Chapter Thirty-Nine
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
M ISS E VELYN C ROSS WAS NOT ON THE LIST.
A footman eventually allowed her inside when she insisted—to his confusion—that she was the guest of Mr. Thomas Gallier and that he would be expecting her, but the fact remained. She was not on the list.
Quite the auspicious start.
Once inside, Evelyn retired her cloak to one of the uniformed servants and joined the crush searching for alcohol and company and gossip.
Without companions or an escort, she found herself lost. She’d grown up on the busy streets of Manhattan, dodging strangers and navigating crowds since she’d learned to walk. Finding her way through a sea of tuxedos and gowns puppeted by slender rich folk shouldn’t have been any trouble.
And yet, as she attempted to skirt whispering couples and scheming mothers and champagne-toting waiters, it occurred to her that in all her years on the stage, she hadn’t ever encountered a spectacle quite like this. The wealth on display was ostentatious and tasteless. Every conversation she caught in passing was riddled with lies and half-truths—you could just tell by the way their voices slithered around the words. Fans hid blushes and kept confidences. Judgmental eyes followed her, but when she caught someone staring, they smiled as broadly as a friend would, only to go right back to questioning stares once she turned again. Whispers carried in these halls, too, and no matter how they tried to stifle their whispers about Evelyn Cross—Thomas Gallier’s tart—the bicycle of vaudeville benefactors , that gossip followed her.
Her theatrical training kicked in. She mentally reached for the costume of Miss Evelyn Cross, Star of the World’s Greatest Stages, but hesitated to fully put it on when she remembered Beatrice’s advice: Don’t ever let them hurt you .
So Evelyn kept her chin high and her eyes straight ahead. As she might with a complicated dance routine, she counted all the things she had that these people could never take away.
Her friends. Her career. Her self-worth. Her talent. Her reputation—at least amongst people who mattered. Thomas. Her lifetime of tomorrows with him.
In that moment, she almost pitied this faceless crowd of strangers. They had their gossip and their self-importance, but she had what really mattered.
“Tom!”
When he materialized in the distant center of her view, his name came to her lips thoughtlessly.
He rushed over to her faster than was strictly polite.
“Miss Cross,” he said, tipping his head but never quite meeting her eyes.
“Oh, sorry. I forgot we’re in civilized company now, Mr. Gallier .”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was invited.” An attempt at a flirt. The firm set of his jaw didn’t shift. She let out a nervous little laugh. “ You invited me. Did someone drop a piano on your head today?”
“Ah. Yes. The invitation. Well, someone should have—”
Evelyn cut him off. “Aren’t you going to ask me to dance? Or tell me how lovely I look? Or give me flowers? I don’t know—what do men do when they want a woman’s attention but want the rest of the room to stop talking about them?”
A glint of recognition lit his face as he scanned the ballroom as if for the first time. Indeed. We are not alone , he seemed to think.
“Yes. A dance,” he said. “Very well.”
This time, he didn’t ask. He simply swept her onto the floor without a word.
Instinct agitated the hairs on the back of Evelyn’s neck. This wasn’t her Tom. This was the old him, Thomas, all business.
She shrugged it off. This change in behavior made sense when she considered their change of backdrop and costume. She may have been unwilling to adjust her attitudes to fit this stuffed-shirt soiree, but that didn’t mean he was.
There was also the matter of the proposal to consider. Evelyn was given to understand men were never quite themselves when approaching the subject of marriage.
Yes. That was it. He was nervous.
“As I understand it,” Evelyn said, “the purpose of an exercise like this one is so you might talk intimately with your partner. And yet, a cat’s got your tongue.”
Tom bore holes into the wall behind her head. “I have quite a bit on my mind.”
“Yes, I suspected as much.”
His grip tightened at her waist—the first sign of life in his otherwise dead hold. “Really?”
“Beatrice told me what’s going on here tonight. You don’t need to play coy about it. Unless you wanted me to be surprised?”
Thomas’s eyes narrowed. “Miss Matterly? How does she know? Did Andrew tell her?”
“No, I believe it was pretty obvious. To everyone except me, that is.”
“So you knew and you still came?”
“Did you not want me to come? Mr. Gallier, I’ve heard that men get anxious before they propose to a woman, but this is—”
“Propose?”
Thomas Gallier had spent too many hours practicing the waltz alone in his room to stumble.
Still, his feet got the better of him, and he faltered.
“Yes, propose.” Evelyn laughed, rather enjoying that dumbstruck expression toying with his handsome features. “Fine, then. If you’re so nervous, allow me to do the honors.”
“No — ”
The band picked up the tempo. He led her through the dizzying paces. A watchful audience spied from the sidelines. Evelyn clutched him tighter, white-knuckling her courage so it wouldn’t abandon her. “Don’t speak. Allow me to say this. I believe I owe you this before you do what you’re about to do.”
He followed her instructions.
Evelyn’s head swam. The ballroom blurred. Were those phenomena from the dance or from something else?
No. It didn’t matter. It had to be said. If he was going to marry her, he needed to know how fully and completely he’d captured her—and how willing a captive she was.
“From the first moment I saw you, I felt as if I were seeing another half of myself. As if I’d found a piece I’d lost so long ago I’d forgotten I ever had it in the first place. I just knew. It was as if my very being were saying Oh, yes. I’ve found you again. Please don’t ever leave me as you did before. I don’t know how to be complete without you . And what’s more, Tom, I don’t want to be complete without you.”
She received no response but the wail of her heart in her ears.
“You know,” she continued, “I never used to believe that anything could last. I was always moving. New city, new train, new show, new bed, new man. But … with you, it’s like … for the first time, I see what forever could look like. And what’s more, I’m not afraid of it. Because I know you won’t hurt me. Because I know this is real, what’s happening between us. Thomas, I—”
“Mr. Gallier! There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Evelyn fully planned to ignore that velvety feminine voice and finish her confession. Thomas had other plans. Like a dog called to his master’s heel, he halted at the edge of the dance floor, sending Evelyn nearly crashing into several onlookers.
When she found her feet, Thomas was grinning down at a petite blonde woman in a white gown that might have passed for a wedding dress in the right light.
Not just any woman.
Miss Constance Alban. The most eligible young lady in Manhattan.
The same one Thomas had been photographed with just yesterday. The one he’d told her not to worry about. The one he said he didn’t want.
The woman wasn’t alone, though. Strangers flanked her on either side and Dr. Samson, who sternly schooled his usually smiling face, rounded out the group.
“Miss Alban,” Thomas said with a little bow, ignoring the rest of their newfound company. “Your mother was encouraging me onto the dance floor earlier this evening. I was only trying to appease her.”
“Very well, then. I suppose I can forgive you.” Her little button nose crinkled and she placed a gloved hand upon Thomas’s. “You’re a very fine sport. Now, who might this mysterious partner of yours be, then? Aren’t you going to introduce us?”
“Yes, Thomas,” Evelyn agreed, asking a question to which she already fully knew the answer. “Who is this?”
In almost perfect unison, the woman and Thomas snapped to attention.
“Yes. Well. Miss Alban, please meet Miss Cross. Miss Cross is the star of The Empire’s vaudeville show. And Miss Cross?” The slightest hesitation. The briefest show of his cards. And Evelyn felt herself crash against the rocks. “Please allow me to introduce Miss Constance Alban. My fiancée.”
A NOTE FROM THE HISTORIAN
I should probably rewind a bit.
But first …
Present Day
A BIG PART OF BEING A HISTORIAN IS MAKING SURE THINGS MATCH. The difference between the truth and a lie can all come down to a matter of a few mislaid lines or figures, and exposing those little fibs—and why someone may have wanted faulty information out there—can result in a career-making find.
Thomas Gallier was a treasure trove of mismatches. His secret identity, his love affair with Evelyn, his entire life lived in the gaps between what he told people and how that differed from fact. The more of these discrepancies I found, the more I revealed about the man, and the more I revealed about the man, the more I wanted to know. It became a game for me, in some ways. Trying to expose a person who’d spent his entire life desperate to hide.
But for all my dogged pursuit of Thomas’s hidden depths, I almost missed a crucial one.
Thomas’s personal financial ledger on the day of The Empire’s investor preview noted one particularly interesting entry.
Purchase: Engagement Ring, sapphire sideset by diamonds
Purchase Price: $375.00
Cash Upon Receipt
Payable To: Charles Lewis Tiffany, 15 Union Square West
By this point in American history, Tiffany had already made its name as the jeweler of choice for the swell set. In 1885, the company redesigned the seal of the United States of America, for crying out loud. Just two years later, it would buy a significant portion of the French crown jewels. Everyone who was anyone got their most important jewelry from Tiffany, and it wasn’t a surprise that Thomas Gallier would gift his wife a piece of hardware like that upon the occasion of their engagement. The woman he married was, after all, from one of the wealthiest families in the city. Of course he would gift her something that cost in the ballpark of fifteen grand in today’s money.
“Ah, yes. Constance’s ring,” Armitage said when I presented him the receipt during one of our study sessions.
And he should have been right. It should have been Constance’s ring. There was only one problem with that assumption.
“It doesn’t match.”
He let out a little laugh of confusion. “What do you mean by that?”
I gestured him over to the fireplace, where the imposing portrait of Thomas and Constance hung overhead. Hands daintily folded in her lap, the painted Constance showed off a truly remarkable yellow diamond on her ring finger.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” Armitage said, at length.
“That’s not a Tiffany engagement ring,” I explained. “That ring is the same one her mother and great-grandmother have in their wedding portraits. It’s an heirloom, not something new. It doesn’t match the purchasing records.”
With a shrug, Armitage returned to his favorite chair. “Maybe he bought Constance a ring, but she wanted to wear a family piece. Or maybe it was a prop for one of his vaudeville things. Or maybe it was an investment. Or maybe it was improperly catalogued, just a normal ring. Not an engagement ring at all.”
“Or maybe Thomas Gallier was going to give someone else an engagement ring that day, but something stopped him,” I countered.
“A little fanciful, don’t you think?”
I didn’t think so. Not after everything else I knew about Thomas and Evelyn’s relationship.
It felt like he was lying to me. Like he knew something he didn’t want me to know.
Like I was Evelyn, a breath away from being caught unaware by some world-shattering piece of news.
But considering Armitage wanted as many facts as possible, I pushed. If he had even an inkling of where I could find an answer, he needed to give it to me.
I wasn’t going to be caught like Evelyn.
“Does your family keep any records of their jewelry collection? Chains of custody or something like that? It’d be pretty easy to figure out if Constance got a ring from Thomas around the time of their wedding. We might be able to track it down, too. I’d love to see what it looks like.”
“I don’t think we keep track of things like that.”
Once again, I was staggered at the ineptitude of rich people . Oh, we have so many priceless jewels, we don’t even care if a few go missing.
“But you’ll look, right?” I asked, taking my place in his lap and cuddling into his embrace. Admittedly working a little of my feminine charm to get what I wanted. “Please? For me?”
“Sure. Of course I will.”
He nuzzled my neck and somehow the rest of the night just got away from us.
I never got those chains of custody. I don’t know if he ever looked.
Which means I’m well within my rights to go with my gut here.
We return to that morning, before the ball. Evelyn and Beatrice had just had their talk. And Thomas walked into The Empire completely, thoroughly, and unapologetically un-fiancéed.