I recoiled, twisting my head away as Boots forced me into another turn. My heart was racing with panic as we passed by Marjorie’s table. The faces were a blur, but I could tell they were looking at me and laughing, Marjorie loudest of all. Her voice had developed a harsh rasp, and her vivaciousness had toughened into something darker.
It was hard to think straight with my head buzzing and my steps clumsy from the alcohol, but I suspected I was the reason they were all roaring. Marjorie had never intended to befriend me; she wanted to see me humiliated. I pushed Boots away with an abrupt shove to his chest, and there was nowhere to go but toward the door, stumbling as tears blurred my vision.
A hand grabbed my arm, and a gentle voice asked what was wrong. I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes and saw Blanche. My dear, loyal cousin, whose kindness I didn’t deserve. The thought made me start crying again, and Blanche pulled me into the coat check, telling me to hush.
Through choked-back sobs, I apologized for ignoring her earlier.
“I get it,” she said. “No hard feelings.”
How easy it was to talk to her, how easy to confess my feelings of shame and self-doubt. With her, I could be the best version of myself, a fun-loving girl who went to the pictures and rode the streetcar. An independent girl with no worries.
“I want to go home,” I said impulsively.
“All right,” Blanche said hesitantly. “Want me to hail you a cab?”
“No,” I explained. “Home with you.”
I’d been happy in that boardinghouse, surrounded by other young women who didn’t think further ahead than what they’d eat for dinner that night. I could get a job, earn my own way, and never see Marjorie again. Or Matthew. I remembered the rush of feeling I’d had on our wedding day, my belief that we could be happy. But that fleeting regret wasn’t enough to overpower my longing for escape.
What if I’d done it? Rejected my marriage and the Lemonts and marched off with Blanche that night? I like to think Matthew would have come after me, but Hannah might have convinced him I wasn’t worth a second chance. He might have listened when she urged him to file for divorce. Our lives would have continued on divergent paths, and if that meant I would have been spared the horrors that followed, it also meant I would have missed out on the kind of love I didn’t know I was capable of. That night at the Pharaoh’s Club was a crossroads, one of those rare moments when one decision determines the course of a life. In the end, it wasn’t really a choice at all, because Blanche refused to take me in.
“You’re drunk and hysterical,” she said bluntly. “Otherwise, you’d never be talking like this. Tell you what—you sleep it off, then call me in the morning. I’ll bet ten bucks you thank me for talking some sense into you.”
“Matthew wants to move to Lakecrest,” I told her. “It’s miles away and absolutely hideous. I’m going to be miserable.”
“Oh, boohoo,” Blanche laughed. Then, imitating my sullen voice, “I have to live in a mansion and be waited on hand and foot. Poor me!”
I smiled in spite of myself. “Try living there with my new mother-in-law. Not to mention Marjorie.”
“You’ll probably hardly ever see her. Seems like she’s out every night.”
“I don’t know how she keeps it up. I’m worn out.”
“Maybe she has some help.”
Blanche said the words quietly, looking down, hinting at something I didn’t understand.
“What do you mean?”
Blanche beckoned me to the doorway of the coat check. She tipped her head toward the dance floor, where Marjorie was being swung around by her aviator friend, her head flung back in rapturous release.
“She’s soused,” I said. “Like the rest of them.”
“It’s more than that,” Blanche said. “I’ve been here long enough. I know the signs. She’s on some kind of dope.”
Dope? I thought that was for the lowest of the low, the failures who’d do anything to escape their miserable lives. Marjorie Lemont had everything: money, good looks, and a crowd of adoring friends. Why would she want to escape into a drugged fog?
I didn’t want to believe it, not at first. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’d been something jittery about Marjorie, just beneath the surface. As I took a taxi back to the apartment that night, I decided not to tell Matthew. Marjorie’s secret would be tucked away like a secret treasure, held in reserve for a time I might need it.
Twenty-four hours later, Matthew was giving me a full tour of Lakecrest, my home for the foreseeable future.
He explained that a series of architects had been given the impossible task of unifying all the odds and ends Obadiah had shipped from Europe, and eventually they’d given up any attempts at balance or harmony. Rooms and staircases and hallways were added on as needed, with no grand plan or consistent design. Thus, the Arabian Room, with its painted blue tiles and colorful peacock mosaics, led directly into the Gallery, a somber medieval-style showcase for Obadiah’s collection of marble statues and oversized landscapes. The ballroom was done up in a gaudy approximation of Versailles, complete with mirrored walls, while the library was a masterpiece of Victorian gloom, with dark wood paneling and heavy crimson drapes.
“Grandfather wasn’t very discriminating, as you can see,” Matthew said. It was the thrill of the hunt that excited Obadiah, the act of claiming something beautiful and rare as his own.
The grand front staircase led directly to the main wing of bedrooms on the second floor, but there were other staircases that snaked through the rest of the house like mouse tunnels, some going directly up to the servants’ quarters on the top floor, others stopping unexpectedly after only a few steps and ending in a storage cupboard or washroom. And everywhere, from the main reception rooms to the lowliest back cupboard, there were things: objects and artworks that seemed to cover every flat surface. Paintings of Italian noblemen in elaborate gold frames and marble busts of grumpy-looking Roman emperors. Chinese fans and jade vases. Rainbows of South American butterflies pinned onto black velvet backdrops. It was a celebration of excess, and were Lakecrest a museum, I would have admired its brash extravagance. But I didn’t see how it would ever feel like home.