"Rumors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godbersen Anna)

Eleven

DIANA WOKE ON THE MORNING FOLLOWING THE opera with the same feeling of emptiness and a need for a several other things besides. Her mouth was dry and her hair was a fright, and she didn’t feel that it was at all within her power to make the bed. Ordinarily Claire, in her capacity as Diana’s lady’s maid, would have brought her water and hot chocolate in the morning, but that whole routine seemed a little silly once their money started running out and they were forced to let some servants go. Mrs. Holland still viewed Will’s disappearance as a defection based on some knowledge of the family finances, and since then they had had to let go of their laundress and scullery girl; and Mr. and Mrs. Faber, who had been the butler and head housekeeper, respectively, had left only last week when it had become apparent that payment would be from then on an uncertain prospect. With all the extra work this made for Claire, Diana had heroically relieved her of any extraneous cosseting duties.

But on this Sunday morning, Diana did not feel in the least bit heroic. She didn’t feel like anything. The sensation of being hollow showed no signs of abating, and even so, eating was not among her multitude of wants. She wanted water, she wanted to look pretty, she wanted to be embraced and petted. Though she did not want to see Henry in the least — the very idea made her stomach feel weak and her eyes burn — she would have liked a better explanation of the rejection he had served her the previous night. She would gladly have had something that sounded like good news to share with her mother. But most of all she longed for her older sister, who had so often been an aloof, judgmental girl when she had still lived in the Holland house, but who now seemed like the only person really qualified to assess Diana’s situation.

Eventually Diana forced herself up. She found some strength and used it to make herself look presentable. She put on a long black skirt and an ivory shirtwaist with tiny pearl buttons — a uniform that would have made any girl less combustible than Diana look put together. But her character was of the sort not easily dominated by clothes, and so it was in a mildly disheveled state that she went down the main stairs of her family town house and into the shadowy tranquility of the front hall. The Persian carpets that ran down the stairs to the front door remained, though many of the little pictures that had once dotted the walls had been removed, leaving sad little holes in their place. At that very moment there were several frames stacked near the front entrance, a sure sign that the dealer would be by again soon.

Not long ago, the selling of material objects had seemed to Diana a romantic shedding of things, a return to essentials, but her mind had since changed. It had been easy to be careless about things when she thought she had the love of Henry Schoonmaker; she saw that the disappearance of bric-a-brac was a more painful business now. Such were her thoughts as she drew back the heavy, polished pocket door, which caught a little in its track, and entered her family’s parlor.

“Good morning,” her aunt Edith said, standing upon Diana’s entrance. She was wearing an old white dress with a narrow waist and somewhat more volume in the rear than was the fashion anymore. It caused Diana to imagine Edith as a young woman, when her hair still fell in dark little curls and when she still thought of the world as wide with possibilities.

“Good morning,” Diana answered, crossing to the little grouping of bergère chairs where her aunt had been sitting with a tray of tea things.

“You had better go straight up to your mother.” Aunt Edith’s eyes shifted downward, as though she disliked dwelling on what she was about to express. “You know she sometimes tends to the dramatic, but she has a bad look about her.”

“Oh,” Diana said, receiving this comment as more of a rebuke than it had been intended.

If she had been looking more closely, she might have seen that her aunt’s face in fact showed signs of real fear and distress for her sister-in-law. Although Edith did not share her brother’s wife’s love for a rigid social code, the women had been living under the same roof for some years and had come to a kind of mutual understanding. For Mrs. Holland’s part, she had always liked Edith as much as she liked anyone possessed of an important surname and a much-admired face, and of course she believed, like all the Old New York people, that family should have a united front and that any differences were to be kept to oneself.

“Is she ill?” Diana asked after a pause. She was thinking of how little she had tried to engage Spencer Newburg last night, and how casually she had dispensed with Percival Coddington the day before, with a tinge of regret. Of course she could never love either of them. But the idea of having disregarded her mother’s desires so completely seemed less funny today.

“I don’t know.” Edith observed Diana and spoke slowly. “She just says that she can’t leave the bed. I think you had better go now.”

Diana nodded, though her feet were heavy. When she had at last reached the door, Edith added: “Don’t forget to tell her how much you charmed Mr. Newburg.”

The way the older woman continued to look at her — hopefully, encouragingly — made Diana wonder, as she lingered on the threshold, if she looked as much like a girl in trouble as she was. For it was beginning to dawn on her, despite the clamoring of her wounded feelings, that if Henry wasn’t as in love with her as she had thought — if he wasn’t in love with her at all — then she was going to have to face some truly unappealing choices.

It had never taken her so long to climb those stairs, and when she reached the second floor she slowed to a stop. The heavy carved door to her mother’s room was ajar, and she could see the diffuse light coming through the crack.

“Diana…?” her mother called from inside the bedroom. Diana stepped forward. She leaned against the door and peeked past it. Her mother’s eyes were closed and her head rested back against a pile of white pillows. Her hair, which was usually so carefully arranged, if not also covered by a widow’s cap, now streamed down across her shoulders. Her face was very pale. “Are you there?” she called again, her voice still a little sharp even when it strained.

A kind of agitation had come over Diana, and she knew that she couldn’t face her mother. She was being counted on to give assurances, but the reality of Henry not loving her was too new for her to hide; the rawness of her abject position would foil any attempts to conceal it.

Elizabeth would have been able to maintain a façade. Elizabeth would have put her mother’s mind at ease, however temporarily. Diana, doubtful of her ability to do either of these things to even a slight degree, was already hurrying down the stairs. She was wrapping herself in a coat and scarf. She was moving past the front door onto the enclosed iron porch and down to the street, all the while fixating on the idea that she must get a message to her sister.

Coming out of the downtown Western Union office a few hours later, Diana hardly felt any better but was slightly warmed by the sense that she had something to look forward to. She had cabled her sister, via Will Keller, all the latest traumas and was now somewhat comforted by the vague notion that she might receive an inspired response. Perhaps Elizabeth would know a reason her little sister’s life was all coming apart at the seams. At the very least, Diana’s many weighty problems no longer felt like her problems alone, and for this reason she was moving with some of her characteristic chin-up confidence. She was also in a part of town where she was unlikely to meet any of her acquaintances, and she felt somewhat freed from her own identity and so quite able to walk without subterfuge.

This assumption was swiftly put away by the sound of her own name, spoken not particularly loudly but with perfect clarity by someone following her through the brass-framed plate glass doors of the office and into the bright, cold afternoon. She paused before turning to face the stranger. The sun was in her eyes, and it took a few more seconds before she recognized Davis Barnard. He was wearing the same fur hat as the last time they’d met, and one of his sharp dark brows was cocked.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Barnard,” she said. The spirit of her sister must have arrived somehow, for though she had no more happy faces, the corners of Diana’s mouth sprang up into something like a polite smile. “I’m surprised to see you so far downtown.”

“I had to send a telegram. Can’t be too careful of spies in the newsroom, my dear. Anyway, I was about to say the same thing to you,” Barnard answered dryly, with an amused twist to his thin lips. “Maybe the rumors are true, and you are cabling Elizabeth in London, where she has run off to marry the fifth in line to the British throne?”

Diana had always considered herself a good fibber, but she knew that the expression she wore now could disguise nothing. She turned her face to the street, with its worn cobblestones and indifferent midday traffic.

“Oh, Diana.” Barnard lowered his eyes, in which Diana momentarily caught a glimpse of something like shame. “I didn’t mean to make light about Elizabeth.”

His voice quieted when he pronounced the name, and he watched two men in frock coats pass. They were dressed for business, but they were as plain as the buildings with their workaday painted wood signs and small glass storefronts that lined the street.

“It’s all right.” Diana met his eyes to show him that what she said was true.

“But I’m glad to have caught you — I think you have some information that I would give a great deal to know….”

Diana, sensing that she was again nearing the topic of her sister and thus a position requiring a level of deception that she was not currently capable of, quickly turned hot. “I really don’t know what you mean.”

“The young lady accompanying Carey Lewis Longhorn at the opera last night?” Barnard urged gently. “I heard you were talking with her in the ladies’ lounge. Everyone was buzzing about it, and of course they all want to know who she could be.”

“Oh.” Diana bit her lip. With all the other heartrending going on, she had nearly forgotten about running into Lina, and had entirely neglected to tell Claire how grand her little sister looked. But reading it in the columns would be even better.

“I’m sure it feels a little uncomfortable, for a lady like you…but perhaps this will help.” Her interlocutor produced an envelope. It was edged with gold, and when she peeked inside, she saw a twenty-dollar bill.

“Thank you,” Diana said, taking it. So this was how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends. “I believe the young lady you were speaking of is named Carolina Broud,” Diana began cautiously. “She met Elizabeth in Paris in the spring, and was offering me condolences.” Once she had begun telling the lie, Diana found she didn’t mind at all and even wanted to spin it further. “She’s an orphan, you know, and they quite understood each other, having both lost fathers. The Broud money was from copper smelting, I believe, and it has brought Carolina to the city with the idea of seeing something of society….”

“And is the old bachelor looking for love again?”

Diana tried her best to look scandalized and then replied that she hadn’t the faintest.

“Ah, well. It’s an excellent item just the same. Can I offer you a ride home, Miss Di?”

Diana knew that it wouldn’t look right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you. The air was bracing and the walk back uptown would take far more strength than she had. Barnard gestured to his phaeton across the cobblestone street and, with the memory of the gilt-edged envelope still fresh in her mind, Diana found herself disinclined to flat-out refuse any of his offers.

“Thank you,” she said. “Though I must insist that you not be too familiar. Diana is my given name.”

Barnard tipped his head, as though to say, “As you wish,” and then Diana accepted his proffered arm.