Page 5 of The English Wife

The color rose in Anne’s cheeks. Or maybe it was just the snap of the cold—cold and scandal.

Janie turned quickly away, before they could turn their ire on her. Was this how other people were, afraid to admit grief, causing pain rather than be comforted? Or was it only the Van Duyvil household?

Bay hadn’t been like that. Bay would have defused the situation with a joke for Anne, a hand on his mother’s arm.

But Bay was gone.

Anne sank into a chair, a sinuous movement, even in her stays. “You have to give the vultures something. If they’re talking about Teddy, they might not—” With a convulsive gesture, Anne’s fingers closed around the slim gold case hanging from a chain at her waist. “Does anyone else need a cigarette? Janie?”

Janie ducked her head, an instinctive gesture.

“Not in my house,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil coldly.

“Even Ruth Mills smokes them these days, Aunt Alva. And she’s a Livingston.” Anne’s voice was its usual drawl, but her hands gave her away, shaking so badly she could hardly work the clasp on her cigarette case. “Isn’t that so, cousin dear?”

“So I’ve heard,” said Janie cautiously. She wouldn’t know. She’d never been invited to any of Ruth Mills’s house parties at Staatsburg. Janie went where her mother went, to select gatherings of the elect, parties that wouldn’t be sullied by the new people and their conspicuous expenditure.

And, of course, to Illyria. A silly name for a house, her mother had sniffed, but it was what Annabelle and Bay had chosen to call it.

Bay. The lamplight dazzled Janie’s eyes, refracting into the light of a thousand icicles. The snow had thickened after they found him, crusting his body with diamonds, turning him into a creature out of fancy, a sleeping prince waiting to be woken.

“Janie!” Her mother’s voice was sharp.

“I’m sorry. I was—”

“Not attending. You never do. Go see what’s keeping the girl. You’d think she was harvesting the tea herself.”

Anne rose from her chair with something less than her usual grace. The cigarette was still clutched, unlit, between her fingers. Even she didn’t quite have the gall to light it in the face of direct objection. “I’ll go.”

“No. It’s all right.” The parlor felt like the inside of a coffin, velvet lined. Janie could feel herself smothering in it. “I won’t be a moment.”

She escaped before Anne could object. If there was one skill Janie had learned over the years, it was the art of absenting herself. One could be absent in the midst of a crowded drawing room if one really tried.

If the parlor was a coffin, the hall felt like a tomb, the marble floor cold and bleak, the frieze of urns that skirted the ceiling disappearing into the gloom. Janie escaped gratefully to the nether regions of the house, down the half stair that led to the kitchen. She could feel the warmth even before she entered; warmth and coal smoke and the strong smells of food in various stages of preparation.

“Is something burning?” asked Janie.

“The cakes—” Mrs. O’Malley started up from the table, grabbing for a towel and catching up a newssheet instead. She stared at it as though not sure how it had got there. “I was just—”

“Yes, I can see that.”

DOUBLE MURDER ON THE HUDSON! shouted the headline.

Somewhere, they’d found pictures of Annabelle and Bay. Neither looked at all like themselves. Annabelle’s was an artist’s sketch, her hair piled high atop her head in a style she didn’t favor, her chin pushed into an unnatural position by the strands of a pearl choker Janie couldn’t recall her ever wearing. And then there was Bay. Janie recognized the picture, taken on the occasion of his graduation from the Harvard Law School six years before, his hair slicked down at the sides, high collar stiff around his throat. The same picture that sat in a silver frame on a table in the parlor.

Someone in the house must have provided the picture. Mrs. O’Malley? Or Katie, the downstairs maid? Katie was standing by the scullery, holding herself as though her very stillness would keep her from notice.

Janie nodded at the newssheet. “You’d best not let Mrs. Van Duyvil see you with that.”

Mrs. O’Malley clutched the paper close to her thin chest. “Yes, miss. No, miss.”

Janie had always wished she could be like a girl in a story, the sort of girl who was beloved by peers and servants alike. But she had never had the gift of commanding allegiance, either by love or by fear. The servants, she knew, took their cue from her mother. Janie was an extraneous female, but a Van Duyvil still, to be treated with nominal respect to her face and derision behind her back.

Janie held out a hand. “May I?”

Mrs. O’Malley surrendered the newssheet. The print was grainy, smeared by the touch of eager fingers. And this was only one of many newspapers being hawked on street corners. Not since the discovery of a dismembered body in the East River two summers ago had there been such a sensation.

Murder. Janie still couldn’t make her mind close around the word. Murder was something that happened in the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, in the dark segments of the city through which a carriage passed with closed curtains. Not in her family. Not in Illyria.