Babs crossed her arms.
I looked over at her. “It’s up to you, Babs. Your veil, your rules.”
She stood up. “I can’t possibly make a decision like this on an empty stomach.”
As we reached the entrance hall, Aunt Alice stopped. “Wait,” she said. “Mom, did you say the woman who gave Gran the veil was Russian?”
Babs nodded.
“Was her name by any chance Nilcha?”
I watched as a wave of recognition passed over Babs’s face. I didn’t know why that was significant, but even if it wasn’t, I was confident that we had solved the mystery of the wedding veil. And now we had to figure out what to do about it.
CORNELIA The Feminine Divine
March 30, 1934
On the train from Asheville to New York, Cornelia knew she looked positively mad holding her wedding veil on her lap. Her life-path number, twenty-two, indicated that insanity was likely a part of her journey. So maybe this was insane. Fleeing her home for England with one trunk and one suitcase of personal belongings? It did give her pause.
But perhaps fleeing wasn’t the right word for it. Judge Adams had—much to her chagrin—come along to help her get the boys settled in school. As if I need his help, she’d fumed. But when choosing between Jack, her mother, and the judge, he seemed the easiest, least emotional choice. And it was nice that he had taken the boys to meet the conductor to show them the inner workings of the train. She missed them already. But luckily, she had the long boat journey from New York to London with them.
Even still, sending her off with a chaperone as though she wasn’t a proper mother was just one more piece of proof that Jack didn’t understand her anymore. He didn’t understand why she needed to eat pink grapefruit every morning because it was her cleansing food. He didn’t understand that she needed to dance nude in the rain to regenerate her positive aura. He didn’t understand that she had to dye her hair pink to balance her hormones, reset her internal clock, and get some sleep. Oh, dear sleep. Yes, she needed some of that.
Cornelia sighed, leaning her head back on the seat as the train stopped. Yes. It had been a hard few years, as Jack had said. But what he didn’t understand was that this was her life. Everywhere she went, people knew her, the press followed her. Asheville had been her only safe place. But now, all the speculation about why they had opened the house to the public, whether she’d lost all her money—whether it had been immoral to have so much to begin with—and, worst of all, whether her father’s dream was destroyed, was more than she could take. George Vanderbilt is dead. The dream is dust and ashes. Damn that Kansas City Star.
“Cornelia, why would you do that to me?” Jack had asked after her mother and Judge Adams left, the day she’d announced her decision to take the boys to England. He rarely called her by her full name, so she knew he was upset. “That was a conversation we should have had alone, something we should have decided together.”
She obviously knew that. But she felt that he was less likely to make a scene in front of the others and, thus, she’d have a better chance of getting what she wanted.
“You’re the one who wanted the boys to go off to school!” she protested, knowing in her heart that Jack wasn’t disagreeing with that part of the plan.
“Yes, fine. Great,” he said. “But my wife moving to England was never quite a part of it.”
“But won’t it make you feel better if I’m close to them? If I can get to them at a moment’s notice?”
Jack looked dubious.
“I just need to disappear for a while,” she continued.
“Disappear?” he asked.
She nodded. “I need to be somewhere where the press doesn’t know me, where I can be alone.”
“There’s a lot to do here,” he said. “But I can make a trip happen. I can go with you.”
This was the hard part. How could she make him understand that she was on a personal spiritual journey and the road she was walking she had to walk alone? Well, maybe he had been understanding of that. He had been understanding when she had fallen apart after every editor she heard back from told her her book wasn’t fit for publication. And he had been understanding when she had said she needed to study art again, to find a way to express her emotions in a way that wasn’t writing. Writing was so… constricting. She was free with her brush in her hand.
“I know you have most of the power here,” Jack said. “I’m not stupid. But, Nelly, we have to make these decisions together. I can’t be told what the rest of my life will be like. I can’t be told I can’t see my children.”
Something broke inside Cornelia when he said that, the idea of actually being separated from her children searing through her. But this was just a test run, she reasoned. And she believed with all her heart that she had been given every advantage on earth, and she should pass every advantage along to her children. People in their world sent their sons to the finest schools. She could certainly afford to do it. And she would.
That was what she told herself. But somewhere, deep down, she knew she simply needed to be free from all the trappings and stresses of her life. She needed to be alone.
“I will not take them away from you, Jack. I promise. You are a wonderful father. They need you. But we’ve talked about this before. I know you must agree that they deserve the best.”
He nodded and, for a few moments, was silent. “Nelly, I get that you’re going through something here, and I have tried to help. I really have. But if you are leaving me, could you please just tell me?”
Something caught in Cornelia’s throat. Leaving him. That was what she was doing, wasn’t it? She had realized she was leaving the United States. She had realized she was leaving her family home and all it had meant to her. She had hoped that, by being away, she could escape from the mounting and unrelenting pressure of keeping up this boulder of a house that had turned her life into a daily avalanche. But had she really meant to leave Jack? She gazed at his handsome face, his groomed mustache, his spotless suit. There was no doubt Jack was part of a past Cornelia was moving away from. He didn’t fit into the world she imagined for herself, the world of freedom and happiness, art and humanity. But leaving him was a big decision. “Jack, I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving me.” Concern passed across his face, but she liked the way it sounded.
“I have worked too hard here. Your mother and I have,” he said. “I cannot leave Biltmore for good. I won’t.”
“No one would ever ask you to leave Biltmore,” she said.
Jack and her mother. Were they the solution? Or had they been the problem? Had they kept her locked tight in this massive cage originally constructed by her father? She would find out, she guessed. That was what this journey was all about.
Her pink hair matted against the train seat, Leaving me, leaving me bounced around in her head as she closed her eyes. She could see why Jack would be concerned, but Cornelia didn’t want to die. No. Quite the contrary. She wanted to live.
The seat jostled, and she opened her eyes hesitantly to see a rather unfashionable woman sit down in the seat across from her. “This sure is a full train,” she said.