Julia nodded. Wright leered, as he did each time they met. He imagined himself irresistible to women of fortune and consequence. “As ravishing as ever, Miss Kydd,” he rasped. He meant she passed his muster, an approval she profoundly did not seek. She said nothing.
“Hello, Julia. Nice dress,” agreed another voice from near the fire. Philip’s good friend Jack Van Dyne rose. He was the most junior member of the Manhattan law firm representing three generations of Kydds, and Julia cautiously considered him her friend as well.
“Looks drafty to me,” Philip said, eyeing her beautiful frock. “I’d have thought you could afford something with a bit more cloth. I mean, why else insist on raiding my coffers?”
That was rich. Pure contrarian poppycock, intended to provoke her. She was also learning to read the frivolous undertone in much of what he said and did. Philip could make the most outrageous utterances, and he often did. It amused him to shock and alarm, and nothing delighted him more than a flustered rebuff. His favorite sport was to jab and jab in hopes of rousing a joust. Now that she understood the game, she might soon muster strength to oblige (if not best) him, but not tonight. She swept her shawl from her shoulders, baring her spine, and draped it across the arm of the sofa.
“My sister so enjoyed her last visit that she decided to move back to New York,” Philip said before Wright could ask the obvious question. “I humbly bask in her radiance until she finds a home of her own.”
More applesauce. He was in a devilish mood. Philip was as likely to grumble at her invasion of hatboxes and shoe trunks as to warble about her company.
“Not that sister nonsense again,” Wright snorted. “Spare me the pretense, Kydd.”
However tasteless, Wright’s skepticism was understandable: Appearances gave no clue that Julia and Philip were even remotely related. He shared his mother’s dark coloring, while Julia’s blue eyes and fair hair proclaimed her own Swedish blood. Both were lean and light boned, nimble when necessary and naturally graceful. But while Philip tended to slouch, Julia stood straight, her posture the last remnant of a misery of ballet lessons. Jack claimed to detect a resemblance, but more objective observers rarely saw it.
“They really are siblings,” protested Jack. “Half siblings, anyway.”
“Different mothers,” Philip added blandly. Neither man saw his droll glance at Julia.
It was true. Julia—the daughter of Lena Jordahl, Milo Kydd’s second wife—had been born a scandalously brief eighteen months after the death of his first wife, Charlotte Vancill Kydd. Philip was the only surviving child of that marriage. There was a deeper truth, however, known only to them: they were in fact unrelated. He’d learned this staggering secret only last fall.
Thus, ironically, Wright’s barb scratched a secret truth. To the world Julia and Philip remained half siblings, cautiously circling détente after a lifelong estrangement. To each other they were strangers bound in a delicious irony: a private camaraderie at once more intimate than friendship and less burdensome than blood.
Jack settled back into his chair. “Wright stopped by to inquire whether Philip’s working on a good puzzler these days.”
This explained Philip’s mood and Jack’s subdued smile. Wright constantly pestered them with questions about the occasional help Philip gave his uncle Kessler, an assistant commissioner with the police, on particularly baffling crimes. A critic chronically short of funds, Wright hoped to write popular detective novels featuring a clever but insufferable sleuth modeled (inaccurately!) on Philip. Naturally Philip forbade it, yet Wright persisted. For plots he’d even tried to weasel from Julia her knowledge of the truth behind the suffragist Naomi Rankin’s mysterious death last fall, an impertinence she had firmly quashed.
“You might at least consider his scheme, Philip,” Jack said. “Detective stories are all the rage in England these days. What harm can it do? He wouldn’t use your real name, of course.”
“So you say. Who am I to be, then?” Philip wondered.
“I could call you Attila the Whozit for all the masses care,” Wright said. “As long as I give them a cracking good murder and a walking whirligig of civilization to solve it. A Cézanne collector, no less!” He waved at Philip’s lovely little watercolor above the drinks trolley. “You’d be the perfect sleuthing macaroni, Kydd.”
The muscles along Philip’s thin nose tightened. “Celebrity is the least of my objections. What terrifies me is that this dandified do-gooder might exist at all. So no, never. We tell him nothing, Jack.” He slouched deeper into his chair and raised his cigarette to his mouth.
Wright gave a sour shrug and reached for more of Philip’s whiskey.
“Out hunting beaus?” Philip asked Julia. “A brace of them bundled in the hall?”
“As a matter of fact, I was at a party. Apparently Paul Duveen’s soirees are all the rage. Poets to the rafters and a—”
“Duveen?” Philip said. “That bleached meringue?”
Wright barked out a phlegmy laugh. “More like sycophantic ass. Duveen fancies himself a novelist, but his books are decadent drivel. Now he drapes himself in all manner of outré nonsense and rhapsodizes about the great and glorious Negro. God help us.” Wright went into raptures at Wagner and the stomp of Teutonic boots, presumably in literature as well as music. Julia could only guess at the acid he might spew at Eva Pruitt’s new novel, with its “jazzy tootles.”
She couldn’t fault Pablo Duveen for relishing the avant-garde. She too resisted so-called respectability, though for different reasons. She preferred to throw her small weight of influence, when she had any, onto the side of the improper, the mismatched, and the not done, in defense of those who defied conventional strictures. Duveen seemed a champion mostly for himself. Every rule he broke, every shocking thing he did and said, became another sequin stitched to his name, one more twinkle in the display that kept him forever in the public eye.
“Meet anyone interesting?” Philip asked Julia mildly. “Outré and otherwise?”
“Oh
