The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

Genres: Biographical; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Madeleine Talmage Force is just seventeen when she attracts the attention of John Jacob "Jack" Astor. Madeleine is beautiful, intelligent, and solidly upper-class, but the Astors are in a league apart. Jack's mother was the Mrs. Astor, American royalty and New York's most formidable socialite. Despite their twenty-nine-year age difference and the scandal of Jack's recent divorce, Madeleine falls headlong into love—and becomes the press's favorite target.



On their extended honeymoon in Egypt, the newlyweds finally find a measure of peace away from photographers and journalists. Madeleine feels truly alive for the first time—and is happily pregnant. The couple plans to return home in the spring of 1912, aboard an opulent new ocean liner. When the ship hits an iceberg close to midnight on April 14th, there is no immediate panic. The swift, state-of-the-art RMS Titanic seems unsinkable. As Jack helps Madeleine into a lifeboat, he assures her that he'll see her soon in New York . . .



Four months later, at the Astors' Fifth Avenue mansion, a widowed Madeleine gives birth to their son. In the wake of the disaster, the press has elevated her to the status of virtuous, tragic heroine. But Madeleine's most important decision still lies ahead: whether to accept the role assigned to her or carve out her own remarkable path . . .

Release date: August 31, 2021

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

The first time she saw him, she was essentially invisible: thirteen years old, a schoolgirl on holiday, her hair dripping from the sea, sleek wet mermaid curls clinging to her arms and back. She was nestled, legs tucked under her, in the coarse silvery sand of Bailey’s Beach, her ruffled cap tossed beside her. Her nose was tingling hot and she didn’t care, because it was breezy and warm, and the sun was a high glorious pinpoint, and if it were ladylike in the least to stretch out all the way in her bathing costume to make a sand angel, she would have.

But Madeleine was not five; she was thirteen. And as it was just after eleven in the morning—the hour that only ladies were welcome to swim in the red algae-choked waves—Mother was bobbing nearby. She was always nearby. Maddy’s removal of her cap was transgression enough.

Gulls screamed and darted overhead. Madeleine lifted her chin and followed their loose circles, ragged-tipped wings, dragon shadows dipping and spinning against the sky.

A gaggle of girls a few years younger than she stood shrieking at the shoreline, kicking froth and sand at each other, too timid to venture all the way in but too aware of their bare shins and feet to resist the cool water. They were nearly louder than the birds.

Like Madeleine and every other female on the beach, the girls wore black. Black bathing bloomers, black shirtwaists with fat blossoming sleeves, everything from their necks to their knees down to the bones of their wrists thoroughly concealed. It was as though each and every summer noon, the exclusive strand of Bailey’s Beach became haunted by covens of fashionable, water-soaked witches.

A pair of carefully plodding bays hauled a carriage past the long arabesques of seaweed that marked the tideline, stopping at the very last stretch of dry sand. Blue-liveried footmen leapt free of the carriage; large, mysterious bundles were liberated from their leather straps in the back. Maddy twisted to watch as the men—who weren’t technically allowed on the beach right now, but they were only servants, so that was all right—swiftly erected a saffron-striped tent, complete with rug, wicker chair, and folding table, and then returned to the carriage to assist a solitary lady down to the sand.

She was white-haired, stooped. She squinted crossly at the sudden hard light but was so quickly guided inside the tent that Maddy barely had time to take note of the glimmer of jet beading on her dress and the garnet brooch pinned to her bosom. As soon as the lady was seated, a wind-tousled maid began unpacking a hamper for her meal.

“Ha,” breathed a voice in Maddy’s ear, accompanied by the sound of a body dropping down onto the grit beside her. Madeleine darted a look at her older sister (grinning and capless and somehow not at all sun-scorched), then looked back at the saffron-tent woman.

“Are you not awed?” Katherine drawled, leaning back on her arms, examining nothing but the unflagging sea rolling in before them. “Are you not suitably cowed?”

“Should I be?” Maddy asked.

“Yes, you certainly should be, little girl. That is Mrs. Astor. The Mrs. Astor. Dare to stare her in the eyes and you’ll turn into stone. Or is it burst into a pillar of flame? No, wait! You’ll be struck from the social register and die a shriveled old maid.” She gave an exaggerated shudder, still grinning. “The horror!”

Madeleine knew, of course, who Mrs. Astor was. Everyone knew. It was just that she had never seen her in person before; the Forces and the Astors didn’t move in the same social circles. Maddy had always imagined the matriarch of the venerable Knickerbocker set as a woman grown wiry and vicious and strong, with a smile of sharpened daggers and the fingernails of a warlord.

Not this. Not this stout, elderly creature who shied from the sun and had her lobster cut into cubes for her by her maid on her gilded china plate.

“And who is that?” Maddy asked, tilting her head toward the hatted man who was crossing the sand in long, leggy strides toward the tent. (He was definitely not a servant, but no one stopped him.)

“Ah,” replied her sister, in a tone of both confidentiality and superiority. She flicked a strand of drying kelp from her thigh. “That, my dear, is her son, the colonel.”

Oh, Maddy thought.

He was comely. She’d heard that he was, but only through school gossip, and comely in schoolgirl parlance might as well mean not so drippy-nosed, or not quite yet bald, or not so fat as his horse.

But Colonel John Jacob Astor, gentleman, inventor, and war hero, was comely, in an older, hawkish sort of way, rather like her father . . . but on second thought, not at all, because the colonel was fair as her father was gray, mustachioed as her father was not; fit and tall as . . . well, as only himself. Because he moved so quickly, she only just managed to get a good look at him, but what she noticed—what she would remember for the rest of her life from those few warm breezy seconds on that rough Rhode Island beach—was that he was smiling as he walked toward his mother. That he was easily conquering the sand, graceful and determined. And that, for the smallest inclination of a moment, he turned his head and caught her eyes and noticed her, there on the sand not so far off.

And then, for an instant, he was smiling at her.

It was as though a dart of light from the summer sun had pierced Madeleine’s heart. A dart, sweet and wonderful and terrible, right through her heart.

Then he was gone, swallowed by the interior of the tent. Someone untied the flap of the entrance and it fluttered closed, and then there was only saffron and white, and the gulls still calling out overhead.

“Maddy,” said her sister, placing a hand on her arm. “You look so queer. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Madeleine said. She sat up straight, wiped a hand across her brow. She licked her lips and tasted salt and sand, relentless, pervasive in her every crease and pore. “Right as rain.”

The next time she saw him, she was not invisible. She was seventeen and draped in greenery: ropes of ivy, braids of ruffled roses, daisies, bright clouds of candytuft (the closest the stage manager could come to rue, sadly unavailable) woven through her dark brown plaits. She was singing, mad, twirling at times across the stage so that her skirts would lift to reveal the smart new boots she’d bought especially for the play.

She was Ophelia—tragic, bereft Ophelia—and had practiced singing her mad, sad lines until her voice had gone hoarse and she’d had to rest it for two days just to speak again without a rasp.

“He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone; at his head a grass-green turf, at his heels a stone.”

After weeks of rehearsals, the Junior League society had the honor of presenting Hamlet in Bar Harbor for two nights only (the Casino’s theater was ever-popular and only borrowed, after all), and this was the second. The previous night’s opening had left Madeleine shaking with nerves, but tonight she felt better; she was a creature composed of flaming hot candle-lanterns and greasy face paint and flowers, saturated in poetry and song. The heels of her boots struck the stage so lightly, she felt at times she might actually be floating.

Beyond the lights lining the edge of the proscenium, beneath the darkened stained-glass chandeliers, sat the hushed, breathing beast that was the audience. Except for the occasional muffled cough, the subtle twinkle of diamonds in earrings and collars, the beast was unseen, unheard. It was there and not there, anonymous. At least until it roused itself into applause.

But—

On her third twirl (“You promised me to wed. So would I ha’ done, by yonder-sun—”), she saw him. She had no idea how she’d missed him before; he was in the front of the house, very nearly center. A demon or a ghost could not have materialized more suddenly out of the shadows. Colonel Astor kept his focus fixed exactly on her, his hands folded in his lap. In the half-light cast from the stage, the planes of his face gleamed dim and harsh.

The toe of one boot scraped the stage; Madeleine stumbled. She stopped and turned in the abrupt silence, then looked upstage and realized the other members of the cast were all staring expectantly at her.

It must be her line. Her mind was a fizzy blank.

She stared back at them helplessly, the roar of her blood louder and louder in her ears.

In the back of the house, someone sneezed once, twice.

Dorothy Cramp, who had been so bitter with envy that Madeleine had won the part of Ophelia that she’d threatened to renounce the League, glared at Madeleine from beneath the tin of King Claudius’ crown.

“How long has she been thus?” Dorothy said again, biting off every word.

The fizziness in Madeleine’s brain cleared; she remembered her song, her wild dance, what to do. She got through her next lines and then swept off the stage in a storm of petals and leaves, and spent the rest of the show watching him from behind a slit in the stage right curtain.

After the curtain call, which included a pelting of bouquets, backstage was a jumble of cast and crew, everyone talking and laughing. Props teetered in precarious piles; willowy young women in wigs and trousers jostled back and forth, abandoning their wooden swords and bulky vests, hugging and kissing and telling each other how perfect it all was, how spectacular, and how next year they would tackle Molière or Marlowe and all the world would bow at their feet.

Madeleine accidentally bumped shoulders with Dorothy and smiled—part apology, part dare—but Dorothy ignored her and walked away.

By the velvet-swathed entrance to the house stood Mrs. Ogden Mills, a matron so prominent and formidable that Madeleine could not recall seeing her even once without at least four strands of pearls around her neck, no matter the time of day. Amid all the bustle and mayhem of the play’s aftermath, she remained as motionless as a graveyard statue; even caught up in the giddy we-did-it silliness bubbling around them, none of the Junior League débutantes dared to venture too close.

“Miss Force,” Mrs. Mills said, lifting her brows and tilting her head toward the man standing, also unmoving, slightly behind her. “Have you met the colonel?”

Of course Madeleine hadn’t; she wasn’t even officially out yet. There was no reason at all for someone like John Jacob Astor IV to have taken notice of her.

She was still in her mad weeds. She dripped with wilted petals and curling leaves. Her hair was fraying from its braids; candytuft dribbled down her shoulders, teeny white starbursts at a time. A stolen glance in a small rectangle of a mirror tacked to a flat revealed her eyes, pale blue smudged with kohl, her skin plastered white, cheeks and lips still painted red as blood.

The colonel glanced where she did, noticed the mirror. The skin along her cheekbones began to prickle with heat.

“Jack,” continued Mrs. Mills, oblivious, serene, “I would like to introduce you to Miss Madeleine Force, daughter of William and Katherine Force of Brooklyn and, of late, Manhattan. You saw her as our Ophelia tonight. Madeleine, Colonel John Jacob Astor.”

There was no choice but to extend her hand. He accepted it, his fingers folding firm and warm over hers.

“How do you do?” she asked faintly.

“How do you do,” he echoed, soft.

It was as though her vision failed and she could not see him, in spite of the fact that he was right there in front of her. She didn’t see him so much as feel his presence; the warm, tanned glow of his skin, the knowing curve of his mouth, the air of a man who knew what he wanted and was not bothered by the wanting, because everything he touched was already his.

Madeleine felt thirteen again, back on that rock-scrubbed beach—that moment when their eyes had met, and his smile seemed just for her.

From somewhere near her left shoulder, a pop of light flared, died, but she didn’t turn her head to see what it was.

“You were excellent tonight,” the colonel said, letting go of her hand.

She stopped herself from wiping her tingling palm down her dress. “I could have been better, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t see how,” he said, and with a nod to Mrs. Mills, angled away. A moment later, he was gone, devoured by the crush.

Mrs. Ogden Mills sent Madeleine a pointed look. Madeleine smiled tightly, murmured her thanks, and retreated slowly, gratefully, back into the Junior League crowd.

It was only much later—hours later, as she lay sleepless in her bed and stared out her window at the cascading, moon-silvered clouds—that Madeleine realized the pop of light backstage must have been a magnesium flash from a photographer, stealing for himself that moment when Colonel Astor had first taken her hand.

Your father’s courtship of me began with a daily delivery of fresh hothouse flowers, starting the very morning after we were first introduced.

Someday I will teach you the language of flowers, my darling. Of how you, as a gentleman, will initiate your wooing with a floral message aimed only just slightly sideways, signifying nothing beyond the suggestion of yes, I have seen you. Yellow bud roses in fern, perhaps, or a spray of violets. A simple corsage, something modest and easily pinned to a bodice, should the young lady so desire. At this stage, always choose a bloom both sweet and candid, one to which no respectable mama could take offense.

Only after that (no fewer than four weeks of teas and picnics and cotillions, and before you groan, believe me, I know how tedious that becomes) may you move on to the flowers more opulent. Gardenias, pearled and intoxicating. Carnations, peach and lemon and cherry. Too many people (Europeans, really) consider carnations to be nothing but a vulgar American indulgence, but in my opinion, there is no blossom more intricate, more deliciously, thickly, fragrantly lavish, than a carnation.

So. After months of courting, you are at last allowed to consider sending red roses, but only if your intentions are sincere. Red roses have but one meaning. You will not be forgiven for mistaking it.

After the roses—after the conquest—what is left? Orchids.

In the fullness of time, I trust, the woman you love will tell you of those.

The brick-and-cedar prison that was the Forces’ summer residence might easily have been a metaphor for Madeleine’s entire life: cramped, elegant, strictly contained. Although not one of the sprawling “cottages” famously dotting Millionaires’ Row, there was no aspect of the house that was not perfectly proper, and perfectly predictable: the handful of Old Masters paintings on the walls, the trompe l’oeil fresco in the dining room (Persephone accepting a pomegranate seed in her palm), the Aubusson rugs, the immaculate gleam of the teak handrail topping the banister that guarded the stairs. The windows were small but ocean-facing, never inviting much of the light or wind inside.

Everything in the Force household, and in Madeleine Force’s world, was exactly as it should be, and everything was exactly as it always would be. Not a single enhancement had been made in all of her memory, except for the Louis XVI ormolu chairs her mother had brought back from Paris three years ago because the cranberry satin cushions matched the runner in the foyer.

It was a wonder that Madeleine herself had managed to change, to expand from infant to child to young woman, within these walls. She thought she had grown; despite the evidence in her mirror, sometimes she wondered. The rooms and hallways did seem more claustrophobic than they had years ago, but otherwise her world seemed always, always the same.

Yet the globe did spin on its axis, and the seasons did flow from one to the next like water along the smooth, certain bed of a stream.

It was the height of summer, the weeks long and shimmering with heat, and the cottagers had descended upon Bar Harbor in a whirlwind of yachts and straw hats and billowing white linen. Drowsy shops, hungry for customers all winter, suddenly bustled with patrons; up and down Main Street, jolly banners snapped in the breeze, announcing fresh clams or imported cigars or exclusive Parisian tea-gowns. Newport, of course, had its matrons ossifying in their marble palaces—but Bar Harbor’s balmy months boasted a slightly franker, more daring crowd.

And, as had been true ever since Katherine’s debut, breakfast at the Force home (whether in Bar Harbor or New York) was punctuated by the arrival of flowers, which their butler placed strategically, jewellike, all around the dining room.

Pink sweet peas by the chafing dish of buttered eggs. Rubied dahlias at the other end of the credenza. Zinnias, marigolds, and hyacinths positioned between the pearlware figurines along the fireplace mantelshelf. Twin clusters of roses (one cream, one canary) in crystal bowls by the saltcellars.

Each delivery was accompanied by a small pasteboard card, which would be carefully collected and handed to Madeleine’s sister, who kept them in a stack by her water goblet for the duration of the meal. And even though not a single one of her beaux ever called before noon—Madeleine imagined they weren’t awake before then, anyway—Katherine dressed as if one might emerge unexpectedly from the side hall or the drawing room at any moment, ardently demanding the next dance.

Katherine at breakfast was a vision in lace and chiffon, powdered and perfect. Katherine at lunch was a vision, and Katherine at dinner was fairly staggering. Katherine, in short, was always a vision, and it was no surprise to Madeleine that the florists in town were kept so busy on her behalf.

So although she was glad of the scattering of fresh flowers that brightened the lead-shadowed room, Madeleine was used to them. She barely looked up any longer whenever some clever new arrangement appeared nearby.

A single, ivory-colored card was placed by her plate. Her plate.

She looked at it aslant, her cup of café au lait paused halfway to her lips.

“Miss,” murmured the butler, and stepped back into the gloom.

Madeleine set her cup upon its saucer.

“Who’s it from?” Katherine inquired, taking a sip of her own coffee.

In deep indigo script, the card read:


For a heartbeat, she could not move. For a heartbeat, she only swooped inside, the heady and helpless feeling of falling from a very steep height. Then she blinked and looked around until she found it: a small nosegay on the sideboard, captured in one of the few rays of sun to pierce the chamber. The mauve edges of the petals glistened so sheer and crisp they looked dipped in sugar.

“Maddy, who is it from?” Katherine asked again, focusing on her eggs.

“Colonel Astor,” Madeleine said.

Katherine’s eyebrows climbed; Father lowered his newspaper; Mother inhaled sharply. Wordless, she held out her hand for the card. With a sense of breaking free from invisible chains, from gravity itself, Madeleine rose, walked around the table, and gave it to her.

“My heavens,” her mother said, turning the card around and around, as if there might be a hidden message somewhere in the margins. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s from Hamlet. It’s a reference to something Ophelia says.” She took a breath; did the air taste of sugar, too, or was it only her sudden and unbounded imagination? “I told you we met last night, remember?”

“You told me you were simply introduced to him in the crowd backstage. I assumed he was there to congratulate everyone on the performance.”

Madeleine shook her head. “We hardly spoke. We shook hands. That was all.”

“Hardly all,” Katherine said, leaning far across the table to steal the card from their mother. The chiffon folds of her morning dress drooped dangerously close to her eggs. “That must have been quite a handshake.”

“I suppose he’s sending flowers to all the girls in the cast,” Madeleine said. Her own dress was ecru muslin—thin, fetching, everyday. She rubbed a pleat between two fingers. “Perhaps he’s only being kind.”

Katherine tapped the edge of the colonel’s card against the gloss of the tabletop, then slid it back toward Madeleine. “Little sister. Even you are not that naïve, surely.”

No. She was not.

The art of stillness—that classic and stultifying hallmark of a true lady, at least according to Mother—had never been one of Madeleine’s best skills. It seemed to her that remaining frozen in time and place really only suited hunted creatures. When she’d said so aloud one day during deportment lessons at Miss Ely’s School, her teacher had retorted that there was surely no creature more hunted than a young, pretty heiress.

Point scored.

And yet, in Madeleine’s hidden heart, she could only marvel at the obedience of her peers, those girls who could sink into such quiescence that their voices never rose, their skirts never twitched with a restless foot as they sat; their hair was never mussed and their jewelry never fiddled with. She wondered if they fell asleep like that, facial expressions composed and pleasant, hands arranged neatly over their bellies and legs pressed together.

She wanted a gallop, not a trot. She wanted the sun burning her face, the wind ripping at her hair, rather than the soft, safe comfort of salons and tea parties and early evening soirées.

And yet.

The al fresco dinner at the cottage named Beau Desert had been on the Force calendar for weeks. It was one of the more coveted invitations of the season; barring actual death, Madeleine knew there was no avoiding it. The afternoon layer of low, lustrous clouds streaking abalone across the sky had at last dissolved away. This close to sunset, the horizon glowed empty and clean, an incandescent heaven melting into the darkened bay. The Porcupine Islands in the distance bristled green and ochre and velvet black above the water.

Beau Desert’s splendid garden itself, so neatly composed of shell-and-gravel paths, nodding flowers and fragrant herbs, had been enhanced for the evening with silver-trayed offerings of champagne and cold canapés, and a string trio playing from a gazebo nestled amid the pines. Paper lanterns crisscrossed the sky overhead, radiant embers, whimsical fireflies, swaying gently on their wire lines with the breeze.

The dinner tables, dressed in damask and wisp-thin china, had been arranged atop the scattering of grass rectangles and ovals and squares framed by the paths. (Anticipating a spongy lawn, Mother had insisted they all wear slippers with low heels.) As twilight began to descend in earnest, women in pale silken sheaths and men in white tie glided through the trees and flowers, meeting, breaking apart, ghosts with soft chattering voices and bursts of muted laughter.

Despite the paper lanterns, the garden supplied plenty of shadows. Mother and Father stood sipping champagne with their hosts by a trellis frothing with honeysuckle, but Madeleine had lost sight of her sister not five minutes after their arrival. The last she had seen of her, Katherine had been headed toward the rose maze with an admirer on each arm.

Katherine, confident queen of both admirers and dinner parties, knew she’d have at least another twenty minutes of venial sin before they’d be seated for the meal.

Madeleine was hardly queen of anything. She stood alone in the sifting crowd and felt surprisingly unmoored, even though she had known this party and these people most of her life. She looked around, searching for (not him, certainly not him) anyone from the League—Carol or Nathalie or Leta—but either none of her friends were here yet, or else, like Katherine, they were taking quick advantage of the secret corners of the estate.

So she became one of the ghosts. She sipped from her own flute of champagne and rambled down a path of crushed oyster shells that gleamed before her like an ashen ribbon, unwinding into the dusk.

The air began to cool. It wasn’t long before she regretted her own silk sheath, floaty layers of coral edged with lace and very little else. She handed her glass to a passing footman and shivered, just for a moment, as the wind skimmed along the exposed skin of her chest and neck and upper arms. It ruffled through her hair, wayward strands already coming loose from her Psyche knot, and turned the pearls at her throat into stone.

The string trio began a new piece, the barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann. She paused beneath a gold bobbing lantern, closing her eyes to take in the notes, imagining how she would dance to it, the placement of her feet, the man who would hold her in his arms—

When she opened her eyes again, she saw, utterly without astonishment, a second shadow overlapping her own.

“Miss Force,” said the colonel, just behind her. “Pardon me. I hope I don’t startle you.”

Madeleine turned to face him. “Not at all.”

He was elegant and black-clad and taller than she, enough so that she had to tip back her head to meet his gaze. It was a strange sensation, and an unfamiliar one; Madeleine was tall for a girl, and most boys her age looked at her straight on.

She thought, This is what it’s like to feel dainty.

They studied each other, motionless in the hitch and trick of the swaying gold light. He seemed almost exactly as he had the night before, his hair precisely cut. . .