The first time she saw him, she was essentially invisible: thirteen years old, a schoolgirl on holiday, her hair dripping from the sea, sleek wet mermaid curls clinging to her arms and back. She was nestled, legs tucked under her, in the coarse silvery sand of Bailey’s Beach, her ruffled cap tossed beside her. Her nose was tingling hot and she didn’t care, because it was breezy and warm, and the sun was a high glorious pinpoint, and if it were ladylike in the least to stretch out all the way in her bathing costume to make a sand angel, she would have.
But Madeleine was not five; she was thirteen. And as it was just after eleven in the morning—the hour that only ladies were welcome to swim in the red algae-choked waves—Mother was bobbing nearby. She was always nearby. Maddy’s removal of her cap was transgression enough.
Gulls screamed and darted overhead. Madeleine lifted her chin and followed their loose circles, ragged-tipped wings, dragon shadows dipping and spinning against the sky.
A gaggle of girls a few years younger than she stood shrieking at the shoreline, kicking froth and sand at each other, too timid to venture all the way in but too aware of their bare shins and feet to resist the cool water. They were nearly louder than the birds.
Like Madeleine and every other female on the beach, the girls wore black. Black bathing bloomers, black shirtwaists with fat blossoming sleeves, everything from their necks to their knees down to the bones of their wrists thoroughly concealed. It was as though each and every summer noon, the exclusive strand of Bailey’s Beach became haunted by covens of fashionable, water-soaked witches.
A pair of carefully plodding bays hauled a carriage past the long arabesques of seaweed that marked the tideline, stopping at the very last stretch of dry sand. Blue-liveried footmen leapt free of the carriage; large, mysterious bundles were liberated from their leather straps in the back. Maddy twisted to watch as the men—who weren’t technically allowed on the beach right now, but they were only servants, so that was all right—swiftly erected a saffron-striped tent, complete with rug, wicker chair, and folding table, and then returned to the carriage to assist a solitary lady down to the sand.
She was white-haired, stooped. She squinted crossly at the sudden hard light but was so quickly guided inside the tent that Maddy barely had time to take note of the glimmer of jet beading on her dress and the garnet brooch pinned to her bosom. As soon as the lady was seated, a wind-tousled maid began unpacking a hamper for her meal.
“Ha,” breathed a voice in Maddy’s ear, accompanied by the sound of a body dropping down onto the grit beside her. Madeleine darted a look at her older sister (grinning and capless and somehow not at all sun-scorched), then looked back at the saffron-tent woman.
“Are you not awed?” Katherine drawled, leaning back on her arms, examining nothing but the unflagging sea rolling in before them. “Are you not suitably cowed?”
“Should I be?” Maddy asked.
“Yes, you certainly should be, little girl. That is Mrs. Astor. The Mrs. Astor. Dare to stare her in the eyes and you’ll turn into stone. Or is it burst into a pillar of flame? No, wait! You’ll be struck from the social register and die a shriveled old maid.” She gave an exaggerated shudder, still grinning. “The horror!”
Madeleine knew, of course, who Mrs. Astor was. Everyone knew. It was just that she had never seen her in person before; the Forces and the Astors didn’t move in the same social circles. Maddy had always imagined the matriarch of the venerable Knickerbocker set as a woman grown wiry and vicious and strong, with a smile of sharpened daggers and the fingernails of a warlord.
Not this. Not this stout, elderly creature who shied from the sun and had her lobster cut into cubes for her by her maid on her gilded china plate.
“And who is that?” Maddy asked, tilting her head toward the hatted man who was crossing the sand in long, leggy strides toward the tent. (He was definitely not a servant, but no one stopped him.)
“Ah,” replied her sister, in a tone of both confidentiality and superiority. She flicked a strand of drying kelp from her thigh. “That, my dear, is her son, the colonel.”
Oh, Maddy thought.
He was comely. She’d heard that he was, but only through school gossip, and comely in schoolgirl parlance might as well mean not so drippy-nosed, or not quite yet bald, or not so fat as his horse.
But Colonel John Jacob Astor, gentleman, inventor, and war hero, was comely, in an older, hawkish sort of way, rather like her father . . . but on second thought, not at all, because the colonel was fair as her father was gray, mustachioed as her father was not; fit and tall as . . . well, as only himself. Because he moved so quickly, she only just managed to get a good look at him, but what she noticed—what she would remember for the rest of her life from those few warm breezy seconds on that rough Rhode Island beach—was that he was smiling as he walked toward his mother. That he was easily conquering the sand, graceful and determined. And that, for the smallest inclination of a moment, he turned his head and caught her eyes and noticed her, there on the sand not so far off.
And then, for an instant, he was smiling at her.
It was as though a dart of light from the summer sun had pierced Madeleine’s heart. A dart, sweet and wonderful and terrible, right through her heart.
Then he was gone, swallowed by the interior of the tent. Someone untied the flap of the entrance and it fluttered closed, and then there was only saffron and white, and the gulls still calling out overhead.
“Maddy,” said her sister, placing a hand on her arm. “You look so queer. Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Madeleine said. She sat up straight, wiped a hand across her brow. She licked her lips and tasted salt and sand, relentless, pervasive in her every crease and pore. “Right as rain.”
* * *
The next time she saw him, she was not invisible. She was seventeen and draped in greenery: ropes of ivy, braids of ruffled roses, daisies, bright clouds of candytuft (the closest the stage manager could come to rue, sadly unavailable) woven through her dark brown plaits. She was singing, mad, twirling at times across the stage so that her skirts would lift to reveal the smart new boots she’d bought especially for the play.
She was Ophelia—tragic, bereft Ophelia—and had practiced singing her mad, sad lines until her voice had gone hoarse and she’d had to rest it for two days just to speak again without a rasp.
“He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone; at his head a grass-green turf, at his heels a stone.”
After weeks of rehearsals, the Junior League society had the honor of presenting Hamlet in Bar Harbor for two nights only (the Casino’s theater was ever-popular and only borrowed, after all), and this was the second. The previous night’s opening had left Madeleine shaking with nerves, but tonight she felt better; she was a creature composed of flaming hot candle-lanterns and greasy face paint and flowers, saturated in poetry and song. The heels of her boots struck the stage so lightly, she felt at times she might actually be floating.
Beyond the lights lining the edge of the proscenium, beneath the darkened stained-glass chandeliers, sat the hushed, breathing beast that was the audience. Except for the occasional muffled cough, the subtle twinkle of diamonds in earrings and collars, the beast was unseen, unheard. It was there and not there, anonymous. At least until it roused itself into applause.