yourself,” she said.
He was dressed as a Mogul
prince, in a fine gold brocade riding jacket and a white turban atop his
caramel-colored hair.
In answer, Oliver took her
bejeweled hand and pressed it to his lips, sending a delicious shiver up her spine. Her
friend and her familiar. They were a team. Like the Los Angeles Lakers, unbeatable,
Schuyler couldn’t help thinking. She always made corny jokes when she was nervous.
“What’s this?” she asked, as
Oliver pressed something into her palm.
“I found it in the garden
earlier,” he said, showing her the crushed fourleaf clover. “For
luck.”
I don’t need luck, I have you,
she wanted to say, but she knew Oliver would think it was cheesy. Instead, she accepted the
flower and tucked it into her sari with a smile.
“Shall we?” he asked, when the bhangra pop ended and the orchestra switched to a waltzy version of the
Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” He led her out to the middle of the dance floor located in the grand
ballroom just off the courtyard. The room was festooned with floating Chinese lanterns, delicate
orbs of light that looked incongruous against the French classical architecture. There were only
a few people dancing, and Schuyler worried they would look conspicuous as the youngest people on
the dance floor by several decades.
But she had always loved this
song, which wasn’t so much a love song as the opposite of one. “I once had a girl, or should I
say, she once had me.” And she loved that Oliver wanted to dance. He held out his arms and she
stepped into them, resting her head on his shoulder as he circled her waist. She wished dancing
was all they had to do. It was so nice just to live in the moment, to enjoy holding him so
closely, to pretend for a little while that they were merely two young people in love and nothing
else.
Oliver led her smoothly
through every dance, a product of mandatory ballroom lessons from his etiquette-obsessed mother.
Schuyler felt as graceful as a ballerina in his confident direction.
“I never knew you could
dance,” she teased.
“You never asked,” he said,
twirling her around so that her silk pants floated prettily around her ankles.
They danced through two more
songs, a catchy polonaise and a popular rap song, the music a schizophrenic mix of high and low,
Mozart to M.I.A., Bach to Beyonce . Schuyler found she was actually enjoying herself.
Then the music stopped abruptly, and they turned to see what had caused the sudden
silence.
“The Countess of Paris,
Isabelle of Orleans,” the orchestra conductor announced, as an imposing woman, very beautiful for
her age, with coal black hair and a regal bearing entered the room. She was dressed as the Queen
of Sheba, in a headdress made of gold and blue lapis. Her right hand held an immense gold chain,
and standing at the end of it was a black panther wearing a diamond collar.
Schuyler held her breath. So
that was the countess. The prospect of asking that woman for shelter suddenly seemed more
daunting than ever. She had expected the countess to be plump and elderly, frumpy even, a little
old lady in a pastel suit with a bunch of corgis. But this woman was sophisticated and chic; she
came across as remote and distant as a deity. Why would she care what happened to
Schuyler?
Still, maybe the countess only
looked imperious and inaccessible. After all, this party could not have been easy for her.
Schuyler wondered if the countess was sad to have lost her home. The H’tel Lambert had been in
her family for generations upon generations. Schuyler knew the recent global financial crisis had
humbled even the grandest houses and the richest families.
The Hazard- Perrys had invested well: Oliver told her they had gotten out of the market years before it crashed. But
all over the Upper East Side, Schuyler heard, jewelry was being auctioned, art appraised,
portfolios liquidated.
Robert Bloch
Nadia Comaneci
Tracie Peterson
Heidi Vanlandingham
Taylor Lewis
Simon Brett
Wayne; Page
Christina Henry
Katie Hayoz
Kevin J. Anderson