…at the same gathering, the enchanting Miss Diana Holland was seen chatting intimately with Mr. Teddy Cutting. She’s also been spotted recently at the opera with Spencer Newburg and skating in the park with Percival Coddington. One might infer that Mrs. Holland is looking to make a match? Of course, Cutting’s position, fortune, and age make him the most suitable of these suitors….
—FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1899
HENRY CROSSED HIS LEGS AND SHIFTED IN THE wooden rocker that was positioned so as to casually access a view into the long main room of the Schoonmaker greenhouse. He was wearing trousers with whisper-thin pinstripes and a cream shirt fastened at the wrist with cuff links that bore his initials. Dressing well was a habit for Henry, but he had put extra care into what he wore that particular Friday evening. This despite the fact that he was on house arrest, after celebrating his renewed hopes for a life with Diana Holland with a group of drunken Christmas carolers. He had brought extra blankets to the gardener’s old bedroom himself and lit the small wood-burning stove, but still he was concerned that Diana, when she came, would not be warm enough.
He had been stuck inside the house for two days, during which time he had done little but experience a building frustration and dream of Diana. He had rallied all his ingenuity to find a way to slip her a note without his father getting mind of it.
Of course now it was well past the appointed time, and there was still no sign of her. He had gone out twice to sneak along the gate and look for her, but a prolonged presence there would only have given him away. Since then he’d had a good hour to contemplate whether this was the longest he had ever waited for a woman. While it far outdistanced the third occasion, it only came in second, after an evening one summer in Newport when he waited for a woman whose smile gleamed with the same pristine glory as her wedding ring and who, the hours finally proved, was never going to show up. He had already known in his heart that she wasn’t coming, and as such was so thoroughly boozed up that he wouldn’t have been allowed to return to gentle company anyway. He instead lay back in the grass and thought maudlin thoughts about love and matrimony and how he would never engage in either.
His mood was different now. He was entirely sure that Diana was on her way to him, that he was in her thoughts as she was in his, and that the time before they were again together was finite. Quite finite.
Still, waiting was not something he was used to; he was not, in any event, doing it very gracefully. He stood, walked around the bed, arched his neck to look at the curved ceiling with its glass panes in their white iron web, which hung over the simple bed buried in quilts. He breathed in the rich, earthy air and straightened his collar. He checked the smoothness of his vaguely golden skin over his high cheekbones in a small mirror and wondered if he had time to get a bottle of wine from the cellar. He turned, finally, back to the chair, where he crossed his legs in the other direction and then began rustling through a pile of newspapers on a wrought-iron table that had been painted white. He supposed the gardener brought them there so that he could read something while he was taking lunch. Henry reminded himself that he should check with the gardener, who was now living with one of Isabelle’s seamstresses in the main servants’ quarters, to see how much time he spent there before he planned another rendezvous, as he was already planning for many more.
Of course, that was an attitude he had before he began idly flipping through the old newspapers in a vain attempt to pass the time. Henry was not naturally interested in world events or stock crises or theater reviews or the problem of public drunkenness amongst the city’s coachmen and cabdrivers. He was interested in yachting and horses, topics amply covered by that week’s papers and that he might have read about on another occasion. At that particular moment, with the stars positioned as they were, he was only really prepared to read to the bottom of a sentence that contained the words Diana and Holland. And after a few moments of shiftless reading he did find one.
The paragraph began innocently enough with some account of a dinner party of Florence Cutting’s—she was Mrs. Darroll now; a few other details followed, but Henry wasn’t reading that part so carefully—which apparently Diana, his Di, had attended. Not only attended, but spent in the company of his friend Teddy. The “intimate” company. This word conjured for Henry all the irritating ways his friend behaved when he took a special liking to a girl—stroking her hand and fetching anything she might have a vague desire for and generally being overly solicitous in a way that no man in his right mind would ever have the patience to be. Henry read the item again four times but found the account unchanged.
Now he saw why Teddy had been so against his relationship with Diana. It was because Teddy wanted her for himself. Henry balled up the paper and threw it onto the bed.
He walked through the long central passageway of the greenhouse, surrounded by year-round hyacinths and orchids, and into the main house with a single thought. He must find Diana and demand to know what had happened. Before she told him too much he would explain how insufferable Teddy was, what a do-gooder, how often—against his own sense of style and his best friend’s frequent cajoling—he succumbed to decorum. He would tell her how Teddy, like an old matron after too much tea, had discouraged their love…. But of course, this line of thinking only made Henry realize how much his friend had gained by stalling him.
Henry continued through the small first-floor galleries with the idea of finding a servant who might be able to help him locate a coat. It was cold, he knew that much, and he had no time to ascend the stairs to his own suite of rooms. He was thinking about the coat and whether he should in fact go to Teddy first when he stumbled into one of the private drawing rooms and saw that it was occupied. By his father, stepmother—though he still had a hard time thinking of her that way—and Penelope Hayes.
“Oh, Henry!” his stepmother gasped, turning in her chair and batting her fan with some mixture of cunning and glee. She was wearing a dress of black chiffon that gathered in folds at the bust like a Grecian gown and cascaded from her shoulders like wings. White lace covered her slim arms and her neck all the way up to her chin. “So glad to see you. We are having one of these private little quiet evenings, which we fashionable people are being said to prefer this season, and it’s boring me half to death. Since you were the last one to bring shame on the family, the very least you could do is join us.”
“Oh, do,” Penelope seconded in a voice that subtly contained—he knew it well enough—the intention to seduce. She was clothed all in off-white. It was not her color. She was cold, and there was something about her skin that suggested death.
“You must excuse me,” Henry began, backing for the door. Isabelle arched a blond brow, and Penelope’s fan came down to her lap in a swoop. He saw in an instant that the women were colluding with each other. “You see, it’s that I’ve got to—”
Henry was cut off by the sound of the carved and polished legs of his father’s chair as they screeched backward against the floor. The man’s solid frame came to standing and then crossed the parquet, where he grabbed Henry by the arm and said coldly, “Oh, no. You’re not going anywhere. Or have you forgotten the fact of your house arrest?” Henry looked at the roaring fire and the ladies by it as he was forcibly brought back into the room. “How poor your memory is,” his father continued, almost as an aside, as he pushed him into the settee by Penelope.
This closeness to the Hayeses’ finest product was a thing he once sought out, but he felt a strong disinclination to it now. She had seemed, then, like the perfect partner in crime—a girl who shared his contempt for all the rules everybody else was so terrified of breaking. Now he saw that she was happy to break them only when it aligned with her other calculations. She might have shared his contempt for everybody else, but she still wanted their adulation. This seemed a very bloodless, unimaginative kind of desire now that his heart was so full of Diana Holland. He clenched his fists and glared at the people who were keeping him from her.