"Oh, Tessie, haven't you learned anything in the last two weeks? Pull me in tighter, you stupid creature!"
Miss Cornelia's face was bright red, but whether it was from excitement in preparing for Gertrude Vanderbilt's coming-out ball, or whether it was a result of Tess's having laced in her mistress's lungs to about half their former capacity, Tess couldn't tell.
"Tighter!"
It was Tess's first attempt at manhandling her mistress, and she would've liked to have practiced before an event of such magnitude as tonight's, but it couldn't be helped: Marie's fiancé had arrived by ship a day early, and that morning Marie, with Gallic imperiousness, had announced that she would not be available to Miss Cornelia in the evening. Some of Cornelia's steam was still being vented, and Tess had the scald marks to show for it. One thing was certain: Cornelia's waist would be somewhat over the eighteen-inch mark which was de rigueur for debutantes. Cornelia's midsection had been thoroughly compressed and artfully redistributed, and still there were three or four inches left over.
"I do believe," Tess said, gasping, "that there's nothing more to be done in that line, Miss Cornelia."
Cornelia stared stonily at her satin-corseted image in the full-length gilded mirror. "I shall never forgive Marie for this. Never," she said through clenched teeth.
It seemed to Tess that Cornelia's waist was less Marie's fault than it was too many of the summer ices and sweets for which Cornelia had a passion, but she said soothingly, "Your gown will hang on you like a flour sack if I lace you any tighter, Miss Cornelia."
"Do you think so?" Cornelia demanded petulantly. "Oh, and look at my hair," she wailed. "It's gone all droopy."
"The curling iron is heating, ma'am. You'll be good as gold when you step into the brougham. Now—shall we continue?" Tess asked dryly.
The wire bustle was belted on, nicely balancing the pneumatic bust—Cornelia had none, to speak of, of her own—that had been strapped on earlier. The physical adjustments and compensations to Cornelia's imperfect form were complete: she was ready for her gown.
Her dress was the latest and best that Paris had to offer, shipped at God only knew what expense to Newport with the waistline merely basted so that a final, perfect fitting could be made. The adjustments had required a great deal of Tess's time and skill, but the result was so outstanding that Cornelia, in a fit of rapture, had presented Tess with a tiny cloisonné box from France as a token of her gratitude. The locking mechanism was broken, but the floral pattern was rich and colorful and had given Maggie much pleasure.
One thing was true of Cornelia: she understood perfectly the nuance of color. Her straw-blond hair, which had been rinsed and re-rinsed with a special blend of tea leaves to produce gold highlights where once there were none, and her pale-pinkish skin were exactly suited to shades of blue and green. The iridescent gown was both, or either, depending on the light. By moonlight—Cornelia and Tess had tested it the night before on the loggia of the Beau Rêve—it shone blue; but by candlelight, green. The quandary was: sapphires or emeralds? Cornelia could not make a decision.
Then, after the last hook was hooked, after the last drooping curl was twisted back into a sprightliness it couldn't possibly feel, given the warmth of the night—after Cornelia was made as lovely a vision as careful artistry could devise, she did what all young ladies do occasionally, and changed her mind altogether. No sapphires. No emeralds. Only the one, spectacular, most prepossessing piece of jewelry she owned, a gift from her parents at her own coming out: a huge dog collar thick with gleaming pearls and marquise-shaped diamonds, calculated to bludgeon competing young debutantes into a general feeling of despair.
Around Cornelia's waist Tess fastened a chain of diamonds and hooked onto it a small, exquisite ivory fan.
"Well, Tess," Cornelia asked, surveying herself carefully in the mirror, "will I do?"
Tess, who'd been astonished by the thought and effort that Cornelia had poured into herself, smiled at the image in the mirror and said, "Yes, ma'am. I think you'll do."
The vision turned pouty. "Really, Tessie, I call that striking an attitude, I really do."
Tess opened her eyes wide. "An attitude, Miss Cornelia!"
"Yes. It's not what you say, it's more what you don't say. And you're too tall," she said, irritated. "You make me feel squat."
Tess bit her lower lip, trying not to smile. In Cornelia Winward's solar system, a personal maid was akin to a distant satellite of an outer planet. "I suppose I could try stooping a bit, ma'am," Tess said blandly, "if that would help."
"What would help is if you'd be more like Marie and say pretty things to me once in a while, especially when I'm about to—I'm going to a ball, Tess. Anything can happen at a ball. I could become engaged tonight! The last thing I need is your ... attitude." Blue eyes above a turned-up nose glared at Tess through the mirror.
Tess was getting used to Cornelia's little bursts of tension. It couldn't be easy, she thought wryly, being the younger sister in a family of immense wealth. At the moment, most of the Winwards' attention was focused on finding a title for Cornelia's older sister. An English baronet had begun to nibble at the bait, but much care and patience would be necessary to reel him in. That left poor Cornelia with little to do but wait her turn. In the meantime it seemed to her that all around the list of eligible peers was dwindling at an alarming rate.
Her best friend Susy had landed an honest-to-goodness viscount, and a second cousin whom Cornelia absolutely despised had cast her dowry before some Slavic count and hauled him in like a five-pound bass. And of course everyone in Newport knew that Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt was about to buy the ultimate in peers of the realm, an English duke, for her scrawny stick of a daughter, Consuelo. Was there no justice in life? The question was often on Cornelia's lips.
As Cornelia adjusted her choker so that the largest of the diamonds lay perfectly in the center of her throat, a now-or-never determination glinted in her bright blue eyes. Gertrude Vanderbilt's coming out was unquestionably one of the major events of the season, even though it was being hosted by two pious, hard-working, decidedly unglamorous millionaires. Still, Vanderbilts were Vanderbilts, and absolutely anyone worth knowing—or being engaged to—would be there.
Cornelia instructed Tess first to turn down the gas lamps, then to light a dozen candles that stood in a gilded sconce from Tiffany's, in an effort to mimic the lighting of The Breakers' ballroom. If the success of a Newport debutante could be measured in her ability to extract the most out of face and form, then Cornelia Winward had done brilliantly. As each of the candles caught flame and danced, the facets of Cornelia's jewels took on a magical life of their own, winking and dazzling and spraying the room with shimmering rainbows. The taffeta of her gown promised blue, then slid mysteriously into green as Cornelia turned slowly round and round and round once more, a blond princess in a fairy kingdom of riches.
And Tess? Tess, in her plain but exquisitely tailored soft gray dress, Tess, whose natural beauty glowed where Cornelia's artifice blinded—Tess was awestruck. She knew half a dozen woman servants as pretty as Cornelia; yet adorn any of them with this gown, those jewels, and the result would be laughable.
Cornelia knew exactly how to stand, Tess thought. Exactly how to hold her head so that her chin line was smoothest, how to arrange her face so that her eyes looked roundest, how to force a dimple into her smile where none naturally existed.
"You're quite wonderful, Miss Cornelia," Tess said, and she meant it. Whether Cornelia was born with such magnificence or whether she was trained for it from infancy almost did not matter. Either way, for Tess and her six pretty servant-friends, it was too late. If she and I had been switched in our cradles ....
"Tess—wake up!" Cornelia demanded, snapping her fingers at the faraway look in Tess's eyes. "Miss Van de Stadt and the viscount will be here for me any moment, and so will the carriage for you. Where's my wrap, girl?"
Within half an hour a stately brougham was pulling out from under the limestone porte-cochère of Beau Rêve, filled to bursting with taffeta and chiffon and peau de soie. The laughing, excited debutantes inside had allocated a patch of maroon leather seat for the many bouquets that had been arriving all day; all of their dance cards were full. In the soft, twilit evening the brougham eased into the parade of carriages on Bellevue Avenue, the luckiest among them bound for The Breakers, the fabulous new cottage on the southeast coast of Aquidneck Island, which was throwing open its massive gates for the first time tonight.
In Tess's coach, which followed a little behind Cornelia's, the laughter of the maid-servants squeezed inside was no less excited, the gossip no less lively. Mostly it concerned The Breakers. By now everyone in Newport had heard about the water taps that were said to run saltwater and rainwater (both in hot or cold) and the priceless tapestries and oils that had been arriving from Europe by the crateload.
Susan Van de Stadt's maid Sarah was by far the best informed. "I understand there are only thirty for Gertrude Vanderbilt's pre-ball dinner. That's cutting it daringly close, if you ask me. Mrs. Vanderbilt is not the lioness she thinks she is, for all her millions. She's bound to put some very prominent noses out of joint. Why, it's not enough anymore to look above you and make sure your Astors and your Oelrichs and your Fishes have been invited. You must look around and below you, too, because most anyone may be someone to be reckoned with tomorrow."
"Especially if 'someone' happens to marry into nobility," another of the maids said slyly. "Would it be your mistress you're thinking of, Sarah?"
"Miss Van de Stadt—soon to be Lady Dennison, it's true—has nothing to apologize to Miss Vanderbilt for," Sarah sniffed. "Her people were never in trade.
"Anyway, if you ask me," she continued, "it's a relief that Miss Van de Stadt wasn't invited to the pre-ball dinner at The Breakers. Because I understand," she explained in a confidential voice, "that Mr. Vanderbilt would allow only the most churchgoing of his daughter's friends to come. I expect the dinner conversation will sound drearily like an Episcopalian sermon. Whereas his lordship," she said with emphasis, "moves with a much smarter set."
"I've heard that some of the women in his lordship's set are breathlessly fast," the other maid said vindictively.
"Well, that's as may be. But Miss Susan is nothing if not absolutely proper," Sarah sniffed.
"And what about Miss Cornelia, Tess?" another maid asked, turning to Tess curiously. "Is she fast, or proper?"
It was the kind of lurid speculation that Tess despised. "I couldn't say," she answered coldly.
"You mean you wouldn't say, Tess," the maid retorted. "Ooh-la-la; Miss Cornelia must smother you in silks to wring such loyalty from you."
"Oh, leave Tess alone, Livia. She's not like the rest of us, secure in her position. On trial the way she is, why, everything could slip through her fingers," said Sarah.
Surprised, Tess stared at her. On trial! She'd had no hint of it from anyone—not the housekeeper, not her mistress.
"Don't look at me like that, Tess. Everyone knows a person can't jump from laundry to lady's maid—leastways, not without running a risk o' falling flat on her nose. That's just what Miss Cornelia told my Miss Susan, see if it isn't."
"Why wouldn't I believe you?" Tess asked calmly, but inwardly she was trembling. She thought she'd been doing well, but obviously Miss Cornelia had some reservations. Didn't she admit as much to Tess an hour ago? Didn't she demand pretty words and compliments from Tess, the kind Marie thought nothing of showering on her?"
"Anyway, I can only do my best," Tess added, sick at heart.
"Which I'm sure is just fine," Sarah answered, patting Tess's knee with her special brand of kindness.
Pre-ball dinners were being hosted all over town. The house to which Misses Van de Stadt and Winward were invited was rather whimsically Tudor in style, and as the coaches rolled through the vast iron gates, Tess caught a glimpse of soaring stained-glass window-panels, lit from inside to reveal deep jewel-toned figures arranged in a tableau of some sort.
"That's Miss Julie's bedroom, if you can believe it," said Sarah. "I've heard that the Pearsons sacked a cathedral in France for those windows, and all because their daughter thought she resembled a woman-figure in one of the panels. Well, I saw the panel close up, and she doesn't."
"Imagine that," Livia said breathlessly.
It was that way everywhere in Newport: absurd stories of Americans running amok all over Europe, not knowing what to buy first. Americans had money to burn; the number of millionaires who summered in Newport was staggering. What Americans did not have, and seemed to crave, was lineage. Those who could, bought their way into titled families. But those who could not, settled for aping the ways of the British aristocracy. Mr. Pearson, tonight's host, had reproduced, down to his snuff-box, the life and times of English country gentry. His liveried servants were powdered, of course; but in Newport that was not unusual.
What was uncommon, even in Newport, was the ferocious zeal with which Mr. Pearson mimicked the ways of a British sportsman. Hunting was his great passion. When the local farmers arose en masse to protest the fox hunts that were being routed across their fields, Mr. Pearson, alone among his peers, actually paid them for their inconvenience, thereby single-handedly keeping a doomed tradition limping along for several more years.
After that he turned to game-shooting, stocking the grounds of his estate with hand-raised pheasants. The birds were so tame that there was no sport involved, but he shot them anyway. Once he fired off a round at what turned out to be a gaily-feathered hat, still on the head of one of his female guests; word quickly went out that it was unwise to wander far from the main house. These days, however, Mr. Pearson was confined to his study and a soft hassock: he was afflicted with gout. Secretly he was pleased. It felt so very British to wave a cane and bark at the servants.
All of this amused Miss Van de Stadt's viscount-fiancé no end; imitation, after all, was the sincerest form of flattery. Of course, the viscount's stables back in Derbyshire did not have stained-glass windows at either end, or a gold nametag above each horses stall as did Mr. Pearson's. If the truth were known, his stables were a bit down in the mouth, and the roof at the south end of one had all but collapsed. But no matter. The viscount had long since been forced to sell what little horseflesh he possessed and had no need for a stable roof, good or bad. In the course of dinner that evening, however, it was not the condition of the viscount's stables that was the subject of a few moments of dinner conversation, but the number of stalls. Of these, the viscount had thirty-eight. There was a murmur of approval around him before the conversation drifted off to another topic.