The Luxe l-1 Read online

  Elizabeth was trying to think of something nice to say about Percival Coddington, and missed what her mother said next. Something about someone being vulgar. Just as her mother pronounced the word, Elizabeth noticed her friend Penelope Hayes on the second-floor mezzanine. Penelope was wearing a ruffled, poppy-colored gown with a low bodice, and Elizabeth couldn’t help but feel a little proud to see her friend looking so stunning.

  “I shouldn’t even have dignified this ball with my presence,” Mrs. Holland went on. There was a time when she would not have so much as called on the upstart Hayes women, despite her husband’s having accepted a hunting invitation from Jackson Pelham Hayes once or twice, but society’s opinion had moved on without her and she had recently begun acknowledging them. “The papers will report that I condone this sort of tacky display, and you know what a headache that will give me.”

  “But you know it would have been a bigger scandal if we hadn’t come.” Elizabeth extended her long, slender neck and gave her friend up above a subtle, knowing smile. How she wished she were with her instead, laughing at the poor girl whose bad luck had forced her to dance with Percival Coddington. Penelope, gazing down, let one darkly made-up eyelid fall her signature slow, smoldering wink and Elizabeth knew that she was understood. “And anyway,” Elizabeth added, turning back to her mother, “you know you never read the papers.”

  “Right,” her mother agreed. “I don’t.” Then she jutted the one feature she shared with her daughter a small, dimpled nub of a chin as Elizabeth offered the subtlest shrug to her best friend on the mezzanine.

  They had become friends during that period in her early teens when Elizabeth was most interested in what it meant to be a young lady of fashion. Penelope had shared that interest, though she was ignorant of the rules of the society she so deeply wished to be a part of. Elizabeth, who was only just beginning to care about all those rules, had cultivated her as a friend anyway. She had quickly discovered that she liked being around Penelope everything seemed sharper and fizzier in the company of the young Miss Hayes. And soon enough Penelope had become a deft player of society’s games; Elizabeth could think of no one better to have at her side during an evening’s entertainment.

  “Oh, look!” Mrs. Holland’s voice rang out sharply, bringing Elizabeth’s focus back to the ballroom floor. “Here is Mr. Coddington!”

  Elizabeth put on a smile and turned to the inevitable fact of Percival Coddington. He attempted a bowlike gesture, his glance darting across the low-cut square of her bodice. Her heart sank as she realized that he was dressed as a shepherd, in green jodhpurs, rustic boots, and colorful suspenders. They matched. His hair was slicked back and long at the neck, and he breathed audibly through his mouth as Elizabeth waited for him to ask her to dance.

  A moment passed, and then her mother singsonged, “Well, Mr. Coddington, I have brought her to you.”

  “Thank you,” he coughed out. Elizabeth could feel his eyes lingering on her uncomfortably, but she kept herself upright and smiling. She was, by training, a lady. “Miss Holland, will you dance?”

  “Of course, Mr. Coddington.” She raised her hand so that he could take it. As his damp palm pulled her through the crowd of costumed dancers, she looked back to smile reassuringly at her mother. She could at least have the gratification of seeing her pleased.

  Instead, she saw her mother greeting two men. Elizabeth recognized the slender figure of Stanley Brennan first, who had been her father’s accountant, and then the imposing figure of William Sackhouse Schoonmaker, patriarch of the old Schoonmaker clan, who had made a second fortune in railroads. His only son, Henry, had dropped out of Harvard back in the spring, and since then the daughters of New York’s elite families had talked of nothing else. At least, the letters Elizabeth received from Agnes while she was in Paris were full of his name, and how all the girls were aching for him. He had a younger sister, Prudie, who was a year or two younger than Diana, though she wore only black and was rarely seen because she disliked crowds. Elizabeth’s impression of Henry Schoonmaker was still vague, though she had seen him and heard his name spoken often enough in their younger years, usually attached to some prank or other.

  Elizabeth’s partner must have sensed her thoughts going elsewhere, because he brought her attention back with a pointed comment. “Maybe you wanted to stay in the drawing room with the ladies,” Percival said, bitterness surfacing in his voice.

  Elizabeth tried not to stumble on her partner’s poor footwork. “No, Mr. Coddington, I am just a little tired is all,” she told him, not entirely falsely. Her ship had missed its arrival date by three days; she had been home for less than twenty-four hours. She barely had her land legs yet, and here she was dancing. Her mother had insisted by letter that she not retain the services of her French maid, so she had been left to do her own hair and care for her clothing all by herself during the entire journey. Penelope had stopped by in the afternoon to teach her the new dance steps and to tell her how furious she would have been had the ship been any later and caused her best friend to be a no-show on one of the most important nights of her life. Then she’d gone on about some new secret beau, whose identity she would reveal to Elizabeth later, as soon as they had a moment alone. There were simply too many servants hovering during those pre-ball hours for the naming of names to be prudent. Penelope had seemed even more competitive about her looks and dress than usual because of the boy and because the ball was the debut of her family’s new home, Elizabeth assumed. Also adding to Elizabeth’s strain, of course, was her mother’s odd behavior.

  Plus there had already been quadrilles, and dinner, and polite talk with several of her aunts and uncles. She had had to give the same account of her rocky transatlantic passage several times already. And just when Elizabeth had finally sat down with friends for a glass of champagne and a little talk about how absolutely stunning everything was, she had been forced back into the center of activity. To dance with Percival Coddington, of all people. But she kept smiling, of course. It was her habit.

  “Well, what are you thinking about, then?” Percival frowned and pressed his hand into her lower back. Elizabeth couldn’t think of anyone she would trust less to move her backward across a floor of exuberant, slightly tipsy people.

  “Uh…” Elizabeth started, realizing that she had been thinking that even the drawing room was not a total respite. Truthfully, she had been just a little bit relieved to leave Agnes, even though Agnes was such a loyal friend, because the leather-fringed dress she wore was ill-fitting and unflatteringly tight. Elizabeth had been distracted with pity during their entire conversation. Agnes seemed, especially next to her new glamorous Parisian friends, like an embarrassing remnant of childhood.

  She focused again on Percival’s animated, ugly face and tried to keep her feet going one, two, three across the floor. She thought about the evening thus far all the hours of mindless chatter and carefully accepted compliments, all the studious attention to appearances. She recalled the calculated luxury of her time in Paris. What had she been doing, really doing, all this time? What had he that boy she had been trying so hard to forget, indeed believed she had forgotten been doing all that time she was away? She wondered if he had stopped caring for her. Already she could feel the stunning weight of a lifetime of regret for letting him go, and she knew that it was enough to bury her alive.

  All at once the room turned mute and violently bright. She closed her eyes and felt Percival Coddington’s hot breath on her ear asking if she felt all right. Her corset, which her maid, Lina, had practically sewed her into hours earlier, felt suddenly, horribly constricting. Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap.

  Then, as quickly as the panic had come, it went. Elizabeth opened her eyes. The sounds of joy and giddy indulgence came rushing back. She glanced up at the great domed ceiling glowing above them and reassured herself that it had not fallen.

  “Yes, Mr. Coddington, thank you for asking,” Elizabeth finally responded. “I’m n
ot sure what came over me.”

  Two

  Cloakroom, one o’clock.

  Bring ciggies.

  DH

  DIANA HOLLAND SAW HER MOTHER ASCEND THE twisting marble staircase on the far side of the ballroom, supported by some big older fellow whom she felt sure she knew. Their family friend and accountant, Stanley Brennan, trailed behind. Just before they moved out of view and toward some surely lavish second-story smoking room, Mrs. Holland looked back, caught Diana’s eye, and gave her an admonishing glance. Diana cursed herself for being spotted and then briefly considered staying in the great central ballroom to wait patiently for one of her cousins to ask her to dance. But patience was not in Diana Holland’s nature.

  Besides, she had been so proud of her cunning in writing the little invitation during a freshening-up in the ladies’ dressing room earlier in the evening. She’d then slipped it to the architect Webster Youngham’s assistant, who was stationed near the arched entryway in order to explain the many architectural references that had been incorporated into the Hayes family’s new home. She had pushed her way through the crowd, curtsied, clasped his hand, and palmed him the note. “You truly are an artist, Mr. Youngham,” she’d said, knowing full well that Mr. Youngham was already drunk on Madeira and lounging in one of the card rooms upstairs.

  “But I’m not Mr. Youngham,” he told her, looking adorably confused. As soon as she saw that look, Diana knew she’d hooked him. “I’m James Haverton, his assistant.”

  “Nevertheless.” She winked before disappearing back into the crowd. Haverton had broad shoulders and dreamy gray eyes, and even if he was just an assistant, he seemed like somebody who had gone places and done things. She hadn’t seen anyone nearly so nice-looking in the intervening hour.

  So Diana picked up her skirt and moved quickly between the enormous planters and the wall. She looked behind her once before leaving the ballroom to make sure no one was watching and then slipped into the cloakroom. It was massive and overly ornamented, Diana thought, especially for a room that was chiefly occupied by coats. It didn’t matter to them that the room was Moorish-themed, with a colorful mosaic floor and antiquities displayed in the turret-shaped alcoves carved from the walls.

  Diana looked around her, trying to locate her French lieutenant’s coat. She had come dressed as the heroine of her favorite novel, Trilby, who appears for the first time on a break from her job as an artist’s model in a petticoat and slippers and a soldier’s coat. Diana had not been allowed to wear a petticoat without a skirt, but she felt the thrill of having gotten away with something just wearing the rest of the costume at all. Her mother had even had a shepherdess costume made for her so that she would match her older sister, Elizabeth, which would have been hideous in addition to humiliating. Instead, here she was in a satisfyingly bohemian red-and-white striped skirt and a simple cotton bodice that she had ripped in a few places on the sly. No one got it, of course all the other girls Diana’s age were conformists at heart and seemed to have dressed up as themselves, only with more powder and artificially narrowed waists.

  She was just beginning to wonder if one of the servants hadn’t mistaken her perfectly shabby gray coat for her own, when she was startled by one single clang from the clock in the corner. She gasped, surprised, and stepped backward a little unsteadily after all the champagne she’d been sneaking and when she did, she felt the chest of a man and a pair of hands on her hips. Her whole body flushed with adrenaline.

  “Oh, hello.” She tried to make her voice flat and indifferent, even though this was by far the most exciting thing that had happened to her all evening.

  “Hello.” Haverton’s mouth was very close to her ear.

  Diana turned slowly and met his eyes. “I hope you brought cigarettes,” she said, trying not to smile too much.

  Haverton had short, straight eyebrows set far apart, which made his eyes look open and earnest. “I didn’t think ladies of your class were allowed to smoke.”

  Diana affected a pout. “So you didn’t bring ciggies?”

  He paused, his eyes lingering on her in a way that made her feel not at all like a lady. “Oh no, I brought them. It’s just that I’m not sure whether I should give you one or not….” Diana noticed a little mischief shining in his eye, and concluded that it must be the glimmer of a kindred spirit.

  “What do I have to do to convince you?” she asked, turning her head jauntily.

  “This is serious, what you are asking me to do,” he replied with an air of put-on gravity. Then he laughed. Diana liked the sound of it. “You’re pretty,” he told her, smiling unabashedly now.

  Diana and her sister could not have shared more physical characteristics and looked less alike. Like Elizabeth, she had the small features and round mouth of the Holland women, although she still had the softness of her baby fat. She liked to think that her dark hair added a certain mystery, although it was in truth a sort of medium brown, and untamable. Her eyes were always being described as vivid. And of course she and her sister had the same chin their mother’s. She hated her chin. “Oh, I’m all right,” she answered him, glowing with false modesty.

  “Much better than all right.” He continued to observe her as he pulled a cigarette case out of his breast pocket. He lit one and handed it to her.

  Diana took a drag and tried not to cough. She loved smoking or at least the idea of smoking but it was hard to practice doing it right with her mother and the staff always watching her. She was pulling it off, though at least she thought she was exhaling little puffs into the air. It felt right, especially with all the metallic and turquoise detail in the room suggesting some hazy, far-off locale. She raised an eyebrow, wondering how Haverton was going to make his move. “So, if you’re an architect, does that make you an artist?”

  “Depends whom you ask,” he replied lightly. “Some of us like to think that we make the most monumental and lasting kind of art.”

  “That’s very nice,” Diana said blithely. “Because you see, I have been trying to find a real artist all night.”

  “Whatever for?” he asked, leaning into the coats and putting his cigarette to his mouth.

  “Well, to kiss, of course.” Diana drew her breath in after she spoke. Even she was occasionally surprised by the audacious things that came out of her mouth.

  Haverton exhaled thoughtfully, the smoky sweet smell of tobacco surrounding them. For a moment, Diana felt like she could have been a million miles off in a tent hidden away in some souk in Tunis or Marrakech, arranging for secret deals in magic powders.

  “It occurs to me,” Haverton started, the hard edges of his American voice reminding her that she was still in New York, on a street as familiar as Fifth Avenue, no less, “that you are being a very naughty girl.”

  “You think so?” Diana asked, dragging on her cigarette amusedly. She, too, sank into the soft wall of coats, moving a little closer to Haverton.

  “Well, how often do young ladies of your class meet strange older men in oversize closets, with all of society a few heartbeats away?”

  “What makes you think there is any comparison between me and the girls of my class?” Diana pronounced the last two words in disgust. The girls of her class were slaves to rules, going about life if you could call it that like bloodless mannequins. “I told you I was looking for an artist,” she went on impatiently. “So if you’re going to go on thinking conventionally and just like everybody else, I may as well leave.”

  Haverton smiled and dropped his cigarette onto the black-and-white marble-tiled floor. He stepped on it before shooing it to the corner with his toe. He looked very old to Diana all of a sudden, even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty. Then he was moving toward her fast. As soon as their lips touched, she knew there wasn’t going to be any magic. This was not the heart-stopping touch that she had been waiting for all evening, and it didn’t help especially that his style of kissing was akin to mashing one face against another. Her whole body went slack with the
disappointment.

  Diana kissed him back, just to make sure her instinct was correct, but she had been kissed before, and she knew what it felt like when it was good. Haverton ranked far below Amos Vreewold, whom she had kissed several times in Saratoga over the summer, and only slightly better than her first kiss, at age thirteen, which had been so acrid an affair that she had banished the boy’s identity from even her own memory. Diana was finally accepting the fact that James Haverton, architect’s assistant, was not the kind of artist she was looking for when the door creaked and a foot sounded at the threshold.

  “Miss Diana?” said a male voice, more hurt than shocked.

  Diana felt Haverton’s grip tighten momentarily as they turned toward the door. Diana recognized Stanley Brennan’s long, tired face immediately. He was only twenty-six he had taken over from his father as Mr. Holland’s accountant but his constant anxiety gave him a prematurely aged appearance.

  “Your mother. She sent me to check on you…” he said haltingly. “To make sure you weren’t getting into trouble.”

  Haverton let go of Diana’s waist and stepped back. He didn’t look especially pleased by Brennan’s entrance, but he kept quiet. Diana felt freer almost instantly, rejoicing as she was in having Haverton’s rough chin off her face.

  “Thank you, Brennan,” she said. “Would you like to accompany me back to the ballroom?”

  Brennan stepped forward cautiously, reaching toward the rips that Diana had put in her costume. They had widened during the poor excuse for a tryst.

  “Oh, stop, it’s fine.” She lifted her arm for him to take. Then she turned to Haverton. “Thank you for explaining the Islamic references in the Richmond Hayeses’ coatroom to me. I will remember it always.”