Baroness (2 page)

Lilly knew that kind of breath—the kind that rattled grief through your soul.

“Jack always wanted to go to Paris. I wonder if he managed it,” Rosie said quietly.

Lilly got up, slipped behind her, and circled her arms around her cousin's waist, resting her chin on Rosie's shoulder. Outside, a crowd gathered along the street, in anticipation of the day's procession.

Rosie cupped her hands over Lilly's. “I am forgetting my brother's smile, the sound of his voice when he teased me. He used to sneak into my room at night, after returning home from his outings, tell me about his adventures. He loved to read—like you do, Lilly—and he dreamed of being a hero. I shouldn't have been surprised that Jack left. He only needed a reason. And Mother
certainly
gave him one.”

“I'm sure he's still alive, Rosie. Out there somewhere.”

Rosie leaned her head back against Lilly's. “I think he may have fabricated a name so Mother wouldn't find him, otherwise, with the war over, he would have returned home. Unless…”

Rosie's fear hung in the crisp breezes of the morning. Her voice fell to nearly a whisper. “I'd do just about anything to find my brother and bring him home. I've written to the Department of War in America, and even London, nearly as often as Mother, and…I admit I look for his face as we walk the streets of Paris.”

Lilly held her for a moment, wishing to shoulder her longings. No wonder Rosie insisted on going out on an excursion every day. “How about instead of attending the procession today, let's go for a stroll in Tuileries Park? Or to the Louvre? The last thing you need is a funeral.”

For a moment, Rosie curled her hands upon Lilly's. Held them there. Then she detached Lilly's hands from her waist and turned. “This isn't a funeral.” She swept her hand toward the crowds. “It's Sarah Bernhardt's bon voyage. We can't miss it.”

“I don't know why you're so taken with this actress.” Lilly stepped away from her, picked up a playbill of
Figaro
with Sarah's picture on the cover.

Rosie stood at the window, and Lilly considered that her cousin might just be brazen enough to step out onto the balcony in her robe. “She spoke once, in Brooklyn. I went to hear her—it was just after you arrived in New York. Sarah was mesmerizing, even then. The crowd hung on her every word. Even now that she's gone, look how they adore her.”

On the street below, along the funeral parade route, Parisians held wreaths, some of them pressing handkerchiefs to their mouths, their eyes.

“Imagine, being able to capture the hearts of so many?” Rosie's voice fell to a whisper. “To be adored so completely.”

“She was just an actress—”

Rosie rounded on her. “Just an actress? Sarah Bernhardt embraced life and everything in it. Did you know she lost her leg? She broke it during a performance and they had to amputate. But she never stopped acting.” Rosie walked over to the balcony, gripping the curtains. “Never stopped living until the very end.”

“Sarah's
life
was an act, a performance, Rosie. It wasn't real.”

Rosie threw open the curtains. “That looks real to me.”

A noise rose from the street below. Lilly watched as Rosie stepped out, garbed, yes, only in her chemise, although she tucked it tight around her. Lilly followed her, shaking her head at the things her cousin made her do. But the attention of the crowd settled, not on the two women in the third-story balcony, but on a decorated funeral cortege. A driver in full eighteenth-century livery drove a team of black horses pulling a floral-covered float, upon which lay Sarah's coffin, draped in yet more flowers. Walking beside it, a row of young girls held palm leaves, shading the float as it proceeded down the boulevard. As they passed, the mass of mourners closed in behind them, following them through the streets of Paris.

The drone could only be the mourning of Bernhardt's thousands of admirers.

“Quickly, Lilly, let's dress and join them.” Rosie nearly pushed her back into the room. “I'm tired of grieving Jack. I want to live life big and bold. White hot and bright. Hurry, we don't want to be left behind.”

“Rosie—”

“Don't you want an adventure, Lils? To break out of this life?”

Yes, actually, but—

“C'mon, let's join the crowd. It's time to become Parisian.”

* * * * *

Rosie longed for the energy, the
joie de vivre
of Paris to sweep her up, to carry her down the Champs-Élysées, and into a different life. She might be attending a funeral, the mood more somber as she entered the surge of the crowd, but Paris never did anything without flourish. A band played as the spectacle of Sarah Bernhardt's grand, final procession urged onto the street all manner of observers. Sailors, dressed for leave, and displaced soldiers still lingering after the war, as if searching for something they'd lost. Frenchmen in bow ties and straw hats, matrons in pearls and furs, despite the spring air, and everywhere Rosie looked, young women in low-waisted dresses and felt cloche hats, and men in baggy suits all hustled behind the carriage.

“Lilly! Stay with me.” Rosie turned, reached her hand back for Lilly's as she flowed into the crowd.

Rosie had rouged her cheeks, painted on lipstick, but haste demanded she forgo her black eyeliner and the pin curls. She'd return home before shopping this afternoon or venturing out this evening for dinner at the Ritz and dancing with Blanche and hopefully Dash. She heated all the way through with the memory of his hands on her waist.

Dashielle Parks embodied the zeal of the expatriates who had escaped New York for the onset of the spring fashion season, perhaps even the sultry Paris summer, in hopes of abandoning the rules of prohibition sweeping the country. They'd also abandoned the mores tethering them to high society, thirsty for something bold and shocking to sever them from its stiff-collared etiquette.

Her mother would keel over in a swoon if she knew Rosie had escaped their flat to join a throng of mourners.

Or perhaps not. Her mother, after all, had marched on Washington with the suffragettes. However, Jinx still cinched on her corset every morning, still wore her gloves and her furs, her diamonds sparkling against her broad décolletage. Still planned dinner parties and watched for suitors with a keen, matchmaking eye.

Rosie had no doubt that one of these days her mother might tote home some unfortunate chap she expected Rosie to marry.

Maybe Rosie would never get married. Look how marriage had turned out for Mother.

She wouldn't look too far ahead. Not right now. Not today. Not when she, too, thirsted.

She gripped Lilly's hand, pulling her cousin along behind her.

“Rosie, you're hurting me.”

“Mother will simply murder me if you are lost. You know she won't allow us in the city without each other. Please, Lilly, keep up!” She glanced behind her. Lilly glared at her, her face unpainted, those annoying freckles thick on her crinkled nose. Lilly had barely had time to braid her long hair—why her renegade cousin insisted on looking like a savage from some Zane Grey novel…it was all Rosie could do to keep the gossips from inquiring about Lilly's heritage. So Lilly was part Crow Indian. It didn't mean she had to embrace it and ignore the privileges of being young and wealthy in Paris.

Like shopping, yes. But Paris offered more than simply a change of fashion scenery. They'd escaped into a new world. A freer world. A laissez-faire, come-what-may aura hued the conversations, the laughter. Women, even more than in New York City, wore their clothes loose, almost boyish. Only last week, Rosie was lunching at the Ritz, eating with Dash and Bradley “Tripp” Martin, Blanche Stokes, and Pembrook Stockbridge, a chap Dash knew at Harvard, when across the restaurant strolled a woman in trousers.

“She must be one of those art
eest
s,” Dash had said, his grin following his mangling of the French accent. And his gaze followed the woman without apology.

“Maybe you'd like to follow her all the way to the Left Bank, Dash,” Tripp said, blowing out a curl of smoke from his cigarette. “We should slum over to the other side of the river, see what Boulevard Montparnasse has to offer. Go dancing at le Café Select.”

Blanche reached for Tripp's cigarette. “Maybe we can talk Rosie into another glass of absinthe.”

Rosie's face heated. “Blanche, that's not fair. I hadn't eaten—”

“What happened?” Dash said. He had a devastating smile, smoky dark, too-probing eyes, and a way of dancing with her that could make her stomach turn to warm milk.

Blanche laughed, blowing out smoke, handing the cigarette back to Tripp. “Two nights ago, she had a glass of Pernod—”

“They put water in it—it turned all green and milky. I thought it tasted like licorice,” Rosie said quickly.

“Going down,” Blanche said. Her gaze shot over to Pembrook, who seemed taken with the blond, his mouth slanted in a line of approval. “Not so much coming the other direction, I would guess.”

For a delicious moment, Rosie lost herself inside Dash's amused smirk, not minding the chiding.

“Pernod is not for little girls,” Tripp said, his mouth drawn down.

His words jarred her, and Rosie glared at him. “I'm no little girl.”

“What are you, twenty?”

“Leave her alone, Tripp. Or I'll start telling her tales about your exploits at Harvard. Let's see, are you in your fifth or sixth year?” Dash said.

Tripp pursed his lips and turned away to watch a pair of flappers stride by, stockingless.

Little girl.
Tripp's epitaph had clung to her all week, even cajoling her into letting Dash back her into a dark corner of the dance floor at the Napolitain. As the accordion player squeezed out a tune, Dash had pressed his lips against hers and whispered something dangerous into her ear.

She'd laughed, pushed her hands against his chest, but her heart stuck in her throat, watching him the rest of the night as he danced with Blanche and an Austrian tart named Lady Frances, whom he'd dubbed Frankie by the end of the night.

Not a little girl. Rosie had grown up the past six years, with the rest of the world trying to break free of the fear, the poverty of war. Grief did that to a soul—aged it.

She wanted to break free of the tentacles of grief, the specter of scandal. To feel every wild emotion layering Paris, to dance the Charleston and drink—yes, absinthe.

She wanted to live it all, in one big gulp. Even this funeral procession, this last hurrah to one of France's greatest performers, seemed alive and bold.

It was time for a new Rosie to emerge. She'd be like Sarah Bernhardt—beautiful and adored. How hard was it to become an actress, to create a life on stage?

More crying—the sound rippled through the crowd.

“I don't like this. Let's go,” Lilly said, tugging at her hand.

L'Arc de Triomphe loomed ahead. Rosie had no idea how long the procession might last—how deep into the Paris streets they might venture, but she held her cousin's grip. “Stay with me, Lilly.”

How tired she'd grown of babysitting. Of Lilly's incessant whining, her refusal to behave when the seamstresses of Doucette attempted to measure her. Rosie had half a mind to let her buy her frocks off the rack in some peasant shop.

Worse, Lilly refused to visit the cafés with Rosie, or even take in the opera. Always the books, or writing letters to some ranch hand in Montana. Lilly was missing
everything.

It was almost as if she'd forgotten she was the daughter of an heiress.

However, maybe Rosie should direct them through Luxembourg gardens, just to satiate her.

The crowd neared the Arc and surged forward, anticipating the narrowing of the parade through the gates. Some pushed, a woman screamed, and Rosie nearly fell. She released Lilly's hand. Immediately, Lilly sank behind. “Lilly! Stay with me!”

“No—I'm being suffocated!” Lilly turned, as if to escape the crush of the crowd.

“Fine! I'll meet you at the Café a la Paix!” They'd lunched there only yesterday—certainly Lilly could find her way.

She glanced for Lilly again, but the crowd closed around her.

“They called her Divine Sarah, did you know that?” A woman next to her held a handkerchief to her mouth. “I saw her in Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra
. She made a heavenly Cleopatra.”

Rosie found a sympathetic smile and only nodded. Clearly the woman considered Rosie to be French, and although her accent might be tolerable to the local garcón, she didn't want to try it out on the locals.

She followed the crowd to Père Lachaise Cemetery then stood on the edge, aware that she hadn't purchased the requisite triad of flowers.

The crowd had barely thinned by the time she snuck away, feeling—despite her attempts—a foreigner.

She inhaled the day as she returned to the Champs-Élysées. Regardless of the circumstances, the hour had a buoyant spirit about it—sparrows singing from the horse chestnut trees, the fragrance of lilac trees and pink dogwood blossoms, and the nutty smells of coffee twining out of the open cafés. Rosie lingered on her way back to the Boulevard, buying a new
Figaro
from a kiosk and a bouquet of pink tulips for her room. Lilly would be so angry with her, but for this brief hiccup of time, Rosie drank in the freedom away from her cousin.

Sure, Lilly pined for the frontier life she lost, but she'd been a wild-edged Calamity Jane when Aunt Esme decided to stay in New York and marry Uncle Oliver. Lilly should be happy to have a father after all these years. Rosie didn't understand the animosity Lilly bore toward Oliver—it wasn't like he had an affair with her mother, had disgraced the family name. Oliver was the co-publisher of the
Chronicle.
He had offices in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris. He'd made something of himself after growing up as a footman in the home of Esme and Jinx, their mothers. Lilly, the champion of the helpless and hunted, the bearer of all tales Wild West, should appreciate that.