Chapter 2
Evalyn McLean didn’t call the next day or the next week.
I made excuses for her at first, assumed she’d had too much champagne the night of her party or had talked with so many guests that she didn’t remember our conversation or me.
In the end, I decided she’d made a promise she’d never planned to keep.
Why should she go out of her way for a woman far below her station and a stranger at that?
And who could say what inspired the whims of the wealthy?
They lived by their own set of rules, and the rest of us were made to pay for them.
And yet I had to find a way in, if not to work for Evalyn, perhaps for one of her friends.
I might still learn the truth of what Julien had been doing all those weeks.
But who to approach and how? I didn’t know Evalyn’s friends personally.
I’d have to do some research, inquire about them through existing Beaumont clients.
I looked out at the quiet rain pattering softly against the windowpane and beyond where rivers of bright-yellow pollen streamed into the street drains.
First a Christmas without Julien, and now a colorful, rain-soaked spring.
Sighing, I rose from my dressing table and extinguished the lamp.
Though the rain suited my mood and the lethargy that came with it, I had to work.
With a very real need for new commissions to satisfy the bank and ward off foreclosure of our three-story home and storefront in Logan Circle, I’d need to put in long hours to finish my father’s abandoned pieces.
I’d also need to attend jewelry shows and house parties, reach out to some other socialites in the city to solicit business.
In the workshop, I switched on a series of lamps and reached for my father’s ledger.
Rifling through the pages, I cross-referenced delivery dates with the progress of various pieces he’d either begun or had planned to do but had never finished.
I flipped open his sketchbook and studied his creations that scrawled across the pages.
They were beautiful, intricate, and always unique.
I turned to the last sketch, still unfinished.
Father hadn’t touched a single project in months, not even to fix a clasp on a necklace or replace a diamond stud in a lorgnette.
Only in recent weeks had I managed to shake the weight of my own lethargy.
I’d done my best to fill the outstanding orders for the company, delivering repaired necklace chains and polished stones with newly tightened prongs, and finishing outstanding commissions.
We’d worked too hard on the Beaumont name, building our client list and our reputation, to allow it to languish now, despite all that had happened.
But nearly all had been finished and delivered, and the remaining pieces were already paid for, in full.
We needed to design new jewelry, to advertise, to sell.
The enormity of the undertaking—which I must do alone—left me sagging in my chair.
I forced myself up to the telephone, prepared to call each of our previous clients to “check in on their satisfaction with a piece” as a guise to offer appointments for future visits to the Beaumont boutique.
Few answered their telephones, and not a single client booked an appointment, so I set about writing greeting cards with our logo and posting them to everyone on our roster.
Someone would come through—they had to, or…
I didn’t want to think about the alternative.
A knock at the workshop door startled me from my thoughts.
I drew the drapes aside from the window and watched Henry Cooper fidget with a bouquet of scarlet tulips in his hands.
I took in his pin-striped suit, auburn hair combed neatly away from his forehead, and gray-green eyes trained on the door.
The desire to stroke the soft mound of his cheek hit me with a violence I didn’t expect, and I leaned against the doorframe for support.
What was he doing here? I hadn’t seen him in months, and it was better that way.
He could move on with his life, and I could try to make it through each day without reminding myself to breathe.
When I let the drapes sweep back over the window, he knocked again.
What could I possibly say to him? The familiar self-loathing I’d grappled with these past six months rose to the surface with a vengeance.
If he’d treated me the way I had treated him since Julien’s death…
A pang of guilt prompted me to open the door.
“Henry, what are you doing here?”
“Can I come in?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
When he sighed heavily, I stepped aside, allowing him to push past me.
“Did you work today?” he asked softly. “On your sketches.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have the energy.” The truth was I’d abandoned my own designs completely. I knew my brother wouldn’t want that for me, but I couldn’t seem to muster the strength to care about the collection I’d told myself I’d always wanted to create.
“I miss him, too,” Henry said.
“I know.” I looked down at the pearled skin of a long, thin scar I’d inflicted on myself with a jeweler’s awl on the nights when I felt I couldn’t go on. I tugged my sleeve over it, too late.
Henry reached for my hand, cradled it in his as he pushed the cotton cuff of my blouse aside. He gently traced the row of flesh that had once been a wound, opened over and over again. “Oh, Elisabeth,” he breathed.
I met his eyes. Pain swam in their gray depths, and I quickly glanced away.
Guilt rushed to the surface again. Every time I looked at him, I remembered that night, how it was our fault that Julien was killed.
If we’d only been with him when we said we’d be, we could have saved him.
I’d wished for a million things since that night that could never be, and I didn’t know how to move on with Henry or with anyone.
I’d simply disappeared after Julien’s funeral, retreated from the world, Henry included.
I couldn’t do anything, be anything, for anyone, not even for myself.
Henry might have been Julien’s best friend, but Julien was my twin brother, a missing organ, a part of me in a way that few could understand.
“Why don’t we go to the Tidal Basin,” Henry said. “See the cherry blossoms. They’re nearly at their peak, and you look as if you could use a break.”
It was one of our favorite places to walk in the city.
Seven years before, the mayor of Tokyo had donated three thousand Japanese cherry trees to the American people as a sign of friendship.
The First Lady, Mrs. Taft, had listened to the advice of Eliza Scidmore, famed travel writer and admirer of the magnificent trees, and ordered the first saplings be planted in a show of gratitude and solidarity with the Japanese.
Now the trees thrived, and a riot of pink blossoms joyfully erupted every spring in Potomac Park, drawing visitors from all over for a week or two.
They’d inspired me to sketch a pretty little choker, a diadem, and a bracelet that I’d always hoped would become a part of the Elisabeth Beaumont collection.
Now I wasn’t certain I liked them, or my talents, or anything at all.
“Come, it will be good for you to see something beautiful,” Henry insisted. “Maybe it will inspire you.”
I hesitated. I’d declined every invitation that had come my way for months, Henry’s included, unable to face the dizzying questions, the condolences, and most of all the eyes that shone with pity that meant nothing and everything.
I couldn’t face Henry or the need in his eyes.
All the words never spoken and the feelings never fully realized between us hovered like a specter.
“I can’t, Henry.”
His face crumpled. “Why won’t you let me console you? We can find solace in each other. We both lost him, and I feel like I’m losing you, too. I miss you, Elisabeth.”
I didn’t know what to say, how to feel, who to be. I didn’t know who I was without Julien, and I wasn’t convinced Henry knew who I was without him either. So I stared back at him blankly, a face so familiar and so dear, and said the only thing that came to mind.
“I have to go. Goodbye, Henry.”
His eyes glinted with disappointment and frustration, but he didn’t plead again; he simply left.
Heart heavy, I closed the door behind him and turned the lock.
* * *
After Henry’s visit, I couldn’t focus on the work that needed to be done. At last I gave up and warmed a bowl of clear soup, fresh bread, and a cup of coffee, arranged it on a tray, and carried it to my father’s room.
I knocked on his bedroom door. “It’s me.”
“Come in.” He was sitting up in bed, staring blankly at the wall.
His rotund middle had deflated entirely, my robust father withered to a ghost of himself.
I’d brought in the doctor on multiple occasions, only to be reassured that he wasn’t physically ill in any way, and there was nothing to be done but wait.
To hope and pray my father would awaken from his reverie of grief and be himself again.
I knew the truth: Neither of us would ever be the same again.
But I also knew we had to try, to pretend until the motions became less forced.
“Here we are,” I said, setting the tray down on his bedside table. “You need to eat, at least a little.”
His gaze remained fixed on an indistinct point of the powder-blue wallpaper. “The commission that Julien sold to Rosalee Smith…you know the one?” he said. “The design I made? Have you finished it yet?”