“I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with mixing two agendas.”
“I’m interested in the orphanage, Mother.”
“And I’m interested in you. Why can’t we find anyone who cares more about you than your money?”
But Lydia knew why. She couldn’t hold a candle to her mother. Madeline’s flame was intoxicating beauty and artful conversation. Beside it, Lydia’s light was all but invisible. Too often a man who professed interest in Lydia was soon captivated by her mother. Lydia observed it, accepted it, and used it as a test, a trial by fire as it were, to determine if the man’s interest lay with her or with her money. Mustering a smile, she approached her mother, stood on tiptoe, and kissed Madeline’s smooth and unlined cheek. “You distract them while I pick their pockets. That’s the best way to mix our two agendas.”
Samuel Chadwick was pacingthe area in front of the library fireplace when the double doors slid open. He looked up, saw his wife and daughter framed in the doorway, and put down his pipe. “Here are my beautiful girls,” he said, opening his arms wide to welcome them.
Lydia walked quickly to her father’s arms and returned his warm hug, kissing him on either side of his graying handlebar mustache. “Papa, you look wonderful! So dapper. Is that a new tie?” She straightened the black silk around the stiff points of his starched collar. “All gussied up for me? You’re a darling, do you know that?”
“I’ve already made a contribution to the orphanage,” he said dryly.
Lydia feigned a wounded expression. “I’m not an idle flatterer.”
“All right. Five hundred dollars. Not a penny more, thief. I’ll have to hit the mother lode to support you and St. Andrew’s at this rate.”
Madeline took the hand her husband offered and raised her cheek for his kiss. “Since you’d rather be digging inside some dark mountain anyway, perhaps you should donate a thousand.”
There was an edge to Madeline’s tone that did not go unnoticed by Samuel or Lydia. Both, however, had their own reasons for ignoring it. Samuel released his wife and picked up his pipe. “Won’t you each have a glass of sherry before our guests arrive? I confess, I thought I was going to have to drink alone. Always need a bracer before one of these shindigs.”
“Oh, Papa. You always exaggerate your misery.” Lydia went to the walnut sideboard and began pouring the sherry. “I’m not going to feel sorry for you. After the first few dances, you’ll slip away with three or four of my guests and spend the rest of the evening in here playing poker.”
Samuel puffed harder on his pipe, an endearingly sheepish light in his pale blue eyes. “Winnings go to charity,” he muttered around the pipestem.
“Of course they do.” Lydia gave her father his glass and offered another to her mother. “I wouldn’t countenance it if they didn’t,” she said saucily. She raised her glass a moment later and toasted her parents, thanking them for their help with her dearest worthy cause.
They were an odd pair, she thought, not for the first time. It seemed that she had always known her parents were suited to each other the way oil was to vinegar: individually distinctive in their own right, mixing briefly for some shared purpose, then separating.
Samuel was his wife’s senior by a score of years, fifty-eight to her youthful thirty-eight. While Madeline’s mien was often cool and her anger icy, Samuel was warm and even-tempered. He rarely raised his voice or showed his displeasure in any way save for a frown that knit his eyebrows. He was not one to suffer fools, but he believed in second chances, and played fair with every partner he’d ever had.
Samuel was in California when gold was discovered in ’48. He’d struck a rich vein and mined his first hundred thousand by the time the initial horde of greenhorn easterners arrived in San Francisco Bay. He parlayed that money into millions through shipping and railroads, and never minded admitting that he’d been lucky. He saw no shame in it. Striking that veinhadbeen a matter of luck. Getting it out of the ground, on the other hand, had been backbreaking work.
That work showed in his hands, hard, gnarled hands, tough with calluses that years of leisure had never quite erased, and in his shoulders, broad and thickly muscled from the burden of pickax and shovel. He shifted now in his black-tailed dress coat, and reminded his daughter that unlike his wife, he’d never grown comfortable with the trappings of wealth. He was supremely happy to wear a pair of overalls and putter in the garden, or take a lantern and pickax a half-mile deep into the Sierra Nevadas. It was Madeline who gloried in affairs like the one they were about to host. Samuel merely suffered them.
Madeline set down her glass. “I think there’s just enough time for me to check the seating arrangements for dinner.” She was out of the room before Lydia could protest.
Lydia shrugged helplessly, shaking her head. “She’s going to select a dinner partner for me, I know it. A gold piece says it’s Henry Bell on my left and James Early on my right.”
Sam winked. “You’re on.” He drew on his pipe and looked at Lydia thoughtfully. She seemed to be trying very hard to keep the sparkle in her eye and the smile on her face. “Did you and your mother have words?” he asked.
“How did you—” Realizing she had given herself away, Lydia sighed and her agitation surfaced. “I’m sorry, Papa, I can’t seem to avoid having words with her these days. It was my fault really. Once Mother saw this gown on me she decided she didn’t like it, or rather she didn’t likemein it, which I understand perfectly. I should have gone with her to choose it, but I was caught up in planning this evening with Father Patrick, and what do I care about a gown anyway?”
“Don’t you?”
“No.” But she didn’t look him in the eye. “All right,” she said after a short pause. “I do care. Just a little. I’m sure Mother thought it would be fine, but you can see that it isn’t. I was standing beside her, in front of the mirror, and I realized how different we are, how I’ll never have even a tenth of her beauty, and somehow I just thought of Marcus. Before I knew it I was blurting out his name.”
“I see,” he said without inflection. He would always regret that Madeline had chosen to tell Lydia that she was another man’s child and that the other man was a rapist. He could only guess at what Madeline’s motives were for sharing that with her daughter. He had never been consulted before the fact, and afterward Madeline had been characteristically tight-lipped. It had been left to him to console the stunned, confused, and heartbroken child he had raised from birth as his own. In the six years since that day, the only good to come of Madeline’s revelation as far as Sam was concerned was the unbreakable bond he forged with Lydia in the aftermath. “Shall I still call you Papa?” she had asked, her eyes grave and wounded. “I think I should die otherwise,” he had answered. His response was so sincere, so heartfelt, that Lydia could not doubt it.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned Marcus. It can’t be anything but painful for Mother to remember him, but sometimes I wonder if she doesn’t see him when she looks at me.”
“I don’t think that’s the case at all,” Samuel said, rolling the stem of his glass between his large palms. “I have an idea what your mother sees when she looks at you, and it certainly isn’t Marcus O’Malley.”
Lydia looked at her father expectantly, waiting for him to expound on his thoughts. He seemed about to when Mr. Hardy appeared in the doorway and announced the first carriage had just arrived. Hiding her disappointment, Lydia looped her arm through Samuel’s and escorted him to the entrance of the ballroom where they prepared to greet their guests.
“I wonderedif you were going to come this evening,” Nathan said as he alighted from a hired carriage and saw Brigham Moore waiting for him.
Brig’s sandy hair caught the light from the carriage’s lanterns. A boyish, mischievous smile touched his mouth. At thirty-four he was not so far removed in appearance or temperament from the boy he had been half a lifetime ago. “I was invited, wasn’t I? The same as you.”
