On the morning of Mrs. Astor’s ball, Newport was full of more commotion than Lenox had seen even in Manhattan. He’d thought the little town was crowded the day before, but that was nothing—today quiet Bellevue Avenue was like Fourteenth Street, with horses crowded together outside every store, newsboys running among the crowds hawking papers with the latest news of the invitation list, and every few minutes someone, for private reasons, sprinting pell-mell up or down the street.
Lenox took this in from Mrs. Berry’s, standing next to the swinging porch chair with his hands in his pockets. He had been up very late—very late, working from the initial document he had drawn up. It had been years since he had worked quite so closely with his own memory, for he was alone here, other than Blaine, who was barely in the infancy of his training.
So it was that Lenox had taken the time to write down from scratch every name, associating freely in his loose scrawl as he described to his own satisfaction all the people in this interwoven little community, even writing down his conversations from memory, a skill at which he had once excelled, and which he found, pleasingly, he still had.
“Anything going on today, do you think?”
Lenox turned and saw the mayor, Welling, on the street beneath the porch. He smiled. “You must be very pleased.”
“Aye, she handles well in a breeze, Newport.” Welling laughed. “I’ve too many errands myself to linger—but enjoy yourself tonight!”
This stray remark was only the first indication of the day that things had changed for Charles Lenox in America. Everywhere he went that morning, eyes seemed to be on him, including the newsstand and the chophouse where he sat outside at a sunny table and ate a plate of eggs and toast (with a pot of risibly weak tea, to which he added a double order of extra dry leaves at half-a-penny a pinch). As he was passing up Bellevue Avenue, a well-dressed young man carrying an absolutely enormous white box that said Worth nearly snapped at him, until seeing his face, when he made his obeisance and moved on—and Lenox was compelled to weigh the unhappy idea that his image had been in the newspaper.
Bellevue Avenue was impassible by carriage toward the cottages, and so he decided, at about nine, that he would walk the mile to see Creighton and Cora Allingham.
They met him on the front step of Wales House, a small but sweet cottage toward the tip of the island, with much of the land given over to stables. Horses roamed freely, grazing. Lenox wondered that they never ran. Two groomsmen stood not far off smoking.
“Mr. Lenox?” said the mother.
She was very pretty herself, about forty-five, with blond hair that was beginning to lighten, and large piercing eyes. Her husband was a careworn but dignified and handsome gentleman in a linen suit. Like so many here, he wore the rosette of his regiment from the war.
Neither parent seemed as inconsolable as they had a right to: manners, the great bulwark against outward grief, prevailed. They invited Lenox very politely to a shaded stone terrace overlooking the water and gave him a welcome cup of tea, much better than he’d had with his breakfast.
“Thank you for coming to see us, Mr. Lenox,” said Allingham.
“On the contrary,” said Lenox gravely, “I am grateful to you for making time to see me. I know these must be most difficult days.”
There was a pause. Mrs. Allingham looked away. Lenox had assessed them, partly from Blaine’s account, and thought he knew who they were, what in England would be called squires, or in Scotland lairds, land-owning country stock. Perhaps a little over their flight here amidst the opulence of Newport’s first families, however. It was Lily—her beauty—that had lifted them so high.
“Where are you from?” Lenox asked.
“We live in New Jersey most of the year,” said Allingham, “upon a gentleman’s farm I acquired there after the war. We have always spent time in the city, however—my brothers both live there, and are in society a great deal. I myself prefer the countryside.”
“But moved into the city when Lily was preparing to come out.”
“Yes. It was clear that she had a chance to make a good match. The boys who live near us are fine young men, of course, but not cut of the same cloth.”
“I always had a secret wish that she might marry Ned Braeburn,” said Mrs. Allingham, more to her husband, or perhaps even herself, than Lenox. She turned to the detective. “He was a sweet boy. Ever so handsome. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and has set up as an engineer in Philadelphia. But what is an engi-neer in Philadephia to a girl with her head full of yachts, and Newport, and balls, and—you were nineteen once, Mr. Lenox!”
Lenox smiled. “When I think of how I might have handled being the apple of society’s eye at that age, I feel a sort of horror. Though there was no risk of it, I can promise.”
Mrs. Allingham smiled gratefully. “Exactly. And as her parents—you only love them, after a certain … but oh, we must have made mistakes, because … if only—”
“It’s all right, Cora,” said Mr. Allingham, and put a hand gently on hers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lenox. The grief is still very new.”
“There is no need to apologize at all. Mr. and Mrs. Allingham, do you know who Lily intended to marry?”
They both nodded, and the husband spoke. “Willie Schermerhorn. She settled upon it a few weeks ago, and I think told him of her decision. Lily was already speaking about her trousseau, their honeymoon in Italy, the ruins in Rome.”
“She needn’t have even gone to that ball at Cold Farm,” said Cora Allingham miserably.
“It sounds as if she was very happy.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But it wasn’t announced yet?”
“No,” said Mrs. Allingham. “Willie wanted to speak to his father formally, though Mr. Schermerhorn knew—he was very gracious to us, invited us to stay at the Cove for the whole length of the summer, though we have been happy here at Wales Farm until this week.”
“I don’t know that her mind was wholly made up, either,” said Allingham.
“Creighton!”
“It’s the truth.” The wind increased in intensity for a moment, flattening the grass, causing the horses to look up, then died down. “Lily was so caught up in the world here—I don’t know what she might have done had she lived. Anything.”
For the first time, perhaps, Lenox realized how powerful their daughter must have seemed to the Allinghams. All their lives, she had listened to them, taken their instruction, followed their principles, and then suddenly everything had changed, and it had been she who was telling them what codes they must follow, which families counted, how one ought to behave. It must have been bewildering.
“Did Lily wear a ring?” Lenox asked.
“Several,” said her mother. “She received—oh, dozens, from these gallant young boys here.”
“But no special one?”
“Yes, one. She had a gold ring that we gave her on her fourteenth birthday. It had a pattern of lilies—after her name.” She blushed. “You’re a detective—I shouldn’t have said that, I suppose—but since you asked.”
“Did she wear it on her third finger?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I could tell that she had been used to wearing a ring there, and there was none near where she—lay. But perhaps she had taken it off that day.”
Allingham looked unsure. “Perhaps. I cannot recall the last time I saw her without it.”
“Can you tell me about the day and evening of Lily’s death?” he asked.
They gave him a detailed account, much of which he already knew: an early ride on horseback with Rose Bennett, lunch on Willie Schermerhorn’s yacht, preparations for the ball, and lastly the event itself.
Lenox asked them about Vanderbilt. They knew him vaguely, as one of the many boys (their word) who had often been mooning around their daughter. Keen to ingratiate himself. But they could offer no insight—probably knew him less well than did Lenox himself, in fact.
He condoled with them again before he left. He asked whether they planned to stay in Newport or return to New Jersey. Mrs. Allingham answered that they were thinking of taking a year and going to Munich; her sister lived there, she said, and her five nieces, and she might be of some use, while Creighton, she said, could finally write his memoirs.
The gentleman nodded, though to look in his eyes was to doubt that such a project would ever come to fruition. One sensed that it would take years in Munich, if not longer, for him to begin to understand what had happened three days before.
Lenox thanked them and strolled back up Bellevue Avenue, brooding the whole way about Sophia and Clara. He would have traded his ticket at Mrs. Astor’s ball to be spirited back home for five minutes, he thought. When he returned to Mrs. Berry’s, he stopped in at the telegraph office first, but they said that neither Willie Schermerhorn nor any of the other recipients had replied to the wires the office had transmitted the night before to Bay Head. He went back up to his room, thinking of the last thing he had told the Allinghams, that Lily’s death had at least been painless and quick. He felt guilty, for he had no idea if it was true.