Newport, 1894
August
Georgie heard the voices before she saw them, first Bay’s, low and urgent. “You can still cry off.”
There was the sweep of a long skirt against the gravel as the wearer paced, turning with a flourish. Georgie drew closer, lifting her skirts so they wouldn’t betray her.
“The seamstresses are already embroidering the linens, Bay. Think what a waste it would be to have to unpick all of those monograms.”
“You don’t marry for linens, Anne.”
“Not just for linens, no … there’s also the silver and the china and those amusing little ornaments that fit in the corner cupboard. And the yacht and the house near Rhinebeck.”
Through the gaps between the vines, Georgie could just make out Anne’s face, her chin lifted to display all the fine lines of her face and neck, the pride of her carriage. She looked like a Burne-Jones princess, wrapped about with briars. They were beautiful, both of them, Anne and Bay, tall and golden.
Anne’s voice was husky and sweet as the scent of the flowers. “Is it so wrong to want something of my own, Bay?”
“But they’re not yours. They’re Teddy’s.”
“And Teddy will be mine. I find him rather handsome. Don’t you? It won’t be such hardship.” Anne’s voice softened, losing its arch edge. “Don’t fuss, dearest. I know what I’m doing. I can manage Teddy.”
“And if you can’t?” The pain in Bay’s voice woke an answering pain in Georgie. She bit her lip so hard she could taste the blood on her tongue. “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to marry for appearances.”
“No?” Anne lifted a hand to Bay’s cheek in a casual gesture of possession. “You did.”
Georgie felt as though she were drowning, the water rising up around her mouth and nose. She couldn’t seem to breathe; her limbs felt heavy, too heavy to move. She blundered back a step, and then another, rose petals catching beneath her slippers, perfuming the air with their too-heady scent.
But he married me, Georgie wanted to cry out. Why would he marry an actress but for love?
Her skirt must have given her away, the hem heavy against the ground, because Anne looked up. Coolly, without hurrying, she took her hand from Bay’s cheek. “Oh, hello, Annabelle. Did you want us?”
Bay turned, too quickly. If he had been a moment slower, Georgie would have been spared the expression on his face. Emotion. Raw emotion of a sort that Georgie didn’t associate with her husband.
Georgie wanted to shake him, to demand to know what had just happened. But what had she seen, really? Just two cousins, talking. Talk, only talk.
She drew in a deep breath, grappling for composure. “I … Janie wanted me to remind you that we’re to meet for portraits before supper.”
“Oh, yes, the ball,” said Anne, and managed to make it sound like something impossibly gauche, a child’s plaything. She placed a hand on Bay’s arm, fleeting, caressing, a badge of ownership. “Proserpina, isn’t it? And Hades. How fortunate we are to have you bring the spring to us, cousin dear.”
Bay stepped too quickly forward, like a puppet handled by an inexpert master. “Is it time to dress? I didn’t hear the gong.”
“It hasn’t gone yet. I was just…” Eager to see you? It made her feel childish to say it.
“Indulging in an excess of caution?” Something about the way Anne said it, with a sideways smile at Bay, made Georgie want to take her corset tapes and pull them tighter and tighter until that satisfied smile faded from her face. “Very wise, cousin. Aunt Alva gets so cross when her plans are balked.”
Bay crossed in front of Anne, blocking her from Georgie’s view. Taking Georgie’s arm, he said, “Shall we go inside? You look rather flushed.”
“Have you had too much sun, Annabelle?” Anne’s parasol mushroomed open, elaborately bedecked. “You must take care, my dear. Bay would hate for you to overexert yourself.”
Anne managed to make everything she said sound like not a double, but a triple entendre. It was just Anne’s way, Georgie told herself. She couldn’t help it. It didn’t mean anything.
But she couldn’t help seeing Anne’s pale hand on Bay’s cheek, the intimacy of it, the familiarity.
“I was born in India. This is nothing to summer in Madras.” Georgie looked across her husband at his cousin, tilting her chin in Annabelle’s way, giving Anne the full effect of Annabelle’s scorn. “The Laceys are hardy stock.”
Anne twirled her parasol between her fingers, making the flounces bounce. “But you’re a Van Duyvil now, Cousin Annabelle.”
“To my infinite joy,” said Bay, covering Georgie’s fingers with his, but the words felt flat, joyless.
They proceeded in silence up the steps. Anne furled her parasol and looked from one to the other with raised brows. “Until supper, then.”
Georgie waited until she had gone into the house before turning to Bay and saying in a low voice, “A marriage of appearances?”
Bay grimaced. “You mustn’t mind Anne.”
A liveried footman was holding open the door, waiting, his face impassive beneath his white wig.
“It would be easier not to mind her if you minded her less,” said Georgie in a low voice, before preceding Bay through the door.
Bay caught up with her by a bust of one of Louis XIV’s ministers that looked as though it had been looted from someone’s château. It probably had. “Anne was my childhood playmate and my closest friend. My mother … well, you’ve seen what she’s like. We were left largely to our own devices.”
Georgie tilted her head back to look Bay full in the eye. “What sort of devices, exactly?”
Bay blinked at her. “What do you mean?”
The mirrors lining the walls reflected them back, a hundred times over, distorted by palm fronds. “What do you think? You must have heard the whispers, Bay. You … and Anne.”
“You can’t think … nothing like that!” He seemed genuinely shocked by the idea. “I love Anne like a sister.”
Georgie started walking again, heels clicking against marble. She hated how small the house made her feel; she wasn’t statuesque like her husband or her relations. A cuckoo in the nest, that was what Annabelle had called her.
She was sick of being the one on the outside, always a step behind. “Do brothers try to break off their sisters’ engagements?”
“Yes!” There was no mistaking the exasperation in Bay’s voice. He moved to cut her off, grabbing her hands in his. “Yes, they do, if they think the man’s a rotter.”
Georgie’s voice was low, scraped from the bottom of her throat. “But you would have let your own sister marry him.”
“With reservations. You know I’ve never liked Teddy.” Bay squeezed her hands, leaning down to try to see her face under the brim of her hat. “And Anne’s not Janie. Anne feels everything so deeply.”
Georgie twitched her hands away. “What makes you think Janie doesn’t?”
Bay held up his hands in surrender. “Perhaps she does. I don’t know. Janie’s the Rosetta stone to me; she’s written in a language I can’t make out. But Anne—”
The way his voice softened when he said Anne’s name made Georgie want to spit. “What makes you think you know Anne so well? Or that you know what would suit her best? Have you ever stopped to think how it must be for her, living in your mother’s house, dependent on your mother’s largesse for every cent she spends? It’s horrid living on someone else’s charity.”
So kind of them to take her in, that was what everyone always said. How fortunate Miss Georgiana was, how grateful she should be. Grateful that she had to exist on crumbs while her half sister had the cake?
“It’s not charity.” Bay caught himself. “Not really. We’re family.”
“There’s family and there’s family. Didn’t you tell me this was once Anne’s father’s house? Can you imagine what it must be to be a pensioner in your own home? No, of course you haven’t. You’re Bayard Van Duyvil, and nothing you’ve wanted has failed to be yours.”
Bay’s face was very still. Only his throat worked, the Adam’s apple moving up and down. “That’s not true.”
Georgie looked defiantly at him. “All right, then. Name one thing. One thing you’ve wanted and couldn’t have.”
Bay’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. “A simpler life,” he said at last.
“That’s rubbish.” Georgie turned on her heel, feeling her shoulder blades tight beneath her dress. “This is a brilliant match for Anne. If you care for her at all, you’ll leave her be.”
“Georgie.” Bay’s hands were on her shoulders. Usually, he called her that only in private, in their own bedchamber. “Georgie. Let’s not fight.”
Georgie only shook her head without looking at him. In one breath, she said, “Carrie Rheinlander thinks that you only married me to get your own back over Anne’s engagement.”
Georgie could feel Bay’s breath against her hair. “Carrie Rheinlander is a nasty busybody who wouldn’t know an honest emotion if it bit her.”
Georgie turned in his arms, looking up at him. “Then what did Anne mean about your marrying for appearances?”
Bay’s eyes shifted away from hers. “When Anne’s unhappy, she lashes out however she can. She doesn’t bother with Queensbury rules.”
“A hit is only a hit if there’s something to hit.”
Bay’s hands tightened on her shoulders. “If I had wanted to marry someone for appearances, don’t you think I would have chosen from my own set?” His voice softened. “You know why I married you, Georgie. I married you because I couldn’t bear to let you go.”
It usually made her feel warm through and through when he said that, but today it left her cold. “And to save me from Giles,” she reminded him. Her hands flattened against the lapels of his coat. “I feel I know you less here than I did in London.”
“I hate Newport.” Bay ducked his head, abashed at his own vehemence. “There’s no space between spectacle and reality. I always feel … not myself … in Newport.”
“London, then,” said Georgie softly. “What were you in London?”
“More myself for being with you.” Bay’s blue eyes met hers, rueful, genuine, the man she had met in London, the man who had sat across from her at the Feathers night after night, who had endured a dozen performances of Eleven and One Nights. This was the man she had married, the man she loved. “Was it selfishness to bring you back with me?”
“No. Unless it was my selfishness as well, to want to come with you.” Georgie ought to have felt reassured, she supposed, but instead she felt obscurely troubled by worries she couldn’t quite name.
Maybe Bay was right. Maybe it was Newport, that hothouse environment of spectacle and show, where everyone whispered about everyone else. Maybe it was feeling herself under public scrutiny, knowing her very name to be a lie. Easier, perhaps, to look for weaknesses in others than admit them in herself.
Bay touched her cheek with one finger. “Shall we dress? If you can bear the costume my mother chose for you.”
“I’ve worn worse.” It was the first time either of them had touched on her past, and it felt strangely intimate, something that was theirs and theirs alone. “At least this is a skirt, not trousers.”
The corners of Bay’s eyes crinkled. “I rather miss those trousers.”
Georgie twined her arms around his neck, heedless of servants, of potential watchers. Let Newport gossip about how shamefully in love the Van Duyvils were. “I might be persuaded to put on a private performance.”
Gently, Bay unwrapped her arms, lifting first one hand, then the other, to his lips. “Tonight’s performance first.” He cocked a brow. “Should I be alarmed that my mother has cast me as Hades?”
“Why should you be alarmed?” said Georgie, trying not to mind. He was right, of course. The gong would go at any moment, and Mrs. Van Duyvil didn’t brook lateness. “I’m the one who’s about to be dragged down to the underworld.”
“For love,” Bay reminded her. “For love.”
Cold Spring, 1899
January
“How did you come to write for the papers?’
With Mrs. Gerritt serving, lunch was a necessarily stilted affair. One couldn’t discuss delicate matters with Mrs. Gerritt slapping dishes on the sideboard with a brisk efficiency that intimated that her time would be better spent elsewhere. She had already demonstrated her displeasure by showing Janie and her guest into the breakfast room rather than the dining room, as “no company had been expected.”
Janie and Mr. Burke had already discussed the unusually cold winter; whether the winter was really that unusually cold or it only seemed that way; and supplemented it with a précis of winters that had been either unusually cold or unusually mild. Having exhausted the weather as a topic, Janie cast about for something else suitably anodyne.
“You make journalism sound like a social disease,” said Mr. Burke, leaning back in his chair with exaggerated ease. Janie had noticed the way his eyes took in the richly paneled room, the stained glass, the Italian marbles and Flemish tapestries. In response, he had adopted a smilingly pugilistic manner that made conversation almost as difficult as Mrs. Gerritt’s silent disapproval.
“Do I? I didn’t mean to. I have a cousin who writes for the papers,” said Janie, by way of apology. “Or thinks he does. It’s mostly doggerel verse, all in rhymed couplets. When he gets away from his nurse, he sends large parcels to the papers.”
She decided not to add that said cousin claimed to be the reincarnated soul of Lord Byron, John Donne, and, on alternate Tuesdays, Shakespeare. The Byron days were particularly trying for his poor nurse, who had to suffer being pinched on top of being recited at.
“There are no rhymes in mine,” said Mr. Burke. Reluctantly, he said, “I came to the paper by way of the theater. I got my start performing in Mr. Herne’s plays.”
“You were an actor?” Perhaps that explained the odd sense of familiarity, the sensation that she had seen Mr. Burke’s face—or at least his name—somewhere before.
“Not a very good one.”
Janie remembered that first meeting in the kitchen, in his imposture as Katie’s cousin. She looked skeptically at him over the remains of her apple tart. “Or so you claim. It might take a good actor to play a bad one.”
“You have a devious mind, Miss Van Duyvil.” It did not sound like a compliment.
Janie gave her napkin a twitch. “Call it, rather, common sense.”
“Another gift from your Dutch ancestors?” Mr. Burke raised a brow, deliberately provoking. “Along with the Delftware, of course.”
Was he trying to change the subject? His theatrical career appeared to be something Mr. Burke had no desire to discuss. Which, of course, made Janie all the more curious. “How did you go from theater to … your current profession?”
“Sure, and it’s all a form of the human comedy, isn’t it?”
Janie frowned at him, refusing to be deterred. “Did you always want to be on the stage?”
“I wanted to eat,” said Mr. Burke bluntly. “I drove a milk wagon for a time, but given that I didn’t like the dawn and the horse didn’t like me, it seemed better to look for other employment.”
“So you exchanged milk bottles for an inkwell?” said Janie, for lack of anything better to say. It seemed very hard to imagine the urbane Mr. Burke on the seat of a milk wagon. “You don’t seem—”
“Common?” Mr. Burke offered, and Janie felt her cheeks redden. He pushed his plate firmly back. “Let me dispel any illusions you might have about me, Miss Van Duyvil. I’m as common as they come. I was a foundling. Left on the steps for the nuns.”
“That’s very … romantic,” Janie ventured.
“No,” said Mr. Burke, “it’s not. There were dozens of us, left every week. The unwanted ones. There were so many of us that they had a cradle put outside the church. For deliveries, you might say.”
The bitterness in his voice made Janie flinch. “You don’t know that nobody wanted you. Your mother might have been ill—she might have had no other recourse.” She’d seen it often enough at the Girls’ Club, women who had taken one misstep, forced to hide their conditions, give up their babies. She’d seen them crying in secret, only in secret, because to admit the truth would mean ruin. “This might have been her way of giving you a better start in life.”
“Or of getting rid of an impediment.” Mr. Burke smiled crookedly. “You’re determined to make a heartwarming story out of this, aren’t you, Miss Van Duyvil?”
Janie wasn’t willing to let it go that easily. “But just think. You might be anyone.”
Mr. Burke choked on a laugh. “A lost prince? You’ve been reading too much Little Lord Fauntleroy. More likely I’m the illegitimate child of some poor soul just off the boat.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Even if it had been. Janie rested her palms on the table, in heady defiance of her mother’s strictures. “Just think, you can be anyone you want to be. You have no family telling you how you’re meant to behave or what you’re meant to do or meant not to do. There’s the whole world in front of you for the taking.”
For a moment, he almost seemed to be listening. But then he gave his head a quick shake. “Or for the stealing. I’ve lived in ways you can’t imagine.”
Janie didn’t have to ask what he meant. Even she had seen it, through the windows of the carriage, the young children huddled together in alleys for warmth, scavenging for food.
“You’re right. I can’t imagine it.” Janie stared down at her own hands, so smooth and unscarred, the nails carefully shaped. “There are times when I look at the women at the Girls’ Club and wonder if I could have lived as they have lived. I wish I could be that strong. I … I don’t think I would do as well, if I tried.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Burke leaned back in his chair, his eyes on her face. “You’re not at all what I expected.”
“My mother feels the same way.” She’d meant it lightly, but it didn’t come out that way. Abruptly, Janie said, “Would you like a cup of tea before you leave for your train? We can take it in the library.”
“A foundling taking tea at Illyria. Your ancestors must be rattling in their graves.” Mr. Burke rose and circled to the back of her chair to draw it out for her. “Do you have anything stronger than tea?”
Janie slipped out of her seat, very aware of Mr. Burke behind her. “Sherry, I think.”
He gestured her to precede him, a strangely courtly gesture for a former milkman. “I’d say the day calls for it, wouldn’t you?”
“Mrs. Gerritt,” said Janie, feeling defiant and bold, “would you bring the tea things to the library?”
“For propriety’s sake, I take it?” murmured Mr. Burke as they walked together from the breakfast room to the library, down a corridor paneled in dark wood and hung with the murky portraits of someone’s ancestors. “Do you mean to drink your sherry from a teacup?”
Janie’s flush gave her away. Mr. Burke gave a bark of laughter.
“How can you be bold enough to seek me out, but not bold enough to take a tipple in your own house?”
“It’s not my house,” Janie pointed out. “It’s Bay’s. Was Bay’s.”
The reminder sobered them both. Janie felt the full oddity of it, entertaining a stranger in Bay’s house, while Bay’s body lay cold and still in the frost-blasted ground of Green-Wood Cemetery.
For Bay, she reminded herself. Her association with Mr. Burke was for Bay. To discover the truth of his death.
The library felt surprisingly cozy for such an imposing room. A hastily lit fire smoldered in the grate beneath a vast stone mantel looted from a French château, casting a warm light over shelves made of oak inlaid with maple. The walls between the shelves and the ceiling had been hung with red silk chased with gold, a pattern echoed in the long drapes that were elegantly looped back from the long, arched windows on the western wall, providing a view of the grounds and a tantalizing glimpse of the river below. Paintings hung pendent in gilded oval frames, portraits all of them, a parade of Van Duyvils, copied, she imagined, from the portraits in the old house, ancestors in periwigs and mobcaps, ruffled fichus and brown snuff coats, coquettish ringlets and bristling whiskers. Janie recognized her mother, resplendent in jewels in the costume of the early 1880s, sometime before her father’s death. And there was her father, quietly pleased, she imagined, to be back among books.
The watch pinned to Janie’s bodice said it was just past three, but the early winter dusk was already beginning to fall, painting the landscape in shades of pewter and gray, making the red opulence of the library seem even warmer in contrast.
Mrs. Gerritt set the tea tray between the windows and, leaving the door pointedly ajar, left them to their tea. Or something stronger.
There was a decanter on a silver tray, surrounded by glasses of Austrian crystal. It was filled with an amber liquid. Defiantly, Janie bypassed the tea tray and took up the decanter, finding it rather more difficult to grasp than she had expected. It had been made for larger hands than hers.
Trying to look as though she imbibed spirits every day, she said, “Would you rather tea or sherry?”
“I rather doubt that’s sherry,” said Mr. Burke, “but I’ll risk it if you will.”
Clumsily, Janie poured one glass, then another, grateful, in an odd way, that Mr. Burke didn’t offer to help. Whatever it was, it certainly didn’t smell like sherry. It had a peaty smell that made her think a bit of her father’s library, although whether it was because her father liked old books or had enjoyed a drink or two in the evenings, she couldn’t say.
Mr. Burke accepted his glass from her and raised it in a toast. “To your very good health, Miss Van Duyvil.”
“And yours.” Janie screwed up her courage and tilted the glass back as he did, only to find her throat on fire. It burned all the way up her nose and along her ears. Her eyes watered with it.
“That,” she said hoarsely, when she could speak again, “is not sherry.”
“Best Laphroaig, I should think,” said Mr. Burke appreciatively. “Sip. Don’t gulp.”
Janie coughed again and held the glass up to squint at the liquid. It looked deceptively innocent in the firelight, like weak tea with honey. “Is this what men slink off to drink?”
“Among other things.” Mr. Burke held up his glass to her in salute. “But seldom sherry.”
“So you say,” said Janie, and took another experimental sip. It made her feel quite dissipated and worldly. And why not? she thought defiantly. The world had turned upside down. It was foolish to apply the old rules, the old standards.
And she was so very sick of being proper.
“Do you know,” said Mr. Burke meditatively, “that while the whisky is aging, a fair bit disappears, into the air, as it were. They call that portion the angels’ share.”
The words made the hairs on the back of Janie’s neck rise. She took another sip of her drink, holding the taste on her tongue. “It’s a bit eerie to think of unseen beings drinking from the cask.”
Lifting his glass up to the firelight, Mr. Burke recited, “Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there. / He wasn’t there again today. / I wish, I wish he’d go away.”
Janie caught herself looking over her shoulder, squinting at the shadows. “Did you just make that up?”
“I write in prose, not verse. It’s a bit of doggerel a friend sent me. Hughes Mearns. It’s a song for a play he’s writing. But it does rather hit it, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Janie soberly, “it does. Rather too well.”
An unseen head on a bed. An unseen hand stoking the grate.
Mr. Burke set his glass down on the table beside him, resting his hands on his knees. “Would you like me to take a look at the room in the other house before I leave?”
“Will it appear in an illustrated supplement in The World?”
“Not unless there’s a body hidden there.” Mr. Burke grimaced. “Sorry. In the newsroom, we … well, the worse it is, the more of a joke we make it. It’s a way to get through the day without being sick.”
Janie gave a slight nod to show him she understood. The room nodded a bit with her. “I almost wish there were a body on the bed.” That hadn’t come out quite right somehow. She wrinkled her nose. “It seems rather horrible to hope for a corpse, doesn’t it? It’s not that I want Annabelle to be dead. But it seems so cruel to let Viola and Sebastian hold out the hope that she might return to them. If her body were found … if we could bury her and let them mourn her.”
“Then they wouldn’t have to someday face the fact that their mother might be a murderer.” Mr. Burke looked at her steadily, looked at her until she was forced to meet his gaze. “You’ve considered it, too, haven’t you? That Annabelle might still be alive.”