Death, Diamonds, and Deception

Book 5: Gilded Age Mystery

by Rosemary Simpson

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Private Investigators

Synopsis

Fall 1889: Lady Rotherton has arrived from London intent on chaperoning her niece Prudence through a New York social season to find a suitable husband. It's certainly not her niece's devilishly handsome partner in Hunter and MacKenzie Investigative Law. Aunt Gillian's eye for eligible suitors is surpassed only by her ability to discern genuine gems from nearly flawless fakes. At the Assembly Ball at Delmonico's, she effortlessly determines that the stones in the spectacular diamond waterfall necklace adorning the neck of the wife of banker William De Vries are fake.



Insisting on absolute discretion to avoid scandal, the banker employs Prudence and Geoffrey to recover the stolen diamonds pried out of their settings—priceless stones acquired by Tiffany, originally purchased for Marie Antoinette. Their search for a possible fence rapidly leads to a dead end: a jeweler brutally killed in his shop during an apparent theft.



The jeweler's murder is only the first in a string of mysterious deaths, as Prudence and Geoffrey pursue their elusive quarry. But the clues keep leading back to duplicity on the part of the De Vries family, who, it turns out, have a great deal to hide . . .

Release date: November 24, 2020

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

“Oh, Miss Prudence, it’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen!”

“It’s House of Worth,” Prudence MacKenzie said, which should have been sufficient explanation had Colleen Riordan been a properly trained lady’s maid. Which she was not.

Most lady’s maids were hired through exclusive employment agencies that demanded impeccable references and proof of extensive experience before referring them to their clients. But the late Judge MacKenzie’s daughter wasn’t like most society employers. She’d simply asked Colleen one day if she thought she would like to become her personal maid, and when the startled Irish parlor maid nodded yes, informed the housekeeper of the change. That was it.

She’d had to learn the fine points of cleaning and polishing jewelry, especially pearls, but her mother had taught Colleen early on how to sew a fine seam and press the wrinkles out of delicate fabrics without burning them. She could lace a corset tight enough to ensure it wouldn’t come loose no matter how long her lady wore it, and she had a natural talent when it came to doing hair. Prudence thought she never looked as fine as when Colleen Riordan arranged her light brown hair into gleaming coils that accentuated the slender length of her mistress’s neck.

Most important to her employer was Colleen’s proven loyalty during one of the most difficult periods of Prudence’s life. Judge MacKenzie had taught his only child that every human being was worthy of respect and should be rewarded for services rendered. In choosing to raise Colleen’s status within the household, his daughter had both honored the judge’s memory and paid a moral debt.

Prudence smiled as the still self-conscious and overawed maid ran a white-cotton-gloved hand over the shimmering fall of ivory satin hanging from the mirrored wardrobe. Its tight, V-shaped bodice shone with hundreds of tiny, pearlescent beads stitched in intricate swirling shapes that danced in the flickering gaslight before spiraling down into the bias cut skirt and looped train. Every stitch had been done by hand in Paris, where the gown had its own velvet-covered wooden mannequin sized to match exactly the proportions of the fortunate young woman who would wear it.

As Prudence had explained to a wide-eyed Colleen, the Paris fashion house of Charles Frederick Worth had clothed the likes of the French Empress Eugénie and the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. More to the point, Lillie Langtry, onetime mistress of the Prince of Wales and known the world over as the Jersey Lily, would wear nothing but Worth creations. New York City’s own redoubtable Alice Vanderbilt had stunned society with the master couturier’s electric light dress created for her never-to-be forgotten fancy-dress ball six years before. Prudence herself had been whisked to the French capital last year to be measured in Monsieur Worth’s salon during a memorable visit to her titled and formidable British aunt. Lady Rotherton had decreed that it was inconceivable for her niece to appear socially in anything but the latest Worth sensation.

“I suppose I can’t put it off any longer,” Prudence sighed. She hated wearing the whale-boned corset that reduced her waist to an absurdly unnatural size and made it impossible to take a deep breath. But tonight was the first Assembly Ball of the New York season, and the elegant Worth gown had been sized for the fashionable wasp-waist silhouette that could only be achieved by cruelly constricted lacing. “You might as well get started, Colleen.”

“Yes, miss.”

Colleen removed the cotton gloves she’d put on to ensure that no trace of human skin oil or perspiration marred the perfection of the Worth evening gown, then helped Miss Prudence step into the garment that would reshape the natural curves of her already slightly built figure.

“Hold your breath, Miss Prudence.”

“I’ll be lucky if I can breathe at all,” Prudence complained.

She’d tossed her corset onto the floor of her wardrobe and dared to ride astride during a recent and ill-fated trip to one of Georgia’s beautiful and deadly coastal islands, but such conduct in staid New York would not be tolerated. Society condemned as unbecomingly careless and indiscreet any such relaxation on the part of its young women, especially those who were as yet unmarried.

“Breathing is highly overrated. I haven’t breathed naturally except in my bed for more than twenty years,” announced the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, former American socialite and heiress Gillian Vandergrift, from the doorway of her niece’s bedroom. She wore a midnight-blue silk Worth evening gown studded lavishly with clusters of tiny diamonds. A diamond and sapphire tiara was anchored firmly atop high-piled hair unmarred by a single strand of gray. More diamonds and sapphires dripped from her ears and cascaded down a beautifully rounded bosom. “Get on with it, girl. We haven’t got all night.”

“Yes, my lady.” Colleen gave an involuntarily hard jerk to her mistress’s laces, whispering an apology under her breath as Prudence took a small, stumbling step backward. Lady Rotherton frightened Colleen to death. Except for Mr. Cameron, the butler, every servant in the Fifth Avenue mansion was firmly under Her Ladyship’s exacting thumb, cowed into impeccable service and not a whisper of complaint except in the safe confines of the servants’ hall or an attic bedroom.

The dowager viscountess had been in New York for only two months, but Prudence’s aunt had picked up the reins of her niece’s everyday life the moment she walked through her late brother-in-law’s front door. And never for a moment slackened her hold. Lady Rotherton had sailed from London and endured seven days of rough Atlantic seas to chaperone her unmarried niece through a New York social season, and chaperone she would. The matter of finding a suitable husband for her sister’s only child was never far from her mind, although Prudence was proving to be annoyingly uncooperative.

“You can’t wear diamonds until you’re married, of course, but your mother’s pearls will do very nicely,” Lady Rotherton continued, running one slender forefinger over the earrings and necklace that Sarah Vandergrift MacKenzie had worn at her debut many years ago. The sisters had been so close in age and looks that people often mistook them for twins, but Gillian had been ambitious for a title and far more adventuresome than the quiet Sarah. She’d been one of the first American dollar princesses, as the tabloid press called them. So eager to see the world and experience life that she’d jumped without a second thought into a loveless, childless union that was fortunately both brief and, thanks to her father’s deft and farseeing hand with the marriage contract, lucrative.

In her more introspective and occasionally tender moments, Gillian wanted something better for Prudence. But for tonight’s ball, the devilishly handsome and wholly inappropriate Geoffrey Hunter would have to do. Prudence had refused to consider any other escort, and although Lady Rotherton was far from approving her niece’s choice, she had deemed it a battle not worth fighting. The main thing was to get Prudence back into society again.

Lady Rotherton didn’t doubt that Hunter would dance like a prince; men like him always did. Which, if nothing else, would draw all eyes to the vision of Prudence whirling across the ballroom floor in her devastatingly gorgeous Worth gown.

Catching her aunt’s approving nod, Prudence realized that she hardly recognized the sedate and serenely beautiful young woman looking back at her from the long, wood-framed cheval mirror. The Worth gown shimmered in the pale yellow gaslight and the pearls Colleen had fastened into Prudence’s ears and around her neck shone like dappled beams of moonlight. Pale gray eyes that usually flashed piercingly intelligent defiance looked back at her with wistful softness. The everyday Prudence she was accustomed to seeing had fled elsewhere for this one night.

That young woman had determinedly forged a new existence for herself during the past year and a half. She had gradually replaced the black dresses and heavy veils of mourning with plainly cut dark gowns and businesslike suits more suited for a secretary than a wealthy heiress. But it had always been for a purpose: to achieve something of the individual independence society denied a woman of her social standing but her father’s ambitious tutoring had taught her to yearn for and seek to attain.

With Lady Rotherton’s arrival, Prudence had been forced to balance on a tightrope where the footing was anything but sure and familiar. Nothing had brought it home to her as convincingly as seeing the exquisitely gowned and bejeweled figure in her bedroom mirror. Definitely Lady Rotherton’s Prudence. Unequivocally not the woman Judge MacKenzie’s daughter had been working so hard to become.

It was probably past time that aunt and niece had the potentially combative marriage discussion Prudence had been avoiding.

Tomorrow. Once the first Assembly Ball was over. It was too late now to back out of one of the premier social events of the season.

About one thing, Prudence had been adamant. The expensive Worth gown would remain in the wardrobe, unseen, unappreciated, unworn, unless Geoffrey agreed to be her escort. And if he didn’t, she would personally call down Lady Rotherton’s wrath on his handsome head.

He had bowed over her hand with all the innate gallantry of his Southern gentleman’s soul and vowed he would not want to be anywhere else except at her side on the night of the first Assembly Ball.

“I know it’s not an event to your liking,” she’d told him. “But I don’t think I could stand all the vapid conversations and the insincere flirtations if I didn’t have someone with whom I could occasionally exchange a few choice words. Or a growl.”

“Growl all you want, Prudence. I’ll inveigle Ned Hayes into coming with us. He rarely replies to the invitations that come his way, but his name still shows up on all the best guest lists. He’ll drive Lady Rotherton into teeth-grinding fury, but with so much charm that she won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

“That’s very much her style also.”

Although he would never admit it to his endearing and always fascinating business partner, ex-Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter was a far more social being than he chose to let on. Mastering chivalrous manners with effortless ease had been an important part of growing up a gentleman in the South, even after the war ravaged so much of what had once been hauntingly beautiful and undeniably cruel.

Over the years, even as Geoffrey rejected slavery and the world it had created, he came to treasure the remembered moments of grace, the sway of women’s skirts in candlelit ballrooms, the light touch of a lace-gloved hand on his arm. Even more contradictory, he understood the convoluted reasoning behind Bible-sanctioned ownership of fellow human beings, and while he repudiated it for himself, he could not hate the men whose way of life it once was. They were his people. Since his conscience would not allow him to join them, he had had to leave. The life he carved out for himself in exile in the North would always be marked by pangs of loss.

Tonight, though, he would put aside everything but pleasing Prudence. And for the first time, he would be able to hold her in his arms. As they danced.

“I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” Ned Hayes said, leaning forward to peer out the side window of the carriage that was about to make the turn onto Fifth Avenue to the front entrance of the MacKenzie mansion. “I haven’t had a pair of dancing shoes on since college days.”

“I know for a fact that isn’t true,” Geoffrey said.

He caught a glimpse of Ned’s face as they passed a gas streetlight. His friend looked good, better than he had in years. Thoroughly dried out, off the white powder, bulked up with the food his man Tyrus cajoled him to eat and daily boxing sessions in an improvised basement gym where a coal furnace drove away the damp of a New York winter.

Ned had survived scandal, the two worst addictions to which a man could fall victim, and the police department that had made him its scapegoat and nearly destroyed him. At one time, not so very long ago, fellow cops who had known him and newspaper reporters who’d followed his story had been taking bets on how long Ned would last. No more. He’d outfoxed them all and crawled his way back from the brink.

Like Geoffrey, Ned was a reluctant Southerner. His Rebel mother had coerced him into the Confederate Army at the age of sixteen, carrying him off with her when she fled her Yankee husband and returned to the plantation she’d never ceased to regret leaving. For love. Which hadn’t lasted.

Ned had fought because he’d had to. He hadn’t been given a choice, and more than once he’d prayed for death rather than the dishonor of what he was doing or the deeper shame of deserting. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. He lived alone now in the home his mother had created as a bride, amid his dead father’s books and her memories. With Tyrus, the ex-slave into whose arms she’d placed him as a newborn.

“Tell me again about Prudence’s aunt,” he said.

“What more do you need to know?” Geoffrey asked. “She’s a widow, the dowager Viscountess Rotherton, elder sister to Prudence’s late mother by two years, and a member of the Prince of Wales’s Marlborough House Set.”

“What made her decide to come back to America?”

“She wants Prudence to make a suitable marriage.”

“Which means someone with an impeccable family background and a fortune too enormous to calculate. Too bad there won’t be a title if the groom is American. What does Prudence say about it?”

“She’s been remarkably silent on the subject.”

And that’s what worried Geoffrey. It wasn’t like Prudence to keep her opinions to herself. If anything, they’d talked more frankly to one another during the journey back from Georgia than ever before. He’d felt hidden places within himself that hadn’t seen light in years beginning to open again. The expression in Prudence’s gray eyes had often seemed speculative, as though she were looking at him with fresh awareness of who he was now and who he had once been. He had felt her edging closer to where he wanted her to be when he posed the question whose answer he had to be sure of before he asked it.

Then Lady Rotherton had swept down the gangplank of RMS Teutonic, the White Star Line’s newest, most luxurious, and fastest Atlantic steamship. And everything changed.

“At least she inveigled the old bat into allowing you to be her escort tonight,” Ned said. “That’s something.”

“I doubt you’ll think of Lady Rotherton as an old bat once you’ve met her,” Geoffrey said.

The sight of her took his breath away.

And as Ned Hayes bent over her gloved hand, he wondered why Geoffrey hadn’t thought to tell him that Lady Gillian Rotherton, dollar princess and imposing dowager countess, was also one of the most beautiful women on either side of the Atlantic.

Crowds of curious onlookers gathered outside Delmonico’s Restaurant to watch the three hundred attendees at the first Assembly Ball of the season descend from their carriages. Bursts of enthusiastic applause greeted faces made familiar on the society pages of weekly magazines and the tabloid press.

The women’s jewels flashed under bright arc lamps that had replaced the soft yellow glow of gaslights along Fifth Avenue. Furred cloaks parted to provide a glimpse of embroidered silk and satin gowns costing more than a working man could earn in a lifetime. The city’s most powerful entrepreneurs, dressed uniformly in white tie and tails, millionaires all, occasionally tipped a top hat or flashed a brief mustachioed smile.

The Delmonico’s staff had laid a broad stretch of red carpet across the wet sidewalk and an army of small boys equipped with short-handled brooms darted along the cobbled street, sweeping away steaming piles of dung as soon as they fell.

Each time the restaurant’s door opened to admit a new arrival, the shivering crowd outside was washed with warm, scented air and the tantalizing smells of a dinner menu whose delicacies were unpronounceable except by those who regularly traveled abroad. Consommé de volaille. Filets de boeuf aux champignons farcis. Pâté de foie gras en croûte. Salade de homard. Marrons glacés. Petits fours. And enough imported champagne to ensure that no guest ever held an empty glass.

Tomorrow’s newspapers would wax rhapsodic about the flowers, the music, the dancing, the food, the names of the great and near great who had graced the event with their presence. The Four Hundred saw each other several times a week during the three-month winter season, from the opening galas of the New York Horse Show through obligatory Friday nights at the opera, the debutantes’ introduction to society in December, Mrs. Astor’s annual January ball, and countless dinner parties, cotillions, teas, and at homes. Their exclusivity marked them as an elite breed set well apart from anyone less wealthy, less well connected, less fortunate than they.

Though she belonged to this select tribe by virtue of her mother’s Knickerbocker ancestry and her late father’s wealth, their arrogant snobbery and absurd rules of behavior annoyed Prudence MacKenzie no end. Yet it was the denizens of that world who ruled New York City, the financial and social capital of the country. The wheels of commerce and industry turned at their command, banks and stocks flourished or crashed at their bidding. Their investments in the dazzling array of new inventions transformed daily life for millions of their fellow citizens. The wives of the moguls, led by an Astor and a Vanderbilt, dictated habits of dress and behavior that were slavishly followed by anyone with pretentions of belonging.

The Worth gown and suffocating stays Prudence was wearing tonight, for example.

She sighed.

“Almost there,” Geoffrey said quietly as the carriage inched forward toward the busy entrance to Delmonico’s.

He might have reached for Prudence’s hand had her aunt not been sitting stiffly upright beside her, radiating disapproval. She had made it clear as soon as Geoffrey extended his arm to Prudence as they left the MacKenzie home that he was there on sufferance only. He would be permitted one dance with Prudence, perhaps two. Under no circumstances was he to monopolize her time and attention.

Geoffrey had no intention of acceding to Lady Rotherton’s wishes.

Ned Hayes cleared his throat as if to speak, but the dowager viscountess fixed him with a glare that dried up every drop of saliva in his mouth.

As they climbed the curved stairway to the ballroom on Delmonico’s second floor, Prudence dug her gloved fingers into Geoffrey’s arm. Stay with me. Don’t leave my side. Her dance card and a tiny gold pencil dangled from one wrist. A girl had to be careful not to allow it to be filled in too quickly and never to bestow too many dances on a casual acquaintance.

Though she hadn’t appeared at a major social event in more than a year, Prudence knew she would attract would-be suitors as soon as her presence and the end of her mourning period became known. The MacKenzie name, family background, and fortune made her an attractive prize despite the reputation she’d acquired for eccentricity. She needs a firm hand, everyone had thought when she’d gone into partnership with Geoffrey in Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law. No doubt there were at least a dozen eligible bachelors who thought they could provide just that.

Lady Rotherton led the way toward where Mrs. Astor stood in regal black velvet and diamond-bedecked splendor beside her devoted shadow, Mr. Ward MacAlister. Between them, they dictated who was in society, and who was not. Who received coveted invitations to the season’s most important functions, and who was forced to pretend illness or a sudden need to leave the city. Who was allowed to approach the acknowledged queen of the Four Hundred and who was condemned to remain on the fringes of the entourage that eddied around her wherever she went.

Lady Rotherton, proud possessor of an English title, albeit through marriage, could boast antecedents as correct in every way as the former Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. Though twelve years Mrs. Astor’s junior, Gillian Vandergrift had dared to outshine her during a brief debut season before setting sail for England and her future. Now Gillian was back, a dowager peeress and favored intimate of the Prince of Wales. With an unmarried niece to launch. As she had told Prudence, any titled guest was a feather in the cap of a New York hostess. Wives of the American upper classes were besotted with the British aristocracy.

“Now’s our chance,” Geoffrey whispered as Mrs. Astor stepped forward to greet Lady Rotherton amid a fluttering chorus of welcoming twitters from a bevy of ladies closing in on the distinguished visitor.

“Quick, before she turns around,” Prudence agreed, eyes twinkling with the mischief of escaping her aunt’s notice.

“Shall we dance?” he asked, lips twitching with the effort not to smile too broadly.

Seconds later they were twirling across the ballroom floor, Geoffrey’s arm lightly but securely around Prudence’s waist, their gloved hands intertwined, his eyes never leaving her face as pure pleasure made her eyelids quiver and sent a pink flush over her cheeks.

“You waltz divinely, Miss MacKenzie,” he murmured.

“As do you, Mr. Hunter.”

Prudence raised her face to his and nearly missed a step. There was a look in his dark eyes that she had never seen before, a kind of naked hunger that caused a tremor to run up her spine and a wave of heat to singe her lips.

Then it was gone. Before she could be certain it had been there at all, the look vanished and Geoffrey was himself again. Shuttered against inquisitiveness and impeccably well-mannered. Not quite aloof, but definitely and conventionally correct.

Prudence concentrated on the rhythm of the waltz, willing the bright spots on her cheeks to fade before anyone remarked that Miss MacKenzie certainly did look a bit odd tonight.

William De Vries caught sight of Lady Rotherton and her niece as soon as the ripple of interest in the American-born member of Britain’s nobility made her arrival impossible to ignore. The moment she began to shake herself free of Mrs. Astor and her court, he steered a course in her direction, majestically bejeweled Lena on his arm. He glanced at his wife, a frown forming between heavy gray eyebrows.

“Are you quite well, my dear?” he asked. She looked pale and distracted, as though her mind were somewhere else.

“Quite well, William,” Lena answered. “It’s just that the heat takes some getting used to. After the cold of the drive over.”

Three hundred formally dressed men and women crowded into Delmonico’s ballroom where stands of green and red poinsettias and banks of scented candles had banished any trace of fresh air. New York’s most famous restaurant was newly electrified, but nothing flattered a lady’s skin like candlelight.

Waves of French perfume and the redolent odor of the men’s Macassar oil hung over the dancers’ heads, beads of perspiration ran down women’s backs to their corseted waists, and more than one gentleman quaffed iced champagne like water. All along the walls, mothers and chaperones fanned themselves while keeping eagle eyes on the young ladies whose value on the marriage market must not be sullied by indecorous behavior.

“My dear Lady Rotherton.” William De Vries bowed over the dowager viscountess’s hand. “Please allow me to present my wife, Lena.”

Lena De Vries smiled and inclined her head ever so slightly, not quite a bow because she was, after all, the citizen of a country that had chosen not to burden itself with an aristocracy.

“I am so delighted to finally meet you, Mrs. De Vries. Every time your husband has come to London I’ve chastised him for not bringing you with him.”

“The only thing that takes me to London is business, as you very well know,” William chided.

“I venture half of New York’s Four Hundred come for our spring season,” Lady Rotherton continued. “We’re quite inundated by them.” She thought Lena De Vries looked very odd, as though she were about to faint, and wondered if her maid had remembered to put the tiny vial of smelling salts into her reticule. She herself never succumbed to the vapors, but a swiftly extended vial of smelling salts was often the tool that pried open a cache of interesting and scandalous secrets.

William nodded toward a passing Delmonico waiter, who immediately extended a silver salver of champagne glasses. Lena sipped delicately at the bubbly golden liquid. Lady Rotherton reached for a second flute before either of the two people standing before her realized she’d downed the first with a well-practiced hand.

“And where is our precious Prudence?” William asked, his banker’s calculating gaze sweeping over the dance floor.

“Dancing with that dangerous-looking Mr. Hunter,” Lady Rotherton said. “What is it that makes young girls want to slip away from their chaperone’s notice? They always think they’re having us on, but of course they’re not.”

Lena De Vries’s spectacular diamond waterfall necklace and matching pendant earrings flashed translucent lightning in the reflected candle flames, attracting more than one jealously appraising glance. Lady Rotherton thought that not even Mrs. Astor’s much celebrated diamonds could match Lena’s display tonight and wondered idly what revenge the queen of New York society would exact for being eclipsed.

The conversation eddied around the former Gillian Vandergrift while she nodded regally from time to time, dragging out one of her stock phrases that meant absolutely nothing but could safely be used to comment on any number of subjects. The only person who ever merited her full attention was the Prince of Wales. He had too well-developed an ear for sycophantic fawning ever to be fooled by anything less than sincerity. Dear Bertie. So desperately unhappy, so shut out of real power in his long wait to be king.

The diamonds around Lena De Vries’s neck caught Lady Rotherton’s eye again. There was something about them. What was it William had confided on one of those trips to London? Loose stones once owned by Marie Antoinette and destined to grace the guilloti. . .