Page 140 of The English Wife

“Yes?” he said, and his voice was so tender that any tart words Janie might have uttered faltered on her tongue.

I love you.

Janie met Burke’s eyes levelly. “As a good man once told me—do what you have to do and have the guts to see it through. Go back to town. Write your story. Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

“Language,” muttered Giles Lacey and upended his glass.

“You sound like your grandmother,” said Mrs. Gerritt from the doorway. “She was a good woman. Nothing mealy-mouthed about her. Good hand with a piecrust, too.”

Burke banged his elbow on the window frame. Giles Lacey dropped his glass, spraying the last few droplets of raspberry cordial across the carpet.

“That’s enough of that,” said Mrs. Gerritt. “Are you all going to bed, or do I have to carry you up?”

TWENTY-NINE

New York

February, 1899

For three days, the papers were crammed with reports of people frozen in their homes, ice floes in Southern waters, walls of snow in the nation’s capital. Never had there been a storm like it, pummeling the country from New Orleans to Vermont.

And on the banks of the Hudson, Illyria lay in ruins, a heap of smoldering masonry, half walls and blackened chimney, gutted window frames and sparkling shards of glass.

Firemen and police climbed over the remains, but there was little they could do. Soot crept beneath the windowsills of the old house, tarring the woodwork, giving Janie a constant cough. The reek of smoke permeated everything.

As soon as they were able, Janie and Anne packed up the twins and fled back to the house on Thirty-Sixth Street. Word of Alva Van Duyvil’s death had preceded them. A pile of black-bordered notes of condolence had been delivered by footmen sloshing their way through the slush in the streets, climbing over the mounds of snow that had frozen hard at the street corner, black with coal smoke.

Only a handful of reporters ventured through the slush to wait at the gate. A death by fire, while a gratifyingly tragic capstone to a major story, was hardly front-page news compared to cattle freezing in the fields in Virginia.

The Doom of the Van Duyvils? mused The Journal, concocting an arresting but entirely fictitious tale of dubious seventeenth-century land deals and Indian curses, but their ruminations were limited to the lower half of an inside page.

Janie and Anne rolled up their sleeves and set about making arrangements for Mrs. Van Duyvil’s funeral. Anne was, much to Janie’s surprise, a pillar of strength in crisis. A slightly cracked and crooked pillar, but a pillar all the same, fierce in public and blunt in private.

In its own way, that was the most helpful of all, not having to pretend with Anne. It was exhausting enough dealing with the emotions she did feel without having to pretend to the ones she didn’t. Anne bullied the rector and the undertaker, poured sherry into Mr. Tilden until he disbursed the necessary funds, and wrote response after response to the notes of condolence that piled higher every day, as every socialite and social climber, every sixteenth cousin fifteen times removed, paid their respects to the late, great Alva Van Duyvil.

“She was mad.” That was Anne’s verdict, delivered in private, in those dark hours of the evening when the children were in bed and Janie and Anne sat together in the grim drawing room that had been her mother’s domain. “Is that the time? You can sit up if you like. I’m going to bed.”

But was she mad? There was something comforting about Anne’s blunt summation, as if the madness were something separate from her mother, something that had taken over her hand and directed her knife. But Janie wasn’t so sure.

It didn’t matter. It was over now. Janie tried to get her head around it all and found she couldn’t quite. The coroner’s court had met and declared a verdict of unnatural death by person or persons unknown. The press, with other, fresher stories to chase, dropped away. Giles Lacey booked passage to England. And Burke …

Do what you have to do, Janie had told him, and he did.

On the Wednesday following the storm, Burke’s article appeared in bold black letters on the front page of The News of the World, and the world turned upside down.

Curiosity seekers shimmied up lampposts to try to peer through windows. Second cousins suddenly contracted mysterious illnesses that rendered them unfit to perform their duties as pallbearers.

“Did she do it, Miss Van Duyvil? Did you see it?”

They ran a gauntlet from the church, the police pushing back the crowds, making way for the mourners, such as they were. The pews at Trinity Church were all but empty. A few elderly relatives, who either didn’t know or didn’t care, came to pay their respects, but her mother’s court was missing. Mrs. Astor discovered another obligation, and the rest of the world followed.

“There is some justice in the world.” Anne pushed back her veil and leaned back against the black velvet squabs as black-plumed horses carried them away from Trinity Church towards Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. There might be no body to bury, but the formalities were being observed all the same. “Aunt Alva must have been furious to see her funeral so ill-attended. Even those upstart Vanderbilts stayed away.”

Janie bit her lip to hide a smile. It wasn’t funny, not really. But she admired Anne’s nerve. “I wish—” she began, and stopped. Anne, while a rock when it came to dealing with grieving children, had balked all attempts to discuss what had happened at Illyria. “I wish I knew what she was thinking.”

Her cousin looked out the window, her face sober. “I used to admire her, you know. I thought if I married Teddy, I could be what she was. Only more beautiful and brilliant, of course.” Anne looked back at her, and Janie was surprised to see a hesitancy there. “Did you mind about Teddy?”

“I minded Mother minding,” said Janie honestly. “But other than that … no.”