Chapter Twenty-Three
Cora should have known better than to expect anything resembling mercy from Mabel.
Her voice echoed in Cora’s head, ricocheting like a bullet, and Cora felt a sudden desperation.
Tonight had to work. Her dream was slipping through her fingers, its heartbeat fading.
And she knew all too well that nothing hurt worse than hope did when it began to die.
Cora ran her fingers over the new serving uniform laid out on her bed.
It was satin instead of cotton, with woven black feathers at the hem.
For some reason, an image of Jack seeing her in it flashed unbidden through her mind.
She wondered if he’d had success with Florence that afternoon—and if he had, if anyone that good at disarming people could really be trusted.
On the other side of the room, Daisy was silent. She was scanning the contents of a letter, her uniform hanging open and loose at her back.
“Did they get your measurements wrong?” Cora asked, coming to help Daisy with the black shell buttons. Normally their uniforms were tailored to fit them like a glove. But this time, even when Cora had buttoned the uniform to the top, Daisy’s swam around the chest and waist.
“Does it ever make you sick?” Daisy asked, folding up the letter briskly.
She had the pinched look on her face that she always got when she heard sad news from home.
She turned toward the windowsill, looking out over a carpet of freshly planted lilies.
The gardeners had worked all day to make the landscape awash with blooms, just in time for the thunderstorm.
“How much do you think it cost to plant all those flowers?”
“I can’t think about it,” Cora said. “But starving yourself here isn’t doing Anette and the baby any good,” she added gently. She turned and let Daisy sweep her auburn hair back to pin it.
“Liam says that at some of the other manor homes, at least they offer services to help the poor. Teaching reading—using space for field hospitals during times of emergency. This is just parties and frivolous waste.”
Part of Cora agreed with her. And yet she found herself saying “Is beauty ever really a waste?”
“It is, when people are starving.”
Cora picked up a brush and began to pull it through Daisy’s hair. “I grew up in a place that felt starved for beauty. And goodness.” She hesitated. “At least one of those is in supply here.”
She drew out the worry stone from her pocket.
“When I was six years old,” she said, “I learned that my father worked a dangerous job. One day, I gathered handfuls of rocks and put them in his work boots, where he would keep them by the door. I thought maybe it would stop him from leaving.” She gave a painful little laugh.
“When he found them, he came and knelt down beside me. I remember it so clearly because he wasn’t usually affectionate.
But he gave me one of the stones from his shoe. ”
She held it up. It was striated with white, and shaped almost like a heart. Daisy was watching her with unmasked attention, because Cora so rarely offered stories about herself and where she came from.
“A worry stone,” her father had said gruffly that day. “You rub it until you don’t worry anymore.”
Cora’s mother had overheard them. “Or a prayer stone,” she had said, a note of teasing in her voice. “That would be more effective.”
Cora had used it as both over the years, and now it was as smooth as silk.
“Can I see that?” Daisy asked. When she reached out to touch it, Cora was surprised to see that she was practically trembling.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Cora asked. “You look quite pale.”
“You’ve been a good friend to me, Ella,” Daisy said. “No matter what, I’ll never forget that.”
“Come, now,” Cora said lightly. “It almost sounds as though you’re telling me goodbye.”
Daisy stroked the stone. “We should go,” she said.
She held out the stone and Cora hesitated before she took it back, wondering if the sense of finality in Daisy’s voice was something she was merely imagining.
Cora and Daisy latched all of the windows in the main house, lighting candles on the mantels.
Fires flickered in all the grates. The sunny, breezy parties of the other nights were replaced by candelabras and lengthening shadows that seemed ready to detach and sail through the corridors.
Wind rustled through the espaliered trees, and the air took on undertones of chill. A storm was coming.
Cora made her way to the outdoor ballroom, stealing up to the second floor to hide her camera.
She returned to the ballroom floor just in time for the ghosts to appear.
Rita Blanchard was almost unrecognizable, in costume as Marie Antoinette.
White curls piled high atop her head and roses spilled across a dove-gray dress.
Rita held a fan above her bee-stung lips, and, when she spied the railroad tycoon William Morton dressed as a Viking, she let out a throaty cackle.
Cora could smell the hint of pears as she passed.
The ballroom felt intimate that night, dreamlike and cloistered, while the storm swelled outside. Cora scanned for Jack as a string orchestra began to play softly from the second-floor balcony.
Byrd entered the ballroom draped in white robes and a crimson sash, a gold-leaf headpiece encircling his head.
Cora knew that some of the costumes had been made just for tonight, commissioned from tailors by Byrd himself and left in ribbon-tied boxes on the beds of each guest. Others were officially on loan from film sets or museums.
There was no sign of Jack, but the British tennis player Simon Leit was dressed, ironically, as George Washington, with a tricorn hat and leather boots. When Cora approached him and offered him a canapé, he took three in a napkin emblazoned with a golden harpy eagle and Byrd’s stitched monogram.
Clementine appeared in a white toga with a slit up to her thigh, her blue eyes lined with thick kohl and a gold headdress wrapped around her forehead like a serpent.
She wore a blunt black wig with a jewel hung suspended between her eyebrows, and her lips were painted a shocking red. Cleopatra, to Byrd’s Caesar.
He lifted his glass to her in approval from across the room.
Cora’s gaze drifted to the entrance through fragrant smoke curling from cigars.
Had she imagined the way she had felt in Jack’s room that morning?
The familiar scent of him, on his sheets.
The cut of his jaw, and the way he looked at her with those eyes she had thought she would never see again.
A delicate shiver tingled down her spine.
Had he felt anything in return? Perhaps it was all in her imagination.
Wanting to see something that wasn’t actually there. Just like on Pelican.
She turned now and saw him across the room. Something in her body curled.
He was dressed in a velvet suit the color of plums with a white neck-cloth.
It was tailored to him even better than Cora’s uniform had been made for her, and he wore a wig the color of fresh snow that was tied with a matching plum ribbon.
Kitty stood next to him, her long, delicate fingers wrapped around a goblet.
“And who are you tonight?” she asked, tilting her head as she examined him from head to toe.
“ ‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies,’ ” he quipped, spinning an apple on his finger, “ ‘but not the madness of people.’ ”
“Sir Newton,” William Morton said, mock-bowing. “Shall we take turns shooting arrows at your head?”
“That part comes later,” Jack said. He tossed the apple and caught it. “And only once I’m good and zozzled.”
“Where’s Berty?” Rita asked, craning her neck to look around the room. “I’ve been simply dying to see him as Napoleon.”
“I heard he was experiencing some unpleasantness of the stomach,” Jack deadpanned. “Messy stuff, I’m afraid.” Jack’s eyes flitted ever so briefly to meet Cora’s, as if he knew exactly where she was, and her own stomach dipped.
“Oh!” Kitty spluttered. “Dear.”
“Wait, no—there he is! Hello, Berty,” Jack called, waving from afar.
Albert Boyle arrived just as a heavy rainfall spattered against the ballroom’s skylights.
He was dressed in a black hat and gold epaulets, his sash studded with twinkling medals.
A long sword was slung at his side, and Cora half-wondered if it was real, though surely Truman wouldn’t be so stupid.
The liquor was already drained from the glass in his hand.
Albert watched Jack with an unnerving coldness.
Jack didn’t seem to notice.
“Now, let me see, doll,” Jack said, twirling Kitty around to examine her. “Who are you channeling tonight?”
Kitty’s blue eyes were lined to a razor point, the fit of her toga pressed against her stomach and trailing down her legs. Her dark hair was coiled, snakelike. She was a fitting Medusa, all crisp sheet and curves. Her eyes lit up when Jack looked her over.
Cora’s stomach plunged. No matter how fitted or fancy the night’s livery was, she was still just a maid in a uniform. And she had let herself get distracted. Her focus returned to Clem, where it should have been all along.
She abandoned her tray and ascended a stone staircase to the second floor.
The first door on the left led to a simple bedroom with warm pinewood boards and mullioned windows. Cora stepped inside. There was a four-poster bed with an embroidered quilt, and a fireplace with a hearth that smelled of spices and kindling.
There was also a connecting closet between the first bedroom and the second that functioned as a go-between for the servants.
Cora crossed the room. The door was a hidden panel seamlessly fit into the wallpaper.
It was covered, she noticed, in a pattern of nightingales.
She opened it and stepped inside. The long, narrow closet smelled of pine.
She felt beneath the pile of towels, and her hand clasped around her camera.