She’d let him kiss her practically in public and had felt herself floating like a lark in his arms.
Color and shade rippled past the motorcar. As they ventured farther up Fifth Avenue, the mansions grew taller, more stately, sketched in bold layers of snow. Row after row of gabled and copper-roofed palaces sprouted from the plain pavements and dirt, blotting out the sun, the moon, the sky.
At the age of eight, Madeleine had voyaged to France for the first time with her family. After a week submerged in the delirium of Paris—and over her mother’s protests—they’d removed to a vineyard so ancient and idyllic that the ground had melted up all around it, submerging the river-rock base of the crush house, the thick weedy bottoms of the vines, their stalks and stakes. The rich black soil was soft and sucking with Madeleine’s every step, pulling at the soles of her boots. All the wild trees leaned, branches akimbo, toward that living dark earth. Everywhere she roamed that summer, the vineyard had seemed to whisper, I am older than ages. You are a spark of nothing compared to me.
Manhattan’s Millionaires’ Row was man’s rebuttal to that vineyard’s earthen grace. Warlike, glorious, every inch of the chiseled marble and limestone and wrought iron was hard and unyielding. The soil here would never rise. Nature would never regain the ground it had conceded.
“One more block,” Katherine said, and Madeleine took a steadying breath.
“Do I look all right?”
Katherine smiled, lifting a hand to adjust one of the diamond-and-topaz clips nestled in her sister’s hair. There were three of them, two smalls and a medium, fashioned as shooting stars. Her Christmas present from Jack.
（She had gotten him a cigar cutter fob, gold to match his watch, with her initials engraved on the back. He’d worn it every day since.）
“Better than all right,” Katherine said. “You’re luminous. Utterly prepared to illume.”
The Astor chateau spread its massive shadow along the street; the automobile began to slow. A line of motorcars idled in front of the mansion, and a handful of pressmen huddled along the sidewalks, long-coated figures powdered with snow, hats and umbrellas turning white. The nearest one noticed the Forces and his camera jerked upward, and then they all did, one after another, as though linked by a puppeteer’s string.
Their limousine came to a stop, still seven cars away from the main doors.
“We’re sitting ducks out here,” said Katherine.
Mother leaned forward. “You’re right. Let’s get out now, before they surround us entirely.”
A pair of footmen had noticed them, as well, trotting up to the automobile’s doors.
“You are a queen,” Mother said to Madeleine quickly, in those last few moments. “Head high. Show them all you belong here.”
Swathed in ermine, Mrs. Force stepped out of the limousine.
Katherine gave Madeleine a wicked smile, then followed. There was a sporadic dazzle of lights, but most of the flashes, Madeleine knew by now, were going to be aimed at her.
She gathered her skirts. She slid across the squabs and raised her right hand to the footman awaiting her, exiting the auto in a slither of mink and ice-blue brocade, trying to show as little ankle as possible.
The flash-powder explosions began, hot lights surrounding her, men shouting her name.
“Miss Force! Look this way, please!”
“Miss Force! Over here!”
She kept her gaze cast down, focusing on her feet, the slippery folds of her gown. The wet gray slush of the pavement.
Think of Jack.
The footman released her hand, keeping an umbrella positioned above her head.
“Miss Force! Did you help plan the menu?”
“How many dances will you share with the colonel?”
“Any surprises in store for this evening?”
She had to look up to orient herself, to make certain she was heading for the porte cochère. It was a mistake. Within seconds, she was blinded, and the only thing to do then was to pause and wipe all expression from her face until her vision cleared.
“Miss?” It was the footman, paused with her but politely concerned, and Madeleine gave a nod and moved forward again, this time with a serene, slim smile, as if she’d meant all along to let them fix her there, frozen as a deer in the road.
“Miss Force! Miss Force!”
And then she was past the open doors, past the inner bronze entrance gates and into the glass-domed hall, her heels striking wood and stone instead of concrete. The air swept by her more temperate, and the snow disappeared, and she did not have to picture Jack any longer because he was there before her, smiling at her, taking up both of her hands in his own.