The Widow of Rose House

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  To Tim and Rachel

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am surrounded by people of many magics. Without them, this book would not exist.

  Patty, Tim, Brianna, and Bonnie Billings have never, in the two decades they’ve known me, wavered in their belief that I am a good thing to have around. Their magic is the Moore family’s magic—they are profoundly good at loving.

  Rachel Paxton has been my steady companion on this journey since NaNoWriMo 2013. So much has happened in those six years: so many book drafts and blog posts and cross-country moves and hours and hours and hours on the telephone talking about writing and men and books and friends and whatever CW show we’re currently in love with or disappointed by. Here is her magic: no matter how good she was before, she’ll always be better the next time you look. Underestimate her at your peril.

  Rose and Bill Savard, my in-laws, always amazed me with their ability to simply love me as I am. Bill, who passed away several years ago, had the magic of a dreamer—he thought big and loved emphatically. In recent years Rose has been one of my biggest cheerleaders: she gloats on my behalf and makes me stop, once in a while, to appreciate the present. That is, perhaps, her magic—she brings out the beauty of the moment better than anyone I know.

  My beloved grandparents, Jack and Marjorie Biller, built so much of the foundation I stand upon. My grandfather was another dreamer: once he loaded two thousand pounds of lead into the garage to prove a theory about gravity. He called Berkeley regularly with updates. My grandmother, I think, was the most magical person I will ever meet, because I loved her with the magic of childhood. She taught me how to work by paying me a penny for every rock I dug out of her horse pasture; she taught me the power of place through the stories she told, the trails she built, and the birds she watched; and she taught me how to love books simply by loving them so much herself.

  My friends have all listened to so many confused ramblings about writing and in addition allow me to address them as “Aunt” and “Uncle” when speaking to my dog (I am that kind of monster). To all of you, thank you for your patience and your good humor.

  Isaac Skibinski’s magic is clarity of vision, which is a particularly dangerous kind of magic to have. Together we dissect the world.

  Morgan Smalley once gave me very sound advice about my heroine; she also burst into tears of joy when I got the email telling me I had an agent. Her magic is that she loves selectively and deeply—I am honored to have made the cut.

  Hilary Richardson has been on my side for many years. I moved a lot growing up, so it is a constant joy to me that I am now old enough to have old friends. Hilary’s magic is that she enchants her surroundings, rendering the mundane comfortable and the absurd delightful.

  All three of these people also make excellent houseguests.

  It is impossible to fully express the debt I owe to Martha Reynolds, who in the four years I have known her has brought incalculable grace into my life. She is a guide and a guardian, and that is her magic.

  This book could not have had a better friend than my brilliant and charming agent, Amy Elizabeth Bishop. Amy’s magic is that of story—I’ve never met someone who loves books more or understands them better. Without her vision, faith, and incredible effort, I would not be writing these acknowledgments today. I’d also like to thank my agent “siblings,” whose support has brightened so many anxious days.

  Vicki Lame, my editor, possesses the extraordinary magic of the sculptor: she can see the finished piece inside the uncut stone. She has shaped and championed and guided this book, and I could not be more grateful to her. Thanks are also due to the other remarkable people at St. Martin’s Press, including Jennifer Enderlin, Anne Marie Tallberg, Jennie Conway, Barbara Wild, Naureen Nashid, Kerri Resnick, Marissa Sangiacomo, Sarah Schoof, Elizabeth Curione, Cheryl Mamaril, Devan Norman, and Brant Janeway.

  As for my husband, Timothy Savard, giver of hugs, wiper of tears, champion orderer of Postmates, words will be insufficient. He is Sam’s inspiration, and like Sam, his magic is his kindness and his brilliance and his laughter.

  Finally, I’ve read one is not supposed to thank animals in acknowledgments, to which I respond: Thank you to my dog, Valentino “Trouble” Biller-Savard, who sleeps next to my desk, and whose magic is love and ears and singing.

  CHAPTER ONE

  New York City, February 1, 1875

  Alva Penrose Rensselaer Webster had been inside Delmonico’s for nine seconds before Mrs. Henry Biddington asked the maître d’hôtel to throw her out. Alva knew because she’d counted them out: one, no one had noticed her yet; two, casual glances to see who had just come in sharpened; three, people began to nudge their neighbors; four, the whispers started; five, they turned angry; six, Mrs. Biddington, gray-haired battle-axe and leader of society, flagged her waiter down; eight, the maître d’hôtel crossed to her table; nine, Mrs. Biddington made an outraged gesture towards Alva and began to complain in a voice piercing enough to be heard clear across the room.

  The restaurant waitstaff looked at Alva with increasing distress, but she just lifted her chin a little higher and followed the waiter to her table. She trusted her family name (or one of them, at least) still counted enough that she wasn’t going to get tossed out of Delmonico’s just yet. Even black sheep get to retain some of their perks.

  The white-mustached man waiting at the table looked distinctly uncomfortable, but he stood politely when she arrived. His fine wool suit mimicked the attire of the men around him, but no one in the restaurant would need to look at the slightly ill-fitting cut or the too-ostentatious buttons to know he was not one of them. They would know, because New York’s upper crust kept track of their own.

  “Mr. Smithson?” Alva held out her hand. After an almost imperceptible hesitation, he took it.

  “Mrs. Webster,” he said.

  “It’s so nice to meet you in person.”

  He waited until she was seated before he sat down again, clearing his throat and adjusting the crystal water glass in front of him. Echoes of his discomfort registered in the tightness of her chest and stomach, but she forced herself to ignore the feeling that hundreds of daggers were sailing towards her back. She could have told him this was how it would be, but he had insisted they meet at a restaurant instead of at his offices, and she wanted to meet him badly enough to agree.

  The waiter appeared again, hovering at Smithson’s right elbow, and her companion recovered himself enough to discuss the evening’s menu. Alva occupied herself by scanning the room, noticing the restaurant had been redecorated sometime in the last twelve years. Green brocade paper now covered every inch of the walls, coordinating oppressively with the dark green velvet curtains. Crystal glinted in the low lamplight, and the air was hazy with smoke. An enormous painting of a ship being tossed on stormy seas dominated one end of the room.

  “Well, Mrs. Webster,” Smithson said, clearing his thro
at again. “I hope your journey was pleasant?”

  “Very smooth,” she said. Her ship had docked two days ago, and in a few days more it would return to France without her. Not for the first time, she wondered what on earth she thought she was doing.

  “You must be pleased to be home?” he said, continuing without waiting for a response. “We—Braeburn and Smithson, that is—were very flattered you chose our publishing house to direct your query to.”

  It was a gracious thing to say, considering the general mood in the room, and her smile became a little easier. “I was very impressed with your firm’s work on The Principles of Interior Decoration,” she said, taking a delicate sip of water intended to show the rest of the room how at ease she was. The angry whispers were still buzzing around her. “I thought the photographs you included were especially helpful. You were an obvious choice for my own work.”

  The waiter returned to pour their wine, and Alva saw Mrs. Henry Biddington sail from the room in fury, her sister and two daughters trailing meekly behind. One of the girls snuck a glance in Alva’s direction as she left, as though she wanted one last look at the tiger before she had to leave the zoo.

  “Yes,” Smithson said. “I must tell you, though, we’re not convinced the market will bear another home decoration book, so soon after Mrs. Bellingham’s. Your angle, though … it’s interesting, at least. You’ve concluded the purchase of the house?”

  “I signed the papers yesterday,” she said. Smithson’s shoulders had relaxed slightly since they’d started talking about business. She thought, overall, that she could have done worse with her choice of publisher. Now she just had to convince him to feel the same about her. “Work should start there next week.”

  The house was the basis upon which the whole mad project rested. The plan was to take a house that was on the cusp of being torn down, turn it into a showpiece of modern design ideas, and document the entire process in a book, along with photographs, illustrations, and general design principles that anyone could follow. Even now she could picture the keys to her new house sitting on her desk at the hotel, a certain imagined sheen glowing around them. They were extremely metaphorical keys.

  “The Principles of Interior Decoration is an excellent book,” she said, “but it’s directed almost entirely to a very small, very wealthy portion of society. This must, by necessity, limit its sales. My book would attempt to distill my experience refitting Liefdehuis—that’s the name of the house—into ideas the middle class could apply as well. There are a lot more people in that category than in the upper class, and they still have money to spare on books and home decoration schemes.”

  “We have been looking for titles for that audience,” he said. He looked over her shoulder again, but this time with an appraising gleam.

  The gleam was what she’d counted on when she’d sent the letter proposing her book, that the publisher would realize exactly how many people were likely to buy a book—any book, even one on the tasteful decoration of houses—written by the infamous Mrs. Webster. She just had to hope that once they had the book, some of them would keep reading even after they realized it was unlikely to contain any titillating revelations. After that … if even a handful liked what she had to say, respected the content of the book, if not its author, she thought she’d be content.

  She decided to give him a little extra push. “And, as you know, my recent … exposure in the press … will ensure the book receives more than the usual amount of attention.”

  “Exposure” was a faint word to describe the two years she’d spent being pilloried in the newspapers, but “crucifixion” seemed a touch dramatic.

  Smithson’s eyes narrowed. “Not particularly positive attention,” he said. “Boycotts, protests, maybe even some burnings. We have the other books on our title list to consider.”

  Alva took a deep breath. He wanted to publish it; she just had to get him over this last hill. “There will probably be some fuss, yes,” she said. “But the more people are outraged, the more they’ll talk about it, and the more people will want to buy a copy to see what the fuss is about. After all, think how many books it takes to make a bonfire.”

  His lips twitched, just a little, and she knew she almost had him. He stroked his mustache thoughtfully while the waiter laid the first course—molded fish pâté—in front of them. She took a small bite and let him think.

  “You’re not what I expected,” he said abruptly. “I hope I don’t offend you if I tell you that I mostly agreed to this meeting out of curiosity. But now … now I think I’m very glad I did.”

  There. Her smile widened, and she leaned forward, conspiratorially. “I’m glad you did, too, Mr. Smithson. I think we’ll make a great deal of money together.”

  “My favorite amount,” he said, lifting his glass. “To Mrs. Webster’s Guide to Home Decoration.”

  “Oh,” she said as he touched his glass to hers. “I was thinking—I had proposed—the book be called A Ladies’ Guide—”

  Fully in his element now, he took a large forkful of the pâté. “Too restrained,” he said. “If we’re going to trade on your notoriety, there’s no reason to be tactful about it. We should be slapping your name on every surface we can.”

  Of course, it was Alain’s name, not really hers. Perhaps—

  “Could it be Alva Webster’s Guide?” she asked.

  He shook his head, taking a long draught of wine. “People know you as Mrs. Webster,” he explained. “Alva Webster could be anybody, but Mrs. Webster, the scandalous widow, everybody knows her. Now, the details…”

  It didn’t matter, she told herself. It might be Alain’s name on the outside, but it would still be her work on the inside.

  * * *

  The restaurant was hot, the air smelled bad, and Sam’s tie was choking him. He never would have put the damn thing on if Henry, his lawyer and business partner, hadn’t bullied him into it, and now he was regretting it. Looking wistfully out the heavily becurtained windows at the New York lights beyond, he sighed. Somewhere out there was his laboratory, which had windows, excellent air circulation, and a casual dress code. He took an experimental sip of the whiskey someone had put in front of him and grimaced. Alcohol had many interesting properties; he wasn’t sure taste was one of them.

  It wasn’t an opinion shared by the men he and Henry were dining with, a white-haired, red-faced, round-stomached man whose name Sam had already forgotten and his son, who would look exactly like his father in twenty years. If he lasted that long, which wasn’t a sure thing going by the number of cocktails the man had tossed back since the beginning of the meal.

  Ah, the beginning of the meal. Sam remembered it fondly, like the memory of a long-distant summer holiday. In his naïveté, he’d thought the whole business would be over in an hour. He’d thought that a generous estimate, actually—how much time could people spend eating? When he was back at the lab he could get the whole meal done in about fifteen minutes, and that was when he didn’t just gobble down some cold meat and bread.

  This meal was entering its fourth hour. It was agonizing. Inhumane.

  “I think you’ll find that if you go with my company, young man, this will just be the beginning of the perks.” The old man’s mustache had … things … in it. “Parties! Supper at Delmonico’s every night! Balls! We can offer you something more than just sordid lucre, you know. We can offer you an entree into society itself!”

  “And we appreciate that, Mr. Denton,” Henry said, “but I’m afraid we must also discuss the investment itself.…”

  Sam withdrew his attention from the discussion. There was no need for him to be involved in the money talks, and he’d just had an interesting idea about a lamp containing linked carbon blocks. He settled back in his chair and idly scanned the opulent room, feeling vaguely smothered by the dark green surroundings. The trick would be choosing the right material to sandwich between the blocks, he thought, patting his jacket idly for his notebook and looking down in confusion when
the familiar lump failed to appear. It obviously hadn’t made the transition between his normal clothes and the ridiculous formal suit Henry had turned up with tonight.

  “Henry,” he said, interrupting some point the elder Denton was making about commodity trading. “Do you have a pen?”

  Henry pulled out a pen from the inside of his jacket and handed it to Sam without missing a beat in the conversation. Sam looked around for his napkin, found it on the floor by his feet, smoothed it carefully out on the table, and began to sketch.

  “Err—” Denton senior leaned across the table and lowered his voice, incorrectly assuming, like many before him, that Sam’s lack of attention denoted a lack of hearing. “Is he always like this?”

  “You know how genius operates,” Henry said, falling into the practiced words with ease. “Their intellect engages with the world in a different way from our own.…”

  Sam let the conversation fade again. Perhaps the blocks could be held vertically, like so, and the fuse wire attached there, like that.… He nodded to himself and leaned back, tipping his chair onto its hind legs and letting his eyes wander the room while he thought. There was really only one thing in the restaurant worth looking at, and he let his gaze travel there again.

  He wasn’t the only one looking at her, either, which Sam didn’t find at all surprising. When she’d entered the restaurant an hour ago—an agonizing three hours into his own torturous meal—the whole room had started buzzing like someone had knocked over a hive of bees. It made sense. She was … magnetic.

  Her hair was dark, pulled away from her face in a complicated, severe knot that made her look elegant yet somehow fierce. She was all contrasts, this woman—Sam amused himself by counting them. Her red velvet dress, simple and bold, against her pale skin. Her straight, almost rigid posture, against the light laughter that drifted towards him across the room. The determination of her chin and the softness of her mouth. He wondered what color her eyes were—