Elinor was afraid she was going to drown. She was swimming with her red hair wrapped around her in thick, black water. But why was her mother on her honeymoon with them? She kept hearing her voice, and was she crying? She would have to include that scene in her book. Oh, and Lucy must be here too. How old were they? This was awfully hot for Canada, and what would her strict, French grandmama say to her hair being down?
“She’d delirious again. The fever seems to hang on. More ice and we’ll try to bring it down,” a man’s voice said, not Clayton’s.
Icy looks. Icy looks from some of those women she’d tried so hard to entertain with her drawings and stories. But they were kinder when they learned she had no dowry, and why would anyone want an ugly, red-haired girl? Lucy was prettier, made pretty costumes for their dolls, too, and perhaps one of those dolls had been presented at the palace . . .
“Elinor, dearest, it’s Mother. You have a lovely daughter. I know you said that it was a boy. But if a girl, you wanted her to be named Juliet.”
“Her story is a tragedy,” someone whispered. “They both die.”
Suddenly, Mother’s face was gone, and Lucy’s was there, her grown-up face.
“Lucy!” someone said. “I’m going to drown! Hold me up!”
“Listen to me, Elinor—Nellie,” she said. “I will hold you up. No one is going to die. You rest now and get your strength back. Do not let go of all we’ve had, all that we can be. Your daughters need you. Your book needs you, and you must finish it. Be strong, and I’ll be right here with you.”
She felt better after that. Lucy held her hands and surely wouldn’t let her go off this cliff above the sea. They were looking out the window of Elizabeth Castle in just Jersey, and she could see from here her heroine Elizabeth from her book. She would not let her die. She would finish her story and share it with people, with Mother, with Lucy and even Clayton.
Elinor was sure she pulled a frightened child named Nellie next to her and held her tight so she would not fall into the water and drown.
Elinor was impatient with how slowly she came back from Juliet’s difficult birth and the rheumatic fever that plagued her after, and her temporary need for crutches plagued her, too. But the truth was she did not mind the doctor telling her she could not risk more children. Clayton was upset, though he was kind enough to lease a small cottage, Lamberts, on the estate for her mother so she could help care for her in her convalescence. But while he’d promised to try to show someone he knew at a newspaper her book when he returned, he was already off to Monte Carlo on his own for a month.
That hurt. Partly because he had proposed to her there. In her own heart, Elinor knew they were at the very least emotionally estranged now. No putting the broken pieces together this time. Let him caress his bottles of brandy. She accepted that their marriage—except for their little girls—was a failure, but she refused to believe she herself was.
“Admit it, Cosmo,” Lucile told him, stooping to give him a peck on the cheek. “This new shop is perfect for all my plans. I adore the pale gray painted walls with the mirrors and the thick carpet to set everything off. I tell you, this mannequin dress parade today will be a feather in my cap.”
He was quick to turn his head so that she caught his lips with her mouth instead of his cheek. “I told you, lass, all this on the condition that you one day model an outfit you have made especially for me, like one of those silky Oriental-type robes with some of the garments under it like you had in your hands and then sat on to hide the first day we met.”
“Cosmo! You’re to help with all this today, not distract me.”
He sighed and rose from one of the little gilt wooden chairs they had set in a circle around a raised stage bedecked with white gardenias, stephanotis, and orchids he thought had cost too much, an arm and a leg he’d said with a narrow look at her arms and legs. The man was absolutely driving her to distraction and on a day like this.
How did she know Lucile Ltd. was doing well? Because important designers were spreading rumors about her, calling some of her designs indecorous. Yes, she was doing away with some layers of petticoats and big bustles and putting slits in some of the tighter skirts. The corsets she sold now were form enhancing, not form shaping. She had introduced the French brassiere and worse—in the eyes of the fashion establishment—insisted on doing away with calling women’s arms and legs “limbs” as if they sprouted from trees. And her expansion to this new address at 14 St. George Street just off Hanover Square was a threat to other couturieres, who believed any sort of publicity, like the embossed and gilt invitations she’d sent out for this newfangled event, was “cheap.”
Edith bustled past. “Hebe looks wonderful in Mrs. Glyn’s presentation gown. All six of the living mannequins are nearly ready, Lucile.”
Lucile patted Cosmo’s shoulder and hurried out after her. “The musicians should be here soon,” she told Edith, amid the nervous, chattering girls. “And I intend to decide which of my sister’s jewels go with which gown of emotion. Have Mrs. Langtry and Mrs. Terry arrived yet? Oh, I pray nothing goes wrong today. How I wish I’d dared invite some of the royal family, but we’re not there quite yet. Down with those horrid old wax-faced mannequins. We are going to give them our beautiful goddesses—reality, though fanciful and fantastic!”
“Yes, Lucile,” Edith said in a loud voice. That was evidently a cue, for all her living mannequins and seamstresses began to applaud. There was Lillie Langtry, who had slipped in too, not only smiling but lifting an early glass of champagne in a toast to Lucile’s creations.
Once Elinor heard what a roaring success Lucile’s dress parade had been, she was even more driven to finish The Visits of Elizabeth. Although she and Clayton were married in name only now, he had kindly taken the manuscript to a man named Mr. Jeyes, who was a subeditor on the Standard newspaper. Clayton had also read parts of it at his men’s club and said it had elicited some “good laughs.”
“Which I take means good in general, not derisive,” she said. “So then . . .”
“So then Jeyes, good old chap, has an offer for us that it be run in segments in a publication called The World.”
Elinor rose to her feet without leaning on her crutches when she heard that. “Well, after all,” she said, “Charles Dickens was successfully serialized.”
“But he suggests a pen name, and I do too. After all, women of our class don’t write, not for publication.”
“And if it fetches in money? Or is praised?”
“Still keep your real name secret, I’d say.”
“Even for other novels I intend to write?”
“Elinor, what in the deuce do you want? A little pin money would be nice, of course. Don’t let your sister’s fame go to your head. As much as you two care for each other, I fear you try to top each other too.”
“Quite untrue,” she told him. But, she thought, just wait until Lucile and all her fancy clients finally figure out who had written a book, one men, too, had deemed delightful.
“You did what?” Lucile demanded as they celebrated the periodical publication of The Visits of Elizabeth two months later in the library—now Elinor’s writing room—at the Glyn flat in Sloane Square. “You are supposed to be keeping the identity of Elizabeth a secret and you told Daisy Brooke Warwick? Don’t you recall even the newspapers used to call her ‘The Babbling Brooke’? She won’t keep your secret, at least with the uppers she cavorts with, including the Prince of Wales, so you . . .”
Lucile’s voice trailed off, and her hands shot to her hips. “Why, Elinor Sutherland Glyn, you told her on purpose!”
Elinor only winked and smiled. “I certainly hope it doesn’t leak out, but Clayton can hardly scold Lady Warwick, can he? You know everyone’s talking about it, saying The Visits of Elizabeth is clever and funny. I can just see you putting an anonymous name on your designs and replacing those tall letters touting the Maison Lucile on your new building.”
Lucile sighed and sank into the chair across Elinor’s writing desk. “You are right as rain, of course.”
“I appreciate your saying so. Dear Lucy, my girlhood friend and ever my sister, I’ve decided that Elinor Glyn sounds a bit like a nom de plume, anyway. I intend to write more novels, and I’ve started another to be called The Reflections of Ambrosine, with the main character modeled on Daisy Brooke Warwick and the hero based on this handsome young man Daisy introduced me to, Major Seymour Wynne Finch, one of the Prince of Wales’s Marlborough House set. And oh, he has such style and panache—like your gowns, only quite in a different way.”
Lucile picked up more than the inspiration for a fictional character in the way Elinor’s eyes lit and her pale skin blushed nearly as red as her hair.
“If you’d been able to come to the dress parade, dear Nellie,” Lucile said, picking up on her tender use of her own girlhood name, “you could have taken part in the toast Lillie Langtry proposed for me. You don’t by chance have any champagne round here, do you?”
“No, but something else that will surely do.” She went to the sideboard, opened a cabinet drawer, and dug under a stack of papers. “Ta-da!” she sang out, producing and holding out stiff-armed a bottle of Bodega sherry from the Duff-Gordon collection. “Clayton is drinking more and more of his expensive brandy, but this should do the trick for two girls from just Jersey. Now where are those glasses he hides? Ah, yes, no fluted goblets but old cut-glass crystal tumblers.”
She poured two liberal glasses of the sherry. They clinked them together.
“To my sister, Lucy alias Lucile, fashion trendsetter and artist par excellence,” Elinor said.
“To my sister, Nellie alias Elinor Glyn, published author and artist par excellence,” Lucile said. “Onward and upward!” And they drank to that.