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CHAPTER ONE

NEW YORK CITY

JULY 1898

Adelaide Stanhope sat at her father's graveside, as still and upright as the surrounding tombstones. The enormous Stanhope obelisk loomed over the family cemetery plot where her great-grandfather, grandfather, and now her father had been laid to rest. Grandmother Junietta Stanhope's hand, gloved in black lace, lay limp and fragile in her own as the service droned on. Adelaide grasped so few of the clergyman's words that they might well have been in another language—eternity....dust....life....rest.

Father was dead.

He was dead, and everything in Adelaide's tightly scripted, well- mannered world had been upended, tossed about, and left to flounder like a luxurious steamship, helpless in the grip of a storm.

The scent of roses and lilies, piled on her father's coffin and heaped all around it, drifted to her on the breeze. The heady fragrance seemed misplaced. It usually accompanied one of Mother's grand dinner parties or balls, filling their New York City mansion or summer home in Newport with their perfume. Adelaide closed her eyes, picturing Father in his tuxedo and starched white shirtfront, Mother reigning beside him in a dazzling gown and ropes of pearls as they greeted guests in their vast flower-filled foyer. It was a picture she had always taken for granted, imagining that nothing in her life would ever change. What would life be like now, without Father?

She opened her eyes again and glanced at her grandmother's face, clouded by a veil of black netting. She sat stoically unbowed as if carved from wax, like the figures Adelaide had seen in Madame Tussaud's museum in London last year. For a parent to lose a child at any age was a tragedy, but Father was Grandmother Junietta's only child, her only son. For as far back as Adelaide could remember, her grandmother had seemed tireless, ageless, committed to the charitable foundation she presided over—a man's job, really, but Grandmother seldom played by society's rules. Adelaide had been close to her as a child, before growing into a young woman and taking her place in the privileged society life she now enjoyed. Adelaide's own eyes were dry as well, not only because a proper lady never mourned in public, but because her father, Arthur Benton Stanhope III, was a distant figure to her, a towering statue on a pedestal, a giant in New York's business world who had spent most of Adelaide's life in offices and business meetings before his unexpected death. As his third and final child, she knew she had been a disappointment to him from the day of her birth. A third daughter. Not the son he had hoped for. Now he was gone, suddenly and unexpectedly, having died alone in their New York mansion while she and Mother summered at their home in Newport, Rhode Island. Adelaide still felt numb from the shock of his death and the hurried train journey home. Nothing seemed real except the feathery weight of her grandmother's hand in hers and the blistering sun above their heads. The scant shade of the funeral canopy offered little relief from it.

The minister closed his book with an "amen." A sigh escaped before Adelaide could capture it, and she glanced around discreetly, hoping no one had heard. They hadn't. She'd grown accustomed to being ignored while her two older sisters had lived at home, but with Ernestine and Cordelia successfully married, nineteen-year-old Adelaide would be the focus of Mother's attention and matchmaking ambitions next. Adelaide had dreamed of a Cinderella wedding, but now Father wouldn't be there to escort her down the aisle.

She stood when her mother and sister did. Cordelia and her husband had arrived from their home in Boston last evening. There hadn't been enough time for Ernestine, married to a British earl, to travel from her home in London. Adelaide helped her grandmother to her feet with the others. "Are you all right, Mimi Junie?" she whispered, using the affectionate name from her girlhood.

"Yes, child." Grandmother gripped Adelaide's arm with one hand and her intricately carved cane in the other. The cane seemed part of her, an extra limb, and she was seldom without it. She rarely used it as a walking stick though, brandishing it like a weapon to make a point or flourishing it like a maestro waving a baton. But today she leaned upon it as she and Adelaide shuffled forward to drop more roses onto the smothered coffin. Before moving on, Grandmother paused to stare at a floral arrangement with a ribboned banner that read Beloved Son. "My son...." she murmured. "My son." It would have been a blessing if she hadn't comprehended her loss, but Grandmother's mind was still sharp.

"Yes, Mimi Junie," Adelaide replied. "You've lost your son and I've lost my father. I'm so very sorry. Come, our carriage is waiting."