His throat parched, he quickly thanked the Binghams for their hospitality, for the use of their doctor, for making a stranger feel so welcome in this great city. The darkness pressing against the windows reminded him that it had been hours since he had abandoned Michael with no one to mind him but a beefsteak and a bowl of ice cream. Michael with his queer expressions, alternately dazed and rifle-sharp, as if there were something in the room that demanded his full attention: the chair with the fleur-de-lis fabric, the drapes that framed the view of the park, the painting of a bowl of pears. Michael needed tending.
He had planned to walk the twenty blocks back to the hotel in order to unwind the restlessness in his legs and sort through the welter uncorked by Anisette’s performance. A Highland tradition, he was going to say, to get a good leg-stretching after a hearty meal, but the truth was that he was destroyed. When the Binghams insisted on having their driver bring round the car, he graciously accepted, and in minutes he was rolling down Fifth Avenue.
If only he could talk to Michael. They’d had only one day together before the accident, but it was time enough to see that his little brother, who’d been a child, really, when Francis had made his way to Dublin, had grown into someone who could ease Francis’s loneliness and make him feel a part of something. Michael would love to hear about the Binghams, richer than Midas and madder than hatters, falling all over themselves to make sure that Sir Angus would escort them to the royal ball. The Michael he had gotten to know in the Morris Minor would have had a good laugh at that.
ANISETTE SAT AT her dressing table, thinking about the wedding. Oh, it would be lovely! She already had the dress, and they had decided ages ago which flowers she would carry in her bouquet. Not that she wanted everything to be exactly as they had planned it last year. Hadn’t Maman said that they would find someone better for her in Europe? An Italian count or a Polish prince, that’s what Maman had said, though Father hadn’t liked the idea of another Catholic in the family—a palace coup, that’s what he called it. Still, anyone in Europe would have been better than the best New York had to offer. Look at what a mess that had been. If she had gone through with it, she would still be in her newlywed year.
She thought it was all going to be so nice but then her intended went and tried that horrible business. She could still smell the drink on his breath, the reek of gin. He had started kissing her, late on the night of the Christmas party at his parents’ home, but the kisses became cruel. He bit her lip, hard enough to draw blood, and when she shrieked he put one hand over her mouth and the other under her dress. He said filthy things to her, with his hand going up her thigh and his mouth hot against her unwilling ear. She struggled, she kicked at him, but he persisted, and only when she managed to pull her face away and scream long and loud did he finally stop.
“You’re right,” he’d said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, “let’s wait. That way the wedding night will be full of surprises.”
She couldn’t get those words or his leering smile out of her head. Both had followed her out the door and all the way home, ten blocks in the bitter chill. It was that night, crying in the tub, that she told her mother she never wanted to see him again. Not ever. Anisette knew that the trip abroad had been planned to escape the chatter that echoed from Park Avenue to Scarsdale to Greenwich. She didn’t know about the sizable payment and the use of the villa in Cuba that kept her intended from contributing to the chatter.
Angus, though. Angus was kind, genteel, sensitive—nothing like that other one. Of course she had known him only a few days, but what she felt for him ran deeper than anything she had felt before. He was polite and clever and he looked after his brother and he had been so careful not to tell tales about the queen. Hadn’t he said it himself? That he had once been bad, but he had changed his ways, and become good?
There was something familiar about Angus, but until tonight she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it. It was during dinner, as he sparred with Daddy about sharp knives and Scottish hills, that it came to her: Robert. Her brother had been her protector, her pal. He was eight years older and had been like a favorite uncle. Or what she imagined it would be like to have an uncle. (They never spoke of Maman’s family, and Daddy’s other children—her half brothers and half sisters—were old people themselves; older even than Maman. They lived out west, in places Anisette had never visited, and there was never any talk of them coming to New York.) When Anisette was a little girl, her nurses had been a succession of pinch-faced matrons—pretty nurses made for bad marriages, her mother said—and whenever they grew cross with her, Robert was the one who could charm them out of their foul humors. He had also been her champion and chief advocate in the long-running wars with Félicité. How many times in her childhood did he rescue her from a bout of hair-pulling or free a doll held hostage by her older sister?
She had often thought of Robert after that awful Christmas party. He would have taken care of everything. Robert would have heard her scream and stormed in, and with one punch sent her Intended to his knees. Then with a few razor-sharp words, Robert would have shamed him in front of all the guests. In another age, it might even have come to a duel—with Robert victorious, of course—and Anisette wouldn’t have minded that one bit.
But Robert had been gone for so long. He had been sent off to Yale—for polishing, her mother had said—and for the first two years he sent funny letters and packages full of her favorite lavender candies, and he visited on holidays and played college songs on the piano. Anisette would take the harmony while Félicité sulked and made faces in the corner. But over time the letters dwindled and the visits grew less frequent. Robert and Daddy began to argue terribly, and shortly after his graduation, the visits stopped. There was still the occasional letter, but where he had once sent jokes and silly doodles, his notes now asked only for her to argue on his behalf to Father: to beg him to support Robert’s scheme for diamond mines in Rhodesia, or bananas in Nicaragua, or rubber plantations in Java. Whenever she tried to raise his name in the house, Father grew vexed and Maman’s eyes filled with tears. She had once heard Félicité say, with a note of envy, that Robert had gotten so polished at Yale that he slipped away entirely.
She didn’t want to let Angus slip away. Saturday seemed an awfully long time to wait to see him again, so she would have to find another day—and soon. Hadn’t she been bold enough to knock on the door of his stateroom so late at night that he had already dressed for bed? Her mother would fret and Félicité would sneer and Father would scoff, but Anisette would be bold again.
THE PLAZA HOTEL