Empire

gold sword to the Admiral, with a few murmured words, no doubt in Church Latin.

“The sword’s only gold plate, by the way. Too shocking! Congress said that it was to be solid gold, of the highest quality…”

“And from the hardest pan?” Caroline could not resist.

But Millie Dewey seemed not to know the phrase. “I would have thought solid gold would be the only thing suitable for the first admiral we’ve had in thirty years. The Admiral now outranks every military man in the country,” she added proudly. “Which is causing all sorts of problems, I can tell you. You see, General Miles,” and, indeed, Caroline could, literally, see that warrior, formidable in appearance with his equally formidable wife, Mary Sherman, the older sister of Lizzie Cameron, “well, General Miles may be chief of staff of the Army but he is only a lieutenant general, while my husband is admiral of the Navy, the first to hold that rank since Farragut, who only won a little victory in Mobile Bay during the War of Secession while my admiral gave us all Asia…”

“Surely, not all. There is still China.”

“We shall have that, too, he says, if the Russians and Japanese don’t get there first. Speaking of Russians, this is my Aunt Mamie.” They were joined by a small, fat woman with dyed red hair; quantities of huge jewels, set in massive gold, were attached to her ears, bosom, waist. She looked Byzantine; and she was. “Madame Bakhmetoff lives in St. Petersburg, far, far from home.”

“About as far as one can get,” Caroline agreed. The ramifications of the hard-pan families never ceased to amaze her. One sister might be a farmer’s wife in Iowa; another Duchess of Devonshire.

“The Russians aren’t civilized,” said Madame; then added, unexpectedly, “That’s why I feel at home there. We’re so much alike, Americans and Russians. Here’s mine.”

Mamie’s Russian was as ugly as she. He wore a monocle; and presented to the world a gargoyle’s face, scarred deeply from smallpox. He kissed Caroline’s hand; and without thinking-or did he calculate?-slipped into French, presumably excluding Mamie and Millie. “You are an unexpectedly splendid apparition for this bleakest of capitals.” Bakhmetoff’s tone was agreeably flattering; and sharp.

“How could you tell I am not a native?”

“First, I know who you are…”

“You have been to Saint-Cloud-le-Duc…”

“No. But I admired your mother a century ago. You must come see us one day, at the edge of the Arctic Circle.”

“I prefer the equator, for now.”

Mrs. Dewey, in perfect if heavily accented French, said, “I understand every word. After all, my late husband and I were at the Austrian court for ages…”

Del saved Caroline from further displays of international glamour. “They are Beales, and can never forget it.”

“What’s a Beale? And why can such a thing never be forgotten?”

“Their father. He was a general in the war, and then he struck it rich in California…”

“To strike…” Caroline paused. “What a funny expression, ‘to strike it rich,’ like a blow of some kind against someone else.”

“Well, many people never recover from those strikes.”

“I think,” said Caroline, “my father might have been one.”

“But he was very rich to start with.”

“He made more, like Mr. McLean.”

Lord Pauncefote stopped Del at the door to the ballroom. “We have had good news from South Africa,” he said. Caroline turned her back on them, so that the old man could tell whatever it was that he wanted Del, in turn, to repeat to his father. As Caroline surveyed the room, she saw the exquisite figure of the Cassini child, as elegantly dressed as a Paris lady of fashion, with a round chubby face, small features, and the bright eyes of a young fox. “They say,” said Mrs. Benedict Tracy Bingham, “that she is neither daughter nor niece but,” the low excited voice dropped even lower and became more excited, “mistress.”

“Oh, surely not!” Caroline was mildly shocked. She might have been even more shocked had she not known Mrs. Bingham altogether too well. Mrs. Bingham was Galatea to Caroline’s Pygmalion, monster to Caroline’s Baron Frankenstein. Ever since she had so off-handedly thrust Mrs. Bingham and her fabulous jewels, aristocratic lineage, magisterial presence onto the front page of the Tribune, she had received not only a number of advertisements for the Silversmith Dairies but a large number of invitations to Mrs. Bingham’s “sumptuous mansion,” where, at last, Caroline met all of her Apgar connections as well as much of pre-hard-pan Washington. The cave-dwellers, or cliff-dwellers as they were alternately known, seldom mingled in the new palaces of the West End and never in the world of official Washington. But Mrs. Bingham, and one of the Apgar ladies, were twin poles of Washington’s high if dowdy social world, to which Cousin John had assigned Caroline her place, a place she filled as little as possible and then only on condition that in return for the pleasures of her company she be given advertising for the Tribune. As a result of her relentlessness, she had increased the paper’s revenues by twelve percent, much to Trimble’s amazement. “It is a charge,” Caroline had explained, “for my appearance at their functions. They think I am rich, so they are willing to give me money. If they knew how poor I really am, I’d be cut dead.”

As it was, every mother of a marriageable son wanted to entertain Caroline, with due pomp and gravity; the present mootness of Caroline’s heiressdom was either not known or not understood. The fact that her brother Blaise was never to be seen had been noted by all, and the Apgars, rehearsed by Cousin John, spoke sadly of an estrangement. Meanwhile, Caroline’s proprietorship of what was, after all, the cave-dweller’s favorite unread newspaper was considered a charming folly due to her European upbringing.

Certainly, Mrs. Bingham revelled in the fact. Until Caroline’s highly creative account of the Connecticut Avenue robbery, Mrs. Bingham had led a decorous life, a monarch of much of what she surveyed, including the ancient dairyman, her husband. But once identified as a sort of Mrs. Astor disguised as a Washington milkmaid, there was now no stopping her. She courted the press. Every visiting celebrity was summoned to her mansion; and those few who obeyed her summons were then written up at length in the Star, Post and Tribune. All in all, Caroline quite enjoyed her monster. For one thing, Mrs. Bingham was a treasury of scandal. There was no one that she did not know something discreditable about; best of all, there was no one whom she would not slander, joyously, to her inventrix, Caroline, who now stared at the lean, yellow-faced woman of sixty, whose moustache was like fluff of the sort that Marguerite constantly found under Caroline’s bed, and could not persuade the African either to acknowledge or identify, much less remove.

“How can you tell? I mean that she’s his mistress?”

The deep voice sounded like a cello when a bass chord is, mournfully, struck. “My butler’s sister is upstairs maid at the Russian embassy. She says, late at night, there are footsteps from his room to hers.”

“A heavy Cossack tread?”

“Booted and spurred!” roared Mrs. Bingham, delighted at her own wit. Caroline suspected her of constant improvisation. Mention Queen Victoria, and she would promptly give lurid details of the Queen’s secret marriage to a Scots servant, in a cottage at Balmoral; and mourn the fact that the Queen, once a symbol of fertility for all the world, was now so many decades past the ability to conceive: “Otherwise, there would be Morganatic Claimants to the Throne!” This said in a hushed voice, awed by the grandeur of her subject.

“You must ‘do’ society for me, Mrs. Bingham. You know everything.”

“But I say nothing,” said Mrs. Bingham, who said everything but not to everyone. “Another proof that she is his mistress,” she began, true artist, to ornament her invention, “is the fact that he insists she act as his official hostess, and attend state dinners. One doesn’t do that with a daughter…”

“In Russia, always,” Caroline smoothly invented. “The wives are left home in their, ah, dachas, and the oldest daughter always escorts her father to court.”

“Curious, I have never heard that before.” Mrs. Bingham gave Caroline a suspicious look. Unlike most liars she was seldom taken in by the lies of others. “I’ll ask Mamie Bakhmetoff,” she said, ominously.

“Oh, she will lie. To save face. They all do.” With that, Del took Caroline’s arm, but before they could escape, Mrs. Bingham struck hard.