“Madeleine,” he greeted her, his tone low and intimate. He bent his head to place a kiss upon her knuckles. She felt the warmth of his breath through her gloves.
In that moment, it was all of it, every bit of it, worth it.
*
Did you help plan the menu?
No. Wives planned menus. Or, in this case, personal secretaries.
How many dances will you share with the colonel?
Any of them, all of them. As many as he wished.
Any surprises in store for this evening?
Only Jack himself knew the answer to that.
*
The portrait of Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, Junior—Lina, the Mrs. Astor—hung with frigid magnificence upon a buff-plastered wall of the Fifth Avenue residence. It dominated the reception room, looming larger than any of the other masterpieces arranged nearby. It had been done by Carolus-Duran during the acme of Mrs. Astor’s tight-lipped beauty; her painted flesh gleamed like the pearls around her neck against the russet background and the black satin of her gown.
Beneath the portrait was a leopard-skin rug, one upon which the living Mrs. Astor used to stand to greet her guests, so that anyone fortunate enough to have gained entrance into these hallowed halls would be presented with the delight of double Mrs. Astors, both smiling grimly in welcome.
Madeleine took careful note of that painted smile, along with the pearls and the diamond-decorated fan and the impressive ruby so discreetly, yet openly, displayed upon the ring finger of Mrs. Astor’s bare left hand.
Behind her, the Knickerbocker guests of Lina’s Knickerbocker son drained cocktails and conversed as they waited for the dinner to begin. Bankers, Wall Street speculators, railroad barons, timber barons, plantation owners; potent, important men with interests in tobacco and politics and steel . . . and all their stiff-backed wives, all very much the age of her mother. The nape of Madeleine’s neck crawled with their attention.
They’d swiveled and smiled at her as she’d entered the chamber on Jack’s arm. Smiled with such pleasantly blank expressions, and took her hand and looked her not quite in the eyes, and the whole time Madeleine had marveled, I thought they’d be more terrifying.
But then Mrs. James Cardeza was in front of her, Charlotte Cardeza, that war dragon, who regarded first the colonel and then her with that same bland, genial air, and Madeleine came back to herself with a start.
She thought, Are they all pretending?
All those tittering scandal sheets were still being read. Madeleine’s lack, the scant merits of her blood, her family’s fortune, were still being weighed against theirs. Even Jack couldn’t protect her from that.
Katherine approached, carrying two coupes brimming with champagne.
“Those sleeves,” Madeleine murmured, without turning from the painting.
“That expression,” Katherine murmured back, handing her one of the etched crystal coupes, spilling a little on her glove. She lifted her glass in mock salute. “She looks as though she feasts upon orphaned children gone astray in the woods.”
“Hush! Everyone will hear you.”
“Never fear. I shall spend the evening as orthodox as a nun.”
“That would be a first. How much champagne have you had?”
“Honestly? Not nearly enough.”
Night had fallen, and it was still snowing outside, stronger now, thick and fast, cushioning all the outside sounds. The windows shone sable with curling fringes of frost, and all up and down the chamber shadows clung to the floor and ceiling and furniture and walls, a slightly milder sort of black than the black outside, sliced with patches of light.
Jack’s Manhattan residence was made of stone. Beneath the caramel oak woodwork, beneath the many rugs of wool and silk and royal tiger and polar bear, beneath the towering marble columns and archways and imported Italian tiles, was stacked block after block of sober hard stone. So with the snow keeping outside noises outside, and the stone trapping inside noises inside, everything in the chamber echoed, amplified, voices and footsteps and breathing; the splashing of the water in the fountain out in the entrance hall; laughter and veiled looks and the smell of floor polish and beeswax.
Gray, antique tapestries undulated with the draft against the walls, labored and slow, like the respiration of old elephants, but even those didn’t dampen the sound.
It was a concert hall of a house, a colossus twisting of a house, crammed with rare and beautiful things yet at the same time composed mostly of hollow air, of wraiths. It seemed impossible that anyone with a pulse could actually reside here, much less thrive.
She had dined at the Fifth Avenue mansion exactly three times before—informal dinners, family dinners, nothing like tonight—and on each occasion, she’d sensed how very easy it would be to be pulled apart by the history and expectations of this place. The life she would be required to live just to survive here.