The Necklace Page 10

Looking at Louis, she wonders if she doesn’t have a small glimpse into why Loulou hired him. He’s smart, certainly, and employed at an elite firm. But there are lots of lawyers who fit that bill. He’s handsome, she realizes. Craggy, you might call it, with none of that boyish thing going on. Perhaps Loulou wanted a piece of eye candy around at the end, and why not? Yes, she thinks, she’s sure Loulou enjoyed being called on by Louis Morrell.

  “It’s taken me completely by surprise. The whole thing has,” Nell says.

  “It shouldn’t. You obviously know your stuff. And she thought you wouldn’t be influenced by old family dramas. And there is the lawyer thing, of course,” he says. “I was thinking . . .” He’s leaning forward now. “I don’t know how long you’re in town, but maybe we could talk about this over dinner.”

  “I don’t do working dinners,” Nell says reflexively, rising. “I think it’s so much more efficient to just make a proper appointment and get it all done in an office. Do you want me to call your assistant or something?”

  He gets a strange look on his face. “Right, so much more efficient.”

  It’s then that she realizes her blunder. But before she can rectify it, can protest that she’d love to go to dinner with him because it’s then she realizes she would, Baldwin and her father come back in. They both stink of smoke. Baldwin sticks his hand out to Louis and they silently shake. “Let me buy you a drink, young man,” Baldwin jokes, leading Louis off toward the flower room, and Nell recognizes that signature move for what it is—a very Quincy way to patch things up. No apology. No acknowledgment.

  THE CROQUET SOIREE

  Ambrose watched Ethan working his way across the lawn—shaking guests’ hands, kissing cheeks, slapping backs. Viewing him from only the right side, his brother looked unchanged. Still, there was something in the forward slope of Ethan’s neck, something in the tight set of his jaw that telegraphed the injury on his left side, well concealed in the sleeve of his tuxedo.

  Ambrose walked into the early evening shade where he’d be hidden for a moment while he took his flask out of his pocket for one quick swig of rye. He needn’t have been stealthy about it. May’s bourbon punch had initially caused a scandal, but it catalyzed the guests. Tonight she’d put together a black-tie croquet soiree. Multiple courts were laid out on Ethan’s lawn in the fading early summer light. Guests had formed teams in a simultaneous elimination tournament.

  After the welcome-home dinner weeks ago, Ethan had hounded Ambrose to come stay in the country. Ethan’s attempt to force normalcy into the situation only made Ambrose perversely want to thwart his brother. Yet Ambrose did understand the desire to move on, move past, to make things stable.

  About a week ago a short, very proper note arrived from May, thanking Ambrose for the necklace yet again and extending an invitation to stay for the weekend, starting with the croquet tournament on Friday. A friendly gesture one might make to any new brother-in-law. Very correct. But in the end it was his father who convinced him to go out and stay at Ethan’s.

  “Don’t you want to see young people?” Israel asked him, handing over the unopened invitation at the breakfast table, guessing correctly at its contents. The newspapers lay spread between them. His father smelled of talc, whiskers perfectly trimmed.

  “Despite what happens at May’s parties . . .” Israel kept his eyes on the newspaper in front of him, proving that while May’s parties had become notorious indeed, Israel was not inclined to criticize a daughter-in-law who had married his injured son. “I imagine you’d find the company of people your own age more enlivening than that of an old man.”

  Ambrose relented after an evening with his father during which the sole topics of conversation had been the price of smelting equipment and a gruesome story about a trolley accident two blocks away, which ended in his father’s suggestion that Ambrose become involved in civic regulation of urban railways. It was the next morning that Ambrose agreed to visit the newlyweds. Because after weeks of brooding in his father’s house, Ambrose realized he was either going to make things normal or he was going to leave. And what better way to decide his course than trial by fire?

  Now, standing in the same spot on the lawn where he’d been two years ago, he wished he’d taken a train back to New York instead. The change in his brother’s house was clear.

  May lived there now.

  The barest hint of her violet scent greeted you at the threshold. A new Canaletto hung over the fireplace in the living room—something his brother never would have purchased. A complete set of the works of Emerson sat on the bookshelves, and Ambrose knew all the pages had been cut by May. Vases of flowers enhanced marquetry tables, scattered anywhere one could possibly anticipate needing them. Even the band setting up in the front hall for later reflected her. These were no part-timers reworking the standards, but an honest-to-God jazz band from Chicago.

  A girl he didn’t know was swaying, taking practice swings with a mallet that she held like a golf putter. Lots of that dark eye stuff they all wore now, garish lips, a flat body that was unattractive but oddly appealing in her sparkling dress. She was likely some parvenu friend of May’s, Ambrose thought. Though she looked too young, even through the makeup, to be May’s contemporary.

  Watching her, Ambrose felt a subtle loosening in his mind, the perpetual low-grade tension he lived with receded slightly.

  He swiped a glass of iced punch off a silver tray and walked it over to her. She sloshed a bit of it as she propped herself against her mallet to take a sip. Faint echo of May as she spilled a little more down her forearm before she drank the rest in one impressive gulp.

  “The famous Ambrose Quincy,” she said as she ducked her head to wipe her lips on the back of her wrist with a glitter of diamond bracelets. “So baaaad you didn’t even make it back for your own brother’s wedding.”

  “Let’s see, I was in . . . Ceylon that week, I think.” He picked up an abandoned mallet and positioned a ball to start the game.

  “Can’t say I blame you.” She wasn’t listening to him, but watched as he lined up a beginning shot through three wickets. “Brother marries your girl, I wouldn’t come back, either. Even if he is a hero and all.”

  Ambrose’s swing and then additional shot sent the ball wide, sailing off course. “She wasn’t my girl.”

  “Oh no?” Her penciled eyebrows shot up, and something in his tone must have told her to move on. “ ’S good news, I guess. Tell me about where you’ve been.”

  They played the game as he told her an abbreviated story of staying at a famous palace hotel in Bombay. Suddenly her eyes got wide. “You were with Dicky Cavanaugh.”

  Ambrose nodded.

  “I mean if the rumors are true . . . How d’you like him with your sister? I know my brothers wouldn’t let me near him.” May’s debauched punch negated prim chitchat. This was clear. What was more surprising was that she even knew about the Indian dancing girl. First his father, now her; Dicky must have been indiscreet indeed.

  Ambrose could see her true age, younger than he’d imagined, and his interest cooled a few degrees. “Your brothers have you on a tight leash, do they?”

  “Like a choke chain.”

  “But you seem to get the punch down, don’t you? What do they think of that?”

  “Why don’t you ask them?”

  “Do I know your brothers?”

  “You don’t recognize me?” she asked with a wide smile.

  Ambrose looked more closely at her. “Should I?”

  She dropped her mallet. “I guess not.” She turned heel with a little shimmy. “You’ve made my whole night.” And without another glance, she did a quickstep dance away from him.

  It was then May walked across the lawn in a silver dress, dark hair and dark eyes. He was getting over the shock of her now—a real woman and no longer a ghost haunting his mind. In the deep V of her gown, against her skin, she wore his necklace. Though he effectively looked calm, he couldn’t be normal, could not yet react to her in an o
ffhand manner like friends. He lowered his eyes from the vision, fiddling with the handle of his mallet.

  “Are we going to play?” she asked.

  “You first,” he said, picking up the green ball, glad of something to do, and settling it next to the post.

  She nudged it with her shoe for a more advantageous shot and then gripped the handle.

  “Rigging it so you get your way?” he asked.

  “It’s my party.” She pretended to study the course. “Someone once told me rules about that.”

  She lined up her shot, looking incongruous with a wide stance in her lamé gown. She sent the ball flying with a solid thwock. “Nicer without the beard,” she said, turning to him.

  Was she flirting? Trying to unsettle him? He felt the edge in her voice, a slight defiance, as if daring him to become outraged, to fight her. He hit his ball through the wickets, joining hers. She came and stood next to him; they were touching shoulder-to-shoulder. He wanted to shove her off, shove her away. But he suspected closeness was her strategy, used to unnerve her opponents. For just a moment he felt how difficult things could be.

  “Who’s that?” he asked for something to say, pointing with his mallet toward his former opponent, who was now encircled by laughing men.

  “Don’t you recognize Arabella Rensselaer?”

  What he remembered of Arabella was a bandy-legged girl with her hair in plaits, younger sister to the twins, Frederick and Michael Rensselaer.

  “She’s an embryo deb; came out while you were gone. She’s having quite the year, so I hear, though someone told me she’s angling hard for college. Smith, I think. She’ll be lucky if she can swing it. Poor thing, I hear her mother’s about ready to ship her off to one of those Swiss finishing schools where you spend all day hiking and eating muesli.”

  “Do those places still exist?”

  “Not everyone’s free to roam the world, you know.” He felt the sting in her words. “It’s where they’ll send Loulou, I’ll bet, if Dicky gets any more serious.” She took her second turn and missed. “What do you think of them?”

  “Dicky and Lou? I try not to.”

  “That is your preferred way of doing things, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Pretty sure I haven’t cornered the market on that. Pretty sure you know all about that.”

  She blew out a little puff of air as she rose from aiming a shot. “This isn’t the way to start.” She took a breath, righted her elbows, and stiffened her back, a hand at her chest. “Let’s start over. Let’s start like this—I love it. Truly. Thank you.”

  “You already thanked me.”

  “It means something to me.”

  This grated, as if he should be surprised, grateful, relieved? Of course it meant something. It meant everything. He’d never have given it to her otherwise. “It’s a trinket, really. For tourists. You don’t need to make a big deal out of it,” he said, avoiding her eye.

  “Someday I’ll hand it down to a daughter and I’ll say, ‘Your uncle Ambrose gave me this as a wedding present.’ ” A pause stretched out in front of them and into it she filled, “I’d like to do that. We’re family now.”

  Ambrose said nothing, suddenly enduring the game, taking wild, chancy shots, hoping to get it over with quickly. He’d made the wrong choice in coming here. He wanted to go back to town, wanted to go back to New York, wanted to get on the next ship leaving for anywhere far from here.

  “I’m happy now,” she said after a pause. “I’ve wanted you to know that.” She twirled her mallet like a windmill, making sure he kept his distance.

  “I suppose that’s all that matters.”

  “Aren’t you happy? Wasn’t your trip everything you wanted?”

  “You stopped writing me.” He took the mallet out of her hand.

  “I could see when you left that it wasn’t ever going to work,” she said, coming close and speaking privately. “I thought it was just the trip. I mean, I didn’t know if you’d even come back, especially after . . . But it was so much more than that, too. With you gone I could see that clearly.” She went on. “It’s so easy now. And nothing was ever easy between you and me. There was push and pull, too much, I think. Always keeping track of who was winning.”

  “You did that?”

  She smiled wanly. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Ethan and I . . . No one has to lose. You have to see that. And if you don’t see it now, I hope you will. I hope you won’t bear me any ill will. I truly did what I think is best.”

  Ambrose noted that she’d said nothing about love.

  “I want us to be friends, Am. I want to see you happy and settled.”

  “Forgive me if that seems a little . . .” He trailed off. “Clearly that wasn’t what you wanted. Not at all.”

  A red flush on her cheeks traveled down to her jawline. “You made it clear what you valued.”

  “You’re the one who made everything irrevocable.”

  “It wasn’t me,” May said quietly. “You didn’t come back.”

  “He told me not to. It didn’t make the trip any longer.”

  “You let him pay you off,” May said.

  Ethan appeared at May’s side then and stepped in between the couple. “Pay what off?” he asked May, awkwardly taking the mallet out of her hand. Watching him, Ambrose wondered if his brother was in pain. Judging by the glimpse of the long incision scars running up Ethan’s arm there was surely nerve damage, and couldn’t paralysis cause phantom pains?

  “Pay you back for my trip,” Ambrose said, twisting what they’d been talking about, hiding it. “But we’re settled up now, aren’t we? Or am I going to have to dump a wheelbarrow full of gold doubloons on your doorstep?” Ambrose had his lawyers take the portion he owed his brother out of his corpus when he’d returned. But the accountant had called him last week. It’d been more than a month and Ethan hadn’t deposited the check. Given the size of the draft, the man had been worried it was lost.

  “The bookkeeper’s taking care of it,” Ethan said, and swung the mallet with his one good hand, sending the ball through two wickets and hitting the post, effortlessly ending the game. “What do you make of that?” he asked, rising from a crouch.

  “I think our actions show us who we are more than anything else,” Ambrose said, while looking at May, the desire to antagonize her not something he fully understood himself.

  “I’ll say,” May said as she stepped to Ethan and took his bad hand in hers. They were a team as they navigated his injury, making it imperceivable to an outsider. It looked like he led her onto the dance floor, but Ambrose knew she was hoisting his hand in hers, allowing herself to be led.

  Ambrose walked over to the cut glass punch bowl, needing a drink.

  “Couldn’t stay away, could you?” Dicky ladled his drink with care.

  “I was invited. Where’s Loulou?”

  “She’s here somewhere,” Dicky said, as if they’d been married for years. “Off with her nutty friends.”

  Ambrose took a sip of punch. Dicky criticizing anything about his sister, even her friends, raised his hackles.

  But Dicky was perceptive. “Don’t know why you’re so uptight,” he said. “We could double-date together. You and Arabella, me and Lou. They’re great chums, you know. And we’d be two brothers in arms.”

  Ambrose had played one game of croquet with Arabella, and already they’d been paired off, likely by everyone at the party. “You’re not my brother,” he said. They weren’t jointly fighting a war. Against what? His sister? Women?

  “No, I’m not. And a good thing, too, given how Ethan’s treated you.” At the look on Ambrose’s face, Dicky continued. “Look, Loulou told me. I said to her that it wasn’t that serious with May before you left, but Lou set me straight. Told me she’d talked to you about it at that going-away party May threw. Told me she’d seen some things. I can appreciate you’re in pain. You don’t have to pretend with me.”

  Ambrose was appalled at the th
ought of Loulou spilling his secrets to Dicky, both that he’d been outed and that she was already close enough to Dicky that she’d take him into her confidence. Gone now was the abashed Dicky from Ambrose’s welcome home dinner. “I’m not in pain. No one’s pretending,” Ambrose said.

  “Fine,” Dicky said. “If that’s how you want to play it. But Loulou knows things.”

  “So you’re the expert on Loulou now?”

  “Oh, I understand,” Dicky said. “She’s your little sister, but she’s not a kid anymore.”

  A thundering clap of revulsion shuddered through Ambrose, though he knew that wasn’t what Dicky meant at all. Dicky might be a hedonist and a libertine, but he was conventional and a coward. Ambrose would bet his life Dicky wouldn’t dare do more than kiss Loulou. Nevertheless, he wanted to tell Dicky to wipe that smug smile off his face, wanted to tell him that his father knew about the dancing girl, that it was the talk of the town. But he had a moment’s thought for Loulou. Though perhaps his sister knew about India, too, and that thought hurt Ambrose. That his idealistic sister, lover of Austen and Brontës, should have grown into a shrewd-eyed realist, a compromiser, and all at the hands of Dicky Cavanaugh. Ambrose took a swig out of his flask.

  “Have it your way,” Dicky said at Ambrose’s silence, and then walked to Loulou, taking up her hand and exaggeratedly kissing the knuckles, which made her friends titter and blush. So perhaps he knew a few gestures out of Austen.

  Ambrose dumped the remaining contents of his flask in the punch bowl.

  After the winners of the tournament had been awarded a little silver dish from May and the runners-up had been given a crying towel, and then jokingly used it to fake-weep; after the band had taken a break and then another again; after the waiters collected empty glasses off the side tables and brought liqueurs or coffee to the last of the guests; after guests started their drawn-out good-byes—Arabella stood leaning against the door, eyes half-closed, skin flushed, no coat. He checked his shock at seeing a girl so young so visibly intoxicated. Such a thing would never have happened before he had left. He liked her the better for it, found it a little appealing even, that lack of control.