The Second Mrs. Astor(2)

I wished, with all my heart, that I had any other book in my hands but the one I did. If he asked me about it, I’d either have to lie and say, yes, indeed, Grecian poetry was so divinely brilliant . . . or else admit that, like a toddler, I was merely entranced with the pretty shapes.

I looked up as he approached, tall and angular and so sharply handsome, his pale brown hair combed flat against his skull, his moustache neatly trimmed.

“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the burgundy leather chair opposite mine.

“Please do.” I closed the book and turned it over, so that the title and author were hidden against the folds of my skirt.

He sat. He crossed his legs. The sun-pebbled sea in the window behind him shot platinum along his hair and starched collar and the taupe serge of his lounge coat.

As I said, he was older than I, but in that moment, with light gleaming so bold and blinding behind him, he might have been a young man on the verge of his first brush with courtship.

He cocked his head, met my eyes directly.

“How lovely you are, Miss Force.”

I looked down at my lap as I had been taught, and murmured, “Thank you.”

“And how opaque.”

That made me look up again. Opaque? Was it a compliment?

The colonel smiled. “Like no woman I’ve ever known before. Your mind is a mystery to me.”

“Oh,” I said, “sometimes it is to me, as well! But I’m not really very mysterious, I’m afraid.”

He leaned back his head and laughed. I felt the sudden spark of the power of that, of making a man like John Jacob Astor laugh in genuine amusement. Of making him react. It rushed like lightning through my veins, hellish and bright.

I think, from that instant, we were both doomed.





CHAPTER 1


June 1907

Newport, Rhode Island

The first time she saw him, she was essentially invisible: thirteen years old, a schoolgirl on holiday, her hair dripping from the sea, sleek wet mermaid curls clinging to her arms and back. She was nestled, legs tucked under her, in the coarse silvery sand of Bailey’s Beach, her ruffled cap tossed beside her. Her nose was tingling hot and she didn’t care, because it was breezy and warm, and the sun was a high glorious pinpoint, and if it were ladylike in the least to stretch out all the way in her bathing costume to make a sand angel, she would have.

But Madeleine was not five; she was thirteen. And as it was just after eleven in the morning—the hour that only ladies were welcome to swim in the red algae-choked waves—Mother was bobbing nearby. She was always nearby. Maddy’s removal of her cap was transgression enough.

Gulls screamed and darted overhead. Madeleine lifted her chin and followed their loose circles, ragged-tipped wings, dragon shadows dipping and spinning against the sky.

A gaggle of girls a few years younger than she stood shrieking at the shoreline, kicking froth and sand at each other, too timid to venture all the way in but too aware of their bare shins and feet to resist the cool water. They were nearly louder than the birds.

Like Madeleine and every other female on the beach, the girls wore black. Black bathing bloomers, black shirtwaists with fat blossoming sleeves, everything from their necks to their knees down to the bones of their wrists thoroughly concealed. It was as though each and every summer noon, the exclusive strand of Bailey’s Beach became haunted by covens of fashionable, water-soaked witches.

A pair of carefully plodding bays hauled a carriage past the long arabesques of seaweed that marked the tideline, stopping at the very last stretch of dry sand. Blue-liveried footmen leapt free of the carriage; large, mysterious bundles were liberated from their leather straps in the back. Maddy twisted to watch as the men—who weren’t technically allowed on the beach right now, but they were only servants, so that was all right—swiftly erected a saffron-striped tent, complete with rug, wicker chair, and folding table, and then returned to the carriage to assist a solitary lady down to the sand.

She was white-haired, stooped. She squinted crossly at the sudden hard light but was so quickly guided inside the tent that Maddy barely had time to take note of the glimmer of jet beading on her dress and the garnet brooch pinned to her bosom. As soon as the lady was seated, a wind-tousled maid began unpacking a hamper for her meal.

“Ha,” breathed a voice in Maddy’s ear, accompanied by the sound of a body dropping down onto the grit beside her. Madeleine darted a look at her older sister (grinning and capless and somehow not at all sun-scorched), then looked back at the saffron-tent woman.

“Are you not awed?” Katherine drawled, leaning back on her arms, examining nothing but the unflagging sea rolling in before them. “Are you not suitably cowed?”

“Should I be?” Maddy asked.

“Yes, you certainly should be, little girl. That is Mrs. Astor. The Mrs. Astor. Dare to stare her in the eyes and you’ll turn into stone. Or is it burst into a pillar of flame? No, wait! You’ll be struck from the social register and die a shriveled old maid.” She gave an exaggerated shudder, still grinning. “The horror!”

Madeleine knew, of course, who Mrs. Astor was. Everyone knew. It was just that she had never seen her in person before; the Forces and the Astors didn’t move in the same social circles. Maddy had always imagined the matriarch of the venerable Knickerbocker set as a woman grown wiry and vicious and strong, with a smile of sharpened daggers and the fingernails of a warlord.