There was no explanation.

  “Of course you’re tired,” Libbie said. “Of course you are. How inconsiderate I’ve been. After your trip, you must be exhausted. Let me take you home.”

  “We could send her—” Sara began.

  “I’m taking her now, Sara.”

  Alex did not wear her triumph on the face she showed Sara Dahlgren as they parted, but this required real effort on her part.

  In the back of the hansom, Libbie took Alex’s hand and held it the length of the way to her parents’ house, her body curled toward Alex. They kissed, the first time they’d done so in more than a year. Alex felt some of her worry ease. She did have a headache and she was tired from her trip. Perhaps that was enough to explain it. If she slept well, maybe in the morning . . .

  But then, when they were climbing the stairs to the bedroom wing—the Packards’ grand house empty save for staff, everyone else still back at the fair—Libbie said, “I won’t do it tonight. God knows you need your sleep. But I do need to tell you something. First thing tomorrow. I was hoping we could have one night together before you knew, that you could, before I said it out loud, but now I don’t think that was right, either.”

  Libbie was a stair or two ahead, and Alex touched the back of her dress to slow her, then said, “I knew there was something. You’ll have to tell me now or I won’t sleep at all. Not after that.”

  “I haven’t been, either,” Libbie said. “Sleeping.”

  “What is it, Libbie?” Alex expected to hear something about Sara Dahlgren in response.

  She did not expect to hear what Libbie did say, which was, “I’m pregnant.”

  Alex was glad she didn’t tumble back down the stairs, she felt so unsteady. She gripped the railing as she said, “Oh, Libbie. You’re certain?”

  “I am.”

  “Tell me how,” Alex said, even though she didn’t want to hear.

  * * *

  Later, much later, once she was the principal at the Brookhants School for Girls and Libbie Packard Brookhants would remember how she’d gotten there, she wouldn’t start her story with her impressive family in Chicago, or with her time at Wellesley, or even with her marriage to Harold Brookhants. Not when she was telling her own story to herself, anyway.

  Instead, she returned again and again to the decisions of a single summer night at the Columbian Exposition. What amounted to a few moments, really, spent by a fence on a man-made island so lush with fragrant plantings that Mary MacLane would have thrilled to describe it.

  She’d had too much champagne. Sara Dahlgren saw to that. The only excuse anyone needed to pour more was that it was finally feeling like spring and the fair, their fair, was here at last.

  The spectacle of the fair, its very life and vibrancy, seemed to grant permission for all manner of excesses and eccentricities. And Libbie Packard, now a college grad with a Wellesley degree and at least a few months to herself—she hoped, oh she hoped—before her mother would start in again, in her committed and tireless way, about marriage prospects, well: she was determined to use that permission any way she saw fit. After all, if one couldn’t be a sensualist (or even a hedonist) in the White City, where could one?

  Our Libbie Packard put this question to the test on the last night of June. She’d been home from commencement activities at Wellesley for only a handful of days, and thus far she’d spent more time at the fair than anywhere else. In the nearly two months since it had first opened, Libbie’s fashionable Chicago friends had learned how best to exploit their connections to curry favorable reservations or invitations.

  Which is what they were doing this night.

  For hours, Libbie had been flirting wildly, obnoxiously, with Mr. Simon Everett III. He was Sara Dahlgren’s distant cousin, visiting from San Francisco and a real cad (or sport, if you were feeling generous). But Simon was also very handsome, and charming enough for one night.

  Libbie had danced with him at a dazzling party held at the Electricity Building and then strolled arm in arm with him through the vendors. (Where he bought her a bouquet of paper flowers she soon misplaced.) On the boat ride across the lagoon, as they neared the Columbian Fountain and felt the spray from its rushing water, she’d pressed up against him, knowing full well the effect of her cause. And so when, soon after, they’d gone ashore to spread their picnic blanket on a field of mint, and Simon had led her away from their party to the nearby fence and behind it—where piles of cable and hulking machines were hidden to keep them from spoiling the Wooded Isle’s pastoral effects—it hadn’t seemed significant so much as inevitable. Libbie had even tried to remember, at the time, lines from Madame Bovary that seemed particularly relevant: He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness on the water. Faded water lilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves.

  Mostly, she felt happy to be young, and adventurous, and desired in just this way.

  There was then the elaborate loosening and shedding of clothing, the scratch of Simon’s moustache paired with the wetness from his mouth, the far-too-brief pleasure of his hand, which came before his somewhat skillful entry, his less-skillful thrusting, and his not-at-all-skillful withdrawal—for this was the manner of contraception most accessible and favored. From that messiness on, Libbie had wondered what the appeal of this encounter had really been, for her. Why she’d entertained it. There was now left only Simon’s huffing and dribbling, the stain on her dress, the sound of the croaking frogs at the shoreline, which was no longer literary or even particularly pleasant, only loud.

  The situation seemed suddenly unnecessary to her, from the thick wrap of mud on her shoes (she’d sunk down into it while he’d thrusted) to Simon himself, who was now straightened up and tending to her in the most careful and unfortunate manner, petting her hand and nearly cooing at her, as if she were a baby elephant at the zoo or some delicate thing on display in a shop window that he might take home and keep all to himself. Libbie dismissed his tender musings and led him back to their picnicking friends, who shared looks. Knowing looks.

  And that, Readers, should have been that. Libbie knew that Simon Everett III had no intention of calling on her again. And even if he had, she wouldn’t have received him. They did a thing, the thing ended. It should have remained as only a very small dot on the very large map of her life. Nothing more.

  Libbie then continued on with her summer. She saw her friends, especially Sara, who was just then enamored with an opera singer and always full of chatter about that. She wrote to invite Alex to come visit in August and was thrilled when she responded yes. She concerned herself with preparations for her fall trip abroad, first with her mother and then, for two months, with Sara and co. She would see Paris, finally, really see it: live within it as a young woman in full bloom. Something would happen in Paris, she felt so certain, something that would make clear to her what to do next. Who to be.

  And then, in the middle of August, some seven weeks after her night at the fence with Simon, Libbie experienced a collection of bodily impressions so inchoate that she only became certain of them as a collection. It took them all for her to notice: the miss of her monthly time, her finicky appetite, the nausea that swept in to overwhelm her, and then dissipated almost as quickly. By week eight she was certain. She was pregnant.

  And Alex was to arrive in three days for her grand summer adventure in Chicago.

  For those days, Libbie lingered alone with this very bad knowledge: the knowledge that she’d let herself get pregnant with Simon Everett III’s baby.*

  And also the very bad knowledge that she did not want a child. And she certainly did not want Simon Everett III’s. She never wanted to see Simon Everett again.

  For three days, Libbie went over and around this and back around.

  And then, that night on the stairs, the night of Alex the Flirt’s arrival, she told. Not in all that detail, but the short of it: who the man was and how she’d allowed this to happen. And Alex, her Alex, looked like she might sink under the tide of this news. And there they were standing in the middle of a staircase, so that wouldn’t do at all. And then—

  In through the big front door came Libbie’s parents and a train of people behind, people they’d invited back from the fair for an after-party. They were loud and gay and champagne drunk.

  “Oh, you are home!” Libbie’s mother said when she saw her daughter on the stairs. She came up to meet them. “Oh wonderful! You’re not thinking of going to bed, are you? We’ve brought the celebration back with us.”

  “I see that,” Libbie said, looking past her mother and the people still filtering in through the front door. She dared not look at Alex next to her. She could not.

  If Mr. and Mrs. Packard were this merry train’s engine, then its caboose was none other than Harold Brookhants, the Harold Brookhants, with the Madame Verrett at his side.

  “Well at least come and say hello to everyone and introduce Alexandra,” Mrs. Packard said as she turned to join her guests. “Before you again abscond in the night. Everyone said they barely saw you at the reception, you were stuck in the corner.”

  “Hardly that, Mother,” Libbie said, starting down the stairs with Alex coming, too. What else could they do now? It would cause such a scene to ignore everyone when here they were plainly awake and still dressed and standing in the middle of the staircase.

  “It’s wonderful to see you again, Mr. Brookhants,” Libbie said, as Harold took her hand and kissed it.

  “It’s much more wonderful for me to see you,” Harold said. “You look radiant tonight, Miss Packard—full of the force of life.”

  “Well I don’t feel it,” Libbie said. “I’m afraid my mother guessed right and we were headed to bed. Miss Trills only arrived today by train from Providence, and I haven’t let her sit for more than five minutes since she got here.”

  “Oh, but she’s so young and strong, she can manage,” Madame Verrett said, plainly appraising them both up and down with her violet eyes.

  “Have we met?” Libbie asked her.

  “Not formally,” the Madame said. “I came here tonight to meet you.”

  “You did?” Libbie said, surprised. She smiled at the Madame as if in on her joke, but the woman did not smile back and did not seem to be joking.

  “Forgive me,” Harold said. “What a goat I am, never fails. Miss Libbie Packard, this is the Great Madame Verrett of Gascogne and”—Harold now looked rather helplessly at Alex—“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name, miss.”

  “Alexandra Trills,” Alex said. She was clearly still so stunned from the news on the stairs that she hadn’t quite returned to form. “Libbie and I met at Wellesley,” she added.

  “Ah, college sweethearts,” Madame Verrett said. “So chic, so American. Though of course your way cannot produce a child. Not yet.”

  Libbie’s heart shuffled like a deck of cards. She could not find words of response.

  Alex had some: “What a peculiar thing to say.”

  “Was it?” the Madame asked.

  “Yes,” Alex said. “Very.”

  “I’m sure I have no idea of your meaning,” Libbie said.

  “I should think you have every idea of my meaning,” Madame Verrett said.

  “Odette,” Harold said. “Not now.”

  “Why else have we come here?” the Madame asked, her earrings clinking with the force of her indignation. “Never say not now to me again, Harold.”

  “Everyone’s moving into the garden for ice-cream floats and cherry brandy,” Mrs. Packard called as she swept back into the foyer. “Darling, why have you stalled our guests at the front door?” she said to Libbie as she plucked a curl at Libbie’s neck. “Your hair has gone so limp in this humidity. You can’t say you get that from me.”

  “No, your style stays very firm, doesn’t it?” Madame Verrett said to her.

  “Yes, it does.” Mrs. Packard seemed unsure if she’d been complimented or insulted.

  “We were just meeting Miss Trills,” Harold said in explanation. “Who is understandably worn out from her long journey. We’d be beasts to keep her awake one moment longer.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” Mrs. Packard said as if this had not previously occurred to her. “You know, both of you girls do look tired. Run along to bed. I’ll make your excuses.”

  “You do need your sleep,” Madame Verrett agreed. “Now more than ever.” She looked only at Libbie when she said this.

  “Why do you say that?” Mrs. Packard asked her.

  “Because the great fair is here, of course,” Madame Verrett said, taking her host’s arm. “And it takes so much from all of us to take it in as we should.”

  “I haven’t heard it put quite like that,” Mrs. Packard said.

  “Oh, then you must stay close to me,” Madame Verrett said. “I know all the best ways to put things. Now will you show me the way to this brandy?”

  Once they’d left the room, Harold said, “You go on to bed now, girls. And tomorrow, please come see me for lunch. Both of you. I’ll send my driver.”

  * * *

  While Andrew Carnegie might have set the standard for businessmen who had done well by Pittsburgh, he was only the guy at the top of that ladder. It was a ladder with many, many rungs, and on one of those rungs, within reaching distance of Carnegie’s trouser hems, stood Harold Brookhants.

  Although, and this is worth noting, Harold Brookhants’s standing did not begin and end with the vast sums of money he had made in turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh. Harold Brookhants could trace his American lineage back to before the Revolutionary War, and he could additionally trace the starting point for his substantial familial holdings to the years after that war.

  In fact, had he settled more firmly in Manhattan (he had a château-style house there, but was not often found in it), married earlier (and a bit more carefully), and worked with any diligence at it, he could have out-Astored the Astors in a quest for social preeminence. But securing and maintaining a position within the Four Hundred* was of no interest to Harold Brookhants. His interest was in securing and maintaining a position within the afterlife.

  Did I mention, Readers, that Harold Brookhants was old? I mean really old. Sixty-six to Libbie’s then twenty-two; a chasm of more than forty years between them.*

  So Harold Brookhants was very rich, an American blue blood, and now quite old. Because all three of those things could be said truthfully of him, he was allowed considerable leeway when it came to his eccentricities, of which there were many.* You should know that before marrying Libbie Packard, he was a confirmed bachelor. And not just any confirmed bachelor, but the kind of confirmed bachelor the very term was coined to elucidate.

  The other thing you should know about him, the thing he told Alex and Libbie the next day at lunch in the private dining room at the block-long Palmer Hotel, is that he was dying.

  “Should be dead already,” he said. “Ought to be, but Madame Verrett has me feeling fine.”

  “For now,” Madame Verrett said. “And not for much longer.” She was consulting a menu.

  “The lemon ice,” she called out to a waiter across the room, though her rudeness didn’t matter to anyone but Alex and Libbie. The dining room, with its mirror-shined mahogany paneling and enormous coffered ceiling dripping crystal chandeliers, was empty: Harold had rented it out for their party. Which, with the fair at its peak, must have cost a fortune.

  They’d been there not half an hour, and Madame Verrett had thus far ordered, seemingly at random, eleven different items off the menu. Of those, she had pronounced two fair and another edible. The rest she had declared an embarrassment.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that you’re in such poor health, Mr. Brookhants,” Libbie said.

  “Well, but I have lived a full life, haven’t I?” Harold said. “In this world.”

  “I’m also sorry for your news,” Alex said. “Though I’m still not sure why you’ve asked us here to tell it.”

  “Yes, you are,” Madame Verrett said. “None of that.”

  “I’m in a position to help you, Libbie,” Harold said. “We can help each other.”

  “Miss Packard doesn’t need your help,” Alex said.

  “Does your sweetheart always speak for you?” Madame Verrett asked as she produced a small blue vial and tipped several drops of some fragrant liquid into her wine.

  “Isn’t that something you should already know?” Alex asked her. “As a clairvoyant?”

  “Of course I do know,” Madame Verrett said. “This is why I’m making mention of it—so that she also notices.”

  “I want to hear what you’re suggesting,” Libbie said to Harold. “I want to hear what anyone can suggest to me about how to unmake this mess I’ve made.”

  “An unmaking, my dear, is but one of your options,” Madame Verrett said. “And not the one Harold is interested in.”

  “All of this is mad,” Alex said. “It’s mad for us even to be here right now. I—”

  “You can say that as often as you like,” Madame Verrett said. “But only naming it as such does not make it true. You have to believe it. And you don’t. You know why you’re here and so does she.”

  “I think we should leave now, Libbie,” Alex said, putting her napkin on the table. “I think we shouldn’t have come at all.”

  “I want to hear what Mr. Brookhants has to say to me,” Libbie said. “I’m sorry if that hurts you, but it’s my decision to make.”

  “It’s a man you scarcely know who’s the cause of this,” Alex tried again. She lowered her voice, though it was impossible to speak to Libbie privately at this moment. “You don’t need the counsel of another strange man. We can find a solution together.”

  “But we haven’t found one,” Libbie said.