Heaven help Lily then.
‘Has Mother been asking for me, Vi?’ Lily said, reaching for her book again. As if French princesses and castles on the Loire could save her. She’d learned long ago that nothing could save her, or her sisters, but herself. She was the key to their freedom.
Violet gave her a sympathetic grimace. ‘She’s talking to Papa in the library. He just got here from the city a few hours ago.’
‘Oh, no,’ Lily moaned. It was never a good sign when her parents actually spoke to each other. Her father seldom even came to Newport, since the seaside was a ladies’ world and men were only meant to pay the bills and come in for dinners or balls or to sail a yacht when needed. When their father did venture out of his New York office, he mostly stayed hidden in the library.
If he was talking to their mother...
Something serious indeed must be going on.
‘Were they speaking about Adam Goelet again?’ Lily asked in dread. Her mother had been pestering her to ‘be nice’ to Mr Goelet for months. After all, Stella would say with tears in her eyes, he was the only son of her father’s closest business associate, heir to much of Madison Avenue and estates in Pennsylvania, and ‘not so bad-looking’ at all. If one overlooked his unfortunate squint and perpetual onion breath—and the fact that even Lily could see he clearly preferred the company of his male friends to any lady.
Violet kicked harder at the dirt. ‘I think she’s quite forgotten about poor Mr Goelet.’
Lily would have hoped that was a good thing. But she knew their mother all too well. Ideas were much too sticky in Stella’s head, and she wouldn’t give up one scheme unless she had another to replace it. Especially when it came to her daughters and their marriages.
‘So what are they talking about now?’ Lily said.
‘I’m not quite sure, but I think you should go listen for yourself.’
Lily sighed. She didn’t want to leave the sanctuary of the quiet rose garden for the chaos of a house embroiled in party preparations, but she knew she had to eventually. If she didn’t at least try to make Stella happy, her mother could curtail her visits to the Women and Children’s Hospital again, or to one of her other charities, and some days that was all that kept Lily sane, being able to be of some use outside the hothouse of the Wilkins house.
She rose from the marble bench and quickly smoothed the navy dimity skirt of her sailor-style dress. ‘No, don’t worry, Vi. I’ll find out what’s going on, you and Rose don’t need to worry.’
Violet gave her a relieved smile. ‘I know you will, Lily. We never worry when you’re here.’
‘And I never worry when I know you’re ke
eping watch. Shall we work on my photograph after tea? The light will be good then.’ Violet brightened and Lily gave her sister a quick hug, then hurried towards the house. ‘Go and check on Rose. I’ll see you both at tea.’
It had grown later than she’d realised, she noticed with dismay as she rushed across the manicured green expanse of the lawn. Rose Garden Cottage, as her mother had named the seventy-room house, gleamed a golden rose in the waning sunlight, all red brick and pale stone, rising above the roll of perfect gardens and the distant crash of the sea against the cliffs. The silk curtains weren’t drawn yet over the windows, but Lily knew they soon would be. Maids would be hurrying to finish pressing evening gowns and grooms would be polishing up the carriage horses.
She had spent too long with her book.
Lily found Rose hovering just inside the French doors that led on to the terrace. Rose, like Violet, was a small, slender girl, but her red hair was neatly braided and twisted about her head, her white muslin dress spotless, her skin fair and not freckled. But her hazel eyes were just as wide and worried.
‘Is Mother in the library still?’ Lily asked her, trying to smile carelessly as she checked her own reflection in the nearest gilt-framed mirror. Unlike her sisters, she had plain brown hair and dark eyes, but her posture had been perfected by years with a German governess and a back brace, horse riding lessons and corsets. She had learned long ago that a straight spine and a serene smile hid much.
But not from her sisters. ‘Yes, with Papa,’ Rose said, her eyes wide. ‘There were...raised voices.’
‘Not to worry, Rose Red,’ Lily said, kissing her cheek. ‘Probably just a problem with the peach ices coming in Papa’s refrigerated train car or something.’
Rose laughed, but Lily knew she wasn’t fooled. Nor was Lily. But she still marched down the corridor, past the marble tables from Versailles and the van Dyck portraits of someone else’s ancestors, past the towering flower arrangements in alabaster vases and maids bobbing curtsies, to where the tall double doors of the library waited.
Normally no one went into the library. That was the one room out of all of the rooms at Rose Garden Cottage that was their father’s. Today, though, Lily could hear her mother’s voice floating past the thick oak panels.
‘...I won’t stand for it, do you hear me, Coleman?’ her mother was saying, her usual dulcet South Carolina tones hard and brassy. ‘You’ve always left our girls’ education to me and I have worked myself to the bone to make sure they are a credit to us. My own health has been broken, but that doesn’t matter to me. Only the darlin’ girls matter. And now we have the opportunity I’ve been praying for...’
Lily’s father’s voice answered, a rough rumble too low for Lily to understand. Whatever he said made his wife wail.
‘You don’t care about us at all! I tell you, I shall die if you don’t...’
Lily thought it would be much better to get this over with, before her mother’s maid came running with the smelling salts. She quickly knocked and pulled the door open.
‘You sent for me, Mother?’ Lily said brightly, even though officially no one had ‘sent for her’. She studied the library in front of her: the carved dark panels of the walls, the red brocade curtains, the tapestries copied from a set at Hampton Court and her parents grouped around the tall, ivory-inlaid desk; her father in his velvet chair, his gouty leg propped on a footstool, his mutton-chop whiskers, once darkest jet, now half-grey, his spectacles slipping down his nose; her mother standing in front of him, tall and slim still after twenty-five years of marriage and three daughters, her pale hair piled atop her head, striped chiffon and silk floating around her. A handkerchief was pressed to her eyes.
This was what Lily had seen over and over in her parents’ marriage, ever since she was a tiny girl trying to keep the peace so her sisters wouldn’t hear the quarrels and start crying. It was precisely what she never wanted for her own life and definitely not for her sisters’.