It was cold and snowing hard, but Elinor didn’t care. She felt as if she were being tormented in the depths of hell.
How dare George Nathaniel Curzon and his new wife hold their second wedding for all his friends—oh yes, the Souls would be there in fine fettle—in the Ritz Hotel, a place that had often been her personal home away from home. He’d secreted her away in tiny hotels, but he was proud to show off his new bride in the grandest.
So Elinor was in the backyard behind her mother’s small London house, and she was going to erase that man from her mind. What the deuce, but she had been out of her mind to trust him, to love him! The heart had its needs and reasons, but he had ruined her lifelong belief in true romance.
The wind and snow—tiny pellets now—peppered her face and bare hands, but she didn’t care. This had to be done now. Perhaps it would help the burning pain inside to burn the past.
She scraped a wide circle of snow away with her foot and dumped the big box of his letters to her on the damp, crushed grass. Stirring the pile with her foot, she took yet another letter from her coat pocket and tried to light it with the box of lucifers she’d brought out. It flared fast and burned her fingers. She hardly felt the pain. It was nothing next to real agony.
She tried again, shielding the lighted envelope. Oh, she had admirers still, one in particular who had been attentive for years. But never would she play with the fire of passion and romance again, except in her novels. There would be only happy endings. Lucile would understand. She was desperately unhappy without Cosmo but she wouldn’t give in to abandon her goals and come back to live in Scotland—not even just have the London and Paris stores as he wanted and let the American ones go.
“The ‘It’ girls are burning their bridges,” she said aloud as she bent to touch the flame to the waiting pile of paper.
“Elinor!” came a sharp voice behind her. “Whatever are you doing out here in this snowstorm? I thought you were lying down.”
Her mother. Her long-suffering, blessed mother. She could not have done without her, tending her and Lucile and then her granddaughters over the years. Mother had cared for Clayton more than she had, but that was because he was generous, so unlike Mother’s second husband, the horrid Mr. Kennedy. Besides, she had never let go of the deep love for her first husband, their father, yet so handsome when he died, never to weaken, ever young.
“I’m burning some letters, Mother. Go back inside.”
“Do not order me about. You will catch your death of cold out here. Can you not cut them up and throw them away?”
“I want them destroyed. I want them burned.”
“Oh, I see,” she said as she came closer and looked down. “His love letters.”
“Ha! Love letters! Lying love letters. Perhaps I should use that for a book title.”
Despite the wet ground and snow, the pile of them finally caught fire. She wished her mother would go back inside. She always saw right through her.
“I thought I would die when I lost your father,” Mother said. “And look how I’ve gone on all these years without him, thanks to you and Lucile being so—well, strong and active.”
“And quite mad, both of us.”
Mother put her arm around Elinor’s waist. She’d come out so quickly her coat was not buttoned nor did she wear gloves or a hat. Elinor dug her gloves out of her pocket and put them on her mother as if she were a child.
“Dearest, Elinor, you will go on without him, the wretched cad and betrayer that he is.”
“It’s not only that. I’m burning another letter too. It came yesterday and kept me up all night. My request to the government for copyright to protect Three Weeks has not only been denied, but in the most cruel way. I wanted to protect my story from others who still make fun of it after all these years. Someone planned to make a bawdy sham of it in some dreadful, cheap London review.”
“May I see the letter before you burn it?”
“It was the firebrand I used to set the others aflame. But I will tell you—only you—what the judge’s decree said. It is going to make it so hard to write the book I’m starting now. The right honorable—that word means nothing to me anymore—judge decreed that I am not to have copyright protection for the novel because—and I quote—“It is vulgar, grossly immoral, and deserves no protection as a literary work.”
“Oh, my dearest, how unfair,” Mother said, tugging Elinor back from the spreading flames the wind now fed. “So, what do you plan to do?”
“Well, not throw myself on this blaze as if it were a funeral pyre where the Hindu widow immolates herself with her lost man. I shall follow your pattern. Lift my head and pick myself up somehow. I must tell you my next novel has a terrible, cynical, cold hero I’ve based on Curzon, but I shall have to give it a happy ending to not let my readers down. Also, I think I shall help in the war effort, here or in France. I shall do it for England, for our countrymen and for dear France. We Sutherland women forge ahead, don’t we, mistakes and tragedies and losses, no matter what? We go on.”
Arm in arm, they stood together in the snowy cold until the flames burned out.
Lucile looked up from her drawing board in her New York shop. For once, Bobbie’s singing was annoying her, and the bustle of the others in and out was distracting her. She stabbed her pencil point into the flowing gown she had just drawn and didn’t really like. It did not have “It.”
“I need some quiet!” she announced.
All the buzz stopped. Even her new designer, Peter, who was bringing her a cup of tea, froze in half step. Bobbie, who was feeling his oats a bit too much lately to order the others around, rolled his eyes and frowned, fidgeting. Could he not sit still lately?
“I can’t think, that’s all,” she said, amazed anew at how everyone seemed to orbit around her whims and schedule. It had to be that way, didn’t it? She was the sun, and they were the stars in this heaven of fashion and design. But, for once, she felt she’d overstepped.
“I am frustrated by the new trends in style,” she told them. “I know America will soon be declaring war, and some will be ‘going over there’ to help stop the Huns, but we must not let women lose sight of beauty and their very special, individual personalities. Some of the new trends I’ve seen elsewhere than in this shop make women look like boys. They might as well be wearing men’s clothes with those straight skirts and jackets and those plain hats. Where is the feminine elegance, the grace and flow?”
Several of her acolytes looked at one another but no one answered. For once, her dear Franks wasn’t even taking notes. And Bobbie dared to storm from the room.
Lucile took two sips of the tea Peter set down silently for her, then got up and went out to see what was ailing Bobbie. It had annoyed her that he’d insisted on singing patriotic songs lately—in both English and Russian—instead of romantic ballads. Sometimes she thought of him as a friend, sometimes almost a son. She adored how he adored her, especially since Cosmo was being so stubborn and difficult, even an ocean away.
She found the handsome young man pouting in the dim, deserted showroom with his arms crossed over his chest. He leaned against the elevated walkway she’d recently had installed so that the mannequins could strut off the small stage through the seated audience, turn round, and walk back.
“What is ailing you, Bobbie?”
“I might ask you the same, dear Diva.”
“I told you not to call me that nickname. This is not some grand opera, and don’t be cheeky.”
“It might be a tragedy but one only in the third act, I think. It’s wrong of you to try to keep me from enlisting. Don’t you think,” he asked, obviously forcing a stiff smile as he came toward her, “I would look smashing in a doughboy uniform?”
Instantly exhausted by another go-round with him on this topic, she collapsed in one of the chairs. He perched sideways in the one next to her and leaned his elbows on the arm of the chair and clenched his hands together as if in prayer.
“Shall I beg, oh, great one?” he demanded. “I can’t just sit here singing to you and your women clients and friends day and night, besides helping with froufrou frocks, when men are dying for a cause.”
“Doughboy—what a wretched name,” she said, hoping she could drag him off his usual subject. “Those uniforms make a soldier look like a lump of dough in the middle.”
“Of course you could have designed much more handsome ones to get shot up in the trenches, ones colored red perhaps to hide the blood.”
“I resent your tone and topic. Bobbie, what is really wrong?”
He jumped to his feet. “If you could see—see and really know—how others feel, you’d know what is wrong with me! There is a world out there beyond your talents and ambition and shops. You’ve been so kind, Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon, so good to me, but I’m not some piece of cloth you can cut and stitch to your own design and then keep in a drawer or closet! This country has been good to me, and it’s going to fight the kaiser over there, and, no matter if you are always used to having your own way, I’m going to enlist!”
He actually saluted and turned about in a most mocking and military manner and marched out, ignoring her when she shouted, “Bobbie. Bobbie! You come back here so we can discuss this again.”
She had a good notion to get up and chase him, try to save him from his frightening, perhaps fatal mission. But she felt frozen in her chair while his words echoed in her mind. There is a world out there beyond you . . . She knew that, of course, but what terrified her was that Cosmo had more than once written or said nearly the same thing.
“My lady,” came a quiet female voice behind her.
With Bobbie’s words pounding in her head, she turned slowly round. Franks. Faithful Franks standing there for who knew how long.
“I’m all right. Whatever is it?”
“Flo Ziegfeld sent a messenger with a letter for you. Mr. Ziegfeld wants to attend your next mannequin tableau and parade, because he wants you to design for his Follies here in town. For what he calls his ‘showgirls.’”
“Read it to me, will you?” she asked, still not wanting to get back on her feet since that dreadful display Bobbie had just dared. Why, she’d sacked people before for such an outburst, and he knew it.
Franks squinted at the page in the dim light. “I recognize some of these names from the show we saw. He requests that ‘The Empress of Fashion’ design for him—oh, siren gowns, Egyptian, Chinese for this list of ladies. Irene Castle. She’s that dancer, remember? Also Marion Davies—”
“William Randolph Hearst’s latest squeeze.”
“And Billie Burke. Why, that’s Flo Ziegfeld’s wife!”
Lucile stood at last, holding herself erect, however deflated she’d felt after Bobbie’s accusations, which had made her think of Cosmo again. Except for businesslike notes back and forth between them, she’d tried to shut out thoughts of her husband, because it made her long for him and hate herself.
“Yes, Billie Burke is indeed Mrs. Florenz Ziegfeld! Oh, Franks, to design again, to design elegant clothes and for the stage, the best advertisement ever!” She clasped her hands between her breasts, then reached for the letter to read it herself. “I may have signed with Sears and Roebuck, but how I’ve longed to return to my first love of designing really ethereal clothes.”
But she thought of Cosmo again. He’d no doubt be glad to hear that Bobbie was leaving his luxurious life for a hard cot and wretched food and being yelled at to march in step, and not by her anymore.
She skimmed the letter herself. Yes, Flo Ziegfeld promised all that, but wanted to see her next mannequin tableaus to get ideas. Oh, she had a million new ideas. Here Cosmo was always fretting that she was spending too much money, and this would be another new contract to appease him. Yet how she wished she had him here to care for the boring business end of things so she could just design, design, design.
Cosmo had recently written that she was too much of a “designing woman.” He meant her never letting up—never letting down to relax. But that’s the way she’d been born and bred, Elinor too, who had written she was volunteering in the English war effort, delivering candy and flowers to wounded soldiers, no less, and she was planning to head to Paris to do even more.
Well, she’d show them all that she could lift spirits too. If only Flo Z’s productions weren’t called the Follies, because that’s something else Cosmo had accused her of—as if in an afterthought—in the postscript of a note just last week. She wondered if he’d taken the quote from Elinor, who adored the classics, since it was a line from Homer.
Lucile had only read it once because it annoyed her so—and hurt her too. It went something like this: People blamed the gods for evils, but in fact it was their own follies causing their woes.
Well, she didn’t like the tenor of that, but she did like her brilliant plans to design for Ziegfeld. It opened up a whole new world, an escape from all this dreadful war talk, from Bobbie’s desertion, from Cosmo’s, too. Ah, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to just create and not worry for the business end of things? Now what was the name of that man Hearst had mentioned who might like to buy a big part of her business and manage the boring parts, maybe buy Cosmo’s share out here?
“Come with me, Franks, and we shall make the exciting announcement that this next fashion parade and tableau must be perfect, all two hours of it, down to every stitch and frill and step. Ah, we’re back to silks and satins, bows and lace and ruffles and flounces. Do you realize this will mean Flo Ziegfeld will do our promotion for us? Oh, and see if we can get that string quartet back, and if they can bring a romantic tenor since, sadly, very sadly, we have lost the one we had.”