“What is it?” called a voice within. The same commanding and precise voice that had told her many tales last night and then shut up to hang on her every word.
“Same puddle, different girl with a twisted ankle,” the nobody called over his shoulder. Several seconds passed and she did not hear the commanding voice again. “Want to see her? I don’t think it’s anything you need trouble yourself with.”
Well, this Vida could not have. She could not have anyone going around implying that she was like the nitwits who apparently risked life and limb just to have a few moments with Fitzhugh. She had had his attention for most of the previous evening, and was herself the sort of creature that men were often making fools of themselves just to meet. With little grace but much determination she arrived on her feet so that the nobody could see that her ankle was just fine. Her pride ached, but she would not let this nobody see that.
“You’re a real gentleman,” she said aridly.
“I am sorry,” he said, and extended a hand—to what purpose, she had no idea, as she was already on her feet—and, when she did not accept it, his fingers did a graceful little flourish through the air. “Girls are always slipping and falling here, you see—I’ve gotten a little used to it, and sometimes forget the rules. How you’re supposed to act when it happens for real.”
Vida drew herself up at this accusation. “How could girls ‘always’ be slipping and falling here? I thought this ship was brand new.”
If Vida had expected the nobody to crumble at her brilliant logic, she was destined for disappointment. He only grinned at her and maintained his amused silence.
“I am a first-class passenger on the Princess,” Vida went on. Though she let her anger show in her eyes, she brought her voice down to a hoarse whisper so Fitzhugh would not know it was she who was having this stupid spat with a nobody, “And I was merely curious to see its famous map room—there is a puddle here, as you can plainly see, so why don’t you go get a mop and do something about it?”
And with her chin high she grabbed fistfuls of her skirt and walked with as much dignity as she could summon from the site of her failure. She (she!) had failed to suavely run into the man whose interest she had believed herself to already have. She kicked the champagne bottle out of her path, but this too was a mistake. Pain bloomed in her toe and it was all she could do to not cry out before she reached the next corridor.
Three
“Oh dear,” said Miss Rosa de Hastings, one of the girls who Vida had traded dance partners with in the ballrooms of San Francisco, as she arrived at Vida’s side, and together they joined the stream of first-class passengers from the salon into the grand dining room. “If you are looking wistful, then we are all in a grave and terrible danger.”
Vida accepted Rosa’s arm. “I know,” she replied in a little voice. “Wistful is not at all my best color.”
They were surrounded by the throng, by the high shine of black tuxedo jackets and the pastel ruffles of ladies who, much like Vida, appeared to have spent the first hours of their journey attending to their dress and coiffure. A gloom had settled in Vida since her failed encounter with Fitzhugh Farrar, and though she tried to shake it off, she found she could not. She followed instead the well-heeled crowd, hoping their enthusiasm for light fixtures and fine carpets and each other’s silks and jewels was catching.
The ship’s social director, a Mr. Selvedge, greeted Vida and Rosa and made all the usual compliments regarding their loveliness and what an honor it was to have them on the maiden voyage of the Princess, et cetera, et cetera, and asked solicitously after their accommodations, and mentioned—in what he perhaps considered a subtle way, but which rankled Vida’s already wounded pride—the names of bachelors that he could introduce them to. She was not the kind of girl who needed help meeting young men! But apparently her fame in this regard did not extend beyond the borders of San Francisco.
“What a bore,” Vida muttered when at last he departed and they found themselves seated at one of several long tables, immaculately cluttered with crystal, silver, china, and hyacinth. Beyond the rows of tables, beyond curtains of velvet and gilt-encrusted columns, beyond potted palms and silken fainting couches, were windows that framed an unfathomable seascape of deepest midnight blue. “I thought he’d never leave.”
“Me too,” said Rosa, craning her lovely pink neck. Her blond hair fell in sweet ringlets, but her eyes had a steely quality. “As though any of us are interested in meeting anyone but Fitzhugh.”
After the stinging humiliation of that afternoon, this statement didn’t exactly shock Vida. Still, it wasn’t good news that Rosa considered Fitzhugh fair game. Vida regarded Rosa, who was not exactly a friend (though they’d known each other all their lives), and wondered if she could truly have missed the report of Vida’s wild night with the Farrar heir. Maybe Rosa had been too busy dressing for a run-in with him—for some kind of slip in front of the map room—to know that he and Vida had been attached in print. “Well,” Vida replied, not hiding her irritation, “you should have asked Selvedge for an introduction.”
“To whom?” This from a voice Vida had never heard before, female and British, a voice that resounded high in the nasal cavity. The owner of the voice was practically skeletal and encased in emerald green satin. Peacock feathers were wound into her high, pinned hair. Her age was impossible to determine—she might have been a few years older than Nora and lived a hard life, or was otherwise a perfectly preserved seventy-nine.
Rosa and Vida must have appeared confused enough by this interjection, for the lady quickly went on: “What I meant, my pretties, was to whom do you want an introduction?”
The woman sat down beside Vida, ignoring the little brass name tag that claimed the seat for Mr. Arnold Hazzard, and lit a slender cigarette, although there were no ashtrays and smoking was generally not done in mixed company. She put her pointy elbow on the table without the slightest notice of how this rattled the crystal, the china, and the silver. Before Vida could think of a clever way to avoid the question, the woman was talking again.
“I can introduce you to absolutely anybody you’d like. I know them all. I have a little something on all of them, you know. Don’t blame me. It’s that kind of world. Myself, I am an old libertine, and cannot be shamed. But all of these types”—she made a conductor-like flourish at the assembled—“well, really, I think you could shame any one of them for sneezing audibly, so it’s not difficult at all, and if you ask me, entirely their own fault. There’s Lady Narcissa of Ghent, who was born Lydia Astor. And Charlotte Coburg, who married a duke, making her a duchess of course.”
For the first time since her slip by the map room Vida felt interested in the evening, and she liked this lady who didn’t seem to believe that any of the first-class passengers were to be idolized at all. Vida’s eyes roamed the room for someone interesting enough that she’d want to learn their secrets. But her gaze became fixed and her bottom lip dropped at the sight of someone not fancy at all.
“Now, darlings, tell me, whom do you most want to meet?”
“Who is that?” Vida asked. She would not ordinarily have spoken so impulsively, but her anger had returned, heating her blood and bringing color to her face. The nobody from the map room had caught her eye. He was lingering near the grand doorway with that same easy posture and insolent face. She was glad to feel angry, actually. She much preferred anger to mortification.