“What an extraordinary young man!” Bathilda exclaimed, scathingly. “Where on earth did you find him, Charlie?” Charlie Montgomery’s black hair was as slick as oilskin, flashing light as he turned his head.
“Oh, don’t mind Corin. He’s a bit out of practice at all this, that’s all. He’s a far off cousin of mine. His people are here in New York but he’s lived out west for years now, in Oklahoma Territory. He’s back in town for his father’s funeral,” Charlie said.
“How extraordinary,” Bathilda said again. “I never thought that one should have to practice one’s manners.” At this Charlie smiled vaguely. Caroline glanced at her aunt and saw that she had no idea how disliked she was.
“What happened to his father?” she asked Charlie, surprising herself.
“He was on one of the trains that collided in the Park Avenue Tunnel last month. It was a right old mess,” Charlie said, pulling a face. “Seventeen dead, it’s now reported, and nigh on forty injured.”
“How dreadful!” Caroline breathed. Charlie nodded in agreement.
“They must run the trains with electricity. Automate the signals and remove the opportunity for sleepy-headed drivers to cause such tragedies,” he declared.
“But how could a signal work with nobody to operate it?” Caroline asked, but Bathilda heaved a gentle sigh, as if bored, so Charlie Montgomery excused himself and moved away.
Caroline searched the crowd for the stranger’s bronze-colored hair, and found herself sorry for him-for his bereavement, and for his fumbling of her hand in front of Bathilda’s flat, unforgiving eye. The shocking pain of losing close family was something she could sympathize with. She sipped absently at her wine, which had gone warm in her hand and was making her throat sore. And she felt the emeralds press into her chest, felt the watery fabric of her gown on her thighs, as if her skin suddenly longed to be touched. When Corin appeared at her side a minute later and asked her for a dance, she accepted mutely, with a startled nod, her heart too high in her throat to speak. Bathilda glared at him, but he did not even look up at her to notice, giving her cause to exclaim: “Well, really!”
They danced a slow waltz, and Caroline, who had wondered why Corin had chosen a dance so slow, and so late in the evening, guessed the reason in his unsure steps, and the tentative way in which he held her. She smiled uncertainly at him, and they did not speak at first. Then he said:
“You must please excuse me, Miss Fitzpatrick. For before, and for… I fear I am not an accomplished dancer. It has been some time since I was lucky enough to attend such a function as this, or to dance with someone so… uh…” He hesitated, and she smiled, lowering her gaze as she had been taught. But she could not look away for long. She could feel the heat of his hand in the small of her back, as if there was nothing at all between her skin and his. She felt naked suddenly; wildly disconcerted, but thrilled as well. His face was deeply tanned, and the sun had lingered in the hair of his brows and moustache, tinting them with warm color. His hair was combed but not brilliantined, and a stray lock now fell forward onto his brow, so that she almost reached out to brush it back. He watched her with light brown eyes, and she thought she saw a startled kind of happiness there.
As the dance ended and he took her hand to escort her from the floor, her glove snagged against the roughened skin of his palm. On impulse, she turned his hand over in her own and studied it, pushing her thumb into the callous at the root of each finger, comparing the width of it to her own. Her hand looked like a child’s in his, and she drew breath and parted her lips to say this before realizing how inappropriate it would be. She felt childlike indeed, and she noticed that he was breathing deeply.
“Are you quite well, Mr. Massey?” she asked.
“Yes… I’m fine, thank you. It’s a little confined in here, isn’t it?”
“Come over to the window, you will find the air fresher,” she said, taking his arm to steer him through the crowd. The air was indeed close, heavy with sweat and breathing, thick with smoke and music and voices.
“Thank you,” Corin said. The long casement windows were shut against the dead cold of the February night, but that cold radiated from the glass nevertheless, providing an area of cool where the overexerted could find relief. “I’m not used to seeing so many people under one roof all at once. It’s funny, how quickly and completely a person can become unaccustomed to such things.” He hitched one shoulder in a shrug too casual for his evening coat.
“I have never left New York,” Caroline blurted out. “That is, only for my family’s summer house, on the coast… I mean to say…” but she wasn’t sure what she meant to say. That he seemed foreign to her, a figure from myth almost-to have gone so far from civilization, to have chosen life in an untamed land.
“Would you not like to travel, Miss Fitzpatrick?” he asked, and she began to understand that something had started between them. A negotiation of some kind; a sounding out.
“There you are, my dear.” Bathilda bore down on them. She could spot such a negotiation from quite a distance, it seemed. “Do come along, I want to introduce you to Lady Clemence.” Caroline had no choice but to be led away but she glanced back over her shoulder and raised her hand in slight salute.
“Don’t be ridiculous, girl!” Bathilda broke into her thoughts and returned her to the present, and the lunch table at La Fiorentina. “You are acting like a lovesick schoolgirl! I, too, have read Mr. Wister’s novel, and it has clearly filled your head with romantic notions. I can think of no other reason why you would choose to marry a cowboy. But you will learn that The Virginian is a work of fiction and bears little relation to the reality of it. Did you not also read of the dangers, and the emptiness, and the hardships of the frontier land?”
“It’s not like that any more. Corin has told me all about it. He says the land is so beautiful you can see God’s hand in every blade of grass…” At this Bathilda snorted, inelegantly. “And Mr. Wister himself acknowledges that the wild era he described is no more. Woodward is a thriving town, Corin says-”
“Woodward? Who has heard of Woodward? What state is it in?”
“I… do not know,” Caroline confessed, pressing her lips together resentfully.
“It is in no state at all, that’s why you do not know. No state of the Union. It is uncharted land, full of savages and uncouth men of all kinds. Why, I heard there are no ladies to be found west of Dodge City at all-only women of the worst kind. No ladies! Can’t you imagine how godless a place it must be?” Bathilda’s chest swelled within the confines of her burgundy gown. A flush mottled her face all the way to her hairline, where her steel-colored hair was gathered into a soft bouffant. She was moved, Caroline realized, incredulously. Bathilda was actually moved.
“Of course there are ladies! I’m sure such accounts are exaggerated,” said Caroline.
“I don’t see how you can be so sure when you know nothing. How can you know anything, Caroline? You’re just a child! He would tell you anything to get such a fine and wealthy wife. And you believe every word! You will leave your home and your family and all your prospects here. To live where you will have no name, no society and no comfort.”