Anna Godbersen: Rumors

“Good. I don’t want it to be this way, my dearest, but that is how it is.” Mrs. Holland put her small, lined hands on the table and pushed herself upward. “We will shelter you for a while, but soon enough you will have to see people. You will have to seem happy that you are home. It is a lucky thing we are a polite society — no one will ask you what you have endured. But you must not give them reason to wonder.”

Diana watched her sister, whose hair was undone and who seemed dead to every comment. How little everything that had ever happened to them mattered now, Diana thought. Their mother smoothed her black dress with her hands and sighed.

“I will not force you to marry again, my dear Elizabeth,” she went on. “In any event, Henry Schoonmaker is by this time already wed to your friend Penelope Hayes. It happened very quickly and quietly this same evening. What a strange, strange day it has been.”

Diana heard the news of Henry’s wedding with something like neutrality. Of course in a world of arbitrary and horrific murder Henry would choose a girl like Penelope. It would have shocked her beyond breath if someone had told her he was not now to marry Penelope, and it seemed almost a blessing that it should be over so quickly. She flinched, even so, and only hoped that Elizabeth hadn’t noticed. She had enough worries already without thinking of Diana’s heartbreak.

“I must sleep,” their mother concluded suddenly. She pulled back her skirt and walked toward the door without meeting their eyes. “See your sister doesn’t stare at the wall all night, Diana — you must get her into bed somehow,” she added as she passed through the door.

They listened to the creak of the stairs above them as their mother retreated to her own room. Diana closed her eyes and exhaled. She was exhausted, but among the many things she could no longer imagine was sleep. She guessed Elizabeth couldn’t, either. When she opened her eyes, she saw that her sister was looking right at her, and there was something new in her expression. Diana blinked and then, when she saw that the new intensity had not faded, she went to Elizabeth and sank down on the rough wood planks beside her and leaned against her lap. She threw her arms up around her sister’s waist.

Elizabeth’s face, which had still been touched by the sun when she arrived in New York, had now gone entirely white. She was so lacking in strength that it seemed a moderate gust could have blown her away. There was nothing to say, Diana knew, but she felt that if she clung to her, then that human warmth might bring her a kind of comfort. She closed her eyes and tightened her embrace.

They sat like that for a while, and then Elizabeth said, “Did you really love Henry?”

Diana was so surprised to hear her sister speak a full sentence that she did not at first realize what was being asked.

“Did you love him the way I loved Will?” she asked.

The younger Holland sister would not have guessed that these questions, at the slightest examination, made her heart flutter and yearn, or that the idea of Henry, once it was in her thoughts, made her not angry or despondent but instead full of an undeniable desire. This longing was the first emotion she had been able to feel since she had heard about the awful thing that had happened to Will. She knew if she could satisfy that feeling in any way, no matter what it did to her dignity, she would.

Diana closed her eyes and nodded, trying to keep from crying again. “Yes,” she said at last.

Elizabeth brought her hand to Diana’s hair and smoothed it with a slow steadiness. The younger girl had never felt so akin to her sister in all her life.

“Then we’re going to get him back for you,” Elizabeth whispered as she bent to fully return her younger sister’s embrace.

Outside, the world was quiet and dark. There was a new snow on the ground, but everyone in Gramercy, and up Fifth Avenue, and downtown, where leisure and comfort were not such givens, was inside by now. The New Year had come, but nothing in it seemed even remotely real.

This book and I are lucky to have not one but two editors: Thank you to the gracious and brilliant Sara Shandler and the witty and lovely Farrin Jacobs, who both worked tirelessly to make the Luxe books bigger, better, and more logical. Thank you Josh Bank and Les Morgenstein, they of the magical powers. Thank you to Allison Heiny, Cristina Gilbert, Melissa Dittmar, Kristin Marang, and Jackie Greenberg for calling so much attention to this series. Thank you Andrea C. Uva, Alison Donalty, Barb Fitzsimmons, and Ray Shappell for bringing the pretty. I am also indebted to Nora Pelizzari and Lanie Davis, as well as everybody else at Alloy, and to Elise Howard, Susan Katz, Kate Jackson, and all the other wonderful people at HarperCollins. Thank you to the New-York Historical Society and all the fantastic librarians there. And thank you Ben Turner.

ANNA GODBERSEN was born in Berkeley, California, and educated at Barnard College. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she is at work on the sequel to RUMORS.

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