The Second Mrs. Astor(29)

She thought, Are they all pretending?

All those tittering scandal sheets were still being read. Madeleine’s lack, the scant merits of her blood, her family’s fortune, were still being weighed against theirs. Even Jack couldn’t protect her from that.

Katherine approached, carrying two coupes brimming with champagne.

“Those sleeves,” Madeleine murmured, without turning from the painting.

“That expression,” Katherine murmured back, handing her one of the etched crystal coupes, spilling a little on her glove. She lifted her glass in mock salute. “She looks as though she feasts upon orphaned children gone astray in the woods.”

“Hush! Everyone will hear you.”

“Never fear. I shall spend the evening as orthodox as a nun.”

“That would be a first. How much champagne have you had?”

“Honestly? Not nearly enough.”

Night had fallen, and it was still snowing outside, stronger now, thick and fast, cushioning all the outside sounds. The windows shone sable with curling fringes of frost, and all up and down the chamber shadows clung to the floor and ceiling and furniture and walls, a slightly milder sort of black than the black outside, sliced with patches of light.

Jack’s Manhattan residence was made of stone. Beneath the caramel oak woodwork, beneath the many rugs of wool and silk and royal tiger and polar bear, beneath the towering marble columns and archways and imported Italian tiles, was stacked block after block of sober hard stone. So with the snow keeping outside noises outside, and the stone trapping inside noises inside, everything in the chamber echoed, amplified, voices and footsteps and breathing; the splashing of the water in the fountain out in the entrance hall; laughter and veiled looks and the smell of floor polish and beeswax.

Gray, antique tapestries undulated with the draft against the walls, labored and slow, like the respiration of old elephants, but even those didn’t dampen the sound.

It was a concert hall of a house, a colossus twisting of a house, crammed with rare and beautiful things yet at the same time composed mostly of hollow air, of wraiths. It seemed impossible that anyone with a pulse could actually reside here, much less thrive.

She had dined at the Fifth Avenue mansion exactly three times before—informal dinners, family dinners, nothing like tonight—and on each occasion, she’d sensed how very easy it would be to be pulled apart by the history and expectations of this place. The life she would be required to live just to survive here.

Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, Junior, had designed the whole of her home to ensure that everyone but herself was made small in its rooms. And right now, Madeleine definitely felt small.

She should turn around. She should mix with the other guests. She should confront their stares and tilt her head and smile, as grim and unapproachable as the famed woman in the painting.

“I only wish it was over already,” she said under her breath.

Katherine opened her fan, hiding the lower half of her face behind a spread of feathers as she drained the last of her champagne. “Who knows? Tonight may be the night he musters his nerve.”

“May,” Madeleine said.

“May,” her sister concurred, matter-of-fact. “But either way, you’d better buck up. Even in the midst of clouds and doom, we must remain sunny. Mother will wring our necks otherwise.” She snapped her fan closed. “Sunny,” she hissed. And then, much louder: “Excuse me. I see Mother conversing with the Pulitzers, signaling me with her eyebrows that I need to come over.”

And, fan and coupe and all, she was gone.

Jack came near. The volume of conversation in the room dipped considerably before picking back up again. Madeleine sent him a brief, welcoming glance, then returned her gaze to the portrait. She deliberately avoided looking at the ruby ring.

He said, “She would have been fond of you, I think.”

Madeleine couldn’t help it; she allowed herself a dubious pursing of her lips.

He noticed. “No, sincerely. She was formidable in her way, of course, but also fair. She valued virtue. Goodness.”

She thought of the stories she’d heard—of débutantes melting into tears at Lina’s smiling insults, of grown women fleeing town in shame over her snubs—and bit her tongue. From the corner of her eye, she could see Jack rotating the signet ring on his pinkie, almost fretful, and wondered that such a man could have been carved from the flesh of a woman like that.

His nails were short and glossy, evenly filed. She liked the shape of his hands, the blue tracing of veins just visible beneath his skin. She liked the experienced look of those hands. Here was someone, surely, who could teach her how to banish whatever specters haunted these halls.

Madeleine said, “Your mother was a remarkable woman. I’m sorry we never met.”

“Yes. Yes, so am I.”

But he sounded distracted. It gave her the nerve to face him, angling herself so that the light from the candelabra nearby fell full upon her features. With her face upturned and the diamond stars in her hair, the blue of the gown that matched her eyes and set off the cream of her cheeks, she knew how she looked. She should know; she’d planned it down to the last detail.

That was the sum and skill of her life now, it seemed. How to make herself alluring to this magnetic, just-out-of-reach man.

His brows drew downward, his lashes lowering. He seemed almost pained.