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Anna Godbersen: Envy

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Anna Godbersen Envy

Envy: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Jealous whispers. Old rivalries. New betrayals. Two months after Elizabeth Holland's dramatic homecoming, Manhattan eagerly awaits her return to the pinnacle of society. When Elizabeth refuses to rejoin her sister Diana's side, however, those watching New York's favorite family begin to suspect that all is not as it seems behind the stately doors of No. 17 Gramercy Park South. Farther uptown, Henry and Penelope Schoonmaker are the city's most celebrated couple. But despite the glittering diamond ring on Penelope's finger, the newlyweds share little more than scorn for each other. And while the newspapers call Penelope's social-climbing best friend, Carolina Broad, an heiress, her fortune — and her fame — are anything but secure, especially now that one of society's darlings is slipping tales to the eager press. In this next thrilling installment of Anna Godbersen's bestselling Luxe series, Manhattan's most envied residents appear to have everything they desire: Wealth. Beauty. Happiness. But sometimes the most practiced smiles hide the most scandalous secrets. .

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“Quite a showing,” Barnard remarked as they crossed onto the richly gleaming parquet floor of Leland Bouchard’s music room. It had been constructed with acoustics in mind, although the music room was rarely used for its titular purpose. Music rooms were for people who held musicales, and Leland Bouchard, who had built the house for himself at twenty, from money that he had earned off his own investments, was known for never sitting still. The walls were paneled with murals, and a gigantic Kentia palm festooned with tiny lights scraped the twenty-five-foot ceiling.

Her vision swept the rectangular room with its high, vaulted ceiling and met the gaze of Isaac Phillips Buck, who quickly looked away, as though he had been watching her. He was large in every way one might imagine, and the soft fleshiness of his face made his age impossible to determine. He was Penelope Hayes’s lackey, Diana knew that much, but she couldn’t imagine why he would have any interest in her. Next, Diana’s gaze fell on her sister’s old friend Agnes Jones, who was resting on the arm of a well-kempt gentleman. She tried to make her eyes widen in a cordial manner, though she still had trouble appearing to like people she did not, which Barnard had admonished as an unfortunate characteristic in both a lady of society and a peddler of secrets.

“Everyone is here,” Barnard went on as they watched Teddy Cutting cross the room with Gemma Newbold, who wore a diamond tiara nestled in her reddish curls and was well known to be Mrs. Cutting’s choice for her only son. There was a time when everyone had thought Teddy would marry Elizabeth Holland, but that was before she became rather publicly engaged to his best friend, and then very privately married to her true love. Like their mother, she had been widowed; both those ladies were home together tonight. That was among the reasons her younger sister tried to be seen in her place as much as possible, though it was hardly cause for Buck to spy on her.

“Nobody doesn’t love Leland,” she replied, shaking off the feeling of Buck’s swinelike eyes on her.

“It would be difficult not to.” Barnard paused to accept a glass of champagne from a passing waiter. “Although I must confess to getting a mystery headache whenever I am in his company too long. He talks too fast, and he is always excited about everything. Me, I am never excited about anything between the hour when I wake up and five o’clock.”

Diana smiled subtly at this, for she knew what five o’clock signified to her friend; of course, she had also known him to take whiskey in his coffee at decidedly earlier hours.

“That is a very gaudy gown on Eleanor Wetmore,” Diana observed, fixing her sight on the array of custom-made dresses and painted faces before them.

Barnard paused and looked. “Indeed.”

“I would imagine she is on quite the search for a husband, now that her younger sister is engaged to Reginald Newbold. That will sting for her, to be twenty-six and a maid instead of a matron of honor at the wedding. I suppose she needs the attention any way she can get it.”

“That would make a nice item.” Barnard finished his champagne and left the glass on the magnificent carved wood mantel, which had been transported from a grand Florentine house, as Barnard himself had reported in his “Gamesome Gallant” column.

“Why don’t you write it?”

This casual offer flooded Diana with nervous anticipation; she smiled behind her fan. “All right,” she said after a moment, so as to not seem too eager.

“Don’t try to hide your smiles from me, Miss Diana Holland.” Barnard turned slightly away from her as he spoke, and motioned to a waiter for another drink. “I hope, for my own sake, that the day you realize that you were made for better things is later rather than sooner.”

They had reached the huge, classically proportioned windows that faced northward onto the street, and Diana dropped her friend’s arm for a moment to gaze down at the fallen snow reflecting the warm light from above. Behind them the voice of Leland Bouchard could be heard going into raptures about his recent purchase of a horseless carriage, an Exley, which was displayed in the first-floor vestibule so that guests could, upon their arrival, stare at its shiny modernity with covetous curiosity.

Their host was tall, with a uniquely broad forehead and wheat-colored hair that always seemed a little overgrown. “It can cover twenty-four miles in an hour, without undue racing effort,” he was saying to Mr. Gore.

“He is an investor in the Exley Motor Carriage Company,” Barnard remarked, sotto voce, to his protégé.

Though Diana should have listened for more information, she found her attention already wandering to the street below. The lace flower on her gown rose and fell with her breath, and a delicate sensation settled across her chest. The crowd behind her, which was full of stories that the protagonists would rather not have told, and also of small deceptions certain to amuse the reading public, dimmed for her. Just a moment ago she had felt the cleverest player in a game that obsessed the whole room, but she was overcome now by the strong impulse to hide herself and the brassy sound of her famous laugh.

Down below, Henry Schoonmaker had stepped out of his coach and was lighting a cigarette as he paused by the iron gate that encircled Leland Bouchard’s mansion. He was the man who had drawn out Diana’s affections last season, and then pounded on them. There was much history between them, but as Diana watched him, posing there with the elbow of his smoking arm rested on his wrist, in a wide, pensive stance, she reminded herself that she felt no emotion for him. And when Henry’s wife, Penelope — of the so newly grand Hayes family — arrived at her husband’s side, with her fierce blue eyes cast directly in front of her, Diana reminded herself that Henry had chosen to marry mere weeks after taking Diana’s virginity.

“I’d like to know what goes on in their bedroom.” Barnard smirked.

“The Schoonmakers are the envy of every young couple in the city,” Diana answered mechanically, as though repeating some lesson learned by rote.

Barnard took two champagne glasses from a passing tray and handed one to Diana. She closed her eyes and took a long sip that did nothing to settle her insurgent nerves. In a moment, Henry Schoonmaker would be coming through the door.

He must not see her.

Even as Diana tried to fill her sister’s role, acting the part of the good Holland daughter in the wider world, she had scrupulously avoided letting Henry catch even a glimpse of her. In the same manner, she had been careful to burn his letters — which had arrived daily since his New Year’s Eve wedding to Penelope — unopened, and to smooth away any feelings the sight of his face might have lit up in her. She had thought once, not long ago, that they were destined to share a storybook romance. But she was an entirely different kind of girl now — she had had her heart broken and all of her naïveté worn off. Nothing Henry said could change her back to the way she had been then, and certainly not if it came in so cold-blooded a form as a letter.

“Are you all right?” Barnard asked, twisting the pale gold flute in his large hand.

“Only a little tired.” Diana smiled weakly as she handed him back her nearly full glass. “I ought to be going, but I promise I will learn everything there is to know about Eleanor Wetmore’s matrimonial ambitions by Sunday at the very latest.”

Her voice rose courageously on that final word. She extended her hand for her friend to kiss, and then she moved carefully through the crowd, always keeping the central palm between her and the entryway. But she must have hesitated too long, for just as she ventured forward, the Henry Schoonmakers appeared and filled the doorframe. Diana let out a little gasp and drew backward, so that the great green leaves covered her figure. She could still see enough, though. For Penelope was wearing a slash of red that might have brought to mind the butcher, were it not made of quite so precious a material.

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