The Second Mrs. Astor(24)

“You are young yet, but God gave you intelligence—”

“Why, thank you,” she said, dry.

“—and a sensible head on your shoulders. I want you to think very carefully about the path you’re treading now. About where it’s going to lead you.”

She turned her face to his. In the deepening dusk, his silver hair became phantom gray, barely discernible. “I promise you, Dad, I think about it every day.”

“No doubt.” He lifted her hand, the one with the tabloid, taking the crumpled pages from her fingers, smoothing the paper flat again against his leg. “You understand, don’t you, that all I’ve ever wanted for you is your happiness?”

“Of course,” she said, surprised.

“But the quality of that happiness . . . I’ve devoted a great deal of thought to that subject lately, something I likely should have done years ago. The quality of happiness. The shape and texture of it. The endurance of it. Believe it or not, I remember what it’s like to fall in love for the first time. To be young and fearless, when the future is spread before you in every color of the rainbow, everything bright, everything impossible suddenly made possible. You’re invincible then.”

She nearly laughed. “I don’t think I’m invincible.”

“Don’t you?” He nodded. “Good. That’s something, to understand that we humans are creatures of marl and earth. Forgive me now, child, but I am your father, and being a father comes with certain prerogatives, so I’m going to ask if you love him.”

She was silent. The sky was deepening, clouding, blue on blue, a wide, curved sapphire at the bottom of a lake.

“Because love is a tremendous gift, Maddy. A gift and a burden. Marriage especially is more than just hope and luck and a handshake. Marriage is work, enormous work, because it’s a living entity that needs everlasting attention. It will push you and bend you and test you, and if you’re not prepared for any of that, it will shatter you. I imagine the colonel could tell you something about what that’s like.”

She stared at the black tall trees, the swimming blue light.

“Being in love makes all that work easier, but it does not make it go away. There will be necessary sacrifices. There will be pain. So I’ll ask you again: Do you think you’re in love with him?”

She sighed. “I could be. He’s—oh, he’s wonderful in so many ways. I could be in love.”

“But you’re not certain.”

Madeleine scowled down at her lap, trying to explain. “When I’m with him, I feel like I’m practically a different person. I feel so . . . noticed. I’m not sure how else to describe it. He looks at me and it’s almost as if he’s given me a magical ability, the ability to be seen. Almost like being on stage again, all lit up, but even better, because it’s only the two of us.” She plucked at her skirt. “But then, when we’re apart, I’m just me again. And I think, well, maybe it was all pretend. My imagination run riot.”

“Will you marry him?’

She felt that heated jolt rise through her, that hot confusion of mortification and hope; she wanted to spring up, she wanted to jump from the swing and leave, but she didn’t. She remained sitting, pressing her palms against the slats of the bench.

“Katherine asked me the same thing, back at his cottage.”

“Katherine is far more savvy than the rest of us, I suspect.”

Madeleine crossed her legs and kicked up a foot, up, down, trapped and restless, and the folds of her dress hissed with each kick, and the bench rocked and creaked. “He hasn’t asked me to marry him.”

“He will, though. Unless he’s an absolute scoundrel—and despite the tales, I don’t believe that’s true—he will ask.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe he will, or he won’t. I don’t know. I want him to, but I don’t know why he would.”

Father’s eyebrows raised. “Don’t you?” he said again.

“I don’t,” she said fiercely. “And I realize you’re my father, and you’ll tell me all sorts of reasons of why I’m so special, why Jack should want to be with me, but in the end, it’s not up to you or me, is it? It isn’t. It never is. The man holds all the power in courtship, and always will. So I can’t—I can’t let myself worry about marriage now. If he does ever ask, I’ll worry about it then.”

Father paused, looking at her. The swinging bench creaked slowly back and forth. “You have power too, Madeleine. You have the power to walk away.”

“But I don’t want to,” she whispered.

“Then I fear marriage is a worry for today, not tomorrow. John Jacob Astor is no ordinary man. He carries a storm on his back wherever he goes, a tempest of unremitting scrutiny.” He tapped the battered tabloid against his thigh. “The rumors, the journalists, the gossip sheets . . . it’s important for you to comprehend that we stand at the beginning of it all still. Aligning yourself with the colonel, with his family—with all that would entail—means this storm will never end for you. Ever.”

“I’m not afraid of that,” she said, willing it to be true. Because it was Jack, wasn’t it? Jack, who could smile at her over a cider doughnut and make her feel like the luckiest girl in the world, like she’d only been waiting to be discovered until he had discovered her.