Page 1 of The English Wife

PROLOGUE

Cold Spring, 1899

Twelfth Night

“They say he’s bankrupted himself rebuilding the house—all for her, of course.” Carrie Rheinlander’s voice carried along the high, arched ceiling. “And then there are those frightful stories about … oh, Janie! I didn’t see you there.”

No one ever did.

Sometimes, Janie felt like the threads on an old tapestry, blending into the background. That backdrop served its own purpose, Janie knew, but once, just once, she wished she could blaze out in a luster of silver and gold.

But not here. Here, everyone glittered, everyone blazed. Her brother’s guests dazzled in garb that would have put a Medici to shame, every breast adorned with diamonds and rubies, every neck hung round with gold chains. The men peacocked in tights and short cloaks; the women dazzled in silks and velvets woven with gold and sewn with jewels. Janie’s own costume seemed modest in comparison, the garnets set in and around the squared neckline subdued in their opulence, the poor cousin of rubies.

“Carrie.” Janie acknowledged Carrie’s greeting with a shy nod. They had played dolls together, made their debut together, but Carrie had no time for her now. Carrie had married and Janie hadn’t. Against that, all the bonds of kinship and childhood counted as nothing.

Carrie lifted a jeweled hand in acknowledgment, but she was already sailing past. “Poor Janie Van Duyvil,” she murmured to her companion. “All that money and still on the shelf.”

A backwards glance and a hushed comment from Carrie’s companion, one of the new people, the wife of a man who had made his money in mines.

Then Carrie’s voice again, a carrying whisper that was worse than a shout. “Hardly! There’s been no one, no one at all, since Teddy Newland jilted her for Anne.”

Janie forced herself to focus on the array of sweetmeats on the buffet table. Hothouse grapes spilled off the edges of platters of ornate silver-gilt. Strawberries, red and ripe out of season, glistened with sugar, like flowers under frost. Bay and Annabelle had spared no expense in this, their one bow to society.

A bow? No, more like the glorious condescension of monarchs, throwing open the palace for a day, letting the world come and gawk before slamming shut the gates and returning to their own quiet state.

Bay and Annabelle had made a point of shunning society—or at least that was how society saw it. The idea that they might simply prefer their own company was taken as nonsense. It was sheer affectation that drove Annabelle Van Duyvil to ignore Mrs. Astor’s invitations, to leave empty the family box at the Opera. It was, everyone agreed, all the fault of her being English and convinced of her own superiority. Just look at what she had done to the Van Duyvil family home on the Hudson! A simple house of white wood, with a mere three wings and a classical colonnade, had been abandoned in favor of a baronial fantasy, a replica of Mrs. Van Duyvil’s family home in England.

“If she liked it there that much, why couldn’t she have stayed there?” muttered the matchmaking mamas, thwarted in their ambitions for their daughters.

But they came anyway, all of them, in their private train cars, their landaus, their barouches, footmen in livery riding atop piles of baggage, ladies’ maids clutching jewel cases, eager to gawk at what Annabelle Van Duyvil had wrought, to cluck their tongues and shake their heads and spread what scandal they could as they dined on their hosts’ food and reputations.

“Van Duyvil doesn’t trust his wife in society, that’s why they’re never in town. On account of her … intemperate appetites.” Right next to her, Janie could hear the unmistakable bray of Alisdair McHugh, self-appointed social arbiter. It was an open secret that McHugh snuck stories to Town Topics, the notorious scandal sheet; no one dared shun him for fear of what he might invent. “The architect’s her lover, of course. Hadn’t you heard? Right under her husband’s nose, no less, and Van Duyvil footing the bill for the renovations.”

Janie didn’t know whether to blush for her brother or his guests. Annabelle’s not like that, she wanted to say. They’re neither of them like that.

But her tongue felt like ice between her lips, frozen, as it always was in such situations. Don’t make a scene. Don’t put yourself forward. For goodness’s sake, Janie, stop that tiresome chatter. Those had been the strictures of her youth. Mr. McHugh might spread scandal all he liked, but if Janie were to contradict him, the world would whisper, “No wonder she’s a spinster.”

Where were Bay and Annabelle? Janie could see her mother, wearing the double ropes of pearls that were her pride, dressed as Gloriana. (Gloriana in her later years, thought Janie, and then grimaced at her own pettiness.) But it was very much like her mother to claim the primary role in a house that was no longer hers, masking her own ambition behind the excuse that her presence would lend countenance to her son and daughter-in-law. Janie’s mother considered herself the last of the true leaders of society, the last bastion of the old guard against those tedious mushroom growths, the Astors and the Vanderbilts.

There were times when Janie thought it might be rather nice to be a mushroom, to grow and flourish without the steely gaze of centuries of Dutch ancestors. Virtue, her mother told her time and again, was its own reward, but on a night such as this, virtue seemed about as much a reward as day-old porridge.

There were times when she wished she had been born a male, that she might make her own way, that she might marry as she pleased and live as she would.

But that was as much a fancy as this carnival version of the Renaissance. In a few hours, the jester in motley would take off his cap and become an actor again; Isabella of Spain would ring for her maid and put cold cream on her face; and the whole pageant would turn again into what it was, hard-eyed businessmen and their ambitious wives, scheming to attain the status to which Janie and Bay had been born, and which had offered them nothing but the right to be gossiped over.

“Janie?” It was her cousin Anne, breathless and impatient, her cheeks flushed with heat or something else. “Janie!”

“Yes?” Next to Anne, Janie felt like the faded copy of an old portrait, set beside the glowing tones of the original. They both had blond curls as girls, but where Janie’s had faded to mouse, Anne’s was glowing, unapologetic gold. Anne had chosen her own namesake for her costume; she had dressed as Anne Boleyn.

Are you sure it’s wise? Janie had heard Bay ask, as the family gathered for dinner. To call their minds to divorce?

Anne had lifted a caressing hand to Bay’s cheek, her laugh just a touch too bright. When have you and I ever been wise?

Now, Anne’s headdress was askew, and twin lines of irritation marked the sides of her mouth. “Have you seen Bay and Annabelle? Supper’s nearly over, and they’re meant to be opening the German.”

“They’re not in the music room?”

Annabelle, when she chose to share it, had a beautiful voice. It was a talent she used charily, although Janie had more than once heard her sister-in-law’s voice, low and sweet, through the darkened entry to the night nursery.