“Your mother puts strange ideas in your head, but an Astor of New York doesn’t need anyone’s help—remember that. You have your good name. You don’t need to scrape at the feet of those empire snobs.”
Ronan held her tongue. To be honest, she did not have it in her heart to resent him. Her father was the one who had played backgammon with her and drawn her pictures as a child. He was the one who had attended her tea parties in the nursery, and read her picture books at night while her mother threw herself into the social whirl of the city. “Did you hear the Haltons have a new fortune-teller?” she asked eagerly. “She predicts a rise in the stock market.”
“Bah, that dark magic has no place in the future,” Henry said. “Fortune-tellers are nothing but frauds, my girl.” She knew her father did not want to admit it, but if she did not succeed in marrying well, they would have to move out west—a last resort—to her mother’s people, the “barbarians.”
She kissed her father on the cheek and left to dress for dinner, heading up the stairs. Ronan had always been fond of the grand staircase, with its oiled and shiny balustrade, treads that neither creaked nor wobbled, and rails solid as stone. When she was a child, she had turned it into a coliseum full of dolls, placing row after row of silk-garbed figurines on each of the steps. The stairs held her audience, while Ronan performed a dance at the base. Ronan remembered nervously descending these steps on Christmas mornings, her nightdress gleaming against the dark of the wood as she tiptoed toward the dazzling tree festooned with tinsel and presents. She’d miss these old boards when she went off to England. Not that they’d had much of a Christmas last year, anyway…and the ancient but beautiful brass chandelier that used to hang in the center of the room was gone now—sold, like all the rest of the most valuable décor.
Rounding the corner, past the now-empty corridors with the scraped-away wallpaper and more missing paintings, she stopped for a moment to stare at the pendant lights, whose candle mounts had been recently retrofitted for Edison bulbs. It looked as if strands of lightning were trapped within their tiny globes. Was this not magic? Wasn’t this power just as grand and unknowable as the Merlin’s? Her father believed so. Sometimes, looking at those incandescent lights, Ronan thought he might just have a point.
“Is that you, Ronan?” her mother’s voice called. She turned toward the sound, knowing it was more of an order than a question.
Ronan entered her mother’s bedroom, the only room in the house that still had all of its original furniture. It was the best room as well, with a view of the park and gardens. Outside, the first street lamps had popped to life as the sun hung low near the horizon. Inside, a single Edison bulb lit her mother’s room with a strong, consistent glow. The white paneled walls amplified the light, making her mother’s chamber not only the largest bedroom, but the brightest one as well. Her father had insisted the house be paneled in walnut, but her mother had disagreed. Against her husband’s will she’d had her room paneled in silk sateen, a finish as bright as newly fallen snow.
The bed was done in the English style, tall and canopied, dressed up like a queen’s with bunting stuck between four tall poles. The plush white rug beneath her mother’s bed abutted a second one that stretched underneath an armoire, a dressing screen, and a powder table. Each of these pieces was framed by a pair of gilded chairs, their backs pressed against the wall. Vera told her that the backs of chairs in great houses like theirs remained unpainted, because no one ever moved the chairs or used them. Ronan had never checked to see if it was true, if the chairs were indeed nailed to the walls, but it made sense. Everything in the room was meant to be admired. Every piece—from the exquisite French clock on the mantel, to the row of perfume decanters on the vanity, to her own mother.
At thirty-five years of age, Elizabeth Astor was still extraordinarily lovely, if a little haunted-looking. Her hollow cheeks and red eyes were the result of many sleepless nights. She came from the provinces—she was from nowhere, her parents nobody. Her only treasure was her arresting beauty, which had won over her husband, the third son of the then-richest man in New York. The youngest boy was traditionally not meant to inherit, or expected to come to much; but when the elder and middle sons of Jackson Pierce Astor were both lost during the War Between the Americans thirty years before, the youngest had inherited the governorship, and little Sue-Beth Morley (the horror of that name—so common—it held the stink of dusty towns and tumbleweed)—suddenly found herself the reigning doyenne of New York. Upon her arrival in the city, her mother had had the good sense to adopt the name Elizabeth, and went by the name “Bits.”