An Heiress to Remember (The Gilded Age Girls Club #3) - Maya Rodale Page 0,68
was not quite the done thing. It was not exactly a topic of polite conversation. And there was the fact that, at the moment, Beatrice was feeling unnervingly like a young girl of sixteen and not a woman of six and thirty, free to live her own life without explanation or apology.
“I’m not an eighteen-year-old debutante anymore, Mother. I’m divorced and already scandalous and if I want to spend an evening with a man, I can. I will take precautions not to be seen but—”
“Of course you can, especially if you take care not to be seen. Don’t think that you are the first unmarried woman of a certain age to take advantage of your freedom.”
Well, if that didn’t stun her into momentary silence. Permission from her mother to have an affair, as long as she did it properly and circumspectly. That was unexpected.
“I just wish you wouldn’t do so with . . . him,” Estella said.
Her mother’s dislike of Dalton was long overdue for a reckoning. Beatrice turned from the window to face her mother.
“Why don’t you like him? That business with him and me was so long ago. He may have been a fortune hunter back then but he certainly isn’t now. He has one of the three great fortunes of the age!”
“Are you sure he still isn’t after the store?”
It was a moment before Beatrice answered. “No.”
He had made his intentions clear to her: he wanted more than just a quick and casual romp. He wanted courtship and romance and possibly marriage. Thanks to the Married Woman’s Property Act, she would still own the store if they did wed. But once their intimate lives were intertwined . . . it would be impossible to keep him and the store truly separate. He would still have claim over her body and time.
“Mother, why are you so sure that he is still after it and not me?”
“Besides the fact that he made an outrageous offer to buy it for more than it’s worth? Besides the fact that he made it plain that it has been his life’s ambition to own it?”
“Besides all that.”
“He reminds me of your father.”
Beatrice availed herself to the settee, wrinkled skirts be damned.
“You’re going to have to explain that.”
Her mother sighed and set down her embroidery.
“I was once like you, Beatrice. Remember, it was my father who had started the store. It was called Bergdorf’s back then, and I followed him around, soaking up all the crumbs of information that came my way. I observed his innovations, his reasons. I saw how he trained the clerks and crafted his advertising copy. I delighted in setting up displays with him. I was just like you. Or rather, you were just like me.”
“You wanted to run the store yourself.”
“I did. Your father promised me that we would run the operation together. First he wooed me, then he charmed my father with his grand ideas and a fancy degree. And before I knew it, my father was selling the business to my husband and it became his. A wedding present.”
Estella laughed and it was bitter.
“Then I had you and Edward and thus reasons to stay home.”
“He even changed the name,” Beatrice said softly.
“And then it wasn’t mine anymore.”
Beatrice realized then that the enormity of the loss hadn’t lessened one bit. She could feel the ache of it.
Her mother resumed her embroidering. Stabbing the needle through the fabric and pulling the thread taut. All these feelings, unspoken, but let out in the push and pull of the needle and thread through bits of embroidery displayed throughout the house. Little monuments to all the women’s feelings that had been left unspoken.
“But you seemed to like all the society stuff, Mother. You were forever going to parties and hosting teas and matchmaking.”
“A woman’s ambition cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change forms. It will manifest where it is allowed. Be that home, children, church, or social climbing. Or a career or business should she be allowed.”
But I was not allowed.
The words didn’t need to be said. They filled up the room anyway. They made it hard to breathe. All that tension that never, ever had a release.
Her mother’s hands stilled as she looked up and met her daughter’s gaze unflinchingly.
“Have your fun, Beatrice, but don’t lose your head to him. You have a chance to live the unlived lives that came before yours.”
Oh, but what a weight for a woman to carry upon her shoulders.