Her immodesty had nothing whatsoever to do with beauty, however. She was not a beauty, as she was quite aware. Her chin was an imprecise proposition and her nose was broad and she was too short to stand out in a crowd. But she had a gift for putting herself together so as to bring attention to her best features. That, and how to let the light of her spirit shine through the pale skin of her face so that everyone who met her came away with the impression that she was the loveliest girl in all of California.
Why try to stand out in a crowd, when you could rise above like a shining star?
That was Vida Hazzard’s personal philosophy, and on a fine, late-October day, which had dawned bright and a little misty and was now absolutely blue, her way of doing things was on display to a rather dizzying degree. Her late-night adventures had appeared in the early edition of the paper, and her parents had fretted and paced, and she had lain on a chaise longue with a cold compress on her forehead wishing very much that they would shut up. It was hard enough, without their pacing and fretting, to decide if it was better to marry the most malleable boy she knew (and carry on as she had been, albeit with a new ring and a new name) or leave town and try to save her reputation that way.
In the end it hadn’t really been much of a choice. She wasn’t interested in the ocean, but she was interested in all the places she had not yet seen. The world was big—so she had been told—and she had never been content to sit still long.
Leave town it was.
The papers had been calling the Princess the “Millionaire’s Ship of the West,” to rival the White Star Line’s grand floating worlds that moved every sort of person and package between Boston and New York and the ports of the Mediterranean and the British Isles. The people her parents socialized with had talked of little else all summer, which had stoked her contrariness. She had taken every opportunity to insist that this going on about a boat was enough hot air to fly a balloon. The notion became quite fixed with her, and she insisted to her parents—who were perfectly nice in their way, but were prone to put too much stock in the general prattle—that she would never set foot on such a grand lie. Yet she had a weakness for parties—the party she could not resist. She insisted they go to the party for the Princess’s inaugural passengers at the Palace Hotel, the night before the ship sailed, just to see all their acquaintances who’d been taken in by this Farrar Line racket behaving like suckers.
“All right,” her father had agreed. This was yesterday afternoon. He told his butler to go steam his white tie and tails. Her father didn’t follow the news unless it pertained to his business, but he, like his daughter, enjoyed a party. “Where, by the way, does this ship of fools go?”
Yesterday it hadn’t mattered, and Vida had told him so. Today it did.
Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Hazzard—whose family holdings originated with bitumen, but were now comprised of all sorts of industry—had purchased the tickets that morning. They had been in a high tizzy over the swirling stories of what a scene their daughter had made the night before. “She’s ruined, she’s ruined,” her mother had wailed into her cocoa, and her father had patted his wife’s shoulder and told her that all could be solved by a swift engagement. They sent cards to several friends to say they planned to only go so far as Hawaii, where they did have a few business interests to see to. But they told Vida to pack for a longer trip—if everything went according to plan, she would be engaged by Honolulu, and it would be only logical for all three Hazzards to travel on to Australia with her intended.
If Vida became engaged to Fitzhugh Farrar, they reasoned, the stories of her wildness the night before would soon be forgotten. If she did not become engaged soon, however, she risked dying an old maid. The whole brouhaha seemed rather humorous to Vida, but if it assuaged her parents’ anxieties she would go along with it, and have a little adventure in the name of getting respectable.
“Will you remember me on your voyage?”
Vida had almost forgotten the young man from the Chronicle, so digressive and flighty were her thoughts. It really had been a very late night. “You know I will,” she said. “Don’t you go forgetting me, either.”
“Come back soon. It will be a boring town without you.”
She didn’t want to agree too readily and so gave him an oblique little smile and a lazy wink, and let her gaze roam over the gathered crowd, many of whom she knew from the early days of her much-remarked-upon social career. There, with elbows on the rail of the promenade, was Theodore Grass—the first boy to propose marriage to her. His father was a newspaper publisher, and Theodore had been educated back East, but he possessed an unwavering love for his hometown, and though he was as adoring of Vida as a girl might rightly hope, she knew he could not keep up with her. He was perfectly content where he was, and there was so much she yearned to see. And there, sitting on the second-floor terrace of a saloon, was Bill Halliday, the author of her third proposal, with a stormy quality in his eyes. She winced a little at the memory of Bill, with whom she’d had some fun—he drove his horses fast, and was on speaking terms with parts of the city that fine people like them were not supposed to visit. But his adventuring had only left her with a taste for more, and anyway, she had seen how his father’s same proclivity had dwindled the Halliday family fortune. And there too, leaning against a ticket agent’s kiosk, was Whiting de Young, who only last month she had warned with a flash of the eyes that he should not humiliate himself by trying to propose at all. He watched her now with a sad little smile, and she could see in his eyes that he half expected her to change her mind and come running to him. For Whit was all things: rich, jocular, adoring, and descended from two of the most prosperous and prominent families in San Francisco. If he had come to her father with a ring, she knew that she would have had to marry him. Her parents would have insisted. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him, and she was even rather fond of him.
And that was how she knew.
That was how she knew for sure that marrying well in San Francisco was not enough for her, and that she would always be vaguely dissatisfied with her lot, always wondering if there was something better going on elsewhere. That she would have nothing to do about it but to stay out too late and get boring people to tell gossipy stories about her the next day. She was a huntress—her hunting grounds were drawing rooms and polo fields, it was true; but that did not make her any less a huntress. Now, standing alongside the sheer cliff of the Princess (which she had derided for months as not worth talking about), she shuddered with some presentiment of the future.
For a moment she saw clearly that her fate and the fate of this ship were entwined.
After all, if she had not bothered to argue about its worthiness, she would not have made a spectacle of herself, and would not be here now.
“You can come aboard,” said a familiar voice at her ear. “It’s almost time.”
Vida squeezed the hand of her maid, Nora. Nora was a tall, bright-eyed girl with an upturned nose who had been her ally in all her stratagems since she had begun training for cotillion five years ago. They moved together toward the plank. It had a fancy rope gate for a railing, and was made of handsome wood, but it was still a plank. As Nora guided Vida upward toward the little door in the side of the ship several stories above the pier, Vida felt how it swayed with the wind, and her heart bounced with a thrilling fear.