“What excellent taste your mother had.”
The colonel opened his hand. “Will you dance with me, Miss Force?”
“I would be so happy to,” she answered, sincere. She passed her punch glass to her mother and accepted his hand.
She was wearing a Fortuny gown of dove silk with glass beading along the shoulders (brand new, perhaps a little much for the evening, but Katherine had declared it perfect), and the long, tiered folds of the overskirt floated above the floor as they walked, rippling and falling like the wings of a slow-skimming moth.
They turned to each other. She had the sense of eyes watching them, of conversations broken off, but it didn’t matter. He lifted his chin, lifted her hand. Then, with a dip of his shoulder, he led her into the next measure of a waltz.
She was a good dancer; she knew that. But he was equally as good. Madeleine couldn’t count the number of times her toes had been mashed by some awkward partner, boys who’d blushed bright as beets at having to go so far as to place a hand at her waist. But she and the colonel glided across the polished wooden floor as if they’d rehearsed together for years, their steps at once perfectly matched, their timing synchronous. She felt a flash of understanding of that old chestnut they moved as one, and in her mind the phrase transformed a little, became even better: they moved as one beneath his lacework of roses.
Madeleine couldn’t help grinning up at him. Colonel Astor grinned back, and the room was crimson and gilt and teal plastered walls, and it was fine that they sailed practically alone across the elaborate parquet as everyone watched. It was fine, because they were touching, they were dancing, they were together.
* * *
He handed her a fresh glass of punch. It tasted more of champagne than of the fruit it had an hour before, and that, as it happened, was also fine with her. The music played on, and the people danced on, but Madeleine and the colonel had retreated past an open set of French doors to a balcony silvered in moonlight, where the breeze felt cooling now instead of chilly, and the soft, persistent scent of roses was washed away clean.
They weren’t really ever alone. There were people wandering in and out, spying the balcony, admiring the view, going back. There was a pair of servants, footmen in black jackets and crisp ties, who stood unobtrusively at either side of the doors, awaiting the colonel’s next instruction.
The balcony jutted out over a bluff. Thick cedar braces dug into the rock face beneath them, rugged pink granite that crumbled gently down into the woods. Looking out straight ahead showed her only more forest, mysterious and dense. Golden, flickering lights occasionally glinted past the trees—torchlights or cabins or lost spirits, Madeleine couldn’t say.
They stood in silence. She tried the punch again, savoring the bubbles popping along her tongue.
“Might I ask a favor of you, Miss Force? Would you call me Jack?”
“Yes,” she said, “if you will call me Madeleine.”
“Not Maddy? I’ve heard your mother and sister calling you that.”
She laughed, feeling warm and bold. “No, please. I’ve tried for years to get them to stop. It’s so undignified. Maddy. I’m not a child anymore.”
“It is a lovely name. Madeleine.” He said it again, under his breath. “Madeleine.”
“Thank you. At least I am grown to someone.”
He smiled at the trees, a wistful smile, one that tugged at her unexpectedly, that lodged itself in a tender place somewhere near her heart.
“It can be difficult sometimes for our families to accept us as people separate from who they are. As separate souls. When we’re young, we’re taught to behave as our parents do—to cherish what they cherish and believe what they believe. And for a while, that’s as it should be. But as adults, sometimes we have our own desires, our own hopes, that are at odds with how our parents view the world.”
“Is that how it was for you? You grew to be at odds with your parents?”
His jaw tightened; he took a longer breath. “Oh, for a while, yes. It was inevitable, I think. My father and I used to lock horns on so many things. Where I would attend school. What I would study. My companions, my ambitions . . . He was so determined that he knew the best path for me. And I, of course, was determined that he was wrong.” He shook his head. “All these years later, I see that we were both right, and both wrong. I wish I could tell him so now.”
An owl began to call from below them, earnest and deep. Another answered, closer to the sea. The golden lights in the woods winked and glowed.
“But your father must have been so proud of you,” she said. “No matter how you locked horns. Look at you. Look at all you’ve done.”
“What have I done, do you imagine?”
“Why,” she said, astonished, “you’re John Jacob Astor. You’re—you’re incomparable, really. Everyone in the world has heard of you. Every man and woman in the world admires you.”
“My money, do you mean?”
He said it mildly, and without looking at her, but she felt the nick of it anyway.
“Not just that. Certainly that, but not just. You’ve invented things, useful things. I’ve read about them, the road improver—the—that special brake, for stopping bicycles. You volunteered to go to war when you didn’t even have to. You’ve funded all sorts of charities, for people and places that need things so desperately—”
“Stop,” he said, now on a laugh. “I beg you. You’re making my head swell.”
“You’ve written a book,” she went on. “An entire book.”
“A passing fancy.”
“A book of fiction about exploring the solar system. Men in spaceships, landing on Saturn and Jupiter. Finding new life. Only someone tremendously clever would think of that.”
He leaned forward, braced both hands against the balcony railing as if to assess its strength, then shook his head. “It was a while ago. A lifetime ago, it seems.”
She tasted the punch again—it really was delicious!—then lowered the glass. “May I read it? Would you mind?”
“Oh, it’s not very good, I’m afraid. Just a clutter of ideas I had when I was younger.”
“But I want to know your ideas. I want to read your words, your book, because I might find a part of you inside those pages. A part I won’t have a chance to know any other way. And I would love to know every aspect of you, Jack Astor. Do they have it here at the library in town?”
“No,” he said, after a long, dumbfounded moment. And then, “Yes, I suppose they might. But I’ll give you a copy. You needn’t borrow it.”
“Thank you.”
He looked at her then with those winter gray eyes, and she looked back without shrinking. Around them rose the warm spill of light, of music, of every splendid fantasy she’d ever nurtured about him suddenly, wildly possible.
Then he straightened, turning away once more. When he spoke again, it was with deliberation, as if he were testing out the words before he said them.
“We live in a marvelous age, Madeleine. A magnificent age. We are witness to innovations and ideas never before imagined upon this earth. Science, philosophy, the arts. We’re fortunate enough to be cast amid these times, destined to be amazed at man’s ideas and innovations. Destined to be improved by them.”