Another moment between them, stretching long and strange and lovely somehow, filling her with both elation and dread, because Madeleine understood then that, despite what she’d said to her mother, she knew she stood at the edge of a very steep cliff, and falling off of it would mean either flight or annihilation.
A lance of sunlight speared the clouds. From the corner of her eye, Madeleine saw a pair of figures approach. She turned to them in relief.
“I’m afraid my mother and sister are swooping in,” she said, returning Katherine’s wave. “Mother has been . . . quite keen to meet you. Do you mind?”
“Not in the least.”
“She’s very impressed with your flowers,” Madeleine said under her breath, and the colonel slanted her another look.
“Only she?”
“No. Not only she.”
* * *
Madeleine made the introductions. She heard herself making them, saying the correct words, using the correct tone, and everyone shook hands correctly as she watched from slightly outside of herself, still suspended in the fleeting light. Still standing at the edge of that cliff, wondering what would come next.
From the saltwater bathing pool walled off from the bay came echoes of splashing, of children shouting and nannies chiding, and cormorants screeching for scraps.
People were beginning to stare at them again.
Mother was speaking. Katherine was trying to catch Madeleine’s eye.
Colonel Astor tested the bottom of his stick against the grass and shifted on his feet, the wind flipping his jaunty striped tie this way and that. For the first time, she caught a hint of his cologne.
Sandalwood, rich and heady. Amber. Bergamot.
* * *
“I didn’t think dogs were allowed at the Club,” Katherine was saying.
The colonel’s eyebrows quirked. “Oh, aren’t they?” he asked innocently. “Alas.”
As if on cue, Kitty yawned, showing miles of tongue and teeth. Madeleine and Katherine burst into laughter, spontaneously, loudly, and both at once.
It was one of the hallmarks that branded them as sisters, their matching laugh: low and full-throated, bubbling up without reservation. It remained the despair of their mother (who feared it revealed a shade too much a bourgeois background) but was as natural as breathing to Madeleine and Katherine, who both brimmed with appreciation of anything absurd.
Throughout their childhood, Mother had dressed them identically, to the frustration of them both. Chocolate-haired and blue-eyed, the sisters might already have been twins, except that Katherine was always a little taller, a little merrier, more sparkling.
Even so, the colonel’s attention kept returning to Madeleine, instead of fixing upon the brighter star.
“Miss Force! Colonel Astor! A photograph? To commemorate Miss Force’s win in the tournament?”
It was a young man in a boater and tennis whites, already setting up his camera and tripod on the spread of lawn just ahead of them. He must have been a member of the Club, although Madeleine didn’t recognize him.
The colonel looked at her. “Would that be all right?”
“Yes,” answered Madeleine’s mother, and tucked a loose lock of hair back behind Madeleine’s ear before moving to stand beside her.
Katherine grinned. Madeleine pushed more hair behind her other ear, and they all four faced the photographer, gathering closer, pulling the dog into the frame. The colonel’s sleeve brushed lightly against her own, electrifying; she clamped her arms to her sides, hoping she didn’t stink of tennis and the fried cod she’d had for lunch.
The young man removed his hat. He stooped behind the camera and lifted a closed palm to them, his fingers opening one at a time to count one . . . two . . . three . . .
Madeleine would have many years to reflect upon this moment. She would study it, pick it apart in a dozen little ways and wonder how things might have turned out differently had she been daring enough to overrule her mother. To say, No, I’d rather he didn’t take our photograph, please. I’d rather we all just turn around and walk the other way.
Set a precedent, as it were.
In her darker musings, she would wonder why Jack himself hadn’t said something. Offered her a whispered warning about what it would mean, a sidelong glance, something. After all, he had to have known what would happen next. He had to have at least suspected. He’d asked her if it would be all right, and maybe that was all the warning he thought she needed.
But the Madeleine of that particular afternoon was scarcely a month past her seventeenth birthday; she was teenaged and untested and sweaty and bedazzled. She didn’t speak the subtle code of the magnificently rich, not then.
To be honest, it likely wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. In the space of just that single conversation—the sea light, the clouds, his gray eyes and his dog—she had already made her choice. She was already plummeting off that cliff, ready to soar.
And so the shutter had snapped, capturing them in their untidy, sunlit line, about to become the cynosure of the world’s avid attention.
* * *
When the grainy image showed up on the front page of the scandal sheet Town Topics three days later (COLONEL JOHN JACOB ASTOR, 46, AND MISS MADELEINE T. FORCE, 17, AND FAMILY, CELEBRATING AT THE SWIMMING CLUB, BAR HARBOR), it showed the dog yawning again and Mrs. Force beaming.
After that, she started to notice them: men—it was always men—lingering at the edges of events, their hats pulled low over their foreheads, sometimes toting cameras, sometimes not. There was something about the stalking, the staring, the incessant sprinkling of her name in gossip columns that unnerved her. When they noticed her noticing them, they’d touch their hats and nod, and Madeleine would turn away, because she didn’t want to look any of them in the eyes for too long. She didn’t want them to memorize her face.
She became better at the art of stillness; she had become the hunted, after all.
Two weeks went by, and she didn’t encounter the colonel again. The flowers still arrived every morning, and he still never called, and no one in the household now said a word about it, not even Madeleine herself. She began to spot the journalists less and less.
America’s richest man had apparently packed up and moved on, taking the ravenous appetite of the public with him. Which was fine with her; certainly it was fine; it was madness to think the brief attention he’d paid to her had been anything more than a superficial kindness—perhaps even a gentlemanly sort of pity—all this while. He’d sent her a single posy, and she’d thanked him, and now they were trapped in a loop, where he felt obligated to continue with the flowers because she’d been so grateful.
John Jacob Astor was reported to be in Newport aboard his yacht.
In Manhattan at his Fifth Avenue chateau.
Abroad in the West Indies with his son.
At his mansion in Rhinebeck.
Back in Newport.
But he wasn’t back in Newport. On that point, the tabloids were entirely wrong.
* * *
She was standing with her father against the railing of the Robin Hood Park Raceway one afternoon, waiting for the horses to thunder past. Katherine and Mother had decided to take luncheon at the Club instead, but Madeleine and William Force, both dedicated riders, appreciated the energy of the races, the earthy must of the track and clods of soil flying, and the rising excitement of the swaying, cheering crowd with every go-round. It was as raucous as it ever got among Bar Harbor’s society proper, and Madeleine enjoyed adding her small voice to the chorus.