Today's Reading
On the day I stole another woman's life, I saw New York for the first time, against a charcoal-gray sky with rain teeming down in sheets. It wasn't much of a sight, but I didn't care and I don't suppose anyone else standing there on the deck, soaked to the skin, did either. We were all just desperate to see land, though the downpour was so heavy that the buildings looming up ahead were no more than vague shapes.
Suddenly the gray was lit up; a flotilla of tugboats sped toward us, cameras pointing up, flashbulbs exploding, men yelling questions.
"Damn journalists," said someone behind me. "Parasites, the lot of them."
I stepped back quickly, into the shadows. I'd been concentrating so hard on what I was about to do, thinking through how it could work—if it could work—and telling myself it was the only way, I'd not given a thought to the fact that we'd be news. But of course we were: over a thousand people had died, on a ship that was claimed to be unsinkable, and we were the ones left to tell the story. Well, I wouldn't be telling them mine.
CHAPTER ONE
If I shut my eyes, I can still picture the invitation that started it all. Thick, cream-colored card, embossed with black copperplate.
LORD AND LADY BURNHAM REQUEST THE
PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR A NEW
YEAR'S BALL AT CHILVERTON HALL, 12TH
JANUARY 1910
I'd been with my father at Star Mill all afternoon, arguing up hill and down dale with him over dye samples for our spring prints. I won the fight for sapphire blue and a beautiful emerald green—the ladies' magazines were going mad about jewel colors—and while he made out the order, I sorted through the post. Mostly invoices, but then this very swish cream envelope.
His eyebrows shot up as he read the words. Our house, Clereston, wasn't far from Lord and Lady Burnham's estate, but we didn't move in those circles at all.
"Why the heck would they invite us?" He held the card over the wastepaper basket, his eyes twinkling. "We'll say no, won't we?"
He knew perfectly well that I'd be for going. I'd been taken with the idea of going to a ball since my mam told me the story of Cinderella, when I was a little girl, and just lately I'd read all Jane Austen's novels—even Lady Susan, which hardly anyone likes—and they're full of them. Of course we'd go.
* * *
As we walked in that evening, both a bit nervous though we'd not admitted it, he said, "Think how proud your mam would be."
He was wishing she was with us, and I was too, but then there'd barely been a day in the past five years when I hadn't thought of her and missed her, and him the same. And she'd have loved it, my mam: women in satin and silk, jewels glittering under the chandeliers; men in tailcoats with snow-white waistcoats and ties; a violin quartet playing; and this lovely hum of conversation and laughter over it all. Everything I'd imagined.
Lady Burnham greeted us, very friendly, and promised to introduce us to "some delightful people" once everyone had arrived. After we'd stood and watched the dancing for a while, my father went to refill our glasses and she led him over to the far side of the room, where he was soon caught up in conversation. I had Pride and Prejudice and Elizabeth Bennet's humiliation at the Meryton ball fresh in my mind, so I wasn't going to stand about looking desperate for someone to ask me up. I'd tucked myself a bit behind a pillar when a lanky young man, a few years older than me, walked by. He stepped back, and smiled.
"Are you hiding? Wouldn't blame you, there are some dreadful people here."
I was flattered he didn't lump me in with the dreadful people, and that smile, easy and open, made me like him straight away. Doing my best to sound as though I went to balls every night of the week, I said, "Just waiting for my father to stop chatting and bring me a glass of champagne." And then, because he had kind eyes. "But I am hiding, a bit. I don't know anyone here."
"We must remedy that." He put out his hand. "Frederick Coombes."
"I'm Elinor Hayward."
...
