This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2020 by Margaret L. Benton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542044646 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542044642 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542007139 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542007135 (paperback)
Cover design by David Drummond
First edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCUSSION GUIDE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
Paul Duveen was the whitest man Julia had ever seen. Stepping into his apartment on West Fifty-Fifth Street, she had no problem spotting him in the crowd. Ivory hair crested high above his doughy face, and eager teeth burst forth as he regaled an audience with some amusing or perhaps scabrous tale. Presiding over one of his infamous Thursday-evening salons, he wore an alabaster dressing gown and bleached pigskin house slippers. Apart from deep-set brown eyes, everything about him was incandescent. The man glowed.
Unseen hands bore away her Egyptian shawl as Julia lifted a martini from a passing tray. She raised it to salute her host across the room. Duveen—Pablo to his friends—returned the greeting through a fog of smoke. Perhaps he remembered last week’s invitation, perhaps not. His slurred shout made no distinction.
Julia sipped her drink—delicious, real gin—and gazed about the apartment. There was something daring and defiant going on here, a snub to all the parties in Manhattan and around the world lumbering along in the old, dead ways of before the war. All things boring and dreary had been swept away; even the walls were the color of tangerines. From across the room a bronze bust scowled beneath the coils of an abandoned silver boa. Above it hung an immense angular painting depicting shards of at least one, possibly two crimson nudes. Tipsy jazz hiccuped from a grand piano in the corner. The musician curled like a smitten lover over the keys, paying no attention whatsoever to the two women swaying to a private beat behind him. Everywhere, conversations bubbled and swirled.
Most remarkably, the party was mixed. A dozen or more Negroes mingled amid the throng of whites. The rumors were true, then. Julia had never been to a party where Negroes did more than disperse canapés and cocktails or sweeten the din with half-heard melodies. She could almost feel the rumble of polite society creaking asunder, of modernity muscling apart the old walls built to separate those fiercely regulated realms of us and them. Here and there, at the bolder edges of Manhattan society, those walls were cracking. People of all shades were squaring their shoulders and dancing through the breach. Not many, and not always safely, but each time, another brick wobbled.
The other guests looked pleased and even proud to be there. Julia felt a twinge of pride herself. She’d found her way to the still-rough edge of the growing century. After five years of living abroad in London, this was why she had returned to New York. This was where she wanted to belong. Here she hoped to make her mark.
She threaded her way through a quartet of noisy men expounding earnestly on Freud toward a massive glass-fronted bookcase. Even from across the room she’d recognized a gilded red spine that beckoned for a closer look. Like most modern young people, Julia indulged a number of minor vices. Hers included an impertinent curiosity about other people’s books. It might not be judged as indelicate as exploring others’ closets and cabinets, but it ought to be, because it was just as revealing.
She was right. It was a copy of the recent Bodley Head quarto edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. That Duveen owned this edition, which reproduced Aubrey Beardsley’s famously decadent illustrations, told her more about him than hours of polite conversation. It confirmed Duveen was one of those men who ventured well beyond the borders of social respectability. Julia knew the type (even shared its impulses from time to time) and also knew that what most repelled could most intrigue.
“Your frock is divine.” A low voice dripped like warm honey over her shoulder.
Startled, Julia steadied her grip on the Salome and turned to see a woman gazing down at her. About her age, she guessed: old enough to vote but not yet thirty. At least six feet tall, the stranger shimmered in a sea-green evening sheath. A matching turban framed her pale, symmetrical face. Long prisms of crystal beads hung from her ears. Beneath tapered brows her charcoaled hazel eyes, like the curve of her neatly painted lips, never wavered in their calm overture. Two realizations, and their dissonance, struck Julia with equal force: the woman was beautiful, and her gaze was guileless. By the age of three any female understood that such beauty was a powerful tool, to be wielded for profit and advantage. Yet Julia saw neither calculation nor naivete in this face, and her interest quickened.
“Not quite Vionnet?” the stranger asked, dipping her glance to Julia’s dress. “But divine all the same.”
Julia covered her second surprise with a smile. The pedigree of a woman’s wardrobe was as undiscussed as her age or weight. A year ago she might have rebuffed the inquiry, but tonight—if races could mingle at posh midtown parties, if a woman could travel about the city alone at night—it seemed absurd to demur over a less-than-couture frock. Not French, no.
Another of
