Chapter Twenty
Ready, this time, was the word.
The estate had not been dressed like this since her mother was alive.
They had opened the good rooms, all of them, the long gallery and the double drawing room and the dining hall with the table that seated forty, and the crystal was down that staff were not trusted with, and hothouse flowers climbed the stair rail, and light stood out of every window into the April dark so that the house arrived at you from the bottom of the drive like a docked liner.
Her grandfather had built it to declare a fortune.
Her father had kept it to protect one. Cordelia, dressing at the top of it in unanswerable blue, listening to the first cars crackle up the gravel, had found it a third use.
Preston stood in the center of the finest room of his life by eight o'clock, being congratulated by every name on the list of his dreams, and he shone.
He shone the way he had shone the spring she first met him, on a lawn, before she knew what the shine was for.
Farrander gripped his shoulder. The exchange men, who had watched his club card die on a wire in the autumn, drank his champagne and called him a survivor, than which, in their language, there was no higher decoration.
The business editor took his elbow for ten minutes about the spring campaign, and Preston said we, and our, and steady hands now, and grew a full inch by the fish course, and twice across the crowd he found his wife's eye and raised his glass to her, glistening, mouthing something she chose not to read, the luckiest man in the city.
Maureen arrived early, in the birthday silk, worn tonight at last in a room worthy of it, and installed herself in the path of the councilmen.
Sabrina came at half past, in gray, having been invited as family, because everything this evening had been arranged down to the boutonnieres and the guest list was an instrument like the rest of it.
She kept to the edges, drank almost nothing, and watched the room with a stillness Cordelia noted and approved the way a conductor notes a tuned string.
She had not spoken to Preston since a click of a closing door in February.
She did not speak to him now. She had come, Cordelia understood, for reasons the woman herself could probably not have documented, except that when a wave has knocked your house down you develop an ear for water, and something in the pitch of this whole shining evening had reached Sabrina Boyd where she sat across the river in a box room kingdom, and told her to be present, and she was present.
Bridget Halloran arrived at nine minutes to nine, examined the flowers as though auditing them, told Preston, "You've your wife's taste in rooms," which he wore as a compliment for the rest of the night, and came to rest beside Vivian Pembroke at the window, two gray monuments with glasses of the same untouched champagne, watching the evening the way statues watch traffic.
And through it all Cordelia poured warmth down the length of her own house, hostess in her mother's blue, and was told eleven times that she was radiant, and accepted the observation graciously each time, and did not once explain it.
Theo came late, on schedule.
He came with the girls, who thundered up the staircase to their appointed kingdom, and with a third child, delivered from the car through the garden door in a mackintosh with the collar up, an operation her brother had planned with the gravity of a man who had waited his whole adult life to be asked to smuggle something that mattered.
The west nursery had been made ready two days before, under cover of the party, toys and supper and the good paraffin stove, and by the time Cordelia slipped up the back stairs at half past nine, the room had been fully annexed.
Both girls, jurisdiction established, were holding ends of a skipping rope.
In the middle, in his best jersey, counting bounces for the younger one with the fierce fairness of an appointed referee, was her son.
"Mum." He broke off at the sight of her, ran two steps, remembered his office, walked the rest, and delivered his report at her waist with both arms already around her.
"The clock up here's broken. Not broken, stopped, there's a difference.
Elsie says it's been stopped for years. Can I have it down tomorrow?
And there's cake coming, Elsie heard the trolley, is it your party downstairs? "
"It's a birthday party." She crouched to his level, in the enormous dress, and put his hair back where it never stayed, and took, from the last hour of the old world, one long unbudgeted look at his face.
"A very dull, very adult one. You'd hate it.
Yours is next month and will be superior in every respect. There'll be a gate to fix."
"Okay." He was already turning back to the rope. "You look really beautiful," he added, over his shoulder, matter of fact, an inspector passing a sound wall, and Cordelia went back down the stairs to end her marriage with her whole chest lit like the house.
Adrian was holding up his stretch of wall in the long gallery, unremarkable, gray, invisible, the family lawyer at a family occasion, and she took a glass from a passing tray and stood beside him for the length of one drink, both of them facing the room, in the oldest position on earth.
"The nursery's secure. Theo's on the stairs after eleven." Her lips barely moved, hostess surveying her triumph. "Papers?"
"In the library, in the birthday box, wrapped by my own hand. Silver ribbon. I billed the firm for the ribbon." A sip. "The folder never leaves my pocket. Registry page, margin note, the laboratory numbers. It comes out only if someone is unwise enough to say the word proof."
"And the second copy for the editor, if wanted?"
"Breast pocket. Left." He turned his head one inch, and the gray eyes came down to her along the line of the blue dress, once, all the way, an appraisal old and slow enough to be indictable, and returned to the room. "That dress is going to be discussed at the trial."
"Objection noted." She finished the glass. "Dance with me, counsel. It's a party. People will talk if the hostess isn't seen enjoying herself."
They had cleared the double drawing room for dancing an hour before, and the small orchestra her mother would have approved was doing patient work, and it was, on paper, nothing at all, the hostess granting the family retainer one waltz between duty dances, a kindness to the family lawyer at a party where he knew nobody.
His hand settled at her waist as though it had been measured for the spot.
Twenty-two years of never touching in rooms, and now one sanctioned rotation of a parquet floor, in full view of the entire city, hiding a whole future in plain sight, and Adrian Vale danced the way she should have known he would, correctly, quietly, with a reserve that was itself a kind of roar.
"The lane's out those windows," he said, at the far turn, conversationally. "Quarter mile past the hedge line. Scene of the crime."
"Which crime?"
"All of them. A long time ago, corruption of a minor by internal combustion.
December, conspiracy. Tonight." The music turned them, and for exactly one bar, at the blind corner of the room where the mirrors gave out, his hand tightened at her waist to the pressure of everything unsaid, and her breath caught audibly enough that only he could have heard it.
Neither of their faces changed at all. She thought that of every performance the two of them had given this year, this was the unbearable one, to be held at correct arm's length by the man whose bed she knew, in her own house, in front of everyone, three hours before the end of the world.
Then the bar ended, and his hand released.
"Tonight, we'll see what the jury brings in. "
"You'll wait for me. However late it runs."
"Cordelia." He handed her off the floor with a correct small bow, family lawyer to hostess, and only she was near enough to collect the rest. "I've waited out the twenty years. I believe I can manage the last hour of them."
At the window, once, passing near with a hostess's warmth, she caught the tail of the monuments in conversation. Bridget Halloran was watching Preston perform the room, glass untouched.
"...always the same act," Bridget was saying. "The comeback. I've bought and sold a hundred of him."
"You're generous," said Vivian Pembroke, without turning her head. "I've buried a dozen."
And Sabrina found her by the flowers at ten, gray and quiet, holding a glass she had not drunk from in an hour.
"It's a beautiful party." She said it carefully, a woman handling someone else's china.
"He'll talk about it for years. It's everything he ever...
" She stopped, and looked down the room at Preston in the middle of an anecdote, one hand on Farrander's shoulder, shining, and something old and tired crossed her face and was put away in the new cold place where she kept things now. "You've made him very happy tonight."
"That was the idea," said Cordelia, and let Sabrina hear exactly as much of the sentence as she was able to carry, and watched her almost carry all of it, the gray eyes coming around slow and level, a woman with an ear for water listening hard, and then Farrander wanted the hostess, and the moment closed over itself like the sea.
Between the courses Preston found her in the doorway of the good room, her husband, glowing, and took both her hands, and for a moment the whole performance of him fell open and something young and true looked out of it, which she had known it would, at some point tonight, and had budgeted for.
"How did I ever earn you?" said Preston.
"You didn't," said Cordelia, warmly, and he laughed, delighted, at what he took for wit, and kissed her knuckles, and went back to his kingdom, and she stood a moment watching him go, holding the answer he had now failed to hear twice in his life. The second time in front of witnesses.
Then the dinner, the kind that gets talked about, and the toasts.
Farrander toasted the host's resilience.
The business editor toasted the spring campaign.
Maureen rose in her silk, magnificent, and toasted her son, the boy who had come from nothing and filled this room, "and if it lands on anyone to be proud tonight, it lands on me," and sat to warm applause, having planted her flag in his triumph the way she had planted it in everything he'd ever owned.
And then Preston stood, flushed and full, king of the evening, cake crumbs on the cloth before him and candle smoke still in the air, and touched his glass with his knife, and toasted his wife.
"Cordelia." He held the glass down the long shining table toward her, and his voice went thick with what she recognized, from a distance of seven years and with a connoisseur's detachment, as entirely genuine feeling, which was the most terrible thing about him, and always had been, that at the very center of the fraud there lived a man who meant it.
"My rock. My compass. The steadiest hand in the worst year of my life.
This house, this evening, every one of you here, all of it is her doing.
Everything I have," and he laughed, warm, expansive, blind, spreading his arms as though to gather the room, the crystal, the flowers, the forty faces, "everything I have, I owe to this woman. To my wife."
"To Cordelia," said forty voices, and drank, and Theo's glass, she noticed, rose to the exact level of his mouth and stopped there, dry.
She let the warmth settle. She let the coffee come down the table and the evening lean back in its chair, loosened and replete, exactly ripe.
Then Cordelia Hargrove rose at the foot of the table in her mother's blue, and touched her glass once with a spoon, and the room came around to her, fond and glowing, refilled and comfortable, forty of the city's best faces shining toward her in the candlelight like an audience that has heard the overture and settled in for a comedy.
"Thank you all for coming. I promised my husband a birthday he would never forget.
" Warm laughter, on cue. "There are speeches on birthdays, and there are presents.
He's had the speeches, and mine would only embarrass him, because he knows what he is to me, and no, darling, I'm not going to say it in front of the councilmen.
" Louder laughter. Preston, thirty-five today, glowed down the table at her like the boy on the spring lawn.
"So I'll skip straight to the present. It's been a complicated year for this family, and what I wanted to give Preston tonight had to be equal to it.
Something no shop could sell me. Something only I could give him, in front of exactly this company.
Because you're his nearest, all of you, and his dearest, the list is very select, he wrote it himself.
" She nodded to the doorway. "And a gift like this one wants witnesses. "
Nina came down the room carrying the box.
It was a beautiful box. White, deep, ribboned in silver, the size of something extravagant, a coat, a saddle, a case of the '29.
The table made the low delighted noise good tables make, and Preston half rose, laughing, protesting the fuss, pink with pleasure, and drew the ribbon, and lifted the lid, and parted the tissue paper.
For a moment he simply looked into it. The smile stayed on, running on its own momentum, a light left burning in an empty house.
Then it began, very slowly, to go out, section by section, the mouth first, and the room, reading his face before it read anything else, leaned in, and quieted, and somewhere down the table a fork was set down on china with a click as loud as the February door.
Inside the box, squared, ivory, engraved as formally as the party's own invitations, lay a document case, and on the first page showing through its window, in the plain dress of the law, stood eight words.
IN THE MATTER OF THE MARRIAGE OF BOYD
"Happy birthday, darling," said Cordelia, down the length of the silent table. "Read it aloud."