It is by now well known that William S. Schoonmaker wants to run for mayor, although he has thus far based his candidacy on little more than the unfortunate loss of his only son’s fiancée. The young man has lately been seen out again and dancing with young ladies, however, prompting rumors of new attachments. If his first fiancée is in fact alive, as the appearance of her engagement ring might indicate, will young Schoonmaker renew his suit? Surely the would-be mayor could put quite a bounty on the head of her supposed captors….
—FROM THE FIRST PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, DECEMBER 26, 1899
“I’D LIKE A DOZEN WHITE ROSES, A DOZEN WHITE freesias, a bunch of baby’s breath….” Diana Holland paused and frowned. She hadn’t made a list, and she was now forgetting all of the things that her sister had asked her to order.
Yesterday, after her brief encounter with Henry, she’d run upstairs for a private moment in her room. That was when she came upon Elizabeth and Will embracing, and she learned their good news. She’d been so swept up in the general exhilaration of love—hers and Henry’s, Liz and Will’s—that she’d volunteered to go to the florist herself when her sister told her the list of things to be done. This was, after all, far preferable to remaining in the house and being “nice” to Snowden. Here she was free to imagine the flowers she’d one day pick out for her and Henry.
He hadn’t come to her last night, but even seeing him on the porch had been enough to consume her thoughts and destroy her concentration. Landry the florist smiled at her from the other side of the marble counter in his Broadway shop; as he had already told her, it was not a busy day for flowers. “Oh! And lilies of the valley! Do you have any of those…?”
“Sounds like a wedding.”
Diana looked up and into the mirror behind the register. The place was all mirrors where it wasn’t white porcelain tile. She looked into the inquiring eyes of the gossip columnist for a few uncertain seconds, and then she turned so that Mr. Landry wouldn’t note the playful nature of her smile. “Mr. Barnard, are you following me?”
“Not at all,” he answered in a tone that left her entirely in doubt.
“Well, nor are these flowers for a wedding,” she shot back blithely. “We always celebrate a white Christmas at the Holland house. You can print that if you like.”
Then she turned back to Mr. Landry and asked if she could pick up her order on Thursday morning.
“Weren’t you here to get flowers, Mr. Barnard?” she asked as he moved to follow her back onto the street.
“I found my daily requirement for visual beauty has unexpectedly been filled by a different source,” he replied, holding the door for her.
Outside the sun was shining, which did nothing to mitigate the icy cut of the wind. Dead leaves reeled in the air and skittered across the sidewalk as Diana brought her camel coat in closer to her chest. “That’s quite a dose of flattery. Pretty soon I’ll have to start wondering if you don’t have an angle.”
“I hope you won’t think me somehow not in earnest about your beauty if I do.”
“Ah, well, that I can’t tell you.” Diana ducked her head so that the brim of her bonnet covered her face. “Some things must remain a mystery, and for now, I think I’ll keep my opinion of you and your compliments to myself.”
“I’ll have to look forward to that another day, then. Though I do of course have an angle.” He pushed his hat back on his head and arched a dark brow.
“Of course you do!” They were walking up Broadway, and though the cold was biting at her, Diana felt a peculiar elation at being again in the gossip columnist’s company. Perhaps it was knowing that she held a few secrets greater than he could imagine, secrets she could never reveal to him. He walked along on her left, so that he shielded her from the view of anyone passing in the street, and he was looking at her in that way that made her feel as though he might have noticed some attractive quality of hers that had escaped even her own notice. Of course, she glowed whenever she thought of Henry, and Henry was always in her thoughts. “Well, do share.”
“The public is hungry for news about you, Miss Diana,” he went on in a voice that didn’t quite touch down on seriousness. “Can’t you tell us something? Perhaps there’s wedding news? Or maybe something about this Snowden Cairns fellow.”
“He is not a beau, if you’re wondering that,” Diana answered quickly, remembering how poorly the last report of her possible attachment had gone over.
“No? Hmmm…and your Christmas dinner?”
“Oh,” Diana replied gaily. They were moving forward, up the avenue, at a good pace now. “We had turkey with cranberries and asparagus points on toast and hothouse lettuce with mayonnaise and, later, plum pudding!”
“Don’t tease me, Diana. I meant, were there any special guests? Perhaps one with the first initial E.?”
Diana smiled her elusive little smile. She was surprised to find within herself a small inclination to tell him, although she wasn’t certain if it was because she wanted the record set straight, or because she enjoyed telling her own story, or if it was simply that she liked manipulating what the papers printed. “I really don’t know what you mean” was her eventual reply.
He sighed. She had never seen him disappointed, and it only made her wish she could tell him more. But he was looking away from her now. He was trying to get a cigarette going even as he walked into the wind.
“Are there really no other stories for you to write?” Diana affected a sympathetic face.
“There are,” he said, his eyes meeting hers in a passing moment. The cigarette was evidently lit, and he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “But I just don’t want to pursue either of them.”
“And why not?” The rhythm in Diana’s chest had slowed to an occasional thud. Was it possible that Davis Barnard was jealous over her? Because he had heard that Henry was in love with her and that perhaps there was a wedding on the way? It was a little wild, Diana had to admit to herself, that news would have traveled so quickly, but he had, after all, been prodding her about a wedding, and it would maybe explain Henry’s keeping himself scarce on Christmas Eve….
“Because they are neither of them are very good for the Hollands, and, as you know, I never want to write anything that might hurt your family.” They had come to East Twentieth Street, and Diana looked to see if his face didn’t betray some of his meaning. She had to turn there—she was almost home. “The first is about Elizabeth; that’s why I was asking about her. Seems her engagement ring turned up in a pawnshop out west and now everyone is speculating if she isn’t alive somewhere.”
Diana’s heart sped, and she gave a loud laugh that she hoped distracted from the color going out of her face. “Surely I’d know if that were true,” she shot back, without the slightest idea whether she was convincing or not.
“It would be a wonderful thing of course…” Davis said earnestly. “Although the pawnshop isn’t a very nice element of the whole story. People wonder, if she is alive, what sort of ordeal she’s been through. I know it would be devastating to get your hopes up and then find out that she’s still dead.”
“Yes.” There were few people on the street, all of them too cold to observe what passed between a young lady from a good family and a newspaper writer on a Broadway street corner. All of the sudden, Diana wished to be home already. “I suppose Tiffany makes a lot of rings.”
“Well, they’re just rumors. No one knows for sure. Though there has been talk of tracking down the man who sold it and having him arrested.” He paused and looked Diana over. “I suppose you gave that up long ago.”
“I wonder what the other story is?” Diana was almost afraid to ask, but the cold was setting in now, and she was growing more antsy with every passing moment. She feared that if he went on about Elizabeth, she would surely betray something.
“Ah! Well, that’s not so bad either if you look at it from a certain angle, though some people would say that Henry Schoonmaker getting engaged to Penelope Hayes at this particular moment signifies—”
“What?” Diana had lost any capacity for coyness or subterfuge. Her vision had gone spotty, and it was all she could do not to reach up and put a hand on the columnist’s wide shoulder to steady herself. Gramercy was only a few blocks away, but she was stuck there, at that asymmetrical street corner with its high buildings and noisy street traffic.
“Yes, I didn’t like it either. But that’s the story. That Buck fellow who Penelope is always hanging around with told me. He’s my cousin, I’m ashamed to say, though I like to think of him as at least a second cousin….”
“Is it to be announced?” So this was betrayal. It was like being left alone in the desert at dusk without water or warmth. It left your mouth dry and your will broken. It sapped your tears and made you hollow. The news sounded impossible until she remembered the look on Henry’s face yesterday, when he’d come to her door, which she had so naïvely explained away. Perhaps he had been coming to tell her yesterday, or maybe he had wanted to take her and run away. None of that mattered anymore. Now she knew what cowardice he was capable of.
Davis shrugged. “I suppose everyone likes attention. Probably I’ll run it myself…. It’s a good little piece of news, if you get over the distastefulness of it all—”
Diana wasn’t sure what else he said. She was running down Twentieth Street at an absurd gallop, her whole body lunging forward and swaying as she did. The cold was so far under her clothes that she could hardly feel her feet. She certainly couldn’t feel her heart. All she hoped for at that particular moment was that she might be able to reach home and her sister before the sobbing started.