Rumors (17 page)

“M
ISS BROAD, HOW LUCKY CAREY FOUND YOU
!” Lucy Carr, the merriest divorcée in New York society, cried happily as the older gentleman’s brougham came to a stop in front of her apartment house in the East Forties. Over dinner, she had told Lina ostensibly everything there was to know about her, and on the ride home she had kept her arm laced in the younger woman’s with a tautness that seemed to resist any potential letting go. The night air was chill and their breath came through their fur wrappings in mystical white gusts. “We are so in need of new blood in our set. And everybody but me is married, which gets
awfully
dull.”

“You forget me,” Mr. Longhorn put in from the opposing seat.

“Oh, surely
you
don’t count,” Mrs. Carr replied with a brassy laugh.

“You’re right, dear. I’m so old I sometimes forget that Central Park is a park at all and not some great wasteland of swamp and rock. But I did throw a lovely dinner, didn’t I?”

If Lina had once thought it would be difficult to catch his attention a second time, she had been disabused of this notion as soon as they crossed paths in the lobby and he asked her to dinner. She’d said yes, after which he apologized at length for having misunderstood her name at the opera. “It was a lovely good time, Mr. Longhorn.”

She said this with a shy sweetness that was the mode of flirtation for girls her age—or at least, it was the mode of flirtation she had seen employed by Elizabeth Holland in her own drawing room—although her feelings fully backed the sentiment. It had been a lovely day. They had raced sleighs in the park and dined in one of the private room at Sherry’s, which she had read about but never entered, and her nose was still a little red from the exertion and the champagne and she felt almost giddy at having met so many new people. She had caught her own reflection in plenty of mirrors and knew her eyes to be very bright. The ease with which she had been swept up by Longhorn’s circle startled her, but she didn’t mind. Anyway, their association was bound to be brief. The world seemed good after all just then, and very likely to supply her with the means to buy a ticket west any day now.

“Mrs. Carr,” Mr. Longhorn prompted. “Your apartment?”

“Oh, yes!” Lucy kissed Lina on the cheek and made her promise that they would soon be in each other’s company again. Once Mrs. Carr, and the long furs she was trailing, dis
appeared into the brightly lit lobby, the carriage jerked into motion. Mr. Longhorn and Lina did not speak again until the horses came to their final stop at the New Netherland.

“My dear,” the older gentleman said, as he came down to the sidewalk, “I haven’t had you to myself all evening. Won’t you come up for a brandy?”

“Of course, Mr. Longhorn.” Lina remained aloft for a moment on the carriage’s backseat. All was very still and quiet on the street, but those heroic buildings with their gilded flourishes rose above her, twinkling at the windows. She sighed, and then took Longhorn’s man’s arm so that he could help her down. “I’d be delighted.”

“You go on in then,” he said kindly. “I won’t have anyone talking about you going to an old man’s room late at night. Go to your room and take off your coat, and I’ll send Robert for you in a little while.”

Lina’s bottom lip trembled up under her teeth and she nodded. She went into the grand lobby, her feet falling lightly across the mosaic floor. She requested her key with such entitlement that she wondered briefly if Mr. Cullen wouldn’t mistake her for someone with a grander room. Then she crossed to the elevator and told the attendant what floor she was on without making the mistake of looking at him. The iron door closed and she felt herself rising.
I’m rising,
she thought,
I’m rising, I’m rising
.

“Carry yourself awfully high, don’t you?”

Lina’s breath stuck at the impertinence. Her cheeks flamed up as she waited for the attendant to turn. When he did she saw a reckless smile and a pair of hazel eyes that she recognized as Tristan’s. The light of the chandelier was suddenly blinding. She stepped back instinctually.

“Where did you get that uniform?”

“Ah, you underestimate me, my Carolina,” he answered with the same smile. “It seems you had a successful evening.”

“Yes.” Lina took a breath and began to recover herself. “He’s asked me up for brandy.”

“Good! He’ll soon be ours. But be careful—give him too much, and you’ll be as useless as any maid.”

“I won’t.”

“And for God’s sake, keep on the lookout for a new friend. Being seen with divorcées like Mrs. Carr is worse than having no friends at all.”

Lina didn’t ask herself how he knew about Mrs. Carr. “I’ll remember that.”

“And be careful not to say too much, or you may give yourself away.” Tristan moved his hand to the elevator’s lever.

“No, of course not.”

“And if it’s the only thing you remember: Pretend to drink, but in fact take little. He may get drunk, but be careful you do not.”

Lina nodded and continued nodding until he told her to stop. She would not have predicted what he did next once if she had been asked a thousand times, which was that he stepped toward her and tilted his head. She felt the leather-padded wall of the elevator against her back and his lips against hers. The skin of his face was rough as sand; her chest swelled up and it touched his. It was her first kiss, and it was both hard and soft at once. She had imagined Will doing this to her a hundred times, but imaginary kisses were nothing compared to the real thing. It felt like a whole bouquet of flowers opening in the light.

When the elevator jerked to a stop everything about her dress was in order and she stepped onto the ninth floor without looking back.

“Be ready, Miss Broad,” she heard Tristan say as she walked toward her room. “My next move comes soon.”

Lina was surprised at herself. For a girl who had just experienced her first kiss, her nerves were remarkably steady. She was careful not to take too much brandy even as Mr. Longhorn enjoyed his. She smiled charmingly as he told her stories about his country estate and his yacht and which of his business associates bored him particularly. Despite the cues Tristan had just given her, she was certain that everything she knew
about sitting still and appearing entranced she had learned from Elizabeth, but she didn’t mind this. Elizabeth had taken plenty from her. It was only fair to take a little back.

“I would like to take
you
to Paris…” Mr. Longhorn was saying. He had been talking about Paris quite a bit. His long limbs jutted out lazily from his rather full center, which a velvet smoking jacket, of a slightly deeper shade than the one he had been wearing when they met, encased richly. He had put off his cigar for the moment, which Lina was thankful for. No one in the Holland household had ever smoked them—except, occasionally and in secret, Edith, old Mr. Holland’s sister—and so she was unused to their odor. “Paris,” he went on wistfully, “is where every good thing happened to me.”

They were situated on rich brown club chairs in front of a roaring fire in the sunken sitting room of Longhorn’s suite. The cut-glass decanter sat between them, and Longhorn’s man hovered in the background. It was impossible to know what the hour was, although Lina wasn’t sure she had ever been awake so late, at least not this way.

“Surely not
every
good thing,” Lina said.

“No, not every good thing,” Mr. Longhorn returned gaily. The lines of his well-lived-in face deepened, and he tossed his head back. His gray hair grew most thickly on the sides of his head and over his ears, Lina noticed, although it was still an impressive head of hair. “Not everything at all! But I was
there when I was a young man, so I can’t help but associate it with the best times.”

Lina smiled blandly at this. She wasn’t sure how else to respond and so she did as Tristan had instructed and kept quiet, which the passing seconds proved to be a reaction of which Longhorn approved.

“See how young I used to be!”

Lina looked around her, almost expecting to see some apparition of his younger self. She saw him gesture, instead, toward a wall of portraits that she had glanced at cursorily on her entrance and taken to be nothing more than his famous collection of beauties. They were all portraits, it was true, but as she rose and approached she saw that one of the thick gold frames contained the likeness of a man in his twenties. He had a mane of black hair and a nose still fine and sculptured. But she recognized the high cheekbones and the playful eyes, and she saw clearly enough where Mr. Longhorn got his taste for old-fashioned collars. She looked at the painting and felt a passing longing for her first kiss to have been with a gentleman like that.

“This was you?” she whispered.

“Yes, back when all the girls would have had me.” Mr. Longhorn paused and took a sip of his brandy. “I hope you don’t think me immodest, Miss Broad, to say so. But that was how I was then. I sometimes wish—several times a day even—
that I’d not been so taken with myself and had chosen a wife. Then I wouldn’t be so alone now. But I also can’t help being a little impressed by myself when I look back.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you,” Lina said, flushing a little at the sincerity in her voice. She looked away from Longhorn’s portrait, and across the framed depictions of beauties past and present. There they were in rosy watercolor or in broad, colorful strokes of oil, with their painted cheeks and fitted silks. She felt a kind of longing to be among them, to be considered so beautiful that some painter would want to immortalize her. For a moment she forgot that she was not alone and lost herself in staring at the portraits. That was when her eyes fell on Elizabeth Holland.

Her portrait was small and framed in simple black tole. She was positioned so that her body faced away from the viewer, but she looked back over her shoulder with a look of utter self-possession. The strokes that rendered her were light and airy, but everything about the likeness was Elizabeth: the small, round mouth, the innocent, wide-set eyes, the pale, clear skin with touches of apricot coloring at the nose and pointed chin. She was wearing a dress of pale pink silk that Lina remembered dressing her in.

Lina turned away, hoping it wasn’t obvious to her host how badly she wanted to be like the girl in the painting, and walked toward the high casement windows that looked down
on the park. She could see now why her room cost only what it did. Mr. Longhorn’s suite had several rooms, with antique furniture and a fireplace that would have dwarfed the Hollands’. More impressive yet, it looked not over a street but over a park. A huge and elegant park that spread below them: bare, purple trees in the snow contained neatly by a rim of buildings on each side as though it were Longhorn’s own personal flower bed.

It was the end of an evening in which she had known what it was to be envied and admired. Gazing down at that view, she found that these experiences only made her long for more. When she left the window, she couldn’t help but glance one last time at Longhorn’s portrait. Oh, if only she could have known him
then.

“Mr. Longhorn.” She had turned away from the youth in the picture and was now looking at the real thing. His heavy lids had closed while she was at the window, and they reopened only slowly now.

“Oh…Carolina,” he replied after a minute. He seemed to have forgotten himself, but when he recognized her, he smiled contentedly. “How happy you make me, my dear,” he added, a little sadly.

Lina’s gaze drifted to Robert, in a black swallowtail coat and pants of the same color. He was watching her. Even his brass buttons shone in her direction.

A moment ago, Lina’s opinion of herself had been quite high. It sank a little now, when she saw how Robert was looking at her. His face was placid, and he was observing the scene as though it were one he’d witnessed before. Her sense of herself as a success might have been further reduced had not a sound at the door called him to attention. When Robert opened the door she found that the winds had changed direction again.

For there was Tristan, wearing the brown suit of a Lord & Taylor salesman and wielding a rather ominous collection of oblong envelopes. She could feel the impress of his lips on hers, as though the kiss had occurred only seconds ago—as though it had left a mark. He brushed past Robert and stood looking down on Mr. Longhorn.

“I am sorry to interrupt, but I have been trying to find Miss Broad everywhere.”

“What seems to be the matter?” Mr. Longhorn replied coldly. He sat up now, alert.

“I’ve never seen this man.” Lina’s voice was hoarse and she felt very much like a skiff battered in a gale. Tristan had mentioned a next move, but this seemed awfully soon. Her confidence began to erode. She seemed again very close to being exposed.

“Surely, Miss Broad, you remember me from Lord and Taylor’s department store?” Tristan pressed.

“Oh! But I go to so many stores….” He was looking at her intensely, which only worsened the heat rising in her cheeks. “I guess my memory gets a little bad sometimes.”

“Miss Broad can forget department store clerks just as often as she pleases,” Mr. Longhorn cut in. “I really don’t see how that justifies your interruption. It is very late, and this is my private room, so state your business or get out.”

A few moments ago, Longhorn had considered her one of the bright young things. But here was her friend, the con artist, come to dispel any of those notions. Lina closed her eyes and waited for things to fall apart.

“I apologize for the hour, but I have been waiting in the lobby for Miss Broad since six. It’s about these bills—”

“Bills? You bother me with
bills
so late in the evening?”

Lina opened her eyes. The older gentleman had drawn himself up. Even though he leaned against the arm of the chair for support, the derision in his voice was biting, and she actually thought she saw Tristan shrink backward a hair.

“I’ll thank you to have Miss Broad’s bills sent directly to my office on Prince Street from now on, and that you molest the young lady herself no further. You know the address? Good. My man will make sure you find the way out.”