It was around a quarter past eight when Lenox left Mrs. Berry’s, half an hour or so after Kitty had departed. He had spent the intervening time nursing a last half glass of wine and making notes from the day at his desk.
He went into the streets of Newport with a lively curiosity to explore. It was dark out, but well lit. He walked briskly through the town for thirty minutes, from Bellevue Avenue to Bannister’s Wharf, until at last he felt tolerably knowledgable about his new environs. A cheerful place, on the whole. The streets were narrow and roughly cobbled. Barks of laughter here and there—fishermen’s taverns, he speculated. There were lanterns at some of the houses, and on the larger thoroughfares kerosene streetlamps, all of it looking no doubt much as it had been a hundred years before, during the country’s rebellion against the British.
How far, and how close, from the great houses as they lay upon the sea, each containing its own complex history. According to Kitty—or rather to Catherine, Lady Cormorant, as it was her right by courtesy to be called, though perhaps here she simply went by Mrs. Hunter—the upper classes of Newport made up a tiny community, which was run as regularly as a medieval court. Carriages went out at the same hour every afternoon. Hostesses made up the same parties on the same days each week, and outside, noses pressed against the window, hundreds yearned for admission.
The most helpful part of the conversation, though, had been Kitty’s description of Lily Allingham.
“They are all named after flowers here,” she’d said as they sat in the parlor at Mrs. Berry’s. “Lily, Daisy, Rose, Pansy, Violet.”
“We have some of those in England.”
“I don’t know if it is quite my taste.” She smiled to soften this judgment. “Yet I confess I admire the girls here very much.”
“How so?”
“They don’t regard themselves as second-class to the men. For one thing, they’re extremely well educated. England—now that I have traveled a little, it seems terribly backward in that regard. These girls know how to ride, play piano, speak French, paint, talk history, and dance. Most of them could fix a horse’s shoe in a pinch. They know how to reject a proposal and how to accept one. They know their minds.”
“Interesting.”
“Whereas English women—they will sacrifice anything, live upon the merest pittance, starve themselves, to see their brothers go to Eton or their fathers in a new hat at church. Meanwhile the brothers and fathers never think of it twice.”
Lenox could have cited counterexamples, but he knew there was truth in what she said.
“And Lily Allingham was of the new type?”
“Oh, most decidedly—something even beyond it.”
“Beyond it?”
Kitty looked sad for an instant. “She was so very beautiful, you know. Ah! Anyhow, yes—she knew her value.”
“I understand she was to marry the fifth William Schermerhorn.”
“So one heard. The old white heads had gotten together and settled it. A good match for him, a spectacular one for her. Her family is not much, though quite comfortable by standards outside of this island.”
“From what I understand, his family has the money for ten such marriages.”
“Yes. And for a girl as beautiful as that, a good family does almost better than a famous one.”
“What is he like, the Schermerhorn son?”
“Small, indignant. Handsome.”
“He sounds like his father.”
“Very much. Mind you, they carry a good deal of weight here, the Schermerhorns and their various cousins.
“But listen, Charles, you are quite wrong if you think that Lily Allingham was settled to be married to Willie Schermerhorn.”
Lenox looked at her curiously. “Oh?”
“There was a chance of it. But it was her first season. I would guess she had a dozen proposals. The young gentlemen in New York will propose to a girl as soon as look at her.”
“That complicates matters.”
“If you believe the gossip, she was also entertaining an offer from Lawrence Vanderbilt.”
“Vanderbilt! Son of the famous one? Cornelius?”
Even in England nearly every living soul knew of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He had been one of the richest men in the world at the time of his death the year before, which had been front page news in London—the person responsible for half the railroad tracks in America.
“No, his nephew. The son of the Commodore’s brother. Wildly, wildly rich, all of them—not in the way you and I are accustomed to, Charles, not land, but what they would call cash, money that flows out of the hand like so many kisses.”
“I have seen the cottages.”
She smiled ruefully. “Before you go I hope you catch a glimpse of the real heft of it—how little they think of buying five oils by Rembrandt from some fallen duke, when the same duke’s wife herself might tarry over ordering a second loaf of bread from the baker’s.”
It was the same story across all of Europe. The wise men in Parliament could explain it: Several bad harvests in Europe, combined with the advent of refrigeration, had annihilated the income of the great landowners in England and abroad. Earldoms a thousand years old were destitute; Polish counts were ten a penny.
One result was that the young men of these families had started marrying Americans. Another was that the Americans had started to buy up the contents of country houses full stock, libraries, tapestries, paintings, furniture—often the only things aristocrats were allowed to sell, since the land and house, even the timber, remained entailed upon future generations. The Duke of Kilcallon’s own bed, built by hand in the 1200s, now sat in a financier’s mansion in Utica, New York; so Lenox had read in the New York Times on his first day in America.
“What is Vanderbilt like?” he asked.
“The opposite of Willie Schermerhorn, as they call the son. Lawrence is tall. Not especially good-looking, but well dressed, and charming enough.”
“How so?”
“You’ll see.” She paused. “He knows he is a Vanderbilt.”
“Will he be at the tea tomorrow evening?”
“I should think so. Perhaps not, if he is in mourning for her.”
“What is the opinion of Newport, then?” he asked. “Who do they think killed this poor girl?”
“Half of them don’t mind who—the aunts, the old gentlemen with their cigars. They think she deserved it.” Kitty had thrown up a hand, a gesture he suddenly remembered from earlier days. “Madness. But she was so strikingly beautiful, Lily, and not modest either.”
“It sounds as if you knew her fairly well.”
“I did. I believe I was one of the few people who liked her. She was a girl with a mind. I admire that above anything. At any rate, the other half of the population here is quite certain that it was either Willie, which would make the most interesting story, or else a vagrant, a townsperson. Someone from the village.”
“It seems unlikely that anyone in the village would have had motivation to kill her.”
“Perhaps, but everything about it seems so improbable! I still cannot quite believe it myself that she has died.”
Lenox ruminated over this last observation as he walked through Newport. Finally he ducked his head into a tavern, which he discovered upon entering was the Paul Revere, a place that no less an authority than Lady Jane’s little book had recommended. Over the bar was a handsomely painted mural of a man in a tricorn hat, face fierce, riding a horse at a gallop. The anachronism of the lanterns jangling from the horse’s saddlebags in the painting could be forgiven. It was Paul Revere; lanterns ought to figure in somehow.
The tavern was bright and calmly noisy, occupied mostly by men of rough-spun but amiable appearance who nursed pewter mugs of beer, looking extremely comfortable as the tavern’s small fire blazed against a night growing cold.
Lenox took a table with that morning’s newspaper on it, ordered a chop, some potatoes, and another half bottle of wine, and polished them off in good hunger, reading as he did.
For dessert the Paul Revere offered something called “hasty pudding,” according to the tall, lean barman, another laconic Yankee.
“What is hasty pudding?” Lenox asked.
“Pudding made fast, I b’lieve.”
“I see.”
In the event, hasty pudding proved to be a thick boiled corn flour, sweetened with a top of crusted brown sugar, and hiding in its warm depths a dozen plump raisins. Lenox ate it with enchantment. Then he paid, returned to his room, changed into his nightclothes, and tucked into his bed. A sea breeze whispered into the room from a cracked window. He had time to think—How very far from home I am!—and smell the lovely scent of cold water. Then he was asleep, nine dreamless hours of total absence, a pure and rejuvenating slumber after one of the longest days he could remember.