“Why not?” Leta challenged. “Maddy’s good enough for a king, much less a colonel.”
“But not a Knickerbocker,” he said. “Trust me. Anyway, he’s too old for her, and he’s divorced.”
“He’s not so terribly old,” Leta said.
“And lots of people get divorces,” added Harold. “My uncle and aunt did, and it was fine.”
“Because they are not Knickerbockers,” said the other boy, patient. He swallowed a bite of the vinegary salmon. “I don’t expect you to understand, I suppose.”
“I think I understand snobbery quite well,” Leta retorted. “There’s nothing wrong with Colonel Astor sending Maddy flowers. I think it’s romantic.”
“I think it’s onion-headed,” the boy said.
Leta gave an incredulous laugh. “So that’s it for you, then? You’ll never fall in love with someone unexpected? You’ll never marry anyone outside of your own little world, never ever?”
The boy shrugged, returning to his fish. “It’s simply not done.”
Madeleine sat back in her chair, hands on her lap, and secretly wished for the Philadelphia boy to choke.
All around her conversations bloomed, swelling and falling like the constant waves that scored the harbor. Beyond them rose the murmur of the breeze through pine needles and leaves, and the canticles of the crickets tucked beneath shrubs, and the dulcet notes of the string trio floating beneath the arc of the luminous blue night.
Through it all, she listened for the singular baritone of that older man, that king of the Knickerbockers, who had sent her purple flowers, and had escorted her to her table, and who’d told her not to doubt.
And she was out of breath.
CHAPTER 3
Pansies.
Cosmos.
Delphiniums.
Asters.
Snapdragons.
Bellflowers.
Tulips.
Forget-me-nots.
Upon reflection, it strikes me as somewhat macabre that the joining of my life with your father’s began with flowers. It ended with flowers, as well. To be clear—it ended on that frigid, starry morning atop the skin of the Atlantic. But as I sit here at my desk, all I can smell is lilies: thousands of lilies, ornamenting his casket, lining the church, crushed beneath the wheels of the undertaker’s wagon, the hooves of the black horses, as somber-faced strangers standing alongside the roads watched and tossed ever more flowers at the procession passing by.
Even on the train that carried his body from Rhinebeck to Manhattan: lilies.
That stench. That overwhelming, sickly sweet stench.
I don’t think I can bear to be around lilies ever again.
July 1910
Bar Harbor
The handle of the racquet bit into her palm, the leather strap wrapped around it digging rough into her skin. But it was a good kind of rough, necessary, and as Madeleine swung her arm and the catgut strings connected with the ball, the force of that connection bounced back through her, powerful and jarring, through muscle and bone, lungs and heart, all the way to her feet.
Her momentum kept her leaping forward, great huge strides that she checked by twisting sideways, a swift and dangerous dance in long skirts, ignoring the pain of her corset biting into her.
The ball streaked low across the net. Her opponent lunged and swung and missed.
“Game and set,” called out the chair umpire, “to Miss Force!”
A mustering of applause lifted up to the overcast sky.
Madeleine bent her head to wipe the sweat from her eyes, then turned and sketched a quick curtsy to the Swimming Club spectators, arranged in pastels and parasols in the lawn chairs lining the length of the tennis court. As she crossed to the net, she swapped her racquet to her left hand to shake with her right.
Her palm smacked into the other girl’s.
“Well done,” Stella Mitchell puffed, still breathless from her final sprint.
“And you.”
Stella was the sort of girl Madeleine always privately envied, because she was the sort of girl that Madeleine feared she would never be: refined and chic and creamy cool, no matter the circumstances. She looked like a Gibson portrait of a girl, a poet’s idea of a girl, one who would be perfectly content to pass the span of her days reading upon a chaise lounge, or embroidering samplers, or contemplating the number of tumbling, adorable children she would someday produce. And perhaps she was those things—Madeleine had known her since Miss Ely’s, and heaven knew they’d both embroidered enough samplers—but in tennis, Stella became ruthless. Beating her today was the figurative feather in Madeleine’s cap. It hardly ever happened.