And now it was on to meet the Binghams. Given the family’s acres of jewels and their months on the Continent, he assumed the Binghams lived fairly high, and friends in high places were the best kind to have. That was one of the central tenets of the FC Plan, or would be, if he ever took the time to write it all down. But when had there been time for anything since the accident? When had Francis had a single moment to sit down and plot his next steps or investigate this persona he had patched together? There was so much he didn’t know about Scotland, and America, and New York, and this business of being an aristocrat. All he could do was steal a few hours on the ship and at the Plaza poring over recent issues of Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country, and Esquire, imagining these to be a Burke’s Peerage of the American ascendancy. From these he gleaned that the New World’s aristocracy could be cracked with the right accumulation of steel mills and coal mines—as long as the source of one’s wealth was obscured by the sheen of daughters schooled in French and sons who wore white jumpers and rowed for Harvard.
To prepare himself for an evening with the Binghams, he had tried to concoct a few stories to burnish his own lordly bona fides, but the best he could manage was some family lore about his great-uncle Mad Fitz, who had acquitted himself so honorably during the Boer War—or should it be the Crimean? Single-handed defeat of spear-wielding Zulus, or the capture of an entire Russian regiment? Or was it the Turks? Tennyson had written a poem about someone the English had fought, but here was the downside of being raised in a flyspeck of a town where your father was the only schoolmaster: if he didn’t teach it, you didn’t know it. As for Francis’s education after his exit from Ballyrath, English military history and Victorian poetry hadn’t been a part of the curriculum. He knew a great deal about books considered too immoral for impressionable Irish minds, knew how to pack salacious French postcards between black pasteboard covers so that they resembled hymnals, knew how to smuggle condoms past inspectors and how to relabel cheap claret as grand cru Bordeaux. He had specialized in luxury goods, or goods that gave the illusion of luxury and sensual abandon. But these weren’t the sort of stories to impress the Binghams.
Francis checked one last time on the still-snoozing Michael and a few minutes later stepped into a taxi called by the shrill whistle of one of the Plaza’s stewards. Rung by rung, through the Sixties and Seventies, the cab climbed the ladder of streets that jutted eastward from the park. Down each one Francis saw a row of low, elegant buildings in shades of white and gray, like a mouthful of strong, square, American teeth. Iron scrollwork danced up the steps from sidewalk to front door, stood guard along the squat parapets, and swept basketlike below the windows, as if to catch the overflow of abundance that spilled from the homes of the city’s first citizens.
Not until he reached the address printed on the card did he realize that the Binghams’ house wasn’t a house at all. It was a mansion—no, a palace. It wasn’t at the corner of Seventy-Eighth and Fifth, it was the corner of Seventy-Eighth and Fifth (and Seventy-Ninth, too). From a block away, the building looked like it had been constructed from spun sugar and marzipan. In the late-day sun, the marble walls blazed a brilliant white. It was the white of a welder’s torch, of a star tethered to earth. The top of the building stretched skyward in a riot of turrets, arches, towers, and other architectural excesses that Francis lacked the vocabulary to name. Any casual passerby would be overwhelmed by the froufrou and the frippery—all those details that made the Binghams’ urban chateau seem like the product of a young girl’s fevered imagination. But closer inspection revealed not a fairy-tale castle but a fortress. Beneath the whipped-cream cupolas were battlements that no siege engine could assail. The foundation was granite and the roofline bristled with sharpened iron rods bent to seem as harmless as licorice sticks, but woe to the barbarian who tried to storm this castle; tant pis to the prisoner who bided his time in this bastille.
Francis was greeted at the front door by a middle-aged man in a stiff black jacket, a man he almost addressed as Mr. Bingham. Before Francis could commit his first faux pas, the man took his hat and ushered him into a foyer floored in checkerboard marble. Twin staircases snaked upward to right and left, meeting in a center mezzanine that oversaw a chandelier as wide as the crown of a chestnut tree, each leaf filigreed in gold. The ceiling soared to a fluted dome suspended above the foyer like a giant seashell. On each side of the staircase, wall niches displayed busts carved in black or white marble—gods or emperors or members of the Bingham family, for all Francis knew. The butler opened a set of doors twice as tall as Francis and indicated with a nod of his head that he was to enter the room. As Francis crossed the threshold, the butler closed the doors behind him. The back wall of this new room was bookshelves, floor to ceiling, each volume bound in red leather and embossed in gold. Painted on the ceiling was a woodland scene, nymphs in flight, their loose hair covering their most interesting bits. Before he could give it a more thorough inspection he heard a mild ahem from another quarter of the room.
He turned toward the source of the sound and a smile leaped to his face. Mrs. Bingham was perched in the center of a sofa, cloudlike in her gown, her hair set with silver combs. Anisette was on her left, her pose suggesting that she was aiming for demure but her smile so broad that she seemed ready to burst. To the right of Mrs. B sat a young woman whose face was caught between a sneer and something more like idle curiosity: You’ve got two minutes; impress me or go home. No one spoke. This was a scene that Francis was meant to admire. He would have tested their resolve—checked his wristwatch and counted up the seconds, just for the fun of it—but he feared that Anisette couldn’t withstand the strain.
He clapped his hands together and time restarted. “My dear ladies,” he said. “This is indeed a pleasure. Familiar faces in this strange land! What a delight!”
“Your Lordship—” Mrs. Bingham began.
“Please, we’re friends. Friends call me Angus.”
Francis closed the distance between them—his feet did not make a sound on the thick Persian carpet—and took her hand, planting a quick kiss on her index finger. He needed to work on his hand-kissing. He had only seen it done in the movies—posh yokes were made for kissing hands—and of course in church, where the target was some bishop’s fat golden signet. He next pivoted toward Anisette, whose hand was already extended, and offered a quick peck.
Mrs. Bingham introduced her daughter Félicité, two years Anisette’s senior. Félicité sat back and extended a long, reluctant arm toward Francis. She had completed the transformation of her sneer into something more complicated, something both haughty and sporting. Here was the girl at the carnival who deigns to try the ring toss, because really, how difficult can it be? As Francis leaned in for the last round of hand-kissing, a door in some distant arrondissement of the library slammed shut. Félicité jerked her hand midkiss, popping Francis squarely in the mouth.
“What did I miss?” A creaky, metal-on-metal voice came from the back of the room. “He hasn’t seduced my daughters yet, has he?”
Francis could taste blood in his mouth. The older sister had really let him have it.
“Oh, Emery,” Mrs. B said. “Don’t embarrass our guest.”