The Luxe by Anna Godbersen Read Free Book Online

respectable.A girl…” Henry watched as his father leaned a hip against the table and pretended to have an idea. He raised his eyebrows at Isabelle. “A girl like Elizabeth Holland, say.”
    “What?” Henry snapped. He knew the older Holland girl, of course, although he hadn’t had a conversation with her since before he went to Harvard, and she had been very young and gangly then. She was impeccably beautiful, it was true, with her ash blond hair and small, rounded mouth, but she was so obviously one of them . She was a rule-follower, a tea-sipper, a sender of embossed thank-you cards. “Elizabeth Holland is all manners.”
    “Exactly.” His father pounded his fist on the table, which caused the golden liquid in Henry’s snifter to slosh back and forth.
    Henry couldn’t speak, but he knew his face was twisted with outrage and disbelief. His father could not have suggested a poorer match. What he had prescribed for his son was nothing short of a prison sentence. He could feel the life of quiet gentility already rolling out before him, like the endless manicured lawns on which so many narcoleptic garden parties had been held by the matrons of his class, in Tuxedo Park and Newport, Rhode Island, and all those other places.
    “Henry,” his father said warningly. He snatched up the piece of paper and waved it in the air. “I know what you’re thinking, and you should stop it. Now. I want you marriedand respectable. You will have to do away with Penelope. I am giving you an opportunity here, Henry.” He paused. “But God help me, if you cross me, I’ll see that every damn picture frame goes to Isabelle. I will throw you out and it will be very swift, and very, very public.”
    The thought of a brown future of threadbare clothing and rotting teeth made Henry feel suddenly, horribly sober, and his eyes drifted to the bottles crowded together on the sideboard. For a moment, he wished he could go back to Harvard—all the readings and lectures had seemed so pointless when he was there, but he saw now how college might have been a way for him to carve his own path, to guard against these threats of pennilessness. It was too late for that now.
    His bad behavior and pathetic marks ensured that, without his father’s intervention, he would never have a place there again. Henry stared into the silent amber bottles and knew that the only route to independence left to him was through the quiet, deathlike boredom of a life with Elizabeth Holland.

Five
    The ideal ladies’ maid will be awake before her mistress, with warm water for washing the face, and will not go to sleep until she has undressed her mistress for bed. She may require a nap during the day, when her mistress does not need her.
    –– VAN KAMP’S GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING FOR LADIES OF HIGH SOCIETY , 1899 EDITION

L INA BROUD REARRANGED HER ELBOWS ON THE SILL and stared out into the tranquil darkness surrounding Gramercy Park. She had been sitting this way for many hours, in the bedroom where she had dressed the elder of the Misses Holland in layers of chemise, poplin, whalebone, and steel earlier that evening. Miss Holland—no longer Lizzie, as she had been called in childhood, or Liz, as she let her sister call her, but Miss Holland, the junior lady of the house. Lina was not looking forward to her return. Elizabeth had been away for so many months that her personal maid had almost forgotten what it felt like to serve. But from the very moment that morning when Elizabeth had reentered the house, she had gone about reminding Lina precisely what was expected of her.
    She scrunched up her shoulders and sighed as she dropped them. She was not like her older sister, Claire, an altogether softer person, content to read the latest Cité Chatter in the narrow attic bedroom that they shared, gazing at drawingsof the Worth gowns she herself would never wear. Claire was twenty-one, only four years older than her sister, but acted as though she were Lina’s mother.