If a certain dashing bachelor whom we all know and love does not exit his engagement soon, and reveal some new paramour, there are those of us who will have placed losing bets.
— FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1899
DIANA WATCHED AS HER AUNT EDITH TURNED down the hall and began to descend the main stairs, the white appliqué of her skirt trailing behind her. Diana pushed at her hair and practiced breathing with her stomach sucked in and her shoulders thrown back. She was wearing the same seersucker she had been wearing last Sunday when Henry had come to visit, which hadn’t seemed like a bad idea when she’d still been planning to stay in her room with her Amélie Rives novel all day. There was nothing to be done about it now, of course. Her aunt wasn’t likely to sympathize with her needing to put on a smarter dress for her sister’s fiancé.
When she entered the drawing room Henry stood up quickly, and almost awkwardly.
“Miss Diana,” he said, bowing his head and suppressing a smile.
She walked across the floor, wishing that Edith could be gone for just one minute what she could do with that minute! and took the chair next to Henry’s. From this position, her aunt could see the right side of her profile, although Diana could not see her. This was the seat Elizabeth had only recently occupied she could tell by the damp and tea-stained armrest. She set her lips together, but still they twitched, threatening to curve into a full-blown smile. She raised her eyes slowly until they met Henry’s. There was a nervous cast to his features, and she knew that he knew that they were being watched.
She folded her hands in her lap and took on a high, ladylike voice: “The weather has been very fine, Mr. Schoonmaker, but I fear it may turn.”
“You’re right, quite right,” Henry replied, mimicking her tone of extreme and dull gentility. “As I was coming in, I got a touch of cold breeze, and found it most foreboding.”
“Oh, dear.” Diana punctuated her statement with a wink.
Henry crossed a leg and fidgeted with a button on his vest. He was wearing a dove-colored suit, and it made the darkness of his eyes and hair look especially arresting. She watched the minute workings of his cheekbones as he tried not to give away the joke.
“And did you enjoy all the festivities on Friday evening, Mr. Schoonmaker?” She watched as the left corner of his mouth flexed upward, and hoped that the phrase Friday evening resonated the same way it did in her own mind. “I heard you were quite busy…on the Elysian.”
“Yes…” he said slowly. “I did enjoy that evening most, out of all the festivities of the last week. It started out dull, but later that night became particularly…revealing.”
Diana could feel her blush spread across her collarbone. She desperately wanted to come up with some clever reply, but all she could think of was her nearly naked self, being watched by Henry in the window. She stammered for a minute, and then heard herself say the first thing that came into her head. “And what brings you to our house today?”
The playfulness left Henry’s face, and Diana immediately regretted her lack of cleverness. With all the novels she had read, surely she could have come up with some witty remark. She had half formed one in her mind, when she heard her aunt say, “Oh, it is for a very good reason. Tell her, Mr. Schoonmaker.”
Diana looked up and batted a stray curl off her forehead. “What?” she said, in an inadvertently high, childlike tone.
Henry studied her for a moment and worked his jaw back and forth. “Perhaps you should tell her,” he called to Edith, with forced lightness. Diana noticed for the first time that there was a bruise on his left cheek. So he had fallen hard from the trellis.
“No, Mr. Schoonmaker. You should.”
Henry paused and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. His gaze went all around the room, and then back to Diana. It felt to her as though the temperature had suddenly dropped. She was staring at Henry so intensely, waiting to hear what Aunt Edith was prodding him to say, that she felt she might get a sudden attack of headache. “Your sister and I…we’ve decided Elizabeth and I to move the wedding date…up.”
“The wedding date?” Diana lowered her eyes quickly. A date implied an actual wedding, and Diana realized that until that moment she hadn’t really believed in any of it. Henry and Elizabeth were merely engaged, and not very ecstatically at that, and she supposed she’d thought things would progress in that way forever. “But why?” she asked, her voice losing itself in the back of her throat.
Henry’s dark eyes glanced quickly at Edith, and then back to Diana. He held her gaze for a long moment and nothing was said. She understood. The fun was over, and she had to put a stop to this ridiculous dreaming.
“Yes, it is wonderful,” Henry went on, as though he had explained everything and Diana had already congratulated him. His voice projected across the room. It was a bit much, really, but then Diana had never been one to disguise her feelings. She could well enough imagine what she looked like at just that moment. “In fact,” Henry continued, “I should be going now. There is so much to be done, if the wedding is indeed to happen in only a week’s time. I must go tell Isabelle that Elizabeth has agreed to be married next Sunday. She will put it all in motion.”
Diana looked up and saw that Henry was already standing. His eyebrows reached sweetly together even as he looked carefully in Aunt Edith’s direction. Then he moved so that his body blocked her view. He bent very suddenly, and Diana felt his breath and then his lips against her neck.
He stood to leave and said, in a loud and formal manner, “Good afternoon, Miss Diana,” but the brief, ticklish touch of his mouth on her skin had begun a series of pleasurable little tremors, which were now radiating through her body.
She sat very still and listened as Henry said good-bye to her aunt. He left quickly, and then she was alone with her aunt in the room where all their big moments joyous or woeful or heart-lancing were supposed to occur.
Diana slouched into her chair and looked at the empty space where Henry had been. That was when she noticed the small volume of Whitman that must have fallen from his pocket during his visit. She reached forward and snatched it up, and turned immediately to her favorite passage. She liked the idea of finding it in Henry’s copy. But she never got as far as reading any verse, because that’s when his bookmark fell into her lap. There, in what was now the familiar scrawl of Henry Schoonmaker, was a message that had been inked just for her.
I have been wanting to show you the hyacinth in my family greenhouse. Will you come have a look soon? I have no plans on Tuesday, after nine o’clock.
Diana glanced up at Aunt Edith, to see if she was watching, and then around her family’s drawing room. The many antiques and heirlooms and objets d’art appeared small and dull in the late-afternoon light. But the beating of her blood and the fast tick of her heart and the glowing spot on her neck where Henry’s mouth had been these were all bright and shining. Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn’t be.