Anna Godbersen - Rumors

In the past Henry had always ignored his friend’s advice at his own peril, but still he could not give up the picture of Diana he kept in his mind. Even as he put a resigned sort of smile on his face and placed his hat on his head, he could not help but think of her loose curls and fresh skin, of a gorgeous recklessness that perfectly matched his own.

Women often stop me on the street and demand to know how they can transform their daughters into society ladies, and I always say: If they are not born with position, and if they are not uncommonly beautiful — for few girls today transcend mere prettiness — they will have to marry in where they can. To this mission, clothes are essential. A good place to start, I tell these eager parents, is at a department store in a good part of town, where one can find a salesman one can trust….

— MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899

LINA BROUD TURNED HERSELF ROUND AND ROUND, overcome with a kind of desire that was still new to her. Everywhere she looked there were objects edged in gold, finished with elaborate hand stitching, or festooned with feathers. They lay in neat piles on tables of mahogany that stretched as far as the eye could see, or at least far enough to reach one of the hundreds of etched mirrors that reflected the opulent scene within the Lord & Taylor department store over and again.

“Tristan,” she said in a high, clear tone. She had been working on her elocution, and had lately concluded that the acoustics within the grand department stores of Ladies’ Mile were ideal for such an endeavor. In her previous life she had only rarely caught glimpses within such stores, which lined Fifth Avenue and Broadway above Union Square, and attracted the kind of women Lina used to serve. This in spite of the fact that the row of grand retailers and little specialty shops was mere blocks from Gramercy Park, where the women Lina used to serve still lived. Most of them, anyway. “I adore these gloves.”

Tristan Wrigley, who was a salesman at Lord & Taylor and the first friend she had made in her new life, came to her side — perhaps an inch closer than men were supposed to in public with women who were not their relations — and said, “Of course, Mademoiselle Carolina. If I may.”

Although Lina was not shy of being seen in public with naked fingers — she had lived most of her life with bare, working hands — she did feel a tinge of embarrassment as Tristan pulled off her gloves and began to draw the new pair on. She immediately noticed how superior in quality the hand-stitched, dove-colored pair were to her own. They fit to her fingers with an almost preternatural closeness, and the smooth softness of the silk against her skin gave her an instantaneous sensation of being very, very rich.

“Does mademoiselle approve?” Like all the Lord & Taylor salesmen, Tristan had been hired for his all-American good looks — the better to lure female shoppers — and he always spoke with an elaborate politesse. He seemed as good a person as any to practice her new persona on, which was why she occasionally let him take her for walks in the park or tea at the hotel. Only occasionally, though — she was merely practicing, and didn’t want him to get too close. Her affections lay elsewhere.

“Oh, yes.”

Tristan had a long face with an architectural nose and cheekbones that seemed to set him even above his peers. He wore a fitted brown waistcoat and an ivory shirt buttoned at the wrists. His hazel eyes were such a hypnotic color that Lina sometimes found it difficult to look into them for more than two seconds at a time. Looking away from him did not distress her, however. Regularly averting her eyes was in fact useful to the illusion she was trying to maintain: that she was a copper-smelting heiress from out west (Utah, if pressed, though she had not been) and recently orphaned.

At first she had been surprised at how easily Tristan bought her story. The day she had met Tristan had been in the most nascent stage of her new life, and it had included a terrific blunder. That had also been the first day she’d drunk beer or been in a saloon, and it had not ended prettily. The episode might surely have proven what a thousand little missteps suggested: that she was not a lady and that her origins were very humble indeed.

But she had since witnessed — both in her new home, the New Netherland Hotel, and on her visits to Lord & Taylor with Tristan — real western millionaires, and had seen that they were even coarser and more prone to gaffes than she. For Lina Broud — Carolina, as she was trying to refer to herself in her own mind — did know some things about comportment, manners, and dress. She had learned them as the lady’s maid of the late Elizabeth Holland. Chief among her observations was how effective an aloof demeanor was in declaring one’s personal importance.

It was in fact Elizabeth, whose wealth and reputation for loveliness gave her advantages with which Lina could not compete, who had won the heart of Will Keller — he had been the Hollands’ coachman, and Lina had loved him in secret for a long time. This wound was one of the reasons that she had sold her mistress’s secret, the one that involved Elizabeth and Will spending nights together in the carriage house, to Elizabeth’s sometime friend Penelope Hayes. That information had garnered Lina five hundred dollars, what had then seemed a fortune but had since been reduced by more than half by the dinners and hotel rooms and dresses and trinkets that she hoped would differentiate her from the plain girl she used to be.

It had been a sore disappointment that such an extraordinary-sounding sum didn’t go very far in the lifestyle of a girl like Elizabeth. And Lina was not proud, either, that her life as a lady, or something like it, had been made possible by such a sordid transaction. But she had done what she had to do. Her object had not really been to make herself into a society girl — she just wanted to make herself enough Elizabeth-like that, when she was ready, she could go out west, and then Will would see that it was Lina he’d wanted all along. Or at least, when he heard of Elizabeth’s death, that the new, shiny Lina could fill that hole in his heart.

Lina had never been above taking Elizabeth’s seconds, even if it was her mistress’s death that now allowed the passing down. She wanted to find Will as much as ever. She believed that that time was near — it had to be, or her money would run out first.

Tristan was placing the gloves she had chosen, the little lace shawl, the Persian lamb muff, the new pair of onyx hose that sold for two dollars and twenty-five cents — Tristan had introduced them to her, and now she could not live without them — each in its own box, with the same magical, crinkling tissue. Lina watched with dizzy joy and a vague sense of dread as these objects were folded and placed, wrapped, and then boxed. Once they were boxed, that meant they were hers and that she would have to pay for them.

“Shall I have these sent to your hotel?”

“No…” Lina paused and looked away. The late afternoon light was coming in through the high, Romanesque windows that faced the street. Already the day was getting away from her, and she couldn’t truly be said to be grander than when it began. When she stepped outside the weather would have dropped, and all the workaday people she so wanted to distinguish herself from would be massed at the store’s plate glass windows to gawk at the Christmas display. At moments like these she couldn’t help but feel a little sad and recall how devastating it had been when, after years of secret longing, she had one night confessed her feelings to Will and then been sent away. She wanted to be sure that such a rejection wasn’t repeated, and reminded herself that she must perfect her transformation before she saw him again. “I’ll be taking a hansom, of course — I can carry them myself. But please do send the bill to the hotel.”