Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,3
might rightly hope, she knew he could not keep up with her. He was perfectly content where he was, and there was so much she yearned to see. And there, sitting on the second-floor terrace of a saloon, was Bill Halliday, the author of her third proposal, with a stormy quality in his eyes. She winced a little at the memory of Bill, with whom she’d had some fun—he drove his horses fast, and was on speaking terms with parts of the city that fine people like them were not supposed to visit. But his adventuring had only left her with a taste for more, and anyway, she had seen how his father’s same proclivity had dwindled the Halliday family fortune. And there too, leaning against a ticket agent’s kiosk, was Whiting de Young, who only last month she had warned with a flash of the eyes that he should not humiliate himself by trying to propose at all. He watched her now with a sad little smile, and she could see in his eyes that he half expected her to change her mind and come running to him. For Whit was all things: rich, jocular, adoring, and descended from two of the most prosperous and prominent families in San Francisco. If he had come to her father with a ring, she knew that she would have had to marry him. Her parents would have insisted. There was absolutely nothing wrong with him, and she was even rather fond of him.
And that was how she knew.
That was how she knew for sure that marrying well in San Francisco was not enough for her, and that she would always be vaguely dissatisfied with her lot, always wondering if there was something better going on elsewhere. That she would have nothing to do about it but to stay out too late and get boring people to tell gossipy stories about her the next day. She was a huntress—her hunting grounds were drawing rooms and polo fields, it was true; but that did not make her any less a huntress. Now, standing alongside the sheer cliff of the Princess (which she had derided for months as not worth talking about), she shuddered with some presentiment of the future.
For a moment she saw clearly that her fate and the fate of this ship were entwined.
After all, if she had not bothered to argue about its worthiness, she would not have made a spectacle of herself, and would not be here now.
“You can come aboard,” said a familiar voice at her ear. “It’s almost time.”
Vida squeezed the hand of her maid, Nora. Nora was a tall, bright-eyed girl with an upturned nose who had been her ally in all her stratagems since she had begun training for cotillion five years ago. They moved together toward the plank. It had a fancy rope gate for a railing, and was made of handsome wood, but it was still a plank. As Nora guided Vida upward toward the little door in the side of the ship several stories above the pier, Vida felt how it swayed with the wind, and her heart bounced with a thrilling fear.
“Wobbly, isn’t it?” said Nora, who had been this way already to escort Vida’s several suitcases.
“Well, yes,” Vida replied drily. “Though I may be wobbly for other reasons.”
Upward they went through the decks, past uniformed sailors and early-boarding travelers, past vast quantities of starched sheets and pillows, glassware and dinnerware, past salons, past dining rooms and observation decks, up interior and exterior stairways, all that brass and oak and freshly painted white iron, all of it brand new and gleaming and as suitable for a grand ball as any millionaire’s house. Nora was urging her on and on until suddenly they were outside again, on the polished planks of the top deck of the Princess, with all the city spread out beneath them.
When she had been a part of it, Vida had sensed the largeness of the crowd, but she hadn’t really understood until she looked down on it from above. Beyond the piers that jutted from the Embarcadero was San Francisco, looking very much like a diorama city constructed by a child out of pastel blocks of Turkish delight. As Vida strode toward the rail, Nora placed the scarlet scarf in her hand; it was half unfurled by the time she reached the edge. For a moment, Vida forgot to breathe. She was farther up from the pier than she could