Every family with daughters old enough to marry must be concerned about the costs of a wedding, which, according to tradition, they must shoulder alone. When a girl from high society decides to wed, the costs of course can be astronomical, and many wealthy fathers-of-the-bride have left such happy events feeling like paupers.
— MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899
ELIZABETH HEARD THE PEALING LAUGHTER OF HER younger sister and opened her eyes. She moved her hands from her face to the shiny, coarse side of the horse. Diana was walking back in their direction with her skirt hiked up, and Henry was a few paces behind her, carrying the wide-brimmed yellow hat. In the distance, the wind was tilting the trees toward the south; everything had a whipped brightness to it. “They’re coming back,” she whispered.
Will shook his head, very slowly, once left, once right, and fixed his wide, clear eyes on her. “I’m leaving on Friday, last train from Grand Central Station. I’m going to see what the harbor looks like on the other side. You can come with me, or you can stay here forever….”
Elizabeth wanted to press her body into Will’s; she wanted to put her mouth on his mouth. She wanted to find the words that would make him stay, and say them clearly and forcefully. But she couldn’t. New York was all around her. So she did what she was supposed to do. She ducked around the horse and took several steps forward on the grass, waving her arms above her head.
“You got it!” she cried, as though the retrieval of the hat were some triumph of her own.
Diana’s mood seemed to have changed entirely. She looked at Henry and laughed. “Poor Henry practically had to dive into the water to get it!” she called back. “But the ribbon was lost! It’s going to make a duck’s nest somewhere.”
Elizabeth could feel Will watching her, but still she went on playing the part of Miss Holland. She walked forward, her leather boots sinking into the soft earth, her ears chilled slightly by the breeze. When she reached her fiancé, he took her arm and led her back to the landau. She let him help her up, and then she let the wide brim of her hat fall over her eyes again. The horses began to move, pulling the carriage into motion. Only then did Elizabeth allow a few silent tears to roll down her cheeks under the safe shade of her hat.
Elizabeth pulled her hat back from her head as she walked through the door of the Hollands’ home. A few strands of hair stuck in the straw weave, but she didn’t have time to fix them. She shoved the loose hair back with her hands as she passed the hat to Claire, who was standing patiently in the low-lit entryway.
“Where is Mrs. Holland?” Elizabeth stepped forward and peeked into the parlor through the pocket doors. Her movements were frenetic, as though if she slowed down for even a second, her chances of making everything right would disappear entirely. The room was empty of people, though. Apparently, both her mother and aunt had given up on any potential visitors. “Claire, where is my mother?”
Elizabeth turned to see that Diana had put her arms around Claire and rested her head against her chest. The elder of the Broud sisters had always had that mothering quality about her, even when she was a girl. Claire looked a little embarrassed and offered the elder Holland sister a crooked smile. “I haven’t seen her,” she said quietly.
“What’s the matter?” Elizabeth said to Diana. “I’m sorry I insisted that you come, if you’re still upset about that.”
She watched as Diana slowly turned her head. She was wearing a melancholy face that Elizabeth hardly had the time to interpret.
“No, I’m glad I came,” Diana said. Her voice had grown low and portentous, though Elizabeth couldn’t imagine why. She didn’t really need to know why, either. What she needed was for Diana to disappear, just as she so often did, so that Elizabeth could find their mother.
“Perhaps you should lie down for a while?” Elizabeth tried to keep her voice even and suggestive.
“Perhaps.” Diana let go of Claire and moved toward the stairs, her limbs drooping as though she didn’t have enough energy to keep them up properly.
When she was gone, Elizabeth turned to Claire. She ran a finger along her right eyebrow, took a breath, and prepared to ask her question a third time.
“I don’t know,” Claire said before Elizabeth managed any words. Her eyes were wide. “I haven’t seen her. I’ll go look on the third floor.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth replied. Since talking with Will in the park, her sense of urgency had only grown. All she could think was that the fiction of her relationship with Henry was unsustainable, and that she must tell her mother immediately. If only she could stop this charade, stop playing the perfect miss, then she would be able to show her mother how it had to be. Perhaps their financial state was not in such ruin that she must marry immediately. Perhaps there was some other way, in these modern times, that her family might recover their wealth. Perhaps there was some way she could be with Will.
Claire took the stairs at a near run, and Elizabeth moved to check the parlor again. That was when she saw the painting in the gold-leaf frame, facing the wall on the foyer floor. She half turned to ask Claire what it was doing there, but the maid was already gone. Elizabeth pulled the painting away from the wall so she could see which one it was. She recognized it immediately it was the Vermeer that had hung in her bedroom for nearly ten years.
The painting had been one of her father’s favorites he had bought it from a Paris art dealer while Mrs. Holland was pregnant for the first time. Several of the big art collectors, the ones who had traded making millions off steel to spending it on old master works, had expressed interest in the little piece, but Elizabeth had begged him not to sell it. It depicted two girls, one fair-haired and one dark, reading a book at a wooden table by a window. The blonde was on the left side, closer to the window, and her hair glittered like spun gold. They were turning the pages of the book, and the light illuminated the pale perfection of their skin.
Elizabeth ran her hand along the gold frame, where a piece of paper was affixed to the corner. The name she saw Mr. Broussard was not a familiar one. Even though the painting was hers, she felt like she’d been rummaging in someone else’s things.
Elizabeth hurried up the familiar narrow back stairs and peeked in on her mother’s bedroom, which looked as though no one had set foot there in a long time.
“Miss Liz…”
Elizabeth pulled shut the door to her mother’s bedroom and saw that Claire had come up behind her. “Yes?” She wished she knew why she felt embarrassed for poking around her own house.
“Mrs. Holland is downstairs.”
“Thank you, Claire.” Elizabeth turned and this time took the main staircase, which was carpeted in a rich Persian runner. She was about halfway down, and practically mouthing that she could not marry Henry Schoonmaker, when she saw the man in their foyer. He was bent in front of her Vermeer, and he was looking through an ornate magnifying glass at the top right corner. That was where the signature was, just above the jug of wine. Elizabeth wanted to shout at him that he couldn’t touch her things, but some instinct, perhaps her habitual sense of politesse, kept her silent.
“We do not have fakes in this house, Mr. Broussard,” Mrs. Holland announced coldly, stepping closer to him.
The man, who was dressed in black and whose long hair was tucked under his collar, turned his head to assess the speaker. He stared at her for several rude seconds and then went back to examining Vermeer’s brushstrokes. When he was satisfied, he pulled a cloth from his satchel and wrapped up the painting. He stood, put his hand into his coat, and produced an envelope.
“Here it is,” he said brusquely.
Elizabeth watched as her mother cracked the envelope and looked inside. Seeing her painting in the hands of a stranger produced a heavy sadness in her, which began to grow into a kind of helpless anger.
“It’s all in there,” the man went on impatiently.
“I’m sure it is,” Mrs. Holland said. “But I would hate to have to trouble you to come back if anything were amiss.”
The man waited until Mrs. Holland gave him the nod, and then he shook her hand and went out into the street. The door came back into its frame with a bang that seemed to cause the whole house to shudder. Elizabeth hesitated on the stair as her mother watched the man go, her black-swathed body framed by the light coming in through the glass pane of the door. Then she sighed and turned sharply. She managed a few steps before she saw Elizabeth, standing halfway to the second floor.
“What are you doing there?”
After watching her mother sell off one of her family’s most prized possessions, Elizabeth wondered if she would ever be able to look at her the same way again. The woman below no longer looked like a fearsome arbiter of society. She appeared small and frail and pitiable. She appeared old.
“I was just looking for you…to ask you something…” Elizabeth managed to say.
“Well, what, then?”
Elizabeth felt as though her heart had frozen over. All her grand emotions, her sense of self-importance, her need to show Will her loyalty and make him stay had drained away. Her family wasn’t just poor; they were desperate. She had only one choice, and that was to marry Henry. She wasn’t going to have another opportunity like that. “I just wanted to ask if you would like claret with dinner?”
There was a long, silent moment in which Mrs. Holland kept a watchful gaze on her daughter. She blinked once and then said, “No, my dear. We had better save that in case the Schoonmakers come for dinner some night.”
Elizabeth nodded feebly. There was nothing else to say, and so she turned away from her mother and went, with leaden feet and a sore heart, to find Mrs. Faber. She would tell her not to bother decanting any wine for their meal that night, or any other night, until she was a Mrs. Schoonmaker.