Anna Godbersen: The Luxe

A cold shock was settling into the muscles of Elizabeth’s face. She lay back and brought her knees to her chest, and twirled the bowler on her finger distractedly. Lillie Langtry stood, stretched, walked around Elizabeth, and then settled on the pillow beside her head. Elizabeth put down the hat and sighed. She might have laughed if she had been the kind of girl to find humor in perversity, but this horrible evidence of her sister’s corruption was not in the least funny to her.

Elizabeth’s mind was seized by a cool fury, as she realized something else: that her predicament with Penelope was at least half Henry’s fault. Whatever his involvement with Penelope, it had surely inspired some of her vengeful actions. Now he was no doubt out somewhere in the city seducing naïve little Diana. And after all of that, on a day not so far in the future, he still expected Elizabeth to be his wife.

She got up from the bed as though she had some purpose, but there was nothing to do but gather the clothes strewn about Diana’s room. The angry, desperate feeling grew inside her with every passing moment as she put away all the many dresses that her younger sister had considered wearing to her misbegotten tryst.

For my True Bride.

“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?” DIANA SAID, GLOWING with joy as she turned the lapis-encrusted cross with the inscription on the back. She ran her fingers along the letters, longing for a way to be his real bride instead. But she already knew that could not be. Since they had left the greenhouse, every moment with Henry felt imbued with its own rare luster. The sounds of the city on its way to work were just outside their carriage, but they might as well have been coming from across the river.

“My father gave it to my mother before they were married. I’ve never understood what it meant. I suppose he might have given it to the seventeen-year-old girl he married in the hope that she would always be seventeen.” Henry gave a muted, ironic laugh. “But that’s not why I’m giving it to you.”

“I know,” Diana said as she tucked the cross into her bodice.

“It’s more understated than all the things he gave her later; maybe that’s why I like it. I don’t remember her very well; I was only four when she died. But I think she was that old-fashioned, natural kind of beautiful that doesn’t benefit from all the ornament.”

Diana took this in. She had learned so much about Henry over the last evening that he practically constituted an entirely new person, and everything he said now seemed a wink to her special knowledge. She leaned forward from her seat in the plain buggy, the one vehicle Henry could possibly have managed to borrow unnoticed from the Schoonmaker carriage house, and around the black folding top. They were paused on Broadway, waiting for the right moment for Diana to slip into the morning crowd and make her way home. She turned her sleepy, adoring eyes back on him and tried to smile as best she could. “It’ll be hard watching you marry Liz, Henry….” She had intended something more finalizing and profound, but her throat was constricting so painfully now that she knew she wouldn’t be able to say any more.

Henry kissed her below her right eye. Diana took a final look at him before pulling her hood firmly over her face and slipping down to the street. Once her feet touched the ground, she found it easy to move forward and join the hordes on their morning route. All around her, men in bowlers and cheap three-piece suits walked at a swift gait that didn’t allow for time to wonder at the darting girl with the hood.

Before long she had found the alley off Nineteenth Street, which led into the Van Dorans’ property and then into her own family’s. She had risked the trellis the night before, which had been nearly as dangerous as venturing out by herself into the New York night, but today she took the easier route of the hatch door into the basement washing room. From there it was a breathless dash up the servants’ stairs and she was on the second floor and very close to the door to her own safe bedroom.

There was nobody there, which was some kind of relief, but the room was altered from when she had left it. All the dresses that she’d pulled out to consider wearing for her evening with Henry had been put away. All her high-heeled slippers, too. And sitting on top of her neatly made bed was the hat that Henry had worn on the day they met. Anxiety began to grip at Diana as she went to the bowler and picked it up. She was frozen in place, immobile with the sad, awful thought of who had been there the night before.

It has become widely acceptable to be late, a new social phenomenon I frown on intensely. A true lady always arrives at precisely the promised hour.

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

IT WAS NINE THIRTY ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, AND Elizabeth found herself stopped on Broadway, in the middle of all the morning bustle, her limbs paralyzed by hopelessness. All the chaos the horse-drawn delivery carts, the trolleys, the yelling of drivers, the sounds of carriage wheels against the battered pavement, the throngs of pedestrians ceased to exist in her mind. The scene she had just witnessed was not, after the evidence she’d seen the night before, a surprise, but the emotion it awoke in her was startling.

The hooded figure of her younger sister had already disappeared down Twenty-first Street. The sight of Diana, on a Manhattan corner so early in the morning, had confirmed all of Elizabeth’s suspicions. But she remained strangely stuck to her spot, watching the person who had been left behind. He had stepped down from his buggy, and was just standing there on the curb. She couldn’t be sure, because she had always been the one doing the running away, but she was nearly certain the forlorn way Henry was looking down Twenty-first Street wasn’t so different from the way that Will must have looked every morning when she turned her back on him and went into the house.

Elizabeth had barely managed to sleep the night before, and still she had risen from bed without the slightest idea how she could subdue Penelope, how she could save Diana, or how she could possibly resign herself to marrying the loathsome Henry Schoonmaker. She had tried to dress herself with some determination, in the same dress of blue-and-white seersucker she had worn the day he had proposed, and because she sensed the weather was about to change, a camel wrap with a hood and flannel lining. Once she was dressed she still hadn’t known what to do, and so she had decided to walk, all the way up Fifth Avenue to face Penelope. Every member of the household was employed in some wedding-related task or other, and in the few moments when her opinion was not required she had managed to slip out the door.

Last night she had come to the conclusion that her fiancé was the most licentious man she had ever met. But his appearance now dispelled that belief. She stood there watching him a moment longer, in his simple black suit, with his face overcome by loss, and felt sure that he was not trying to take advantage of Diana. He actually did love her sister, and though she couldn’t totally explain it, she had the growing conviction that her sister loved him in return. Elizabeth had been wrong. Her anger had dissolved in seconds.

A high, black coach, with men in work clothes standing up on the back, paused between Henry and Elizabeth, considering how it should enter the fray on the wide thoroughfare. When it had passed and her view opened up again, Henry had turned and was looking in her direction.

Henry lowered his head, but kept his eyes, full of remorse and resignation, looking directly into her own. She could see now that he was not so unlike her that he was willing to marry for some reason having more to do with family and duty and class than love, but that his heart lay elsewhere. He took off his hat and tipped it gently in her direction. She bent her head slowly in reply, to let him know they understood each other, and then turned away and moved northward into the crowd. She had an appointment for which she could not be late.