Perhaps the Holland family is not so bad off as they say, for the late Mr. Holland’s business partner—Mr. Snowden Trapp Cairns—was seen squiring Miss Edith Holland and her niece Diana at Sherry’s last night. The light from their windows has, neighbors report, been uncommonly bright in the last few days. But will these developments stamp out the rumors of Elizabeth’s unfortunate fate, or will it fan them higher?
—FROM CITÉ CHATTER, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1899
“LADIES USUALLY DO NOT BELIEVE ME, BUT THE Yukon can be quite lovely in summer,” Snowden Cairns was saying as the remains of the broiled squab were being removed from the Hollands’ table. “The drifts of fuchsia fireweed, the lavender lupins, the daisies, the arnicas, all of them giving off their pungent perfume…and meanwhile the robins and woodpeckers making their music…”
Diana’s softly rounded cheek was rested on her balled fist, and her lids were heavy. Her drowsiness was not, she was vaguely aware, what her mother had meant when she asked her to be nice to Snowden. But drowsiness was the only alternative she currently knew to a kind of wild agitation. She could hardly swallow a bite of food, her skin felt cold despite the many fires now burning in the hearths of No. 17, and her head was encircled in feverish heat. She was lovesick for any sign of Henry, and she now understood—as she had never before understood—how literally true that phrase could be. Snowden, her constant companion, did not make not seeing Henry any easier. He was a dull and repetitive conversationalist, she had decided over dinner the night before, and she had not yet revised her opinion.
“Of course, that was before the stampede, before the boomtowns started appearing and the unsavory characters spilled off the ships in droves….”
Snowden’s man had finished clearing the dinner things, and Edith, who was positioned on the other side of the table from Diana, was giving her a look. There lay between them new candles and piles of oranges and the old crochet table linens and what was left of the family silver.
“Are you tired, Di?” her aunt asked her, interrupting their guest’s soliloquy. They had tacitly agreed to let him speak, since his retinue had gone about repairing the house, securing the kind of fare the Hollands had not consumed in months and positioning a decorated tree in the parlor and locating new pictures to fill the unfaded squares in the wallpaper. It would have taken something more than indifference to politesse not to listen to whatever he wanted to say.
“Yes, Miss Di, you do look weary,” Snowden seconded with a tone of concern that she would have given many things not to be the beneficiary of.
“I am,” she lied. “I am entirely fatigued. Perhaps it is the weather, or perhaps I am worn down by my gratitude,” she said with a sincerity that was strong but not strong enough to escape Edith’s notice. “So many things you have done for us!” she added quickly. “It rather overwhelms.”
“Then you had better go to bed,” her aunt went on with a warning eye. Diana could never tell if it was the facial resemblance between herself and her aunt that made her feel understood at moments like these, or if she really was being empathized with.
“Indeed, you have listened to enough of my boring stories.” Snowden gave her a smile that she supposed she might have found generous if she did not find his every gesture a tiresome intrusion on her thoughts. “Please don’t weary yourself further on my account. You were such a pleasure to dine with last night and tonight. I hope you will have the strength for many more meals in my company.”
Diana managed a kind of smile and left the low-lit dining room with lowered eyes bearing only a lazy implication of regret. Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty, she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep, and that if she dreamed, she might then finally be with Henry. Earlier in the day, when Snowden’s retinue was carrying in crates of produce and bundles of firewood, she had managed to slip a bottle from one of the cases of wine. When she reached her own room, she thought, she would have a glass of it, and then she would become giddy and then hazy, and she would drift off soon enough. It had not occurred to her that she had no means of uncorking it, or that she didn’t even know how.
She climbed the stairs indifferently, holding back her skirt. She paused with her hand on the brass knob and considered going back for a corkscrew but decided against it. If she ran into Snowden, there would be more odious conversing, and then she would never get back to her safe little room. When she opened the door she saw that such a trip had already been made unnecessary.
For there Henry sat next to the opened bottle of wine. He had been so present in her thoughts that it seemed entirely rational for him to now be present in reality. It was only how much better he looked in person that needed getting used to, and that she absorbed soon enough. His face was set in a subtle, familiar smile, and his eyes were full of fire. He was wearing a black dinner jacket, and a shiny top hat rested in his lap. He was still, watching her, and yet every inch of him was animated. Diana leaned against the door behind her to close it and felt for the lock without diverting her gaze. She would not have trusted him to stay there if she had looked away.
The light in the room came entirely from one lamp by her bed and the dying flames under the mantel. Henry was sitting next to the fireplace, in the wing chair with the worn gold upholstery, where she had imagined herself reading a few verses before that hopeful sleep. The embers lent his skin even more of a metallic glow than usual. She did not think that his dark eyes had blinked even once since she entered.
“You’re in my chair,” she whispered.
Then she gave up the support of the door and crossed to him, her feet falling across the white bearskin rug. She plucked the hat from his lap and placed it on her head, jauntily, and then she sat across Henry’s legs sidesaddle. He brought an arm around her and fixed his palm on the high, flat part of her thigh, his gaze unwavering. When she realized that she could smell him, she finally knew he was real.
“I’d like to reply that you’re wearing my hat,” he said, “except that it’s not mine.”
“Oh?”
“It’s Teddy Cutting’s.”
His expression was unchanged, but she could hear the difference in the way he pronounced the name. It was not how he ordinarily would have pronounced it. Diana’s confusion was momentary, and then she remembered, in a rush, a room on East Sixteenth Street, a desperate feeling, and a gossip item that she herself had spitefully composed. She took the hat off.
“Oh, you can’t think—”
“No, but still I’d like you to tell me.”
“That was a silly prank, Henry.” She tossed the hat toward the bed and fussed with her long, white skirt. “There’s nothing. It was when I thought that you and Penelope—”
“Enough.”
She watched the play of light in his eyes and decided that if Henry had felt jealousy over the Teddy incident, then she could truly let go of the emotions his past involvement with Penelope had caused her. She bent her face toward him and waited until his lips met hers. He brought his mouth to hers again and again, slowly and softly at first, but then with a growing urgency. His hands were in her hair, they were at the most siphoned part of her corset. She was only vaguely aware of the sound her heeled slippers made when they fell to the floor, one and then the other. It seemed very natural that, as she knew somewhere in the margins of her consciousness, her hair was spilling down around her shoulders. Minutes had passed, but she had no idea how many, when he pulled her face back from his.
“I love you.”
He said it simply, quietly. He didn’t say those words as she had imagined them said so many times by characters in novels. He didn’t say them with desperation, with pleading, with futile rage or florid persuasion. He spoke without lasciviousness; he spoke only with the intention of being understood.
Diana’s response was a smile that was radiant and beyond her control.
“You know I never loved Penelope, and I never will.” She wasn’t sure she had ever seen his black eyes so devoid of mischief, so sincere. “It won’t seem right to people, you and me. They don’t know Elizabeth is alive—they’ll just think that I’ve replaced her with another horse from the same sire. Whatever position your family is in now, our affair won’t make it easier.”
Diana raised her chin and held his gaze. “It’s right to me.”
“I wouldn’t want you to do anything that made you feel—”
But Diana had heard enough. She stopped Henry with a lasting, humid kiss. When it was over, she drew him down backward onto the bearskin rug. He propped himself on his elbow and looked at her for a long moment, in which she felt she knew what it was to be an artist’s model as she was studied. He reached for the open wine bottle, which had been sitting beside the chair, and took a long sip. Diana took it from him, and she too sipped, and after that there was no more discussion.
Henry rose over her with careful hands and watchful eyes. He took off his jacket, and then he rolled back her stockings and examined her small feet. He kissed her on the ankles, and then he planted kisses up to the insides of her knees. She was trying to keep herself very still, and she found she had to remind herself to breathe. By the time their mouths met again she had lost all sense of the outside world, but she hardly cared.
He asked her once more if she was sure, and she nodded that she was. She told herself she was.
There was a stabbing kind of pain at first, and Diana briefly wondered if she were perhaps the first human woman born physically unable to commit original sin. But then Henry whispered to her and time passed—she would never know how much—and she found her body wanted to move against his in a way that she had never, even at her baddest moments, imagined herself moving.
Later, at some remote part of the night, she woke to find Henry examining her naked shoulder. He watched her and she watched him back. She went down to the kitchen to get them water, but she mostly spent the rest of the hours before morning curled against his chest as tightly as possible.
She couldn’t remember when her thoughts merged into sleep, but she knew exactly when she was awakened. There was the sound of the door handle turning in its groove, and then she opened her eyes to see her own bedroom bathed in morning light. It was sparkling white all around her, but all Diana could think was: I am not a virgin anymore. I am no longer a girl. Her body was different, too; it felt sore but experienced, like a body prepared for everything the world had to offer.
Then the door swung against the warped wood planks and she looked up and into the face of her lady’s maid. Claire was holding a blue-and-white porcelain pitcher. Diana turned to where she was looking and saw Henry’s handsome, sleeping face beside her on the bearskin rug. His face looked even better in the morning, at close range. The fire had died down in the night. By the time she looked back at the door, it had been drawn shut. Thank goodness it was only Claire, she thought, and moved back into the warm, sleeping form beside her and let her eyelids flutter contentedly shut.