The Luxe (24 page)

As the hours passed she made up little stories about herself, although she was careful to keep them vague and minimal, and he listened in rapt attention. Three more beers came and went, and then she found herself drooping forward off her stool.

“Hey,” Tristan said gently, as he pushed her upright.

“Careful.”

“Thank you.” She giggled and burped into her hand, and then gave the man next to her a grateful, sloppy smile.

“You know, Christian,” she said. She squinted her eyes at him and wondered if that name sounded a little wrong. “I like you. Not as much as my Will—I could never love anybody but him—but I’ve enjoyed talking with you.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “I think I’ve finally figured out who you are. You’re friends with Adelaide Wetmore, and you came in with her to look at brooches two weeks ago.”

She giggled and shook her head.

“One of Commodore Vanderbilt’s granddaughters, perhaps?”

Lina raised her eyebrows at this suggestion, and then had to shake her head no again.

“Then perhaps I recognize you because you’re in the Schoonmaker-Holland wedding party?” Lina felt her smile disappear from her face. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re one of Elizabeth Holland’s friends?”

“The
Hollands
,” she said hatefully. “They’re awful. Especially Elizabeth.”

“Really? She always seemed so well mannered when I saw her in the store.”

Lina nodded disgustedly. She reminded herself that if it
weren’t for Elizabeth sneaking around and tricking Will into falling in love with her, he’d be in love with
Lina
right now instead. “That’s the way she seems in public. But everyone who knows her knows that she’s nasty as can be.” Lina paused and decided that she was rambling unwisely. Then she remembered how the very man she was sitting next to had demanded payment of her former employers. “I’m far richer than they are now anyway.”

“Really?” Tristan said, lowering his mug slowly to the bar. “The Hollands are such an old family, though.”

“Oh
yes
,” Lina said proudly. She knew that she was going on really foolishly, but she couldn’t help herself. “I could buy and sell them.”

“Oh, really,” Tristan said lightly. “And what would you do with them when they belonged to you?”

“I would make them scrub my floor and mend my stockings, and then I’d send them out to find me lilies in a very particular shade.” Lina couldn’t stop herself. She was enjoying this fantasy too much.

“Sounds like an awful lot of work for Holland girls.” Tristan’s eyes were full of mischief.

“Oh, you’ve never met them. Awful family. Real princesses. Elizabeth especially.” Lina paused to slurp her beer. “I wish she’d never lived.”

“I could make that happen.” Tristan leaned forward
confidentially. “I know you look at me, in my tailored suit and my fine way of talking, and think I’m probably out of my element with the Kid Jack Gallaghers here. But if you want a little problem like Elizabeth Holland gone…” He trailed off, raising a blond eyebrow.

Lina dropped her mug to the bar heavily. She was suddenly discomfited by this bend in the conversation. But then she looked at Tristan—serious now but so light before—and realized he must be joking.

She put her hands over her face and giggled. She felt terrible laughing at a thing like that, but there
was
something funny about the idea of Elizabeth being done away with by one of the men who used to deliver her dresses. And anyway, it was just an elaborate story. “It would serve her right,” she added when her giggles had quieted down.

“Cheers to that, Carolina.” Tristan raised his eyebrows and clinked his mug against hers.

Pretty soon everything began to feel warm and fuzzy; the faces in the room grew long and distorted, the warblings of the vocalist grew louder, and clinking glasses with Tristan Wrigley was the last thing Lina could recall.

E
LIZABETH WOKE EARLY ON TUESDAY AND COULD
not fall back to sleep, although she was grateful to have slept at all. The night had been restless and full of ghosts. She didn’t have the energy to choose a new outfit, so she put on the same dress she had worn the day before, the eyelet with the square neck and ruffles on the three-quarter-length sleeves. When she had finished dressing herself it was still well before breakfast, which she had little interest in anyway, so she went up to the morning room on the third floor. It was the room where the Holland women wrote their letters and stored their correspondence.

The most striking thing about the room, when she entered on that particular morning, was the heap of bridal fabrics from Lord & Taylor, which must have been delivered the previous afternoon. The room was simpler than the rest of the house, with wide dark floorboards and a plain metal frame for the fireplace. The wallpaper was an earthy brown with a velvet leaf pattern over it. The yards of silk muslin and point de
gaze caught all the light and seemed almost to glow from the worktable in the center of the room. There was a note from Mr. Carroll, asking her to approve the fabric and informing her that his assistant would be by in the afternoon to pick it up and take it to his shop on Twenty-eighth Street. She didn’t have a mind for that, however; what she wanted, more than anything, was to talk to her father.

The letters Edward Holland had sent to his oldest child were kept in several of the small drawers in the great mahogany cabinet. She had received crisp white envelopes embellished with the stamps of Japan and South Africa and Alaska, and she kept them all in dated order, each month’s tied together with light blue ribbon. They were full of his quiet observations of foreign peoples and his carefully espoused principles of personal dignity. Her father had traveled a great deal, ostensibly on business, although really he had just wanted to see the world.

Elizabeth opened one of the cabinet drawers and pulled out a stack of letters. Even before he had passed, Elizabeth used to come here sometimes and pick a letter at random, looking for advice or wisdom. She needed that more than ever now, so she closed her eyes and ran the tip of her soft finger along the neatly opened edges of the stiff white envelopes. When she settled on one, she opened her eyes and saw her father’s long, slanting script. She pulled open the envelope,
and reread the little note, which must have accompanied some gift or other.

“Remember always to be true,”
she read his words in a whisper.
“As true and honest as the girl I know.”

A creeping shame set in around her chest bone. So this, she knew instantly, was what her father would have said if he were here. She closed her eyes, and thought how little the words
true
and
honest
applied to her now. But perhaps she still had time to change all that.

Elizabeth turned and marched across the hall to the room that once was her father’s study, letter in hand. It was now the room where her mother went every morning, to look over their mounting bills and go through the papers as though she would somehow find a way to make them rich again. Elizabeth leaned her face against the door and knocked.

There was no answer. Elizabeth waited a moment and entered on timid feet. She saw her mother, a figure in black, behind the big oak desk with the burgundy leather top that her father once used. Her mother’s hair, which was always pinned in a dozen places, if not also covered with a hat, was completely loose. It was the same chestnut color as Diana’s, except streaked with white, and it streamed down her shoulders. She glanced up from her letter briefly and wished her daughter a good morning.

“Mother,” Elizabeth said as she tiptoed into the room.

“I’ve got to talk to you about this wedding.”

Her mother nodded for her to continue, but she kept her eyes on the letter in her hands.

“I have been thinking about what Father had wanted for us, about how he lived his life, and how he expected us to live ours. I was reading through his letters this morning, and I came across one in which he urged me to stay true and honest. And when I think about it, marrying Henry Schoonmaker would make me neither of those things.” Elizabeth waited for her mother to say something, but she barely even moved. “I think Father would have wanted me to marry for love,” she went on, in a shaky voice. “And though I am deeply flattered by Mr. Schoonmaker’s interest in me, and while I am very sensitive to his position in the world, I know I do not love him at all. I don’t think I will come to love him either.”

Mrs. Holland leaned back in her oak-and-leather chair, but still did not lift her eyes from the piece of paper to look at her daughter. She pressed her lips together, but otherwise remained completely still. Though she had never been a beauty, and had aged considerably since her husband’s death, Elizabeth could see the woman who must have so impressed Edward Holland when she was still Louisa Gansevoort. There was a particular authority in her every gesture.

“I suppose I should be happy that our servants are de
fecting, since I can no longer support them. Still, it is painful, especially when he was your father’s valet.”

Elizabeth was so stunned by this allusion to Will that she said the first thing that came into her head. “Mother, what are you reading?”

“It is a letter, child.”

“From who?”

“From Snowden Trapp Cairns, your father’s guide on his trips to Yukon Territory.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth had a vague memory of the gentleman from Boston, who had fair hair and nice manners, despite his mountaineering spirit. “Is it very interesting?”

Mrs. Holland finally put down the letter and looked up. Her eyes were dark and calm, and she assessed her daughter with an almost melancholy stare. “It would be very nice if you could marry for love, my child, and perhaps if your father had not gotten himself killed…” She paused, and the wrinkled skin around her mouth puckered. “But not now.”

“
Killed?
” The word stuck painfully in Elizabeth’s throat. All of her conviction drained away to make room for this newest misery. “But Father died in his sleep of a bad heart.”

Mrs. Holland threw up her hands. “That was the only way it was possible to tell the story to you girls…and to everyone.” Her eyes drifted sadly. “Your father was very young for his heart to fail, and Mr. Cairns tells me that there was
some highly suspicious trading of claims, ones that your father had invested in around the time of his death. Those people are not gentlemen like the Hollands. Prospectors do not come from good families like ours. They are criminals, usually. And your father was caught up.”

Elizabeth thought she might be sick, and refocused all her energy on standing up straight and keeping the rising bile out of her throat.

“It doesn’t matter now, my Elizabeth. Your father made some very ill-advised gambles with his inheritance, I am afraid. He may have wanted you to marry for love, but he also would not have wanted his family to be destitute. Is that what you want? For your family to be destitute?”

Elizabeth shook her head in a slow, pained motion. She could feel the tears coming again, and already she felt like she had been crying for days.

“Good, because there is really only one thing to do. Your father would have wanted you to think of your family before yourself, Elizabeth. It is what our kind of people have always done.” She lifted her chin now, and her voice rose slightly to make her position clear: “You
must
marry Henry, Elizabeth. You will not be my child if you do not.”

W
HEN LINA WOKE, SHE FOUND HERSELF IN A COLD
sweat. Her head ached and there was a wretched hum behind her eyes. She was in a bed, but it was substantially wider than the one in her hotel. The ceiling was made of bare wood boards, and there was only one narrow, grimy window overlooking a downtown cobblestone street. She tried to recall how she had come to be in this unfamiliar place, but all she could conjure was a dark saloon filled with blurry faces and her own uncontrollable laughter. Soon after that she remembered Tristan, and the scene in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the fact that she had walked out into New York yesterday with every cent of her recently acquired fortune.

She clutched her chest, and then bolted out of the bed. She was still wearing Penelope’s old bloomers and corset, and found her things piled on the single, unvarnished wooden chair. Her purse rested on her neatly folded red dress—not a single bill had been removed—with a note perched beside it.

She read the first bit with only foggy comprehension—
what was it that he was going to take care of exactly? The part about the shoes was very clear, however. Lina’s shame-making boots were gone, and in their place were a pair of shiny black patent-leather lace-up shoes, with low wooden heels. They were as polished and new as anything in the Hollands’ closets. For a moment she could concentrate on nothing but them.

She slipped them on and stepped lightly across the room, wearing nothing but her corset and bloomers and her brand-new shoes. She had never had anything that fit so well. She imagined how her future as a society lady would be filled with nothing but custom-made dresses, and elegant slippers, and how there would be a wedding to Will Keller, who would have made his fortune out west by then. For a moment she was filled with delight, but then some logical thinking broke through into her stuffy head, and all of her good feelings began to turn quickly to shame.

She was prancing around a near-stranger’s barely furnished room, wearing nothing but her former mistress’s former friend’s undergarments. Yesterday she had had the chance to be a lady, and instead she had gotten drunk in the wrong part of town and now here she was, waking up in a strange room with a spotty memory of what had gone on the night before. Lina despised herself for having fallen so quickly, and so far, off her intended path.

She threw on her dress, took her purse and the note, and left as quietly as possible. She found her way down a slender tenement staircase and onto the street, all the while wondering how anyone could be so easily duped. Tristan had taken her for a lady, and she was now painfully aware that she was anything but.