Twain's End (31 page)

“You know better.” It was Him.

Their footsteps stopped. Mrs. Lyon thought she heard kissing. She picked up her lemonade glass and put it down loudly. She thought she heard her daughter giggle. They resumed walking her way.

Mrs. Lyon scrambled to sink her needle into the cloth. She was pulling it through just as Isabel led Mr. Clemens into the parlor by the hand. “Mother, you're still working.”

Mrs. Lyon nodded sedately at Mr. Clemens before turning to her daughter. “I finished a dress for you, dear. Go upstairs to your bedroom and see.”

Mr. Clemens dropped down on the sofa. “Go on, Lioness. Try it on. Give me a show.”

Mrs. Lyon raised her brows to let him know that she disapproved of vulgarity. But wait until he saw the dress. Mrs. Lyon had given it a particularly low décolleté. Isabel still had a good bust, and a woman should use every arrow in her quiver when hunting a man. “Yes. See how it fits.”

Mr. Clemens sat back, then swung one leg over the other. “You can do the can-can for me in it. I ever tell you about the time I saw the can-can dancers in Paris?”

Isabel went over to him. “Me and everyone else who read
Innocents Abroad.
I got your dirty message that the dancers were naked underneath.”

“So you're saying you'll dance the can-can for me?”

She tapped him on the cheek. “You are terrible!”

Mrs. Lyon didn't know how much more of this she could encourage. This was no Wild West saloon. “Go try on your dress.”

When Isabel was gone, Mr. Clemens picked up the crystal paperweight given to him by the archduke of Austria and tossed it from hand to hand. “So, Mrs. Lyon, are you going with Isabel and Clara when I'm in England?”

“On their trip to Nova Scotia? No.” She plunged the needle into the material with a satisfying pop. “I must leave them to get to know each other better, if they are to someday be . . .” She could not say related. She must not be too pushy, not before he had popped the question. Men had to think that everything was their own idea.

“I don't know, Isabel might need you there. Those two in a ship room might kill each other after a while. Clara can be a pistol.”

“Isabel loves your daughter.”

“I do, too, no matter what I say.”

She tugged the thread taut. “You should tell her so.”

“Clara? Do you tell Isabel?”

“Well, no. But she knows. We are as close as a hand in a glove.”

“Huh. Clara and I get along like the same poles of a magnet, but she knows.”

Mrs. Lyon looked at him over her glasses but said nothing.

He got out a pipe and packed it with tobacco. “Whoever thought I might be beating my grown daughters to the altar.”

Mrs. Lyon's heart sang. But she must not act too eager. “You have to help them along. Encourage them to find nice men.”

“It's repugnant to me. I think of them as little girls.”

“Children do grow up, Mr. Clemens. They become people whom you must get to know fresh, as if meeting a new friend.” She dipped her needle into the hem. “They are not the children you once knew. You have to relearn them.”

He lit the bowl, sucking on the stem until the tobacco glowed orange. He waved out his match. “Yet doesn't that child stay forever hidden in the adult, animating the grown-up self with levers and tricks from behind the curtain?”

Mrs. Lyon was looking over her glasses at him, her needle stilled, when Isabel came out in a frosty pink silk that was dotted with black.

Mr. Clemens lounged against his pillows like a potentate, smoking his meerschaum and blowing gauzy rings. Isabel had taken to calling him her King, ridiculously enough, and at the moment he looked every inch of one.

“Do you like it?” Isabel swished this way and that, more like an ingenue than a forty-three-year-old woman. Something tugged at Mrs. Lyon's heart. She remembered when, early in their marriage, Charles had given her a new dress from a visit to the city. How she'd wanted to show it off for him when she'd opened the box and seen it. But flustered from the warmth that had come creeping up within her when she thought of him touching her, she had clamped down the lid. The disappointment on his face had flustered her even more, and before she could think of how to fix it, he walked away. Now a wave of regret washed over her so powerfully that she could hardly pull the thread through the cloth.

Mr. Clemens took his pipe from his teeth. “Now, that's what I call a dress,” he growled. “You look like a succulent slice of watermelon. Come over here so I can eat you.”

Isabel went to him, shy as a schoolgirl.

He pulled her to him, then, adoring her with his gaze, reached up to touch her face.

Mrs. Lyon rushed out to get some air. Children might even come from this, if only those two would hurry. She smiled at a pair of ladies strolling by, not noticing their too-short skirts and rouged lips. Visions of triumphant carriage rides with her daughter, her famous son-in-law, and their beribboned children were dancing in her head.

July 1907

The
Rosalind,
Halifax, Nova Scotia

C
LARA LEANED CLOSER TO
the mirror to examine her face. “How cold is it outside?”

Isabel sat on the tufted satin bedspread, her knees almost brushing Clara's skirt as the other woman primped. Clara had insisted upon taking the most expensive room on the
Rosalind,
but the stateroom, although elegant with its glossy white walls and white panels edged with gold, was cramped, little more than a narrow galley along which the furniture was lined. Isabel thought it nice. A steamboat that ran between New York and Newfoundland could not be expected to be a luxury liner, like the one that Mr. Clemens and Ralph Ashcroft had just taken to London for Mr. Clemens to collect his honorary degree from Oxford. Clara, on the other hand, had greater expectations. Her room, the best on the boat, was too small, too musty, too noisy, too ugly. Already the steward ducked his head and wheeled in the other direction when he saw her coming, and they were only now sailing into Halifax, three days out from New York.

“I suppose it's in the low fifties, possibly cooler.” Isabel ran her hand across the buttery satin spread. “The fog's as thick as pea soup. It put a chill in my bones when I was on deck.”

Isabel had spent much of the first days of their two-week holiday wandering the ship while Clara stewed in the unsatisfactory cabin.
She had thought that the voyage would take her mind off her King while he was gone, but so far, it'd had the opposite effect. Without her heavy workload to occupy her, she had nothing to do but remember the amusing things he'd said to her, the brilliant things and the intimate, which would lead to her rehashing their most private moments and how she could have made them better. Was it her fault? Was there something more she could have done to please him? No amount of reassuring him that she loved him seemed to soothe him after his failures in lovemaking. Her understanding of his limitations only infuriated him. If only this trip to England, with all the adulation and pomp and press that went with it, could restore his animal confidence. His pride so desperately needed it.

At the cramped vanity table, Clara pinched color into her cheeks as she examined her eyes in the mirror. “Well, we asked for the cold, didn't we? It's better than staying home and melting in New York.”

“July in the city is unbearable,” Isabel agreed.

“What are you wearing when we go on shore?” Clara patted her hair.

“This.” Isabel plucked at the woolen cape topping her simple shirtwaist, an outfit in which she was perspiring from having waited for Clara so long. Like a bride collecting her trousseau, Isabel was saving the new clothes that her mother had made until she was reunited with Mr. Clemens. She expected that they would be married when he returned, not that she cared two pins about what people thought of her. Having been shunned by her class for losing her family money, she couldn't be hurt any more than she already was. Nearly five years ago, when the woman from Bleecker Street had first learned that Isabel was working for Mark Twain's family, she had sent letters to Isabel, threatening to expose her affair with Isabel's father—from which a daughter had come—if Isabel didn't give her money. Isabel had laughed. In her circles, she was already an outcast; you couldn't ostracize someone already beyond the pale. But because this woman, “Poppy,” was ill and could not provide for the child, Isabel regularly gave her money, Isabel's only stipulation being that Mrs.
Lyon wasn't told. Although Isabel had accepted her fall in status, her mother hadn't.

Even more than her mother, it was the Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope who cared about appearances. He, the man who publicly took issue with the policies of the Belgian king, who wore white suits in the dead of winter, who, according to yesterday's paper, had walked across the street from his London hotel in his bathrobe, had been afraid of how it would look for her to accompany him to England before they were married.

Clara peered at her in the mirror. “How do you like my dress?”

Isabel glanced at the loud purple low-necked number. “Very nice.”

Clara met her gaze in the mirror. “Will bought it for me.”

“It's beautiful.”

They watched each other's reflections. Will Wark had started accompanying Clara on piano soon after her American debut, and with his assistance at the keyboard, Clara's singing had bloomed, a forward move for her career. Accompanists did not often buy their soloists expensive dresses, however. Nor did the mere mention of their names make their soloists break into grins.

“All right, all right,” said Clara, laughing, “it's true. We're in love.”

“Clara, that's wonderful.”

Clara threw herself into Isabel's arms. “I'm so happy!”

“I'm so happy for you.”

Clara pulled back. “Do you know that I've never been in love before? I'm thirty-five years old and have never been truly in love.” She blinked as if she realized that she was talking to a forty-three-year-old spinster, then, overwhelmed with her own joy, recovered from her momentary spate of sympathy. “It feels so wonderful.”

Isabel was considering telling Clara that she understood and was experiencing her own kind of wonderful, when a knock came on the door. Clara looked at Isabel expectantly, their servant-employer relationship slipping into place.

The steward drew back warily when Isabel opened the door, then
relaxed when he saw it wasn't Clara. He held out a slip of paper in his white-gloved hand. “Telegram for Miss Clemens.”

Isabel gave it to Clara, then took money from her own purse to tip him—one less postcard for her mother.

Clara's mouth was hanging ajar when Isabel turned to her.

Isabel felt a stab of fear: Sam. “Is something wrong?”

“It's from Will.” Clara didn't look up.

Isabel suppressed a sigh of relief. It wasn't Sam. “Is everything all right?”

Clara stared at the slip of paper, her freckles darkening.

“Clara?”

“Just go, would you?”

Isabel let herself out, too accustomed to Clara's rudeness to let it rattle her. The metal stairs rang out as she descended the flights to her cabin, third-class accommodations that shook from the roar of the nearby boiler room. Inside her room, she took off her cape and dropped down on the edge of her bed, her knees nearly brushing the white-painted metal of the opposite wall. She swung around to stretch out for a rest.

She had hardly settled when a hard jolt rocked her bed.

She sprang up. Aftershocks rumbled through her feet. Through the thin metal door, she heard the shouts of crewmen. If they'd had a collision, her deck would fill first. She glanced around, imagined her plain bed, her tiny desk, her opened leather case, floating. The clang of the alarm bell stung her into motion. She flung on her cape and dashed out into the hall.

Passengers were pouring from their cabins. Deafened by the clanging alarm, she helped a mother stuff her five children into life jackets and buckled them up. Leading them down the hall, she passed an open room in which stood a stooped elderly woman, her shaking hands folded at her chin.

She sent off the children with their mother.

“Let's go, dear.” She collected the quaking woman, and murmuring reassurances drew her into the hall. Slowly, they mounted the
stairs to the main deck, passengers hurrying past, until Isabel could deliver her to a crewman who was blowing his whistle, directing passengers.

Clara was huddled against the wall of her room when Isabel reached her. “Clara! What are you doing? You've got to go.”

“I'm cursed.” Clara put her head to her knees. Out in the hall, shouts rose over the clanging of the bell and the thundering of footsteps on the metal floor.

“Get up. Please. We've got to get to the lifeboats.”

“Accidents follow me everywhere.” Clara turned her cheek to her knee. “When I was a baby, Papa had one of his rages and kicked a rocking chair across the room. I went flying, just missing the stone hearth by an inch. He almost killed me. I wish he had.”