black space. Lina listened as her sister stepped across the bare boards and fumbled for a candle. She waited in silence to be chastised, and longed to be far, far away. In a few moments the room came into dim view.

“I wish you wouldn’t give Miss Elizabeth cause for complaint,” Claire said as she lit a second and third candle. She stepped across the creaking floor to the brass bed that they shared. “Say something, Lina. Don’t go into one of your silent moods on me.”

Lina went to the simple dressing table, where the flickering candles sat, and picked up a few rusted bobby pins—hand-me-downs from the Misses Holland—with which she pinned back several errant hairs. She looked at herself in the cracked mirror, turning her face to the side to examine her profile. She couldn’t explain to Claire her burning sense of injustice, her need to change everything about her life. “I’m sorry I didn’t help you with the laundry today,” she said instead.

Claire sighed, glancing at the basket of clean laundry next to their bed. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Now, are you going to share what is so wrong?”

Lina hadn’t told her anything about Will, or last night’s episode, but her older sister had long been sensitive to her moods and was used to covering for her when she slacked off. This always gave Lina a vague, itching sense of guilt. But what was guilt compared to the furious brew of humiliation and unrequited desires she had been drinking since last night?

“It’s a good job, Liney, with a good family,” Claire went on, when Lina didn’t answer. She shook her head, and her copper bun moved in a slow, disappointed arc. “I don’t know why you are always stirring up trouble.”

Lina looked into her reflection. She felt, with her oversize feet, and her dull hair, and her total lack of fashionable things, like the lowest of underdogs. But this was an age of remarkable reversals, she tried to remind herself. One read about them every day. Fortunes could be made overnight, and diligence and inventiveness could transform a girl’s looks. Lina had always believed that there might be a beautiful girl lurking underneath her plainness.

“I’m just not used to having Miss Elizabeth back,” she replied at last. Even saying her name made Lina’s stomach curdle a little. It reminded her of how proud Elizabeth’s gestures were these days, her voice dripping with fake goodness.
Every singsong of that voice reminded Lina of how out-matched she was. “It was all so much more manageable when she was gone,” she added defensively.

“I shouldn’t have to remind you that there aren’t many lines of work for girls like us.” Claire shook her head with a touch of extra vigor. She was working even now, Lina realized, folding the fine pillowcases that the Holland girls rested their pretty heads on. “And if we lose this job, well…we won’t be ladies’ maids in New York again. You and Miss Elizabeth used to be so close. Of course it can’t be like that now…but if you…”

Lina couldn’t possibly comment on that, so she went to her sister’s side and took the pillowcase she was folding from her hands impatiently. Claire turned her drawn and lightly freckled face to her sister. Her eyes were questioning.

“Oh, go and sit. You’ve been on your feet all day.” Lina punctuated her speech with a little jut of her head, and then continued in a softer tone: “Let me do some folding for once.”

Claire snorted and went around to the other side of the bed. She propped her head up against the headboard and crossed her ankles. For a few moments she kept her eyes on her sister, watching her almost skeptically as she folded. “Careful with the embroidered things,” she said as Lina shook out an ornately embellished shirtwaist.

“I am, I
am
,” Lina replied, smoothing her hand over the
intricate embroidery. “Now would you please relax? Maybe you could read from the columns to me.”

Lina usually teased Claire about her favorite pastime—reading about the lives of the fashionable and rich—but she smiled at her sister now to assure her there would be no heckling about what a mind-numbing diversion it all was. Claire reached enthusiastically for the folded
News of the World Gazette
, and began to skim the report from Newport in search of the doings of New York society ladies on holiday.

Lina continued to fold as Claire started reading, in a fake upper-class accent. She nodded along as though she were listening carefully, though in truth she could not put away her misery. She could not stop searching her brain for some way to show Will that he had no business with uppity Elizabeth Holland.

She hadn’t come up with a thing, when she heard her sister exclaim: “Henry Schoonmaker—that’s the young man who came to visit Miss Elizabeth today.”

“What?” Lina looked up from her laundry and her thoughts and tried to look like she was at all interested in this Henry Schoonmaker.

“It says right here that Miss Elizabeth’s friend Penelope Hayes is rumored to be an item with Henry Schoonmaker. He was the young man who came over this afternoon, and oh, Lina, did you see him?” Claire’s eyes were bright with dis
belief at the few degrees that separated them from such good fortune. “He was so good-looking, it was almost unfair. And Miss Penelope is going to marry him!” Lina was amazed that Claire could be thrilled for a girl who was always so rude to them, but she resisted saying so. “Though I wonder,” Claire added, as a musing afterthought, “why he would have been with Miss Elizabeth this afternoon, then?”

“Maybe he wanted advice on how to propose?” Lina suggested, folding a pair of Miss Diana’s plain cotton bloomers into a neat square.

“Yes, maybe…” Claire shrugged and went on reading the latest news of the most charmed New Yorkers.

Lina offered her sister a smile, which she was too engrossed in fantastical gossip items to notice, and so she went on folding the Misses Holland’s underthings and listening to the comforting sound of her sister’s voice.

She soon found her mind wandering back to Penelope Hayes with her translucent skin and fancy dresses and bejeweled hands and aloof manner. You can always tell the rich by their skin, her mother used to say. She pictured Elizabeth’s fine porcelain complexion, which was so even and free of flaws, and felt again how excluded she was from the light and fizzy world.

Lina couldn’t help thinking that if she were a lady like Miss Hayes or Miss Elizabeth, then Will would never have asked her to leave the carriage house that night. Or any night.

I
T WAS WELL PAST TWO, AND EVERY CORNER OF THE
Holland house was dark. Elizabeth took the servants’ stairs one by one, mindful not to let them creak. Only that morning her mother had cautioned her to be especially careful of appearances, and so she heeded the warning even as she crept toward the carriage house. She held a candle in a brass holder in front of her to better see her way.

She stood in the hay, letting her eyes adjust. It was a little lighter in the carriage house, because Will’s window was high and let in some starlight. Elizabeth moved toward the ladder and reminded herself why she had come. Already it was tomorrow, and tomorrow was the day she had promised herself she would tell Will.

She put her slippered feet on one rung after the other, bringing herself slowly up to the loft. She paused there to admire Will, illuminated by her candle’s flickering light. It was a scene in warm browns and flesh tones and blacks. Will must have kicked his red quilt off in his sleep, because she could see
that he was curled like a baby on the bed, without a blanket to cover him.

Elizabeth moved across the floor, ever careful of the old, creaky wood planks. She set her candle down on the milk crate beside his bed and paused to look at him—the solid curve of his shoulders, the closed lids of his big, pretty eyes. The idea of hurting him was so awful to her that she couldn’t even begin to think about it. She lay down beside him, pressing herself against his body. He was relaxed in sleep, and his chest was soft, moving slowly up and down with his breathing. She looked at his face closely and tried to commit it to memory, in case she never saw him this intimately again.

Suddenly a taut wakefulness came back into his limbs, and he pulled her into an embrace. She almost cried out in surprise, but a smile broke out across his face and she laughed instead—a quiet, happy laugh. She felt his hand move to the nape of her neck, where he ran his fingers through her hair. He cradled her head, and she felt the outside world fade as she came alive to what was right in front of her.

“I can’t believe you’re here again already,” he whispered.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she answered, keeping her eyes on him. His irises rolled back and forth as though he were searching her.

“How lucky for me.”

She wanted to kiss him, but she didn’t want to break
their gaze even for a second. His hand moved from her neck down her spine and rested again at the small of her back. The way Will was looking at her made her feel like she had lain in the sun for a whole afternoon. For the first time all day she felt her lungs swell with air and her heart with happiness. She tried to remind herself, with a stern internal shake of a finger, that they had no kind of future. But as she gazed into the pure blue of his eyes, they confirmed what she had known about him more than half her life: that she could trust him with anything.

“You must really have missed me,” he went on.

“Who are you again?” She only managed to hold her straight face for a moment, however, before she broke out in ringing laughter.

He laughed back, grabbing her around the waist and rolling her over him and then pinning her to the mattress. He hovered above her with a broad smile on his face. She tried to sit up, but he grabbed her by the wrists and held her down. She shrieked with laughter, and then he bent down and quieted her with a kiss.

Sweet as it was, she couldn’t help feeling like a liar, and Will was the one person she never wanted to lie to. She pulled her face back gently and gave him a serious look. It would be cruel of her to wait, she told herself. It would only aggravate Will’s pain when the inevitable came out.

“What is it?” he asked.

She closed her mouth and opened it again, and then took a deep breath for courage. “Henry—” she began.

“Schoonmaker?” Will laughed, cutting her off and skewing his smile sideways as he did. “You’re not going to tease me about that again, are you? I saw him leaving the house this afternoon, and you don’t have to worry. I won’t harangue you with my jealousies anymore.”

He kissed her gently. She felt a tightness in her throat and wished that she could make this moment go on forever.

When he pulled away, he was smiling and there was light playing in his eyes. “I think everything is going to be all right,” he whispered after a long silence.

Elizabeth brought her lips back together in a kind of smile, and wondered if he could see how sad it was. “Everything is going to be all right,” she repeated in a voice that sounded almost convincing to herself.

Tomorrow—she would tell him tomorrow. All she wanted was one last night when they weren’t angry or heartbroken about the way things had to be. Tomorrow, she repeated to herself. How much harm could be done saving the awful news for one more day?

When he pulled her nightgown over her head, she tried to tell herself not to think about how far her family had fallen, and how vulnerable they all were. She tried not to think of
her responsibilities to them. Or how it was going to be just as impossible to tell Will tomorrow. Or the tomorrow after that. She told herself to concentrate on the way he was kissing her neck just under her chin, so that she could remember forever how it used to be.