If only Emily would cross the room now to look out at the view.
Instead, Emily made a show of checking both ways. “No handsome dukes? No renegade blackguards pining for your affections?” She turned, the letter crunching under the toe of her satin slipper.
Lilli forced herself to appear calm. Casually, she reached down for the letter.
Emily pounced on it. “Voilà! A note from a secret admirer!”
Now Lilli dove for it.
But Emily snatched it up before her friend could touch it. “Oh no. As your closest confidante, I have every right to know what kept you pacing at night last week. And to whom, just now, you were directing that French fury of yours.”
Emily spun away, right hand overhead clutching the letter. Gazing up, she wrinkled her nose at the handwriting. “How very atrocious! Of all the men of our acquaintance, I can’t say I know a single one with such an indecipherable hand.”
Desperate, Lilli leaped upward. Sent her friend tumbling back against the wall.
Emily Vanderbilt Sloane sank against the hand-tooled leather wallpaper and all the way down to the floor, her expression its own complex design of bewilderment and surprise.
For a moment, the two friends stared at each other.
At this rate, I’ll be not only at the center of a cyclone of scandal, I’ll be fist fighting those who would get in my way.
Lilli held out her hand. “Forgive me. Please.”
Ignoring the offer of help, Emily slapped the letter in Lilli’s palm, then rose from the floor, brushing past to walk to the window. She spoke with a coldness Lilli had rarely heard from her. “I won’t pry further into your private affairs.”
Lilli shook her head. “I’m sorry. I never was comfortable in school days, either, with the other girls knowing my latest crush.”
Better to have Emily assume she was being denied intimate details of Lilli’s romantic interests than have her suspect Lilli’s real connection with the writer of this letter.
Lilli forced her head to dip, a kind of embarrassed gesture that felt deeply unnatural. “The handwriting, as you say, is not that of an educated man.”
Emily twisted the rest of the way around from where she stood, arms crossed. Already, her face was softening. “Am I to understand, then, that this secret admirer of yours is . . . not a gentleman of our set?”
Lilli allowed herself to blush. And as her thoughts flashed to the stables, her blush deepened.
“Why, Lils. I do believe you have an admirer of a more—what shall we call it?—plebian sort. But that sounds unromantic. My, how risky. And thrilling.”
Apparently forgetting the letter, which Lilli crumpled behind her back, Emily swished across the room. “Let me guess, now. Had I not seen the penmanship for myself, I’d have presumed any clandestine messages coming to you these days would be from my uncle George. Although my dear uncle lacks the bravado with women, bless him, to send you a secret note this early in your acquaintance. Or Mr. Madison Grant—ah, a flicker of recognition here! Well, then, someone to keep an eye on, at least. Or from Mr. Cabot.”
One finger tapping her lips, Emily circled her friend like a detective haranguing a suspect. “Still, we have the problem of the unschooled hand—the atrocious penmanship. Which could hardly belong to any of these gentlemen.”
Lilli forced a girlish smile as her friend’s inquisition went on.
“And now we see another flush on your cheeks. Really, Lils, the possibilities of liaisons are endless with you. I know: the desk clerk back at Battery Park. He makes eyes at you each time we pass, and finds every excuse to call you aside.”
Holding her breath, Lilli batted her eyes the way she imagined other women did when they felt flustered. The heat of panic deep in her gut she let rise to her face.
“But, no. That won’t do. He would write in a smoother hand, I feel sure. Any man who speaks English, French, and Italian as he does . . .” Emily stopped there. Whipped an about-face. “Italian. My uncle George’s Italian? The new stablehand?”
Lilli turned away. This was bad—awful, even. But much better than having Emily stumble toward a far more dangerous truth.
Emily sat down heavily. “The Italian.”
When Lilli turned, she found her friend no longer with the impish smile she’d worn only a moment ago. The expression she wore now was disbelieving. Confused.
And vaguely . . . what was it?
Lilli realized with a jolt what she was seeing on her friend’s darkened face. And now it was too late to undo the lie she’d let cover the truth.
Disapproval. Thunderous and fierce.
Emily thought she’d uncovered Lilli’s liaison with the Italian, a murder suspect, no less, and—still more disturbing than that—a groom.
Flirtations were one thing, but Lilli Barthélemy always took things almost too far.
And this time, Emily’s face said for her, Lilli had driven the bounds of proper behavior right over the edge.
Chapter 27
Balancing a tray of biscuits and scones, Kerry stopped at the threshold of the breakfast room as George Vanderbilt’s niece stalked away from her friend, the women clearly having argued bitterly over something. The door still only open a crack, Kerry hesitated, unsure whether to pretend she’d not seen.
It was the footman who saved her the trouble of deciding, Moncrief’s brogue spiraling down the grand stairwell. From four stories up, he called, “Where’s the wee American lass of the fells?”
Backtracking hurriedly down the servants’ corridor, running behind the breakfast room and banquet hall, and dropping her tray on a hall table, Kerry raced to the foot of the grand stairwell before anyone might complain of the noise.
Mrs. Smythe appeared on the second-floor landing. “I’ll not be having my staff yelling like a bevvied-up . . .” She deepened the ferocity of her glare upward.
“Like a drunk clan of Scots, she was about to say, did ye see?”
Making way for three painters bumbling past, Mrs. Smythe shook a thick finger up at Moncrief. “As if it isn’t enough, whole regiments of workmen tromping past us all day, the service stairs still a proper mess of sawdust, all these workers and the servants having to use the main staircase with Mr. Vanderbilt and the guests. Only in the colonies would this be allowed.”
Kerry looked up with sympathy. “You’re doing your best to retain standards, Mrs. Smythe.”
“This, and the master’s still being in want of a wife to take charge.” Mrs. Smythe shook her head.
“Aye, but he won’t be for long, God love him.” Moncrief’s Glasgow burr was amplified by the stone.
Mrs. Smythe threw up her hands, then drew a finger over her lips. “Be gone with you, before I ban your ruddy face from the house. And no more shouting!” Her mouth puckered with the effort of finding the right expletive for him. “Scotsman,” she spit at last, and stormed off.
Three floors away, Kerry and the footman exchanged glances that said they both knew Mrs. Smythe’s was the loudest voice of all echoing in the stairwell. Moncrief winked.
George Vanderbilt and Cedric came loping in from outside, the front doors slamming behind them with a force that echoed across the main hall.
John Cabot rose from where he’d apparently been reading in the Winter Garden. Madison Grant appeared at the door that led to the billiard room.