“Allow me to be afraid.”
*
The bite to the air grew sharper. The leaves began to change, slowly at first, and then seemingly all at once, and everywhere she looked were great splashes of copper and vermilion and plum atop spindly trunks, and the bright annuals in the Village Green flowerbeds faded into beige. It rained still, black-pearled days of misty rain, but it wouldn’t for much longer. Soon the rain would turn into snow, and all the cottagers would flee back to their city homes, to the solid comfort of life amid every winter luxury to be found.
Madeleine wanted to leave, but then on the other hand, she didn’t. Jack had decided to stay a while longer in Bar Harbor, and so remained the rest of this small, glimmering society, like barnacles attached to an anchored ship’s hull. Yet she couldn’t help thinking that being back in Manhattan might be better, somehow. More anonymous. Their brownstone was much smaller there but the city itself much, much larger. It would be easier to blend in with crowds, to walk and shop and dine without always fretting about being followed.
But the colonel stayed, and so the Force family stayed. And everyone stayed. Madeleine began to wonder if they would be there long enough to see the lakes freeze, and the locals driving their motorcars and ice boats across the thickly glazed water. She’d seen daguerreotypes of that, bundled figures skimming along on skates, the autos parked far from the safety of shore.
At Jack’s invitation one brisk September evening, they dined at the Swimming Club. He’d booked the entire dining hall of the clubhouse, and the mood was festive, with wine freely poured before the meal and the colonel’s guests laughing and chatting without taking their seats, a few of the ladies occasionally tugging their gloves higher to better cover their arms.
As Mother had begun to mention more and more, they had not shopped for this weather—and while stranded so far from the elite modistes of Manhattan, they were unable to do so. Looking around the room, Madeleine thought that hardly any of the ladies had prepared for the cold: the lightest of crêpe de chine and tulle were still being worn, gentle swirls of pastels much better suited for the months that had come before than for this one.
The seasons seemed all atilt. Summer had dissolved into something new, something not quite not summer, but not yet definitely anything else.
It was all because of Jack.
“Would you have ever guessed there exists a man with the power to change the orbit of the planet?” Katherine asked lightly, standing beside her sister near the chamber’s only hearth as they watched the colonel greet yet another patrician couple.
“Is that his power?” Madeleine asked.
“We hang like icicles here by the andirons, Maddy, trying to thaw. It feels like we’ll be thawing for an eternity yet—why won’t the Club’s harebrained manager build up the fires? Anyway, no. That is not the colonel’s power. It’s far more straightforward than that. It’s the power of wealth.”
“Which is also his,” Madeleine noted.
“Yes.” Her sister rubbed her arms. “His preposterous, ridiculous wealth.”
Leta Wright strolled up, a cashmere shawl wrapped tight over her shoulders.
“May I join your little cloak-and-dagger conference over here by the fire?”
“It’s not cloak-and-dagger,” Katherine said. “We’re just trying not to freeze to death.”
Leta nodded. “It’s worse across the room. Look at Henrietta over there, talking to William Dick. I think her lips are blue.”
As he was shaking yet another hand, Jack turned his head, finding Madeleine across the busy chamber. They looked at each other in the flickering light, steady, connected, two-three-four, before he turned away again, smiling, bending at the waist to reply to something a diminutive white-haired matron had said.
“Maddy,” said Katherine in a low voice. “Fix this.”
Madeleine came awake. “What?”
“Fix it.”
“Fix what? The fire?”
“No, silly. Fix this.” She made a sweeping gesture to take in the chamber, the finely dressed people attempting to smile past their clenched teeth. “We are pinned here in Bar Harbor like bugs to a board because of your beau.”
Leta snorted a laugh; she smothered it with a hand clapped over her mouth. Madeleine glanced at her, her merry dark eyes above the fabric of her glove, then back at Katherine.
“Don’t be absurd. I don’t have the means to—”
“Of course you do,” Leta interrupted. “You have the means, the ability, the wiles—all of it. Any of it. We are entirely at your mercy, anyone at all could see that. You, the sublime Miss Madeleine Force, hold us hapless, commonplace mortals hostage, captured in the heart of your hand, because God knows our own mothers don’t have the sense to yank us out of the cold. Not as long as Colonel Astor dallies nearby. Make use of it, please, I beg you, and send us all back to civilization. I swear I can’t eat another bite of lobster, or clams, or lobster mixed with clams.” Leta lifted the flats of her palms to the fire and gave a groan, tilting back her head so her neck showed long and taut. “Lord, I miss dining at the St. Regis.”