Empire Read Free

shut down. They’ve never had so much work, they say. But Mr. White’s on his way from London. He’ll have the latest news.” Mr. Eddy left the room to Caroline and Del, who left the room altogether. Caroline held on to Del’s arm as they stepped out onto the stone terrace with its long view of the Weald of Kent. Although Caroline did not know just what a weald was, she assumed that it must contain green woods and distant hills—the vista before them, in fact. They moved toward the one end of the terrace that was in shade, from a giant gnarled diseased oak. The soft green English countryside was beginning to shimmer as the before-noon sun burned a hole in a sky that ought to have been pale blue but instead was white from heat.
    “You should be more interested in our war.” Del teased her as they sauntered decorously in the shade, gravel crunching beneath their feet. Below them, on a grassy terrace, a somber peacock glared, and unfurled a far too brilliant tail. Everywhere, the bright, if dusty, overblown roses grew in remarkably ill-tended plots. But then Caroline had spent herlife seeing to gardens and houses. “She will make some fine lord a splendid hostess,” said her father’s last but one “translator,” a Miss Verlop from The Hague. “Or,” said Blaise maliciously, “some fine capitalist a good factory boss.” But Caroline had no intention of being either a hostess or a wife, though a factory boss sounded interesting. Of course, she had had no desire to be a daughter or a half-sister, either. But she had dutifully served her time as the first—and duly matriculated; as for the second, Blaise was good company; and she quite liked him, so long as he did not steal her share of the estate.
    “Why should he?” Del stopped beneath a vast—again dusty—rhododendron.
    Del looked as surprised as Caroline felt: she had not realized that she had spoken aloud. Was this madness? she wondered. The Sanford family was full of eccentricity, to put the matter politely, which is how they put it to one another, quite aware that a number of them, including her father, enjoyed the homely modifier “mad as a hatter.”
    “What did I say just now?” Caroline was determined to be scientific; if she was to be like the other Sanfords, she wanted to know every phase of her descent. She would be like M. Charcot, clinical.
    “You said you didn’t care if anyone were ever to remember the
Maine
again …”
    “True. Then?”
    “You said you thought Mr. Hearst and Blaise probably sank it together.”
    “Oh, dear. But at least I tell the truth in my delirium.”
    “Are you ill?”
    “No. No. Not yet, anyway. Not that I know of. How did I get from the
Maine
to my father’s will?”
    “You said … Are you making fun of me?” The small gray eyes in the large face were kind, with a tendency to absorb rather than reflect the now intense August light.
    “Oh, Del!” Caroline seldom used a young man’s first name. After all, her first language was French, with its elaborately gauged and deployed second person. On the subtle shift from intimate “you” to formal “you” an entire civilization had been built. Although Caroline had never been in love (if one did not count a fourteen-year-old’s crush on one of her teachers at Allenswood), she knew from the theater and books and the conversation of old ladies what love must be like and she fancied herself best as Phaedra, consumed with lust for an indifferent stepson; worst, as a loving wife to a good man like Adelbert Hay, whose father, thecelebrated John Hay, was once private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, and now ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. John Hay was himself not only civilized to the extent that any native American could be (Caroline was never quite sure just how deep the veneer could ever be of any of her countrymen) but wealthy as a result of his marriage to one Clara Stone, an heiress of Cleveland, who had borne him two sons and two daughters. As