The Second Mrs. Astor(18)
Madeleine and Katherine exchanged a look. Matthews, their butler, was genteel and efficient and about a thousand years old.
“Too late for any of that.” Katherine released the panel of lace. “The colonel’s here.”
The sound of an automobile roaring up the lane, powerful and rough, was impossible to miss. The man beneath the oak pushed away from its trunk, flicked his cigarillo to the grass, and crushed it beneath his heel. Madeleine began to pull on her gloves.
“Maddy,” Mother said sharply. “We are a civilized household. Allow Colonel Astor to come to the door.”
“No,” Madeleine said. “We’ll meet him outside. Otherwise, the next thing you know that fellow out there will be tapping at the windows to get his story, and soon everyone will be reading about the color of our walls and the arrangement of the furniture. Are you ready, Katherine? Yes? Let’s go.”
Mother sighed. “Poor Cook has spent half the morning preparing choux à la crème for him. She’ll be so crushed.”
“Tell her I’m sorry, I really am. We’ll have cream puffs by the ocean, anyway, I imagine. Or sandwiches. Or something. We’ll be back before you know it. ’Bye, Mother.”
She didn’t even wait for Matthews to reach for the door, didn’t pause to pacify her mother further or to see if her sister followed. Madeleine finished with her gloves, adjusted her hat, opened the front door, and walked outside into the sunlit day as if she had every right to do so.
Because she did. It was her home, on her street, and she did not have to be intimidated by a stranger beneath an oak. She didn’t. She wasn’t.
She chanced a swift glance at the man—he had abandoned his nonchalant pose to scrawl something in a notebook—but after that looked only at the colonel, still seated behind the wheel of his touring car in his driving cap and duster, breaking into a smile as he caught sight of her.
In the high back seat, Kitty was clambering to stand upright on the cushions beside Vincent, her tail tracing a wide, cheerful loop in the air.
“Great,” Katherine grumbled, hurrying to catch up. “I suppose I’ll have to sit in the back with Sir Surly so you can be next to Jack.”
“Keep the dog between you. She’ll be better company.”
*
They followed the coast for miles, with the engine of the shiny yellow Atlas a grinding, uneven roar in Madeleine’s ears as Jack shifted gears and slowed, shifted gears and sped up. Conversation without shouting was impossible. She kept one hand locked around the strap on the door and the other on her hat, watching the shoreline, the surf, the colonel. A distant haze blurred the horizon where the ocean kissed the sky, but closer in, both shone vivid blue. The air rushed by fresh and warm, almost tropical.
Every now and then, Kitty would poke her head over the front seat, eyes wide and tongue lolling, and Jack would reach over and rub her ears without taking his gaze from the road.
As far as Madeleine could tell, they’d left the man with the cigarillo behind; no one raced after them. They passed two plodding buggies and an elderly woman driving a one-horse shay, but that was all.
He took them to a cove she didn’t know and never would have guessed existed, its entrance half-hidden from the roadway behind a thicket of pine and wild sarsaparilla. A handful of chickadees scattered up to the topmost branches as they rumbled past, and a single brown hare leapt daringly right in front of them across the gravel, clearing the wheels by inches.
Madeleine watched it melt safely into the shadows of the woods, a fleet, secret life, there and gone.
The road narrowed, narrowed, until eventually it was little more than a footpath, choked with hobblebush and wintergreen and slabs of rock.
They left the Atlas parked off the side of the path—in case anyone else came by, although the odds seemed slim—and the colonel carried the heavy wicker hamper of food with both hands, leading the way to the sea. His son, just behind him, carried the blankets.
Kitty raced ahead, doubled back, raced ahead again.
Madeleine and Katherine, in their elegant layered skirts and modish heels, moved at a more moderate pace. As the trail grew rapidly more rocky and vertical, they picked their way along; the sound of lapping water made a low, lovely counterpoint to the crunch of stone underfoot and the birds gossiping above them.
The path curved, the trees opened, and all at once they were at the shore: a secluded wedge of sand framed by rugged pale rocks, glassy ripples of salt water rolling up along the slope of the beach to dissolve in sparkles and foam. More rocks broke the surface of the water farther out, sun-bleached and jagged, a giant strand of shark’s teeth protecting the cove, shattering the strongest of the waves.
Vincent began to unfold the woolen blankets. Kitty plunged into the water, prancing. She came out, threw herself at the colonel, shook the wet from her coat, then bounced back into the sea.
Katherine stood with her arms crossed while Madeleine laughed, and John Jacob Astor IV merely brushed the damp sand from his waistcoat before bending down to unpack the hamper.
*
As predicted, there were sandwiches: shaved ham and cheddar between thick slices of buttered bread, garden pickles on the side. There were also clusters of red grapes and green; cold chicken salad and smoked salmon on wafers. No cream puffs, but an assortment of blackberry tartlets, their crusts golden and crumbly. The hamper also produced two corked jugs of lemonade, still nicely cooled, and one of a very pale ale, which only Vincent drank.