Page 103 of The Lost Heiress
Chapter Forty-One
1961
It felt surreal to Florence to be back in her old rooms again at Cliffhaven. The last time she was here, three years before, she’d been mourning the passing of Doris. At the time, she thought she’d never again know a grief so raw and harrowing, but she’d been wrong. Astrid’s passing had gutted her. This time, a part of her was missing. A part of her was gone, and she knew she’d never get it back. She’d never be whole again.
Charles had flown to Paris as soon as he’d heard the news of Astrid’s overdose. Florence had come home from work to find Astrid still and unmoving in their bed, her lips tinged blue, her eyes vacant and staring. Charles took care of closing out the apartment, arranged for the body to be flown back with them. And he brought Florence home with him to Cliffhaven.
Scarlet was despondent at the funeral. She shrieked and fell to her knees when they lowered the coffin into the ground, and it took the strength of two men to pull her up again. She wept hysterically, and Florence’s heart couldn’t help but pinch at the glimmer of Astrid she saw in the display.
After the funeral, Florence wandered the halls vacantly, like a ghost. No one asked anything of her. She slept late and went to bed early and pushed the food around on her plate, barely eating.
After a while, Florence started to wonder if she really had become a ghost. People no longer tried to engage her in conversation when they saw her. She wondered sometimes if they even saw her at all as she glided through the rooms of Cliffhaven silently. It was almost like she wasn’t there, the way that people’s gazes slipped past her (or was it through her?).
One afternoon, she went into the library to get a book, and she saw them standing there, silent and still as statues. Birdie, Charles’s wife, her hair swept back into a low chignon, and William Bass, standing over her. Florence stopped instantly and breathed in sharply as the cold realization of what was happening washed over her. Bass’s hand was on the top button of Birdie’s silk blouse, and he leaned toward her, possessively, and she toward him, as if they belonged to each other. Birdie’s eyes drew toward Florence, reflexively, across the room. But Birdie didn’t say anything, and her expression didn’t change when she saw her watching them. Bass leaned forward and kissed Birdie’s neck, and, after a moment, Birdie closed her eyes. Florence retreated from the room, as quietly as she had come.
A few months later, Scarlet Towers died silently in her sleep. She was only forty-seven. The medical examiner said there was nothing wrong with her, aside from the fact that she was dead. But nobody was surprised by her passing or questioned its cause. It was obvious that Scarlet had died of a broken heart.
Three years passed at a pace that felt, to Florence, impossibly slow and, at the same time, much too fast. Suddenly (or so it seemed to Florence), her old companion Verity—her first playmate, the girl with whom she had shared the nursery and been tutored side by side—had graduatedfrom college, married, and had a son. Florence could barely recognize her old playmate anymore—Verity had grown tall and lean, leggy and lithe. Gone was the round face Florence had known so well, the pudgy hand that had held hers in the dark of the night when the strange noises of the old house settling around them had seemed the hungry grumbles of a monster’s belly. Verity had grown chic, with her hair cropped short and oversize sunglasses, her brightly colored shift dresses and her chunky knit sweaters worn over button-down shirts and stirrup pants. She had landed a coveted position as a guest editor atMademoisellemagazine in New York City, and she had married a stockbroker named Francis Gordon, who, while he himself was rather plain looking, owned an attractive brownstone on the Upper West Side. At the christening party for their son, Hugh, which Birdie hosted at Cliffhaven, Florence looked across the room full of guests she only half recognized and wondered where the time had gone. How had she not changed at all, while the rest of the world went on around her? It was like she was wading through a vat of molasses, her movements sloth-like, her progress slow, even though it felt to her as if she were exerting far too much effort to have traveled so little distance in such a length of time. It was amazing to her that simply existing with no real purpose other than to make it from one day to the next could be so exhausting. The raw pain and emotion she had felt for the first few months after Astrid’s passing had settled into a low, throbbing ache below her ribs. A constant presence, but one that was not as all-consuming as it once had been.
Florence could feel Charles’s eyes on her from across the room, even though her back was to him. She’d felt him looking at her all day. It was as if, somehow, this milestone of Verity’s had called attention to her in the most unexpected and unwelcome way. Verity’s achievements threw into stark relief Florence’s lack thereof. Verity had an education, a profession, a marriage, a child. A place in the world. While Florence was like a spinning top—constantly moving but always staying in the same place. It raised the uncomfortable question: What to do aboutFlorence? It was a suffocating question. It made Florence’s head dizzy to think about.
Florence left her drink on the side table and meandered down the hall to the library, away from the hum of the party. She ran her hand across the spines of the books in their cases and settled into the leather sofa by the fireplace.
She heard his voice before she saw him.
“Not enjoying the party?” Charles asked.
“Just getting some air,” Florence said.
“Can I join you?”
“Please,” Florence said, motioning to the empty seat next to her.
Charles sat. For a moment, they just looked at each other.
“I know these past couple years must have been quite hard for you,” Charles said. “Seeing Verity get married, become a mother.”
Florence picked at the hem of her dress. “Not really,” she lied. “I don’t think I’ll ever do those things.” This part, at least, was the truth. She said it practically, matter-of-factly, without an ounce of emotion. “They’re just not what I imagined for myself.”
“Birdie thought you might want to go east for school,” Charles said.
Here it was, then. The time had come. She’d worn out her welcome.
“We could help you, if that’s what you wanted,” Charles went on. “I’m close with the dean at Wellesley, and, of course, Birdie has ties at Vassar. We could help with your lodging and tuition and then get you settled after, wherever you wanted to go.”
Florence’s heart ached. It was ironic, what he was offering her. It was the kind of offer Astrid would have leaped at and exactly the thing that Florence dreaded. Maybe everyone was cursed to want the thing they could not have. Or maybe they only wanted it because they couldn’t have it, and that was the curse? Her whole life, Astrid had longed for an open door, the opportunity to go and be whatever she wanted, to separate herself from her family. But all Florence had ever wanted was to stay at Cliffhaven, to be accepted into the Towers family fold. Astridhad been hedged in her whole life, desperate to get out. And all her life, Florence had been desperate to be let in.
“That is a very generous offer,” Florence said. “But then, you’ve always been generous, and very kind, to me, Charles. I hope you won’t find it impertinent of me to say, but I’m not like Verity, with her grand ambitions to go out into the world and make something of herself. I’m not like Astrid either—I don’t have a passion for art or dance; I don’t need to create something. I’ve always been a creature who is firmly rooted in people and place. I want to behere. I want to make myself usefulhere.”
She’d never been able to be so honest with Scarlet, but the past few years had changed her. Besides, she’d always looked up to Charles as a big brother.
Charles looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said. “I thought it would be selfish of me to ask you to stay. I thought it might be hard for you to be here, after all that’s happened.”
Florence nodded. “It is,” she said. “But it would be harder for menotto be here, if that makes any sense.”
“It does,” Charles said. For a moment, he looked deep in thought. “I will have to run this by Birdie, of course,” he said. “But—” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Birdie is expecting,” he said, very seriously.
For a moment Florence sat there, waiting for him to finish. Expecting what? And then, it dawned on her: a baby.
