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the appearance of some saintly champion of the poor. She was clever—
    Henry had to admire her for that.
    “What a fine young lady Miss Hayes is turning out to be,” Henry’s father, William Sackhouse Schoonmaker, said as he proceeded through the intersection. Henry watched from behind as his father strode purposefully across the bricked street. “It was so good of her to partake in our little charity, and to stay as long as she did.”
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    “And you know how she must tire so,” his wife, Isabelle, put in. At twenty-five, she was only five years older than Henry himself, and she spoke in a high, girlish voice that made her sound perennially giddy. She wore an ocelot coat and a hat that was top-heavy with silk roses and stuffed sparrows, and even with a firm grasp on her husband’s arm she still managed to bounce as she walked. “As all ladies do.”
    “Young Miss Hayes was changed forever, as we all were,” Mr. Schoonmaker went on, to the New York World reporter who had been trailing along at his other elbow and dutifully writing down his thoughts all afternoon, “by the loss of Miss Holland. You see how transformed my son is.”
    Both men turned to look at Henry, who was following a few paces behind. He wore a top hat and a black knee-length coat that fit his slim frame well. For while the death of Elizabeth Holland had indeed taken a profound toll on his previously carefree attitude toward life, he had not been so truly transformed as to have given up caring what he wore.
    “You see,” he heard his father say as he looked away from his son. “He is inconsolable. The current mayor’s handling of Elizabeth’s death is of course chief among the reasons I intend to challenge him.”
    The elder Schoonmaker went on, but Henry had heard the speech many times before. His father had recently decided, despite his enormous personal wealth and the power it afforded him, that he wanted to play in politics as well. His desire to be mayor of a recently consolidated New York City was one of the reasons that Henry had been compelled to enter into an engagement with Elizabeth Holland in the first place, and it was thus also one of the reasons that she had come to such a tragic end. For Henry had seen his fiancée on the last day of her life, and the image of her
    —alone and frightened in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk—had been simple enough to interpret.
    She had stood there for a few moments looking into him. They had been engaged only a few weeks at the time and, under pressure from their families, they were to be married in a matter of days. Henry’s behavior during that period was not something he looked back on proudly, although it was one of the few times in his life that he had been completely honest with a girl.
    Just not the girl he happened to be engaged to. He was not proud, either, of his behavior in the years leading up to his engagement, which had earned him a not undeserved reputation as a cad.
    Still, he could not bring himself to entirely renounce his behavior the night before he saw Elizabeth on that street corner—the night before she drowned. For that was the night that he had invited her younger sister, Di, to the Schoonmaker greenhouse. It had been, for him, an uncharacteristically chaste night; she had stayed up whispering to him and kissing him with a sweetness and innocence that could not possibly have survived what happened next. Elizabeth had seen Henry and Diana together the following morning, and he knew from her clear-eyed gaze that she understood what had occurred. That knowledge must have driven her to her death
    —one did not just fall into the river and never return. Henry could not deny that devastating fact.
    But Henry did not blame himself alone. He blamed his father, too, which was one of the reasons he could not stomach W. S. Schoonmaker’s talking again of Elizabeth as though she were a 23 ♥elavanilla♥

    martyr to his own political cause. He turned and