An American Beauty

by Shana Abe

Genres: Biographical

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of The Second Mrs. Astor returns with a spellbinding new book perfect for fans of HBO's The Gilded Age and readers of Marie Benedict, Karen Harper, and Fiona Davis. This sweeping novel of historical fiction is inspired by the true rags-to-riches story of Arabella Huntington—a woman whose great beauty was surpassed only by her exceptional business acumen, grit, and artistic eye, and who defied the constraints of her era to become the wealthiest self-made woman in America.



1867, Richmond, Virginia: Though she wears the same low-cut purple gown that is the uniform of all the girls who work at Worsham's gambling parlor, Arabella stands apart. It's not merely her statuesque beauty and practiced charm. Even at seventeen, Arabella possesses an unyielding grit, and a resolve to escape her background of struggle and poverty.



Collis Huntington, railroad baron and self-made multimillionaire, is drawn to Arabella from their first meeting. Collis is married and thirty years her senior, yet they are well-matched in temperament, and flirtation rapidly escalates into an affair. With Collis's help, Arabella eventually moves to New York, posing as a genteel, well-to-do Southern widow. Using Collis's seed money and her own shrewd investing instincts, she begins to amass a fortune.



Their relationship is an open secret, and no one is surprised when Collis marries Arabella after his wife's death. But "The Four Hundred"—the elite circle that includes the Astors and Vanderbilts—have their rules. Arabella must earn her place in Society—not just through her vast wealth, but with taste, style, and impeccable behavior. There are some who suspect the scandalous truth, and will blackmail her for it. And then there is another threat—an unexpected, impossible romance that will test her ambition, her loyalties, and her heart . . .



An American Beauty brings to vivid life the glitter and drama of a captivating chapter in history—and a remarkable woman who lived by her own rules.



"This story of one woman's ascent offers a fascinating look at the choices she made to become a Gilded Age titan." —Kirkus Reviews

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

I just suffered the most wretched dream. I found myself in a room of gold, a room so grand and exquisite it surely belonged in a palace. The tables and chairs and settees were all gilded and scrolled, inset with precious gems and pearls. Curtains and tapestries adorned the walls, every one of them cloth of gold, and a fire burned in a great cream marble hearth. (A wood fire, mind you, not coal.)

Beyond the windows shone sky, only sky; deep blue, flat and brilliant as a slab of polished turquoise.

In the center of the room was a banquet table, all laid out. There were dishes such as I’ve never seen before, never even imagined. Dream dishes, I suppose, roasted meats and nuts and soft cheeses, fresh fruits and confections, everything so mouthwatering, and I could not wait to dine.

I walked toward that table, saw my own arm reaching out. The sleeve of my gown was as fine and golden as my surroundings; I wore a link bracelet inset with carved cameos, exactly like the one in the window at Monsieur Monroe’s on Broad Street.

It looked so right around my wrist.

I reached for an iced petit four—chocolate, with little pink frosted roses—no gloves or fork, nothing so civilized, just my bare hand, and I picked it up and brought it to my lips and knew—oh, I knew how it was going to taste; knew how that delicious dark bite would melt across my tongue; knew how I would lick my fingers after I’d finished it all, sucking the very last hint of chocolate from my skin . . .

And that, of course, is when I awoke.

I cannot recall the last time I tasted chocolate. Or a petit four.

Today is my seventeenth birthday. And the clock is chiming downstairs, and I must hurry to work.

The best part about working for Johnny Worsham, aside from the fact that he paid reliably, and in cold Yankee cash, was that he insisted she never wear her spectacles while on the floor. Which meant that Belle never had to really see any of the men she served, not unless they came quite close, which some of them did. It was a blessing in disguise, although she could certainly smell Johnny’s customers well enough, and feel their hands, and still had to laugh coyly at their drunken (and usually filthy) jokes.

Most nights she was the Champagne Girl, a position which sounded both joyful and amusing, but in fact meant a great deal of meandering around the faro parlors balancing a heavy silver platter along one arm, loaded with cut-crystal flutes. By dawn, her back and legs would be afire.

Some nights, the Tuesdays and Sundays Franny had off, Belle was the Piano Girl, playing a series of tunes carefully selected by Johnny himself. There were thirty-two in total. She had memorized them all.

She couldn’t advance to the position of Dealer, the girls who received the best tips, because that would require her spectacles again. She’d tried to convince Johnny that she could read the cards well enough without them; the world was only slightly blurred, really, but he refused to take the risk. Johnny was flamboyant and debonair and deeply committed to one thing and one thing only, and that was his income.

She supposed she couldn’t blame him. Worsham’s illicit gaming saloon was the most popular in Richmond, not in the least because of the beautiful young women he hired to work in it. Currency of all sorts—cash, credit, conversation—drifted thick as cigar smoke through these ornate chambers, but it wasn’t so very long ago that Richmond had been in flames, Richmond had been beaten and shamed and starving, and no one had forgotten that.

Money meant everything now. Maybe it always had.

So, yes, really, being paid was the best part of her job. Clutching those coins in her fist when Johnny first handed them over, the weight of them in her pocket. The sound they made as she walked home with them, a silvery clinking song, barely there but there if you listened.

It was the finest song she knew. It was a song that meant today the earth spins on and still carries you with it. Today you will survive.

The curtains inside the gaming house were uniformly velvet, although the colors varied from room to room. Crimson or cypress, saffron or peacock blue, they hung in heavy folds from floor to ceiling, every one of them, blocking any hint of the world beyond the windows (all but a strategic few of which were nailed shut, anyway). Not a sliver of light could slip past those folds, nothing of the sun or moon or stars, nothing of the common cares or woes of life beyond the walls of the saloon. Time had been removed from Johnny’s place; there were no clocks to remind anyone of the ticking minutes; not so much as a corsage watch was permitted. If any of the girls needed to know the hour, they had to retreat to the kitchen and ask a steward.

Even the seasons had been erased here: the floor girls all wore the same low-cut gown of moiré silk, in the same shade of royal purple, no matter the month or the weather. Belle had surrendered a full six weeks’ wages to purchase it. Last February she’d nearly caught her death of cold from the perilous neckline (another two weeks’ wages gone), but Johnny still refused to let her wear a fichu, not even her mother’s fine black muslin.

It was August now, but in the cool, languid spell of autumn and winter, with the fires burning so cheerfully—and dangerously, for a girl who could not see the andirons all that well—in the house’s onyx hearths, Belle had learned to maintain a stately, constant pace around the rooms with her heavy silver tray. Standing motionless for too long slowed her heart, slowed her thoughts and her blood. Not unlike a mule bound to a millstone, she traveled the same path over and over, dreaming of her eventual escape.

Also like that unfortunate mule, Belle had come to anticipate with uncanny precision when her shift would end, when the sun was about to lift the sky from ink to ash to lilac, even though she couldn’t see it. At lilac she was done, she could put away her tray and remove her ridiculous dress and wrap herself in something warmer and go home. And sleep.

Which was why, perhaps, at first she didn’t notice the gentleman who had come to linger before her, standing there so quietly while the piano played and customers laughed and slapped down cards and Johnny’s Fancy Girls conversed in low cooing murmurs, like doves tucked away in a cage.

It was about five minutes away from lilac, by Belle’s internal reckoning. So her eyes were half-closed and her feet were aching and despite the fact that she had only three filled flutes on her tray, she hadn’t bothered to return to the bar for more.

The man simply did not exist, until he gently cleared his throat.

She did not startle. She didn’t spill a single drop of that precious champagne. Belle only opened her eyes fully again and pasted on a smile. She had to lift her chin to pretend to look him in the face; the man was extremely tall.

“Sir?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said in a pleasant baritone, somewhat familiar. “Do you have something besides champagne?”

“The punch, sir. If you’ll find Sadie—she’s the one with the long strawberry hair—she has the punch tray.”

“Punch,” the man echoed. “Which I believe also contains champagne.”

Was he smiling at her? Yes, probably. Yes, she thought so. He was bearded, certainly; she could make out that much, but most of the men around here were.

How deep his voice was, though. How clipped his words.

“Is there nothing else?” he asked, with no hint of smile in his tone.

“Madeira, a very good one. If you’ll just look for Ellen—”

“No,” he said.

“Whiskey? Amos will be pleased to serve you, sir, over at the bar. He also has sherry.”

“Something without spirits.”

“Well,” Belle said, because she was tired and sore and surely it was time to go home now, surely it was time to plod home, “I suppose you might try a glass of water. I wouldn’t, though, if I were you. I’ve seen the state of the cistern.”

There was a pause. Belle looked down, wet her lips. Looked up again.

“Can I help you with anything else, sir?”

The man studied her a moment—she could tell that he did, even if she could not clearly see it, and made certain her smile held steady. Then he said, “We’ve met before, Miss Lenore.”

(None of the girls at Worsham’s used their true names.)

“Do you recall it?” he pressed.

“Of course,” Belle replied, because suddenly she did. She lifted her free hand, her left one but it hardly mattered, and he took it in his own, a rough spot on his palm catching against the delicate lace of her mitt. “Mr. Huntington. Of course I recall. It was . . . what, two months ago?”

“Forty-one days,” he said, still holding her hand.

“How kind of you to remember me.”

“I’m afraid,” Mr. Huntington said, “there’s nothing especially kind about it. I have discovered that you are ensnared in my memory.”

“Ah.”

He released her hand. “It’s almost dawn. Are you done for the night?”

Her smile deepened. “I am. But I’ll be here again tomorrow, if you’d like to come by.” She turned away, inched the tray a little higher up her arm and said over her shoulder, “No doubt Mr. Worsham would appreciate your patronage.”

Belle had not always lived in Virginia. She’d been born in Alabama, in a cabin by a river that on warm nights captured tendrils of mist, sly dancing curls that her older sister Lizzie had tried to convince her was full of ghosts, although it wasn’t.

Look there, Lizzie would whisper, pointing through the sultry night air, through the eerie dark. Look there, Belle. A murdered settler woman in a bonnet, blood all down her skirts. A fur trapper starved to death, looking for meat.

Belle only ever saw mist.

But there could be no denying that the woods by that cabin had felt haunted, had felt green and dense and impossible to fully penetrate . . . though, up until the day her father died, she and her brothers and sisters had certainly tried, gathering twigs and pawpaws and deer berries, digging barefoot in the mud for watercress or tadpoles.

But then Papa had died. She’d been barely nine when the cholera had swept through and taken him. He’d been a mechanic—not a tinker, as she had heard murmured among the neighbors—but he’d traveled so much, she had hardly any memory of him before his death. Black hair, kind eyes. Big hands. That was it.

She supposed he might be a ghost now, maybe trapped back on that wide river. Or perhaps he was one of the wraiths lingering here, in Richmond; God knew there had to be thousands of them haunting the rubble of this town. She thought she could sense them sometimes: a fleeting sharp scent of char and smoke; a disembodied murmuration of despair, sorrow she could feel sinking into her bones.

How she loathed it here, where everything was grimy and crumbling and broken, even the things that were supposed to be working again, like the street lanterns, or the railroads.

The walk home from Worsham’s was short at least, only three blocks to the boarding house. And she didn’t have to brave it during the dark, because by the time Belle would step out the saloon’s back door, lilac would be transformed into morning. It might be rainy, or clear, or pink or blue or choked with coal vapor, but it would be morning, and it was hers, and she was, for a few precious hours, free.

When the wind chose to bless Shockoe Bottom from a certain direction, the streets and shadows smelled of freshly sawed lumber and the James River, a strong ceaseless flow near enough to hear but not, on Belle’s walk at least, to see. More often than not, however, the air hung with the particular rotting stink of slops and manure. Mosquitoes lingered in clouds above the stagnant puddles that lined the curbs, whining and zinging, tormenting any living creature passing by.

This morning was more a manure-and-mosquitoes kind of morning, but it was also one scented with the dozen or so leftover deviled eggs from Johnny’s that Belle carried in a wicker basket along her arm. So, manure and vinegar and warm eggs: she had to turn her face away from the basket to keep from gagging, even as her stomach rumbled.

Yarrington House (such a grand name for what was, in fact, a skinny, graceless two-story rectangle of red brick and peeling paint) sat close to the street, shutters open, the paving-stone steps swept. A solitary tulip tree had somehow managed to survive the war and the subsequent hunt for prime hardwood. It cast its shade across the lot, and it was under its branches that Belle lingered for a moment, listening to the sounds rising past the parlor windows, left ajar to catch what breeze they could.

A faint clattering of tableware. Her sister Lizzie’s voice, softly chiding. Footsteps along the squeaky front stairs, too rapid to belong to any of the boarders, she’d bet. Likely Richard or John, hurrying to the kitchen to gulp down their porridge before the school day began.

A fly buzzed by, landed on the scrap of gingham covering the eggs. Two more joined it before she waved them away.

She hated deviled eggs. She hated porridge. She hated having to eat breakfast when her body told her it was time for dinner and she wondered, for what had to be about the millionth time, what would happen if she didn’t walk up those steps and through that front door. If she just turned around and . . . left. Found something different for herself out there in the unknown corners of the world.

Something untethered. Something better.

But she was a mule, wasn’t she? Her feet were too used to plodding the same path, and porridge was better than nothing.

Belle went inside.

Much like the boarding house she had named after herself, Catherine Yarrington had been created for a different, some would say more gracious, time. Square-jawed and sturdy-boned, she had married for love, a decision she’d regretted nearly at once. But her beau had been so sweet, so shyly devoted . . . the well-bred Miss Catherine James Simms, who absolutely knew better, found that within weeks of meeting Mr. Richard Yarrington, apprentice mechanic (and comely, so comely), her thoughts and her heart were no longer her own. There was no stopping what was to come: a swift, forbidden courtship; a hasty wedding attended by none; a swelteringly hot honeymoon in the raw woods of Alabama—not even her home state—and child after child after child.

Five of her babies survived those years in the woods. Two did not.

Her hands, once so pampered and smooth, grew knobby and rough. Her hair, her golden-brown beauty, dulled into drabness. There were days she could convince herself that it was worth it, this life she had willfully chosen. That falling in love with Richard had been a gift, even when she went without supper so that her children might eat. Even when her husband was gone so often in search of work, leaving the brunt of poverty’s endless, everyday miseries at her feet.

Those fine days, however, were strung few and far between, even before the war.

The soft young girl Catherine had once been melted away. The woman she became soldiered on, because really, what was the choice? Richard had died and once again Catherine adapted; she learned; and by hook or crook, she did manage to put food on the table for her children, nearly every day. Their small souls were her light and her reward. And weren’t they such a reflection of her, these blessings of hers? Hadn’t they all turned out just like her, sturdy and square, built to walk the earth in hard, certain steps. One damned, plodding foot forward at a time . . .

Except for Arabella, her middle child.

Arabella, who had somehow missed inheriting her mother’s bony build, her mother’s iron jaw. Arabella, slight and delicate as a wildwood rose, with her dark tangle of ruddy curls and those lucent eyes that must have come from Richard’s line, as Catherine had never seen such a flowery, violet-gray color in any of her own kin.

Arabella, who was not her mother’s light, but her mother’s hope.

All of Catherine’s hope in these latter days, actually, resting on Belle’s lovely white shoulders. On Belle’s slender, straight back.

Dear Mr. Cobh,

Enclosed you will find $7 as partial payment of my balance owed to you. I beg your patience for the full amount, and also plead, most humbly, for you to reopen my tab at your butcher shop. My business has been lean of late. I have but three boarders at this time, two stevedores and a carpenter. The stevedores pay in cash but the carpenter is behind and promises me full payment for his stay within the week. When he settles his bill I assure you I shall send the money to you at once.

Most Sincerely,

“You’re late,” said Lizzie.

Belle paused at the entrance to the kitchen, returning her sister’s harried look with a level one of her own. Only seconds later, the wall clock in the hallway began to chime.

6:45. She wasn’t late.

“What’s in the basket?” Richard asked hopefully, thin and teenaged, hunched in a shepherd’s crook by the sink over his bowl of boiled buckwheat.

“Deviled eggs.”

Lizzie took the basket from her. “How old are they?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Belle, honestly.”

“A little risk is good for your soul. And I can’t imagine Johnny wants to poison us.”

Emma shuffled into the kitchen, yawning, dressed but her hair still bound in its sleeping braid, a brownish blond snake down her spine.

“Oh,” she said at last, at the end of the yawn. “What’s that smell?”

“Eggs,” Belle said.

“No.” Emma opened her eyes fully, glancing over at the stove. “Good gracious, are those sausages? My heavenly days!”

“They’re not for us.” Mother hurried in, a platter and tongs in hand, pushing past Emma and Belle to reach the skillet. “You know better, child.”

Emma and Lizzie exchanged a look. Belle was not included in it—Belle was seldom included in the private moments that transpired between her elder sisters—but she could read their expressions as clear as day.

Of course they’re not for us. Nothing good is ever for us.

And oh, even excluded, Belle knew that feeling all too well.

Mother was busy transferring the links, fat and glistening, to the chipped serving platter. “Mr. Cobh has been kind enough to extend our credit a bit. Just a bit. Enough to tide us over for the week—”

“When do we get sausages, too?” demanded John, twelve years old and wildly untidy, fidgeting on his stool by the chopping block.

“—for the week, until I’m able to repay him more.” Mother placed the tongs gently on the counter, wiped her hands on her apron. Without turning her body, only her neck, Catherine met Belle’s eyes, her mouth drawn tight.

“Tomorrow,” Belle said. “Tomorrow I should have some funds.”

Mother nodded, picked up the platter and walked in her taut, deliberate way out of the kitchen. Just beyond the doorway she paused, still without turning.

“We’ll make use of the drippings.” Her voice was low, firm; the voice of a woman accustomed to bargaining. “Red beans and collards. Won’t that be nice?”

All five of her children watched her walk on without waiting for an answer, the gloom of the hallway stealing her figure and any chance of meat for breakfast.

They squatted in the attic. Yarrington House had four bedrooms to let, references requested, deposit required. The main parlor was reserved for entertainment and the common dining room for meals. Richmond was rebuilding from its ashes—painfully, yes, but nonetheless—and there were nearly always men stopping by to inquire about weekly rates. But even if none of the four rooms were rented, the Yarringtons themselves did not reside in any of the bedrooms proper.

Belle would have killed to spend a single day sleeping in one of those clean horsehair beds made up by her sisters, but instead she survived in the attic: that airless, pitched space between the roof and someone else’s bedroom ceiling. A place where it was impossible to ignore the snores that rattled up from the boarders below, or the conversations or smells, or the pops and snaps that bedeviled the wooden skeleton of the house, always settling.

The trip up the ladder was short and perilous. There was no natural light, of course, not even an oriel window, and the trapdoor that opened up to the floor above was a rough-sawn square without a single guardrail. But Belle made the climb quickly, the bulk of her skirts twisted up into a rope that she wrapped like a python over her left arm. The old ladder protested her weight as it always did, threatening to give. It had been borrowed before the war from a cabinetmaker sweet on Emma, a beau who’d joined up and never returned. On warm days the slats still reeked of varnish and glue.

So this, this, was Belle’s true home:

Five camp beds (all that would fit), crammed against the eaves.

One chamber pot, secreted behind a leather folding screen.

One bureau, three trunks.

One oil lamp.

And shadows, so many shadows, lifting and falling, dark dancers that slipped along the canted walls.

She crossed to her cot, stripped out of her clothing, unrolled her stockings. Belle, the day dreamer, and Lizzie, the night, shared a single bed, and this morning her sister hadn’t bothered to remake the covers.

Belle was too tired to care. The porridge and toast she’d eaten sat like a rock in her stomach and both her feet throbbed; her shoes were only half a year old and already too small. She was going to have to find the money for new ones soon.

But that was tomorrow’s problem. All of her problems, right now, were for tomorrow.

She extinguished the lamp—she was always extremely certain to extinguish the lamp—crawled beneath the blankets and closed her eyes.

Mornings in Shockoe Bottom were not peaceful. Buckboards and donkey carts rattled along the cobblestones outside, mere feet beyond the house’s walls. Bells rang, more distant, from the ships along the river. Men jostled by, talking or laughing or sometimes fighting; dogs barked; women gossiped in their neighborhood clusters. Children scrambled to school or to the factories, and everyone only got louder as the day brightened.

But it was the grosbeaks living in the tulip tree that Belle heard most distinctly. They’d been there since spring, two parents, three babies, then just the parents again. They trilled and trilled, enormous sweet notes lifting from such tiny bodies, unbound, lifting straight up into the open sky.

The boarding house had come with a piano, a battered old upright missing five of the ivory veneers covering the keys. Catherine supposed the previous owners of the house had left it behind because it was worthless, or at least not worth the cost of hauling it anywhere else. But even without the five veneers, it did play, and once a year she paid a tuner to tend to it. It was an unnecessary extravagance, perhaps. Lizzie, who helped manage the books, certainly thought so. But Catherine had argued that the piano was a lure for boarders. That they could offer an hour or so of evening music to the men who stayed with them was a pleasant benefit of Yarrington House, one that could only help them bring in more paying guests.

“Oh?” Lizzie had said, caustic. “And who will be the lucky soul who gets to entertain everyone for an hour or so every night after a full day’s work?”

“You will take turns,” Catherine had replied, because she had taught all five of her children to play; it was one of the few legacies of her youth she was able to pass on. “Even the boys. And you will smile and be polite and the sky will not fall on your head, Lizzie. Arabella plays all night at Johnny’s twice a week and doesn’t complain.”

“Arabella,” Lizzie said, “enjoys better wages than I do.”

“We all enjoy her wages, and you will enjoy a brief hour—”

“Or so!”

“—of demonstrating your skills at the keyboard and filling the air with a little beauty. Lord knows we could use more beauty these days.”

After a good deal more moaning and complaining, Lizzie gave in. Four men knocked on their door during that first week, drawn by the notes drifting through the open windows, and even she had to acknowledge the cleverness of her mother’s plan.

Yes, it had been a fine idea and Catherine knew it, but the heart of the matter was actually this: the piano, dilapidated as it was now, was burl walnut beneath its discolored varnish, richly grained. The legs and moldings were carved with flowers and vines; the front panel was inset with more flowers and trimmed in gilt, delicate brushstrokes of real gold, faded but there.

Just like Catherine herself, once it had surely graced a house more grand than this. And also like Catherine herself, it endured these less noble times, these less beautiful times, with a sort of solid stubbornness that defied every disaster around the bend.

Thanks to those long-ago lessons from her childhood, her own children could coax the old piano to life, could play all the old songs Catherine had taught them. And she could take a slow breath and sit back for an hour—or so—and close her eyes, remembering the years when she never starved, when her bones never ached and each new dawn promised a sparkling new adventure, a glorious new day.

The looking glass hanging in the dressing chamber was old and badly foxed, centered in an elaborate, tarnished frame that resembled a sunburst of knives. Johnny told everyone he’d imported it straight from Venice but that might easily have been a lie, as Johnny Worsham lied about as effortlessly as a shark sliced through the ocean. Wherever it was from, the mirror was only large enough that three of the Fancy Girls could fit before it at the same time, and even then only if one of them crouched.

As there were never fewer than eleven girls on duty at a time, in those last few minutes before the saloon opened for business, the dressing chamber was crowded. Swirls of powder hung in the air, cheaply perfumed and faintly glistening, fairy dust brushed with lamplight. Pots of cream rouge, peach and rose and coral, were passed from hand to hand, and the line of girls waiting their turn before the mirror smoothed and straightened their moiré gowns with delicate fingers.

Belle, kneeling at the base of that silvery spotted glass, was adjusting the last few hairpins in her curls when Johnny walked in.

He did not knock. He never knocked; it was, as he was fond of pointing out, his house, not theirs.

“Arabella? Are you in here? Has anyone seen—”

“Johnny,” she called without rising, still concentrating on the pins.

“There you are.” He crossed to her side, careful to avoid the frothy purple heap of her skirts, and stood looking down at her, frowning.

Johnny Worsham was what any sane woman would call beautiful. Black-haired and whip-lean, he had the brightest green eyes Belle had ever seen and a smile that could melt frost. He spoke like a gentleman and dressed like a dandy, always vivid brocades and silks and stickpins of solid gold. For the briefest week of her life, back when they’d first met, she’d fancied herself in love with him.

But that was what all the girls thought in the beginning. It was one of Johnny’s greatest gifts, in fact: the ability not just to charm hearts but to dazzle them. To capture some tender young thing in that emerald gaze and tell her how lovely she was, how unexpectedly lovely, and wouldn’t it be a fine world if they might have the opportunity to get to know each other a little better? An opportunity that would, indeed, enrich them both for . . .