Anna Godbersen: Splendor

It was this sticky fact — that Will, the real father of her child, was never far from her mind — which made her resist lying down on one of the new chaises in her parlor, or in the frilly confines of her upstairs bedroom. For though Penelope had been perfectly gracious all through tea, Elizabeth could sense that she still remembered her old friend’s queasiness when they had vacationed together in Florida over the winter, when it had only just been occurring to Elizabeth what she might bear within her. She suspected that the newest Mrs. Schoonmaker probably doubted the child’s paternity, which was not a nice thing to be thought of any man, especially one who cared for his wife so well. And Snowden did care for Elizabeth well. The evidence was all around her, in the sturdy walls, the hammered black leather panels decorating them, and the polished birch wainscoting below.

That sensation of guilt, combined with her native orderliness, sent her rather heavily up the stairs and into the room that had been assigned as her husband’s study. It was in the back of the house, where he would be less bothered by the noise of the servants or the noise of the street and, very soon now, the noise of a little child. She stepped into the masculine space somewhat timidly, for she had a strong sense that it should be his refuge. But Elizabeth, in her lacy, high-necked smock and black linen skirt, her blond hair rising like a hazy pillow over her fine forehead, was the product of a decade of assiduous grooming. The man whose proposal had saved her and her child deserved to benefit from her well-honed feminine abilities, too.

“Can I help you, Mrs. Cairns?”

The housekeeper, Mrs. Schmidt, a fastidious widow in middle age whose late husband had been for many years an employee of Snowden’s, had come up behind her and was now lingering in the doorway. She appeared just slightly displeased that the lady of the house would be poking about.

“Mr. Cairns said I was to see that you don’t overexert yourself, and to make sure that all of your needs are met while he is out on business….”

Elizabeth rested her hand on her considerable belly and tried to let a certain glowing kindness light up her heart-shaped face. Excepting the case of Lina Broud — who had been the final lady’s maid of her life as a debutante, and with whom she had sparred mightily — she had always had a nice way around the help. With Mrs. Schmidt her gentleness seemed to hold no special power, however; the two women had yet to strike a natural ease in their relationship.

“No, I’m all right, but thank you.” When the older woman did not budge, Elizabeth added, almost apologetically, “I wanted to put Mr. Cairns’s study in order myself.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Schmidt replied, although still she hesitated until Elizabeth gave a firm gesture of dismissal with her pointed chin.

When she was gone, Elizabeth busied herself with the arranging of pens and paper on her husband’s broad desk and the placement of several objets d’art. She turned over in her mind which of the taxidermied heads lining the walls she could persuade him to do away with, for though Snowden was an outdoorsman, and though she did not want him to abolish that aspect of his character, she felt that as his wife, she owed him the benefit of her rather excellent eye. The animal trophies did not, in her opinion, belong in such a genteel home. When the room was finally starting to appear tended to by a steady feminine hand, she turned to a box of papers that needed sorting.

The ordinary activity of putting a house together had calmed Elizabeth, but that steady, neutral feeling evaporated when, after carefully filing several bank statements and business documents in the drawers of the large walnut desk, she glimpsed her own name as it had been written during the first eighteen years of her life. And not just her name, but along with it the name that she chanted in her thoughts each night before going to bed — the name that she still thought of as hers, too. Her brown eyes grew large.

A letter to Stanley Brennan, who had once been her family’s accountant, was clipped to the document, and the bit that caught Elizabeth’s attention read: Please have the deed for the California property transferred — immediately and jointly — into the names Elizabeth Adora Holland and William Keller . The signer of the letter was her late father; it was dated a week before his death, and posted from the Yukon Territory. Her heart had begun to thud and her vision was growing blurry with tears. Still her eyes lingered there. Even the sight of Will’s name brought to mind the picture of him in a new brown suit on the day they were married, the last time she remembered feeling anything like pure joy. It was another few moments before she was able to collect herself and read the rest, and thus to realize that the paper she held was in fact the deed to a bit of land she knew quite well.

She could not begin to understand why her father would have put her and Will’s name together on any document, much less one that connected them to the land that they had in fact lived on, quite happily, far, far away in a place called California. She had known that her father had told Will it might be a lucrative territory, but that he had owned it, much less deeded it to his oldest daughter and former valet, confounded her.

She rose to her feet with some difficulty, and then went as quickly as she could down the stairs, calling for Mrs. Schmidt.

“When did Mr. Cairns say he would be returning?” she demanded when the wide, flat face of the housekeeper emerged below her in the foyer. Elizabeth clutched the curved railing for balance. From below, her swollen figure must have appeared tremendous.

“I expect him home any moment now….” The housekeeper was wiping her hands with a cloth. “What can I do to assist you in the meantime, Missus?”

“Please tell him that I am in the second-floor sitting room when he returns.” She covered her mouth with her hand and tried not to feel woozy. “Tell him I must speak to him as soon as possible.”

She did not know how long she waited. It might have been several hours or only a part of one that she reclined in the ivory wingback chair in the sitting room next to where she slept, and felt her heart rise and fall over recollections that she could not keep at bay. They were a deluge. By turns they washed her onto high, dry land and then back to rough waters. In moments she was there — making dinner for Will while he searched for the oil he believed would make them rich, her skin a little browned in the sun, her body warm — and in the next, she was on the platform at Grand Central Station with the sound of bullets ringing horrifically in her ears and the smell of blood turning her stomach.

“What is it, my dear?”

Snowden came rushing through the door, as though she really were his wife and it really was his child whose birth he was nervously anticipating. Elizabeth’s pale lashes fluttered. But of course she was his wife, she reminded herself, as he knelt by her side. He grasped her hand, and she realized that he had scarcely touched her since kissing her in the carriage after he’d first shown her the new house.

“Please — can you explain this to me?” Her voice broke over the words as she thrust the peculiar document in his direction.

Snowden’s small mouth twitched. Slowly it became a gentle smile. He wore a waistcoat of striped brown silk, which had not in the past been a fabric he favored. He took the paper, glancing over it before folding it away in his pocket.

“This is a deed,” he began. “One of the ownership docu ments of a piece of land your father purchased, in California, near a little railroad town called San Pedro….”

“Yes,” Elizabeth whispered. She looked into her husband’s eyes, imploring him to explain it all for her. “I know that land.”