Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,8
with in the ballrooms of San Francisco, as she arrived at Vida’s side, and together they joined the stream of first-class passengers from the salon into the grand dining room. “If you are looking wistful, then we are all in a grave and terrible danger.”
Vida accepted Rosa’s arm. “I know,” she replied in a little voice. “Wistful is not at all my best color.”
They were surrounded by the throng, by the high shine of black tuxedo jackets and the pastel ruffles of ladies who, much like Vida, appeared to have spent the first hours of their journey attending to their dress and coiffure. A gloom had settled in Vida since her failed encounter with Fitzhugh Farrar, and though she tried to shake it off, she found she could not. She followed instead the well-heeled crowd, hoping their enthusiasm for light fixtures and fine carpets and each other’s silks and jewels was catching.
The ship’s social director, a Mr. Selvedge, greeted Vida and Rosa and made all the usual compliments regarding their loveliness and what an honor it was to have them on the maiden voyage of the Princess, et cetera, et cetera, and asked solicitously after their accommodations, and mentioned—in what he perhaps considered a subtle way, but which rankled Vida’s already wounded pride—the names of bachelors that he could introduce them to. She was not the kind of girl who needed help meeting young men! But apparently her fame in this regard did not extend beyond the borders of San Francisco.
“What a bore,” Vida muttered when at last he departed and they found themselves seated at one of several long tables, immaculately cluttered with crystal, silver, china, and hyacinth. Beyond the rows of tables, beyond curtains of velvet and gilt-encrusted columns, beyond potted palms and silken fainting couches, were windows that framed an unfathomable seascape of deepest midnight blue. “I thought he’d never leave.”
“Me too,” said Rosa, craning her lovely pink neck. Her blond hair fell in sweet ringlets, but her eyes had a steely quality. “As though any of us are interested in meeting anyone but Fitzhugh.”
After the stinging humiliation of that afternoon, this statement didn’t exactly shock Vida. Still, it wasn’t good news that Rosa considered Fitzhugh fair game. Vida regarded Rosa, who was not exactly a friend (though they’d known each other all their lives), and wondered if she could truly have missed the report of Vida’s wild night with the Farrar heir. Maybe Rosa had been too busy dressing for a run-in with him—for some kind of slip in front of the map room—to know that he and Vida had been attached in print. “Well,” Vida replied, not hiding her irritation, “you should have asked Selvedge for an introduction.”
“To whom?” This from a voice Vida had never heard before, female and British, a voice that resounded high in the nasal cavity. The owner of the voice was practically skeletal and encased in emerald green satin. Peacock feathers were wound into her high, pinned hair. Her age was impossible to determine—she might have been a few years older than Nora and lived a hard life, or was otherwise a perfectly preserved seventy-nine.
Rosa and Vida must have appeared confused enough by this interjection, for the lady quickly went on: “What I meant, my pretties, was to whom do you want an introduction?”
The woman sat down beside Vida, ignoring the little brass name tag that claimed the seat for Mr. Arnold Hazzard, and lit a slender cigarette, although there were no ashtrays and smoking was generally not done in mixed company. She put her pointy elbow on the table without the slightest notice of how this rattled the crystal, the china, and the silver. Before Vida could think of a clever way to avoid the question, the woman was talking again.
“I can introduce you to absolutely anybody you’d like. I know them all. I have a little something on all of them, you know. Don’t blame me. It’s that kind of world. Myself, I am an old libertine, and cannot be shamed. But all of these types”—she made a conductor-like flourish at the assembled—“well, really, I think you could shame any one of them for sneezing audibly, so it’s not difficult at all, and if you ask me, entirely their own fault. There’s Lady Narcissa of Ghent, who was born Lydia Astor. And Charlotte Coburg, who married a duke, making her a duchess of course.”
For the first time since her slip by the map room Vida felt interested in