The Second Mrs. Astor(6)
Point scored.
And yet, in Madeleine’s hidden heart, she could only marvel at the obedience of her peers, those girls who could sink into such quiescence that their voices never rose, their skirts never twitched with a restless foot as they sat; their hair was never mussed and their jewelry never fiddled with. She wondered if they fell asleep like that, facial expressions composed and pleasant, hands arranged neatly over their bellies and legs pressed together.
She wanted a gallop, not a trot. She wanted the sun burning her face, the wind ripping at her hair, rather than the soft, safe comfort of salons and tea parties and early evening soirées.
And yet.
The al fresco dinner at the cottage named Beau Desert had been on the Force calendar for weeks. It was one of the more coveted invitations of the season; barring actual death, Madeleine knew there was no avoiding it. The afternoon layer of low, lustrous clouds streaking abalone across the sky had at last dissolved away. This close to sunset, the horizon glowed empty and clean, an incandescent heaven melting into the darkened bay. The Porcupine Islands in the distance bristled green and ochre and velvet black above the water.
Beau Desert’s splendid garden itself, so neatly composed of shell-and-gravel paths, nodding flowers and fragrant herbs, had been enhanced for the evening with silver-trayed offerings of champagne and cold canapés, and a string trio playing from a gazebo nestled amid the pines. Paper lanterns crisscrossed the sky overhead, radiant embers, whimsical fireflies, swaying gently on their wire lines with the breeze.
The dinner tables, dressed in damask and wisp-thin china, had been arranged atop the scattering of grass rectangles and ovals and squares framed by the paths. (Anticipating a spongy lawn, Mother had insisted they all wear slippers with low heels.) As twilight began to descend in earnest, women in pale silken sheaths and men in white tie glided through the trees and flowers, meeting, breaking apart, ghosts with soft chattering voices and bursts of muted laughter.
Despite the paper lanterns, the garden supplied plenty of shadows. Mother and Father stood sipping champagne with their hosts by a trellis frothing with honeysuckle, but Madeleine had lost sight of her sister not five minutes after their arrival. The last she had seen of her, Katherine had been headed toward the rose maze with an admirer on each arm.
Katherine, confident queen of both admirers and dinner parties, knew she’d have at least another twenty minutes of venial sin before they’d be seated for the meal.
Madeleine was hardly queen of anything. She stood alone in the sifting crowd and felt surprisingly unmoored, even though she had known this party and these people most of her life. She looked around, searching for (not him, certainly not him) anyone from the League—Carol or Nathalie or Leta—but either none of her friends were here yet, or else, like Katherine, they were taking quick advantage of the secret corners of the estate.
So she became one of the ghosts. She sipped from her own flute of champagne and rambled down a path of crushed oyster shells that gleamed before her like an ashen ribbon, unwinding into the dusk.
The air began to cool. It wasn’t long before she regretted her own silk sheath, floaty layers of coral edged with lace and very little else. She handed her glass to a passing footman and shivered, just for a moment, as the wind skimmed along the exposed skin of her chest and neck and upper arms. It ruffled through her hair, wayward strands already coming loose from her Psyche knot, and turned the pearls at her throat into stone.
The string trio began a new piece, the barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann. She paused beneath a gold bobbing lantern, closing her eyes to take in the notes, imagining how she would dance to it, the placement of her feet, the man who would hold her in his arms—
When she opened her eyes again, she saw, utterly without astonishment, a second shadow overlapping her own.
“Miss Force,” said the colonel, just behind her. “Pardon me. I hope I don’t startle you.”
Madeleine turned to face him. “Not at all.”
He was elegant and black-clad and taller than she, enough so that she had to tip back her head to meet his gaze. It was a strange sensation, and an unfamiliar one; Madeleine was tall for a girl, and most boys her age looked at her straight on.
She thought, This is what it’s like to feel dainty.
They studied each other, motionless in the hitch and trick of the swaying gold light. He seemed almost exactly as he had the night before, his hair precisely cut and combed; his ebony tailcoat immaculate; his expression a combination of gravity and absolute focus, as if nothing else existed in the world other than her.
She remembered that day on the beach in Newport; how she’d thought him comely. But comely wasn’t the right word for him, she thought now. It was too simple, too shallow to describe him. It was true that he had little of the muscular charisma of the young men she’d spy down at the docks, sunburnt and joking, sons of lobstermen grown to be lobstermen themselves, hauling in their daily catch. But neither was he one of the pale, paunchy gentlemen of her father’s circle, who golfed leisurely and dined voraciously, and spoke only of market fluctuations and real estate prices and the abundant promise of industrialization.
When she had been still in pinafores, Colonel Astor had outfitted an entire regiment in the Spanish-American War and then gone with them to do battle down in Cuba. He was a scion of the most blue-blooded family in America, head of a massive fortune, and distant cousin of President Roosevelt himself. He had traveled the globe purely because he’d wished to do so, visited lands her imagination could not stretch to encompass, and in the hush of the moment, Madeleine could very nearly catch the scent of those wild, exotic adventures still lingering upon him like a perfume—gunpowder and sharp spice and the dust of faraway trails.