Her friend Emily was somewhere behind. But as her father liked to say, “Slowing down has never been in our Lilli’s nature.”
Was there a time, she wondered now, that he’d said it proudly?
“Lillian has far too much of you in her, Maurice,” Lilli’s mother always made clear. “Too much of the mad, headlong drive. It’ll be the death of us all.”
By the time Lilli and her mother had left for New York last summer, Maurice Barthélemy may also have seen too much of himself in his daughter.
“Consider the lilies, ma chère,” he’d called after her.
One foot already on the ramp to the ship, she’d turned. Startled. “Excusez-moi?”
“The lilies. You know. Of the field. They neither sow nor do they reap. And you, daughter, needn’t rush at life so.”
It sounded ludicrously like something the priests of Our Lady of Guadalupe might drone into a homily. From Maurice Barthélemy, titan of the waterfront, though, it sounded more like a jest. A wink. A good cynical joke.
“Not how you built your empire, though, was it, mon père?” She’d patted her father’s cheek. And noticed how gaunt he’d become.
“I worry that I have set an example for you of—”
She’d not let him finish. Because of course he’d set the example for her. Of course she’d become her father’s child. Even when he disappointed and hurt her as he’d done just this week yet again, she understood him. Because she was like him.
Even now at a full gallop, her pulse did the opposite of what it should have done. Her heart rate decreased, settled to a slower thud—almost suspended in time.
Danger had always done that for her, calmed her in a strange way. Which she suspected might not be normal.
Men of her class were searching for a wife who was docile. Angelic. Prone to fainting. And capable of finding all the ecstasy she required in a Trollope novel.
Lilli, on the other hand, when trapped in a drawing room full of women, paced near the windows. When the conversations trenched, as they always did, on how much their children had grown—Don’t all children grow? What’s noteworthy about that?—she fashioned elaborate excuses to leave.
Society women tittered over the latest soirees—the cigarettes rolled from hundred-dollar bills and handed out as party favors. Or at Newport, a game of digging in sand for diamonds the hosts had strewn there for guests.
Lilli found the women unspeakable bores.
Gentlemen of her class were no better, none of them looking for a wife who craved speed and courted risk and preferred the outdoors to in. And none of them looking for a woman at the center of a storm of scandal.
She bent lower over her horse’s neck, her cheek brushed by the flying mane. The thrill of an unknown road, the rhythm of the strides over the wet gold and burgundy leaves: this was what she needed to pound away the worry—the panic.
She and Emily had rented from the stables at Battery Park Inn, but this was no barn-sour nag. Over the stone bridge he charged now, left front leg on the lead, reaching farther each time.
Gripping the uppermost pommel on the sidesaddle’s left with her right leg, she relaxed into the gallop. Around her, the ring of mountains rose above the forest and fields in a great blue bowl with fog rising like steam from its sides.
Slowing her mount at last, she scanned the roadside: birches and rhododendrons and ferns. Stone bridges and streams.
A few moments alone to think, to try and sort out her father’s most recent behavior. She and Emily had traveled down here from New York a week early in order to meet him.
ASHEVILLE, THE LAND OF THE SKY, he’d cabled from New Orleans. ALL THE RAGE, THE PAPERS SAY. SINCE YOU AND YOUR FRIEND ARE GOING, YOUR LAST LETTER SAYS, WHAT IF I MET YOU THERE? A SPONTANEOUS VISIT WITH MY BELOVED DAUGHTER.
He hadn’t cabled since she and her mother had moved to New York, and on this one, he’d not economized on his words—instead he let them flow as if he’d been in a rush or wanted her to be sure of his warmth, or both. In the past months, he’d dashed off the rare letter from time to time, but they were a businessman’s notes, full of labor strike threats and import disputes. Beloved daughter was not his typical language. Warmth and spontaneity weren’t really his style.
But she’d welcomed the chance to be with him, the elusive Napoleon of New Orleans whom she was like—and whom she barely knew. Lilli relished the four days she and her father and Emily had shared here. Until yesterday morning, when her father had been handed the telegram by the Battery Park Inn concierge.
His face had drained of all color. “Damn New York Times. Can’t let a story die after all these years. Bordel de merde. Thought they’d outsmart me and send someone here, did they?”
“The timing,” she said, as much to herself as to him, “couldn’t be worse. If word got out there was any question at all—”
“Precisely, ma chère. Ils sont cons, the idiots. Will no one stop them from dogging my life?”
He’d packed his bags and left—for where, he’d not even said—within the hour. And forgotten to tell her goodbye.
From behind now came hoofbeats: Emily approaching at a sedate trot.
“I can tell, Lils, by the way you’re sitting stock-still: you are amazed by the Approach Road. I’m so sorry your father couldn’t stay to see it.” She paused here, as if unsure whether to add how odd his sudden departure had been. But appearing to decide to steer clear of the subject, she only smiled. “George will be thrilled with your reaction.”
“I imagine your uncle has more pressing concerns than the opinions of a lady he’s never met.”
“But wait till he meets you. Then we shall see how much he cares what you think of his project.” Emily beamed at her friend. Which was her way: a childlike kind of warmth that, for all its naivete, was hard to dislike.
“Your uncle seems perfectly content as he is: traveling the world, collecting his art, reading his books, building this hidden estate . . .”
“He does, yes. But the right kind of woman can teach even a contented man just how miserable he really is.”
Lilli laughed.
“Without her, I mean,” Emily added.
“Let me make perfectly clear that I did not come south with you because I was desperately seeking a husband.”
“No one, dear Lilli, suspects you of desperately seeking anything. You secure whatever you want with hardly seeming to try. Which reminds me to ask about what it was you were saying to that man this afternoon. By the station.”
Lilli turned back to the Approach Road. “It’s hard to imagine a structure at the end that would live up to the suspense of all these twists and turns.”
Emily rearranged the drape of her riding skirt. “Change the subject if you like. I only hope that man from the station won’t make a nuisance of himself. He looked to me like he might be the kind to . . . become too familiar.”
Lilli felt her pulse drop again, and the words seemed to hang suspended there between them. No one was supposed to have seen her talking to the man at the train station. Lilli must have miscalculated how long it would take Emily to send her telegram. Perhaps Emily saw her approach the man. Who knew what she might have heard.
“He was only a local man. Asking for work. I sent him away, naturally.”