Anna Godbersen - Envy

• Название: Envy
• Автор: Anna Godbersen
• Издательство: HarperCollins
• Жанр: Исторические любовные романы
• Год: 2009

Jealous whispers.

Old rivalries.

New betrayals.

Two months after Elizabeth Holland's dramatic homecoming, Manhattan eagerly awaits her return to the pinnacle of society. When Elizabeth refuses to rejoin her sister Diana's side, however, those watching New York's favorite family begin to suspect that all is not as it seems behind the stately doors of No. 17 Gramercy Park South.

Farther uptown, Henry and Penelope Schoonmaker are the city's most celebrated couple. But despite the glittering diamond ring on Penelope's finger, the newlyweds share little more than scorn for each other. And while the newspapers call Penelope's social-climbing best friend, Carolina Broad, an heiress, her fortune — and her fame — are anything but secure, especially now that one of society's darlings is slipping tales to the eager press.

In this next thrilling installment of Anna Godbersen's bestselling Luxe series, Manhattan's most envied residents appear to have everything they desire: Wealth. Beauty. Happiness. But sometimes the most practiced smiles hide the most scandalous secrets. .

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Carolina was a little disappointed that Elizabeth had already gone to bed, leaving Teddy Cutting without a partner, for it meant that she would not be forced any longer to witness her former maid’s entry into the rare world of which she had once been the undisputed princess. For a moment, Carolina wondered uncharitably if her onetime mistress had found another member of the staff to have midnight assignations with. But it didn’t matter, really. There were plenty of witnesses to Carolina’s total acceptance into the fold, and some of them might even cable their contacts in the newspaper business about it tomorrow. They were all her friends, or something nearly as good — they had to be nice to her, they had to have her on their little trips now. She was possessed of her own intrinsic social value, and none of their petty jealousies or little games could take that from her.

“Miss Carolina Broad?”

When the diminutive man in the bow tie said her name, Leland came to a stop. She realized that she was no longer dancing with the man who that afternoon had given her reason to anticipate a possible proposal, and then she felt herself, however irrationally, beginning to hate this messenger, who was waiting patiently off to the side, and whatever it was he had to say to her.

“Yes?”

“You have a telegram.”

“Well, give it to my maid, then,” she replied brusquely, as if she were in the habit of receiving late-night telegrams, before moving back toward Leland. He waited for her beside the white latticework on the far side of the dance floor, which protected the guests from the view of the inner workings of the kitchen. There was a real grapevine climbing up it — Carolina had surreptitiously checked earlier in the evening.

“I did.” The man paused, and there was something terrible in the way he hesitated over his next words. “She said that you should be summoned at once. She said you would want to respond immediately. Our correspondence room, where you may want to avail yourself of our telegraph, is on the first floor, just past the—”

A thousand harsh words for this man brimmed in her throat, but somehow none rose off her tongue. Carolina knew that the disappointment of being taken away from the center of things was humiliatingly obvious in her face, although when she looked at Leland she did attempt a brave smile. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she managed.

“I hope so.” Leland’s features were so full of kindness that she could not look at them. “Do you want me to accompany you?” he offered.

Whatever the news, some instinct told her that Leland must not hear it. She shook her head and turned to the man with the bow tie, who led her away from the dance floor, where everyone worth knowing and everything worth seeing would continue to go on without her. As she stepped back into the main lobby of the hotel, she looked at the elaborate pattern of the carpet and felt the horrible tightness of her high-heeled slippers with the little gold crests on the toe.

The correspondence room was all polished oak and gadgetry edged in gold. It was well, almost harshly, lit, and Carolina felt ungainly again beside the fastidious little man. He handed her the telegram, and for a moment she wished that she could hand it back and make it untrue. She wished she could return to the ballroom and go on dancing with Leland forever. But there was nothing that could undo the finality of what she read:

THE WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY

TO: Carolina Broad

ARRIVED AT: 25 The Royal Poinciana,

Palm Beach, Florida

2:00 a.m., Sunday, February 18, 1900

Carey Lewis Longhorn dead this evening after a short illness. His final request was your presence at his funeral — You must return to New York posthaste — I have purchased tickets for you and maid on the train 12 p.m. tomorrow — Upon arrival, discontinue her services.

Yours, Morris James, Esq.

Chief Executor of the Longhorn Estate

Carolina closed her eyes and folded the telegram. A long, cold shudder passed through her body. The events of the day, in all its illuminated perfection, seemed very far away now, but she couldn’t help but realize what awfulness had passed while she was thinking highly of herself and dashing around in horseless carriages. Her memory was overwhelmed by the image of him, on the docks that day, and how very much he had wanted her to stay.

Then, just as quickly, her sadness gave way to another emotion. It seemed impossible that Longhorn could have expired so quickly, and for a moment she was angry that no one warned her of the possibility. But there was no one to blame, and no matter how her heart yearned for it, nothing Leland could do to save her from this. She tried to look as high and mighty as before, and told the man in the bow tie that she would need tea in her room, as there would be much packing to do.

Twenty Five

Men talk themselves into all kinds of trouble at the card table — that is the true reason that real ladies do not go to such places, ever.

— MRS. L. A. M. BRECKINRIDGE, THE LAWS OF BEING IN WELL-MANNERED CIRCLES

THE MUSIC OF THE ORCHESTRA COULD STILL BE heard in the little casino that was adjacent to the ballroom, and though the decorations were all of cheery, sporting green and white, the dark-suited men who crowded the tables gave it quite a different effect. They all had at least one thing in common, which was that they had had enough of dancing. Though for Henry, who bent to slap away some of the sand that still clung to his trousers, dancing was the least of the reasons he wanted to escape.

“Brother!”

Henry’s eyebrows lifted, and the rest of him followed shortly thereafter. Grayson Hayes was sitting at a card table, and at some point in the last two hours his bow tie had come undone and his jacket had disappeared. There had been several hours that afternoon when Henry had hated nothing in the world as he hated Grayson, for he’d been flirting with Diana endlessly — Henry’s Diana — and she had at times seemed to return his attentions. But he liked the man a little better as he was now — far from any women, his heart racing over a game instead of a fine figure.

Henry signaled to a passing waiter for a drink, and then pulled up a chair.

“Could you lend me twenty?” Grayson asked.

Henry couldn’t help the droll smile that played at the edges of his mouth. He waited a moment before nodding to the dealer. “Charge it to my room,” he said, and then fresh chips were produced. There was some fatigue beginning to show under Grayson’s eyes, but the attentive hunch of his shoulders suggested he was many hours from bedtime yet. Henry crossed his legs and lit a cigarette.

“Where’s Penny?” Grayson asked presently.

“I don’t know.” Henry had left her on the dance floor, but he was too consumed with the image of Diana half-drenched, her clavicles exposed in the moonlight, the silk sleeves of her dress clinging to the arms that had once hung around his neck so joyously. Henry’s characteristic pose was one of stylish indifference, and he doubtless still looked like that now as he exhaled contemplatively. But he was, in truth, full of fire.

“She’s smiling and explaining away your absence now, but she’ll have your head later,” Grayson said. “Oh, boy, drink up. I wouldn’t want to be you tomorrow.”

Henry’s drink had arrived, and — knowing this last bit to be true — he took a healthy sip. “Who cares?” he muttered.

To his surprise, Grayson chuckled. “And she used to be such a sweet girl.”

“Oh, I only meant—”

“Don’t worry, Schoonmaker. And don’t think I don’t know she sometimes likes to pull the strings like some puppet master from hell.” The hand ended, but Grayson’s eyes had lost none of their animal quality. “Could you lend me another twenty?”

Henry waved his cigarette at the dealer in confirmation and finished his drink. He tried to discern the waiter, out there amongst all the other men in black and white, in order to request another drink. But the waiter had already seen him and was on his way, and after Henry had taken a sip of the fresh Scotch he felt loose enough to prod a bit.

“You seem awfully fond of Diana Holland.”

Grayson was distracted by his hand, and Henry experienced a terrible moment when his words hung in the air without hope of a response. Eventually his brother-in-law looked over, revealing a sparkle in his eye. “She embodies all varieties of feminine beauty,” he said, taking a cigarette from the box that Henry had left on the edge of the table and placing it for a moment between his broad front teeth. “She is perfection in a woman.”

Henry’s mind’s eye filled, briefly, with the chaos that would ensue if he struck his brother-in-law across the jaw.

But then Grayson continued: “Her mother must have been strenuous in raising her, though. There’s a door no man can crack. She’s quite young, quite naïve, more protected even than her sister. I can’t get so much as a kiss on the cheek out of her.”

Henry’s shoulders relaxed, and in celebration of this news he drained the contents of his sturdy glass. He circled his finger in the general direction of the waiter, indicating that he wanted drinks for his friend and himself as well. He knew that he should abandon the conversation there and then, but Diana was everywhere in his thoughts and on his tongue. “She is lovely…” he continued, almost to himself.

“Ah!” Grayson looked up at the ceiling fans and smiled to himself. “That pink skin. Those dreamy lashes.”

Henry closed his eyes, and imagined the sweet, petulant woundedness with which she had stared at him on the beach. He felt a little proud that she could love him. “And she moves so gorgeously.”

“I tell you, Schoonmaker, she doesn’t know what she has. That’s the heart of it. She’s like some wild creature who hasn’t a clue the worth of its coat.” Grayson paused to up his bet and then assumed a philosophical tone. “Whoever wins her in the end will be a lucky man indeed.”

More drinks arrived, and the colors in the room grew both brighter and less distinct for Henry. Grayson became engrossed in cards again, and asked to borrow more money, but the last thing he’d said about Diana had lodged itself in Henry’s head and begun to put down roots. He lit another cigarette and thought on it, and also on his promise to her, and how he would keep it.

The arrangement of the furniture in the best suite in the Royal Poinciana had never seemed so treacherous. It was all blurry, low-lying forms, although the moonlight did glaze the tiled floor. Henry’s eye followed the glittering reflection to the French doors, which were thrown open onto the terrace. The silvery trail ended in a fluted skirt of white chiffon dotted with black that was cinched at the waist and then spread over the bust and up to the shoulders dramatically, where the fabric was gathered with black ribbons. His wife was still wearing her long black gloves, although they had slipped somewhat at the elbows, and she had put all the weight of her long body against the voluptuous carved wood balustrade.

The sky was turning from purple to navy, and beyond Penelope the tops of the palms were just visible, like the unkempt heads of giants. The moon above her had grown hazy under the clouds, but still it glinted in her hair and on her bracelets. He hated her then, not just for having cost him so much, not just for all the hypocrisy and vanity and stupid greed she embodied, but because he had returned to her, even now, when all his being wanted to be elsewhere. He looked at her back — for she showed no signs of turning toward him — and imagined all the ways he might tell her he would leave. But his tongue was as useless as some mud-bound carriage.

Out on the terrace, Penelope remained still, except that she bent her ear toward her shoulder — it seemed to him that no gesture had ever contained such malicious self-possession. His mouth did open once or twice, but his anger had grown and sat in the way of words.

Now his feet were carrying him across the floor, his conscious mind trailing a few beats behind his heavy, drunken footsteps. He had seen how easy it would be. Without any words he could sidestep all the messy legal entanglements, all the cutting judgments of society. His wife was leaning carelessly there, four stories above the gravel walk, and if she leaned too far — trying to catch a glimpse of Lady Dagmall-Lister’s bejeweled coiffure, say, or the flight of a parrot from one low branch to another — then she might stumble, lose balance, and fall to her death. Her neck would snap in painless seconds, and then she would have no way of preventing her husband from finally being with the girl he truly loved. The girl who was somewhere in those hundreds of rooms, believing his promise…

Henry had traveled across the room with forceful speed, removing his jacket as he did and dropping it on the tiles, but something stopped him at the threshold of the terrace. The warm outside air met him like a thick, damp curtain, and Penelope twisted to look at him. Her bottom lip quivered and the corners of her eyes turned down in sorrow. She watched him, and he watched her, and then he knew that the danger had passed. She had seen the idea in him, and now he recognized the full horror of it reflected in her eyes.

Henry gripped the doorframe, unsteady and panting a little, shocked by what he had discovered himself to be nearly capable of. The rich fabric of her dress was contorted around her long body, and even in the darkness she had the appearance of a woman who had seen too much.

Time passed, and then she said, “I don’t blame you for wanting to kill me.”

Her head swayed away, as heavy on her long neck as overripe fruit. A few of the short dark hairs on the back of her neck floated down, away from her coiffure and toward the clasp of the diamond and onyx necklace that she had had to buy for herself as a wedding present. Below them women in evening wear and festooned hairpieces were teetering through the Coconut Grove, a little worse for drinking, laughing just slightly too loud in response to the sweet lies of suitors who were growing generous with the waxing of the moon. Her shoulders slumped, and she gave him an imploring look, as though she would rather he’d just go ahead and do it.

“Penelope”—his voice broke over the name—“I could never—”

“Oh, Henry,” she sighed. “No one would blame you.”

A few moments ago he would have agreed, but he’d climbed some great summit and descended into an unfamiliar valley since then. “It would be…I’m sorry.”

But she did not seem to hear him. She put her hand farther back on the balustrade, and leaned on it as though she were trying to better hear the faint music of the orchestra. Her position looked precarious, and he worried briefly that she might push herself over. He decided that he was close enough to stop her, but then he took a woozy step toward her and felt the floor wobble under his feet, and in the end nothing dramatic happened. She stood and gazed at Henry with those same aged eyes, and then she took a shaky breath and tried to smile bravely, once or twice, without ever quite succeeding.