A Crown of Stars

by Shana Abe

Genres: Biographical; Sagas

Synopsis

A sumptuously vivid and poignant account of the Lusitania’s fateful last days, drawn from the true story of an extraordinary young actress who survived the unthinkable—for fans of Marie Benedict, Louis Bayard, Fiona Davis, Kate Quinn, and HBO’s The Gilded Age.

In turn of the century England, the Jolivet family lives a charmed existence. Daughter of a wealthy vineyard owner and a French pianist, vivacious Marguerite, the eldest of three, loves spinning stories and entertaining her family’s well-connected friends. No one is surprised when she announces, at 18, that she intends to become an actress. Her sister, Inez, a virtuosa violinist, moves to London with her. Soon the two beauties are being celebrated in the highest social circles.

Marguerite takes the stage name Rita, and quickly draws the attention of legendary theater producer Charles Frohman. From the West End to Broadway, and then in the new medium of silent film, Rita is known for her “sultry eyes, her mystic smile,” and her star burns brighter with every role. While filming in Italy, she’s courted by a charismatic aristocrat and Rita feels on the verge of a life even better than her dreams. Inez, meanwhile, has already found love, and travels the world with her adored husband.

Yet soon, war is raging across Europe. Rita, in New York for the premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Unafraid, receives word from Inez that their brother is about to enlist. Hoping to see him before he departs, Rita books a ticket on the fastest steamer available: the RMS Lusitania. But the ship sails under a British flag, and the German government warns that all such vessels are fair game. Few believe Germany would risk attacking a ship carrying Americans, certainly not one as swift and imposing as the Lusy.

Once aboard, Rita is delighted to discover both Charles and her brother-in-law as fellow passengers.The days pass in a haze of parties and pleasurable pursuits, and the comforts of the luxury ocean liner are almost enough to calm Rita’s ripples of unease. But as the ship nears Liverpool, every assumption will be tested, and Rita, her family, and the world, will be changed forever by the voyage’s infamous and catastrophic end . . .

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

19 July, 1915

Marguerite,

Forgive me.

It’s been so hot these latter days. Sweltering, rancid, the sky bleached near to white like an old dog bone, the grass in Central Park faded to straw. I can tell that, while I was gone, my housekeeper did her best to salvage the bougainvilleas in their urns lining the balcony, but poor things. Early spring they promised a verdant bramble. I’ve come back to my apartment to find that even they have been sacrificed to the heat, pink leaves dried to dust, their tender edges crisped and dead.

Forgive me. I did not mean to dwell on the morose.

At night—oh, especially at night, when I’m abed and I hang, suspended, between my dreams—I take a deep breath of this stinking Manhattan air, and all I smell is the cool salt wind off the Celtic Sea.

Isn’t that funny, sissy?



MEDMENHAM, ENGLAND

Most locals claimed that the misty, leafy estate known as Winter Queen was named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who might—or might not—have spent three snow bound nights in its manor house, and who might—or might not—have found three snowbound nights of respite from her mad husband, King George, in the warm arms of an unnamed courtier. Or perhaps a stable lad.

Nonsense, said others. The house and land were actually named for the fairy queen said to dwell in the surrounding woods, Mab or Old Moss or Gloriana, depending on who was telling the tale, and how many pints they’d enjoyed before starting in.

Whatever its origin, Winter Queen was indeed an impressive mess of a place, close enough to a wide bend of the Thames to attract errant seabirds blown inland, far enough to barely glimpse its ribbon of silver from the tallest hill. The original manor house was small, mysterious, and Tudor, cupped by trees and surrounded by deep purple bellflowers. Stained-glass windows sliced through dark-paneled rooms, so many windows that on bright days the house’s walls and floors were bejeweled with color.

Subsequent owners kept the glass but expanded the rooms, generation by generation, adding two wings of gilt and marble, a conservatory. A library. A koi pond, also surrounded by bell-flowers. By the time Charles Jolivet and his wife, Pauline, purchased the estate, the eldest fish in the pond were nearly thirty years old, and the imported turtles nestled along the shore much older.

The scent of ageless grandeur, the whiff of royalty that still lingered in the manor’s corners and crevices, suited Pauline quite well.

She was tall, almost too tall for a man’s comfort, but handsome Charles never minded, so neither did she. Pauline had a blue-blooded inheritance and a flair for the piano, chestnut hair and an aristocratic nose. Yet her eyes were warm and brown, and her laughter so infectious she’d had her choice of suitors. Both she and Charles were native Parisians; Pauline was fond of mentioning to her guests that her great-grandmother was the only one in her family to survive the Revolution’s guillotine.

But France was not meant to contain them. Utilizing Pauline’s lofty connections and his own grit, Charles proved a singular success as a businessman, so even though they had first met as teens, giddy in Paris, now as a married couple they owned vineyards in Provence, a flat in New York, and, of course, Winter Queen, the home where they had decided, mutually, to raise their three children.

Alfred, the youngest, blond, stubborn, and adventurous.

Inez, the middle child, blue-eyed, a dreamer who heard music in the woods no one else could, and who could replay it by memory (for the unbelieving) on her violin.

And Marguerite, the eldest, who had inherited her mother’s glossy chestnut hair and vivacious laugh, but also an enthusiasm for independence and creativity that surpassed even Pauline’s. Her spirit was not so much wild as it was genuinely unchained to convention. Of the three younger Jolivets, she was the natural leader.

Even before she’d mastered her alphabet, Marguerite invented feral dances and rambling plays, persuading her siblings to perform alongside her for their parents and the nanny and footmen and maids. In her plays, she was nearly always a princess, with Inez as her faithful handmaiden, which left Alfred (once he was old enough) to perform the role of either dragon or knight. He much preferred to be a dragon, roaring and stomping. So Pauline and Charles sat through a good many nursery performances about princesses slaying dragons, with Inez kneeling in terror—or awe, or joy—in the background.

It was an enchanted life for a child, even if the locals muttered under their breath about how bohemian the Jolivets were, with their Continental ways and rambunctious children tearing through the pastures and forests. One notorious story concerned the time the family had stopped by the Ruby Rabbit for supper. When six-year-old Marguerite had been offered a serving of the pub’s famous cod and chips, perfectly golden and steaming hot, she’d turned up her nose and declined the plate, haughtily demanding pot-au-feu instead.

As the years passed, Marguerite heard echoes of the tale but honestly had no memory of it. The truth was, she adored fish and chips; she adored her English life and couldn’t imagine that she’d ever disparage either. But, of course, she also loved France and the long, supple rows of grapevines composing their vineyards, the acres of fragrant soil and ancient crush houses scented of green and yeast. She loved New York, too, where she had been born. Their flat in Castleton was nice enough, but going into the city, walking along the streets and lanes of Manhattan, felt like visiting another world, under another sun, everything scintillating and glamorous and diamond-bright.

Broadway, with its luminous lights and theatres looming tall as castles, was especially enthralling. One the best evenings of her life was when her parents took her to see The Shop Girl at Palmer’s Theater for her ninth birthday, and on that night, Marguerite’s dreams swelled beyond the boundary of herself and overflowed. She didn’t have to pretend to be only a princess. On a real stage, in front of a real audience, under flattering hot Fresnel lanterns, she could be anyone she wished.



THERE WERE OTHER luminous lights dotting her life, although it took her a while to realize it. Friends of her parents, men and women who moved through the parlors of Winter Queen with an almost uncannily similar elegance: ebony tailcoats, cravats pinned with rubies or pearls; silk dresses with hems that hissed along the floor or layers that rippled along the air; low heels, satin gloves, cultured voices.

There were formal dinners the children were not invited to, confined as they were to the nursery on the top floor. (Someday, Maman promised, when pressed by her eldest.) There were entertainments they were sometimes invited to, piano recitals by Pauline, arias sung by opera singers, lectures about oil painting or fan-making or botany. Once there came a rough bearded man who gave a talk about the perils of his voyage to the Antarctic and back. For a full three months afterward, Alfred insisted he was striking out soon to see it for himself, if only Mother and Father would lend him a ship.

Yet, by and large, these guests were simply sir or ma’am to the children, or monsieur or madam, or signor or signora. For years, very few really stood out, not even to the observant Marguerite. But one evening …

She was ten, and it was green April in Medmenham. The early, tender days of spring, when the cold fist of winter had finally loosened enough to allow yellow cowslips and delicate bluebells to uncurl from the earth, and the trees in the woods sparkled with rain instead of snow. Up in the nursery, Marguerite had been restless in her bed, her quilts pushed into a lump by her feet. Mother and Father were having another of their long, laughing dinner parties, and even through the floorboards, the company tonight seemed especially boisterous.

Both Inez and Alfred slept soundly, but Marguerite felt a prickling along her skin, a dryness to her eyes. She could not relax; she could not sleep. She sat up, shoved her feet into her slippers, found her robe, and crept out of the room.

She knew from experience how effortless it would be to ease open the connecting door of the library to the west drawing room, where most of Winter Queen’s guests lingered over sherry and cigars after dinner. How she could press her face against the seam of the opening—staying low, staying invisible—and observe the glitter of her parents’ grand affairs.

She found her way on silent feet, freezing when she heard servants nearby, pressing back into the shadows. The manor was old, and she was young, but she’d already memorized its quirks, which stairsteps would creak no matter how lightly she trod; which corridors were dark or bright; the tucked-away nooks where maids would pause to gossip in whispers. The rhythms of the manor house were as familiar to Marguerite as her own pulse.

Tonight, the library was illumed, but only barely. An elderly fire burned in the hearth, tarnished light dancing along the bared teeth and scales of the wyverns carved into the mantlepiece. The tapers lining the chandelier above her were pale slender ghosts, but a pair of oil lamps with cut-glass bases had been lit in two corners, spreading a soft glow.

She lingered at the hallway entrance, listening, but heard nothing beyond the sounds of the soirée bubbling on in the drawing room, still a chamber away.

Marguerite crept forward; the air held its breath. Usually a draft or two snaked across the room, chilling her ankles, but tonight only the fire stirred, twisting and licking the logs piled behind the fender, orange embers flashing patterns along the charred wood.

The door to the drawing room was already cracked. She fixed her attention on it, that chink of bright warmth that arrowed through the opening, her heart already swelling over the river of words and sultry laughter and perfume that washed over her, promising her someday-future, promising enlightenment—when someone spoke.

Someone behind her.

“Child?” said an unfamiliar voice, soft and deep.

Marguerite turned so swiftly she bumped the door. It began to swing closed. She only barely caught the knob in time to stop it from slamming shut.

A gentleman sat in the dark, away from the fire and the two lamps. He was in her father’s favorite wingchair, the one Papa used to read the papers early in the morning, when the sun shone through the windows and lit the room to brilliance.

Marguerite dipped a hasty curtsy. “Oh! I’m sorry! Please don’t tell—”

She was already scurrying back toward the safety of the hall, but the man in her father’s chair only lifted an open palm to her, somehow stopping her in place even though she was nowhere near him.

She stared at him warily.

“Never fear,” he said. A thin wash of starlight from the window beyond him brushed silver along his hair and beard. “I know full well what it’s like.”

“What what’s like?” she asked, still ready to bolt.

“To peer in from the outside. To be small and kept apart, when all you want is to be included.”

Marguerite straightened. She’d never had an adult speak to her so, as if she were grown too. As if someone so old might understand her heart.

“Well,” was all she said … but she inched a step closer.

Her eyes were adjusting to the night. The man had not moved, so it was easier now to pick out the precise leftward sweep of his gray hair, the trimmed beard and moustache that ended in waxed points. The dull gleam of a watch chain that curved from one section of his coat to the other. His legs were crossed at the ankle, and the buttons of his tailcoat were undone, revealing a sizable belly covered in a satin waistcoat.

She remembered the image of Saint Nicholas on a card Inez had given her last Christmas, one of him seated on a throne with his red coat open to show his big belly, smiling almost just as this gentleman was smiling at her now, so kind, and before she could stop herself, Marguerite blurted, “Are you Kris Kringle?”

For an instant, he seemed affronted—or maybe just surprised; his bushy eyebrows lifted, his eyes on hers. Then his smile deepened. “Why, child? Do I resemble Santa?”

“Yes,” she said, and added, “well, not your clothing, of course. But your beard, and your hair and face and”—she gestured to his torso, then hurried on. “He carries a gold pocket watch like yours, to keep time on Christmas Eve.”

“Indeed,” said the man.

“But,” she went on, working out the logic, “why would you be here now? It’s not even Christmas.”

“Must I disappear after Christmastime?”

She tilted her head, thinking about it. “No. But … you should go back to the North Pole, shouldn’t you? Isn’t that your home?”

He made a small sound, not quite a sigh. “I suppose it must be.”

Marguerite was ten, not six or seven or eight. In the cool hush of Winter Queen’s library, she came back to herself, a girl more grown for her age than not.

“You’re not him.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Oh.”

She waited, but the man added nothing more. She rubbed her left foot against her right ankle, stalling, then asked, “Who are you, then?”

He gave her another smile, but this one seemed weary. “No one nearly as important as Santa Claus, I’m afraid.”

“But you’re someone important.”

“Some would say not.”

“No,” she replied, impatient. “Maman and Papa don’t invite just anyone here, you know. You must be important to someone.”

He looked up at her, still weary, still smiling. “I suppose you’re right. I must be, mustn’t I?”

He held out a hand to her, and after a second, she stepped forward and accepted it in both of hers. His skin was chilled; his fingers curled lightly around hers.

She felt it then, his fatigue, the sorrow that weighted his bones. On instinct, she bent her head, pressed a swift kiss to his knuckles.

“Don’t be sad about it,” she commanded, looking up again. “Whatever it may be, don’t be so sad.”

“No,” the man said. He released her hands. This close to him, she could tell that his eyes were pale, his hair mostly silver, and the chain across his stomach more golden than the fire. “Thank you, dear. I won’t be. I’m not.”

For the rest of her life, Marguerite Lucile Jolivet would entertain her friends and the press with the tale of how she’d once informed the Prince of Wales that he must surely be important, and of how he had eventually, reluctantly, agreed.

THE POND HELD a particular fascination for Inez. She would spend hours draped along its shore, her head bent and her long, honied hair sometimes brushing the water as she followed the languid, orange-red-white turns of the koi. The pond wasn’t overly wide, but it was deep—well over twelve feet—dug that way, perhaps, to ensure the survival of the fish through the winter. In the bitterest months, the surface would thicken into ice, and all the beautiful koi would sink into a stupor at the bottom, still breathing, but oh so barely.

Inez told everyone they were dreaming and then, one afternoon over tea in the nursery, wondered what fish would dream about.

“Juicy worms,” said Alfred.

“July,” said Marguerite.

“Their happiest selves,” said Pauline, hugging her younger daughter close. “They dream of waking up again in warmer waters, surrounded by all their friends, their husbands or wives.”

Marguerite looked up from the lukewarm crumpet she was smearing with jam; she respected Maman but didn’t feel it appropriate to let the comment pass. “Fish don’t have husbands or wives.”

Pauline smiled, reaching for her own crumpet. “Don’t they? Many creatures find their partners and bond for life, much as we do. Fish, swans, rabbits, snails—all of nature, all of hidden life—live nations apart from us. It would be foolish to pretend they don’t have their own secret realms. So turns the glorious world.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Fish!” said Alfred, and he fell into snorts of laughter.

THE AUTUMN OF the year that Marguerite would come to consider the end of her childhood arrived when she was fourteen. Too old for the nursery any longer, so she had her own room, but still young enough to secretly miss the comradery of that stuffy attic chamber, the soft snores of her little sister and brother, the old familiar toys and apple-green curtains framing a view of the rose garden three stories below. She’d kept a handful of her favorite dolls to sit on a shelf by her bureau, but the rest of the room was a harbinger of her future: gleaming furniture, crystal-prism lamps, dainty sparrows and wagtails hand-painted on butterscotch silk wallpaper, vases of fresh flowers. And, most significantly, a wardrobe of dresses with hems falling past her ankles.

But living rooms apart didn’t mean living a roof apart, and Marguerite and Inez remained each other’s devoted companions, with Alfred tagging along as he liked. On this fateful October day, the girls were returning from an early ramble through the woods. Inez had discovered a fairy ring the day before and was eager to show it to her sister, to ask her opinion whether it could be the work of Gloriana or Old Moss.

“Neither,” Marguerite had announced, after squatting down to examine the circle of velvety gray toadstools. She shifted, and the leaves at her feet rustled and cracked. “This ring belongs to Mab, clear as could be. See how perfect it is? See how in the sunlight the caps turn to silver?”

“Yes,” agreed Inez, solemn.

“Well, that’s Mab, certainly. Well done! She wouldn’t reveal this to just anyone, you know. You must be special.”

“I do hear her music,” Inez replied. In the dappled light, her face was heart-shaped and serious, but her eyes shone brilliant, a deeper blue than the heavens.

Marguerite stood up again, dusting off her hands. “Perhaps later on, after supper, we can steal back and leave some bread and milk for her and her court. She’d like that.”

“Oh, yes, let’s!”

So they were walking back to Winter Queen, following an olden path lined with rosebay and witches’ butter, and emerald wood sorrel with broad, nodding leaves. The days were sneaking by, shorter and shorter; even the nuthatches above them chattered about the cold. It wouldn’t be long before the first snow.

Every step they took along that forest path released a spiced scent of fallen leaves, of cinnamon and frost and dirt. Marguerite enjoyed that fragrance, the crunch of her boots against the earth, and when they left the woods behind them for the more formal grounds of Winter Queen, she lifted her face to the sky, to the sun, soaking up its meager warmth. She was lost in that moment, breathing in, breathing out, when Inez gave a sharp inhale and jerked to a stop.

Marguerite turned. Her sister had transformed into a pillar of salt, just like Lot’s wife, pale and frozen.

“What is it?”

Inez lifted a hand to point ahead of them.

Marguerite turned back again.

They were near the koi pond, its dark waters throwing darts of light. Flashes of orange and white churned beneath its surface, the fish agitated, moving fast despite the cold. But above the koi, larger and very awful, was the shape of a person. A man in a tattered jumper, his arms out, his legs bent at the knees to fade into the deep. His hair—the color of silt, of the murky depths—swept lazily back and forth with the swish of the water. He lay against a fall of rocks; a strand of algae had got caught near his temple, lifting and swaying.

His face was puffy, upturned, the color of the toadstools, swollen lips opened to a slit around his tongue, glazed eyes staring.

One of the koi rose up and nudged the man’s neck.

Marguerite spun back to Inez, clapped a hand over her eyes, and dragged her away, one step at a time.

“Don’t look! Do not look!”

But as they staggered past the pond, Marguerite herself couldn’t help but look, even though she didn’t want to, even though she knew it was a mistake.

Bloated flesh, sodden clothes, hungry koi. Dead eyes fixed upon the eternity of the midday sky.

She realized that she knew him. That the horror of his face still resembled the gardener’s son, known to drink and brawl as happily as he had tended the roses. A young man who whistled under his breath as he worked and always smelled of gin and sod.

She lowered her gaze again, still leading her sister, but it was too late. This particular mistake would sear itself in Marguerite’s memory like an ember burning through sheets of paper, creating its own particular scorch mark in her mind, slowly dimming and cooling, but never fully erased.





The voyage home seemed to stretch into forever. I know my time aboard the Saint Paul spun out into the same hours and minutes it usually does; I know that my dull mind was the problem. My vision was blurred. My body ached. Every moment felt like midnight.

But it gave me the opportunity to consider a good many things. During those midnight days and nights out there on the Atlantic, I found myself pondering the notion of courage. Of what it means to act boldly and fearlessly, even when confronted with death. As a girl, I used to believe that I was courageous. I would venture into the heart of the woods all alone. I would play my violin for Maman and Papa’s ocean of humanity, for strangers and royalty, even when I was so sick with nerves I wanted only to hide.

I realize now that I was only pretending to be brave because you were. You were the girl in the sun and I was your shadow, and I swear I wanted nothing more than to be just like you.

Bold and fearless.

But shadows are what they are, fleeting shade that only exists in the presence of strong light.



AUGUST, 1901

MEDMENHAM, ENGLAND

Inez hardly recalled a time when her life was not saturated in song. Gentle music, sometimes like a breeze teasing a weeping birch into flutters, or the lapping of the Thames along a shore of shiny mud. Sometimes stronger, like rain pelting glass, or even violent, like a storm at sea, which, thank God, she’d only endured once in her life, on a crossing from Cherbourg to New York. A November gale had wrenched their steamship up and down, back and forth, a banshee that never stopped howling. For two days, it had been impossible to eat, impossible to drink; even Papa, usually so hale, kept to his berth. When, desperate, she’d tried to sip a mug of hot beef tea brought to her by a steward, her chin was left scalded and the front of her pinafore soaked.

Of course, all of that was the music of nature. Even in its most barbarous form, Inez adored it. She could transcribe it, transform it, stroke the notes of it from her cherished rosewood violin so that everyone could hear it, not just her. Wood and string, horsehair and rosin were her tools, and the otherworldly, fey pieces she produced (sometimes forgotten the moment the notes lifted from her bow) were her offering to the great mystery of life.

More difficult were the compositions of man. Paganini, Bach, Chevalier de Saint-Georges—all required more precision than passion, it seemed to her. Yet her mother, accomplished pianist that she was, insisted that Inez learn how to play not just from her heart but from sheets of paper printed with other people’s notions of form and harmony.

“Learn the rules,” Pauline had told her, “before deciding to shatter them. Don’t leave room for anyone to claim your genius an accident.”

It turned out to be excellent advice. By learning the rules, how others had handed their music to history, how dead men with fevered imaginations and grand reputations had created symphonies, composed scores that could spur crowds to weep, Inez gradually began to understand the truth of her own small magic. She was her music. She was her violin. She was the sonatas and concertos and the mysterious, half-hidden songs from the woods. When she stood, slender and alone, in the middle of Winter Queen’s red salon and played for her parents’ silk-and-satin guests, she was one of them, listening as they did, entranced as they were. When she played for the moon outside in her robe and bare feet, she was its alabaster light.

This was her world, and at sixteen, golden and slight, she was a spark ready to burn even more brightly.

Both she and Marguerite had long ago overcome their Medmenham reputations as Other, at least as far as the male population was concerned. The difference was that, although her older sister could flirt and charm and pull practically anyone along in her wake, willing hounds tethered to her leash … Inez was different. A friendly smile from a boy would either baffle her or embarrass her, depending.

A walk to the village on the most mundane of errands would end up with the two of them drawing a flock of interested fellows. The Jolivet girls were now considered fresh and lovely, local enough to matter, unusual enough to intrigue. And it certainly didn’t hurt that their parents were intimates of the king. The good people of the parish were many things, fishermen and shopkeepers, doctors and gentry, but loyalty to the crown was the common thread that bound them tight.

Marguerite, of course, could manage them all. She would tilt back her head and pretend-laugh at a joke, and no one could look away. With her dark hair and eyes, her pale milky skin and bee-stung ruby lips—with that throaty, sultry voice—she was more goddess than girl, even at seventeen.

Inez could only stand awkwardly by as the boys (and a few older than boys) orbited her sister, wishing herself alone again, safe in her room at Winter Queen, safe in the solace of the music.

It was a miserable thing, to be so shy. But it was who she was, and the idea of trying to break free of it (beyond those transcend. . .