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

Fourteen

LINA SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT THE ADVENT OF her first true moment of glory would coincide with the complete annihilation of all her dreams. Also, that were her name ever to appear in the columns, it would naturally be misspelled. If Will happened to glance over the columns he likely wouldn’t even wonder if the girl mentioned was the one he used to know. She had been born into the plain world, and it now seemed very likely that she would die in the plain world as well. She had taken her desire to be grand one step too far, and now the sight of her full name, Carolina, in print made her feel a little sick with herself for having dared to imagine such a fine future for someone so clearly destined to be common. She had paid through Friday at the hotel: after that would commence the long descent Diana had warned her about.

There had first been the fact of her money being gone. This had been an eventuality, of course — it was more than half gone in a short period of time. But it would have lasted her a little longer, and then it would have taken her away from the city and all of its expenses to find Will out west. She had been planning to carefully budget out the remainder any day now, exactly how much it would cost to travel to Chicago and from there to San Francisco. Then she might need more, to travel down the coast to one of those towns she had heard Will speak of before, places he’d no doubt read about in one of his books. And of course she had hoped to arrive in Elizabeth Holland — style grandeur. For all of it to be gone at once, and for it to have taken all her plans with it!

She had sat with this new fact for a good part of the night, and that was when the anger came. For the money had not disappeared into thin air. Someone had it. Someone was already spending it, and probably on something much less important than finding the love of one’s life. Surely whoever had it was someone whose name had not just appeared — correctly or not — in the “Gamesome Gallant” column in the Monday early edition.

She wondered, at first, if the thievery weren’t somehow Mr. Longhorn’s doing. It was a little too good to be believed, after all, that her first trip to the opera should bring her into such a very fine box. But he was enormously rich — that fact was in no way in doubt — so why would he bother with her paltry fortune? Then she thought of Robert, Mr. Longhorn’s valet, but of course Robert had been waiting at the carriage outside the opera house the whole evening. She thought of the front-desk man, and of the maid, of all the invisible parts that made the hotel function — but she stopped herself there. She had been lying to them so consistently, and she had been so artful in her vagueness, that to bring a precise complaint felt impossible. Later, when she was older and grander, when she had proved herself as a lady, this illogic would seem like the comical thinking of a frightened child. But at the moment the idea of causing any kind of scene was nearly as terrifying as the loss of the money itself.

If only she could raise half the stolen sum, she told herself, she would go to Will straightaway. These thoughts circled her head all morning, and then, around noon, she remembered she still had one thing left to sell.

“Miss Carolina Broad,” the Hayeses’ butler announced from the corner of what appeared to be a vast drawing room. Lina, hovering behind him, caught a glimpse of the girl who had first given her hope for a new way of life. She was perched on the corner of a divan and wearing a displeased expression as well as a skirt of dusty pink silk. Penelope looked up at the sound of the name and turned her head to the side contemplatively. Perhaps, Lina thought, she had noticed the changes to the name since the last time she’d heard it, or maybe she hadn’t — it was impossible to know. “I would have presented her card, mademoiselle,” the butler went on, not assuaging the visitor’s discomfort in the least, “but she hasn’t got one.”

It was through a forest of blue-and-white-upholstered Louis Quinze that Lina had to walk — her nerves raw and her courage flagging all the way — to get to the young lady of the grand new house. Although she had met Penelope before, it was hardly the kind of interaction that might lead to further genteel visits. Lina had to force her leather lace-up boots — a gift from Tristan, the day after they’d met — across the black walnut floor. She was finding it awfully difficult to appear natural.

Penelope looked up at Lina only after she had paused a few feet from the divan. The young lady of the house was drawing her long fingers over the head of a small black-and-white dog. “That dress used to be mine.”

Lina looked down on the pale red fabric with the Swiss dot pattern, which she had worn quite a few times over the fall. She remembered Penelope telling her, when she handed it down, that it had been one of her favorites — Lina wondered now if anyone at the hotel might have recognized its provenance.

The large man with the feminine brow and soft skin, who had been reading the columns in a chair just behind Penelope — though she’d never met him, Lina assumed he was the Buck Elizabeth used to speak so doubtfully of — commented without raising his eyes from his folded paper, “She certainly doesn’t wear it as you did.”

“Oh…” Lina looked down at herself and wished she hadn’t come. It had been a mistake, as she would have realized earlier if she hadn’t been desperate. But she was desperate, so she moved a little closer to her onetime patroness.

“I can’t imagine what brings you here,” Penelope put in sharply.

“It’s quite irregular,” Buck added.

Lina’s cheeks turned the color of claret. “Perhaps I could speak to you about that in private?”

Penelope looked as though she had just been asked to make her own bed.

“Anything you can say to Miss Hayes, you can say to me,” Buck said finally, ending a pause that had done unkind things to Lina’s already suffering nerves.

She looked several times from Buck and back to Penelope, and finally resolved to go forward with what she had planned to say. “I thought we might be able to arrange another trade.”

“Another trade?” Penelope exclaimed. There was disbelief in her wide-open eyes. “I hope you haven’t told anyone about all that.”

“Of course not.” Lina drew her lower lip under her teeth and wondered just how evident the despair was on her face. “But this is a bit of news I think you’d find most interesting.”

Penelope’s gaze turned neutral and she moved her elbow — its sharpness obvious even beneath the tight-fitting pink silk — a little forward on the armrest. “Well. What is it?”

“It’s about the Hollands,” she forced herself to say. “I discovered it while I was still part of their staff. You see, there was a man, I think he dealt in antiques and things, he would come by the house and take pieces of theirs away. The bills were really piling up then. That’s how I realized…me and my sister, Claire…that they’d lost their money. And Claire still works there, so I know that they’ve had to let most of their staff go.”

“Carolina Broad, is it?”

Lina nodded.

“Carolina…” A dry smile had crept onto Penelope’s face. Maybe this was a good sign, Lina thought. For a brief moment she felt at ease in that vast room with its ormolu-encrusted mirrors and old master paintings and its blindingly shiny floor. “Are you saying that the famous Hollands are poor?”

Carolina smiled back a little now. “Oh, yes. I am absolutely sure of it—”

“Lord, get out.” Penelope’s face fell and she waved her hand impulsively. She turned her whole body away from her visitor now, even as Lina bent toward her, wishing to know what she had done wrong.

“But before you said that—”

“The Hollands are poor?” Penelope went on in a voice that even the little dog, struggling to free his tail from under her skirt, seemed to find discomfiting. “Everyone knows that one already. If you’d come here with a reason Henry Schoonmaker hasn’t fallen back in love with me, then perhaps…but that’s a riddle that people far smarter than you are stumped by. You stupid girl, did you really think you were going to come into my house and sell me old news?”

Lina’s lips hung open slightly and she took these words as though they had been a physical reprimand. She was indeed a very stupid girl. “I was only trying to help,” she said faintly.

“Oh, tsk, tsk,” Buck admonished from the background. “You were trying to sell something, dearie.”

Lina felt so miserable and confused, there in the middle of that once-again hostile room, that she was almost grateful for Penelope’s next stroke.

“Rathmill!” she called. Lina turned and saw the butler appear in the doorway. “Miss Broad was confused about whom she was calling on. You can show her out now.”

The butler understood the implications perfectly, crossed to the helpless girl in the lesser shade of red, and took her by the arm. Lina went without protest, hanging her head on the long walk back across the floor.

“That was unpleasant,” she heard Buck say as she was pulled forcibly into the hall. “And just when you were about to go out.”

Lina closed her eyes as the butler drew her roughly toward the front entrance. She had so recently crossed its black-and-white-checked floor in hope and trepidation, but she returned to it with all her hopes dashed. Penelope was right: She was a stupid girl who would never find her way.