Julia was not one to feign or inflate a social schedule. The past months of financial uncertainty and a difficult transatlantic move had brought her to the brink of exhaustion and ill temper, but she was ready now. She’d finally ventured forth on her own into her new city, and the party had rekindled her social energies. She felt refreshed, restless to entangle herself again. Soon, if possible. Even if New York was not yet firmly under her feet, London was at last behind her. Her years there had been glorious but also shadowed—with memories of poor Gerald, her doomed first love, and the other false starts and disappointments by which she now hoped to steer more happily forward.
Before she could reply, Austen hurried on with needless enticements. Horace was always throwing parties, he said. Tuesdays and Fridays, at least. This week was to welcome a new author in from the provinces—Nebraska, he thought. Pablo and Arthur Goldsmith would certainly be there, taking a victory lap as Eva Pruitt’s new publisher. “You’ll like Goldsmith, Julia. He loves books more than women. Maybe O’Neill will come, maybe little Vincent Millay, leading poor Bunny Wilson on his lovesick tether. You never know who—”
Thwack! A sharp slap of palm on flesh sounded from the hallway.
The door to the opposite bedroom was ajar. Eva Pruitt, shoulders heaving, stood nose to nose with Jerome Crockett. Both held their hands away from their bodies, clenching in and out of fists. Julia’s first instinct was to defend her. To a proud man like Crockett whose lover had outshone him, and in such a public way, Eva’s success would scald. Julia drew breath to protest, but Austen shushed into her ear.
He was right. It was impossible to know who had struck whom.
Eva grabbed her lover’s wrist. Crockett jerked free with a force that squeezed a soft ooof from her lungs. She seized it again and pulled him to her side, spinning them both toward the door.
Austen drew Julia back into the library’s shadows.
“Leave them be,” he whispered as the couple moved down the hall to rejoin the party, arms curved stiffly around each other’s waists. “Some lives are complicated. Especially writers’.”
CHAPTER 3
More from habit than hope, Julia glanced down the broad hall of Philip’s apartment. He was likely out, but occasionally light beneath the library doors announced a rare evening at home. It had been two days since she’d seen him. For most of her childhood he’d been little more than a name to her, the absent half brother ten years her senior. At her mother’s death twelve years ago, Philip had suddenly loomed large in Julia’s life, though still remote, first as her guardian and then as trustee of her estate until last fall, when she’d turned twenty-five.
Although she still barely knew the man, in a few scant weeks she’d learned that he seldom rose before noon, took most meals out, and generally frequented the city’s many theaters and concert halls and galleries before lingering at one club or another well into the wee hours. Yet he also had an uncanny way of surprising her, of upsetting each basketful of smug judgments just as she managed to assemble it. Whatever his misgivings about her return to New York, Philip kept them to himself. But then, he owed her no less.
For the hundredth time she rued this imposition on his hospitality. At one point eight months ago she’d vowed never again to darken his door, after he’d nearly usurped her inheritance. Worse, he’d done so in jest, claiming he’d never dreamed the panel of arbiters would accept his specious claims about their father’s will. Afterward he’d begged her forgiveness, insisting he’d never have cut her off. But Julia needed time to recover. Once glimpsed from its brink, the maw of poverty was not easily forgotten.
The pocket doors to the library had not been fully closed. Through the gap she saw Philip slouched wearily in his favorite wing chair beside the hearth, legs stretched out across the carpet and fingers knit at his waist to enfold a crystal snifter. He looked half-asleep.
She hesitated. Was he alone? Should she interrupt? She’d like to simply invoke a guest’s prerogative—the cheerful claim of a brandy before bed—but their relationship was still tenuous. Lifelong ambivalence (no, call it the wariness it was) and the monstrous scare he’d given her last fall lingered. Growing up, she’d never mourned the absence of his affection, having never had it. But in recent months she’d felt a few pangs of empathy with the man she was finally learning not to fear, if not yet to fully trust.
At the sound of a voice too muffled for Julia to recognize, Philip stirred. He set aside his drink and lit a cigarette. His long fingers moved lazily. Julia held her breath, alert for what came next. Philip’s most careless gestures were often his most deliberate. The more idle the movement—the languid heave of a shoulder, a bored sigh—the more he often simmered with some deep annoyance or even anger.
“Don’t be an ass,” the visitor whined. “You’re such a bloody orchid, Kydd.”
“So you’ve mentioned.” Philip flicked ash into a saucer.
Oho! Whatever simmered might soon boil. This she would not miss for anything. Julia pushed apart the doors. He had murmured something about making herself at home.
“Ma petite soeur,” Philip said in an abruptly velvet voice. “You remember Wright?”
Ah. Too clearly. His guest was Willard Huntington Wright, the purported author. A dismal superstition crossed her mind: Had her recollection of his name earlier that evening somehow, genie-like, summoned him? It had been a flippant remark, and she rued it all the more if it had now conjured the odious fellow.
Wright half lay across the sofa, too ill or dissipated to rise at her entrance. He had aged a decade since September. His skin was sallow, his cheeks cavernous, and an odor of stale cigarettes rose from his clothing. Whatever had possessed the
