Free Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath

happening to him.
    I believe that after he left the studio Julius spent the rest of the day on the streets of New York indulging the emotion which had sprung to life in him as he sat gazing at that naked body. At what point he returned home to Waverley Place I do not know, but it seems he had had time enough to decide that what he was experiencing was, in fact, love. When he told Charlotte the extraordinary news, rather than talk carefully to her brother, perhaps advise him to go slow, and be prudent, instead she apparently clapped her hands together, gave out a small scream, cried “Oh,
Julius
!” then flung her arms around him and told him how proud she was.
    Then she insisted he tell her everything. In this way Julius’ folly was given validity by one who should have know better, for Charlotte was not a child, indeed Charlotte was herself engaged in some related negotiation, though in a spirit altogether different from that of her brother.

    Max Rinder was a man who apparently had “no warmth, no heart, no passion, no nothing.” What he did have, it seems, was a swift and devious intelligence and an ability to get what he wanted regardless of what to any other mortal might seem insurmountable obstacles. This utter ruthlessness was a quality he shared with Noah, and it accounted in large measure for the continuing expansion of the House of van Horn. But if he was in some ways like the father, he was as different from the son as he could possibly be, being a wary, cynical sort of a man. Julius by contrast was spontaneous and open, his conversation frequently punctuated by cries of laughter, his body rarely still, and a wide grin overspreading his face as he pushed his fingers through a tumble of unruly curls and adjusted the spectacles forever threatening to fall off his nose.
    Over the course of a long New York winter Max Rinder, dressed in his black suit and derby, the collar of his shirt as stiff and starched as the man himself, and those licks of hair as black as bat’s wings plastered so close to his skull they might have been painted on it, appeared several times a week at the house on Waverley Place with a judiciously chosen bunch of dried flowers.The object of his attentions was Charlotte van Horn.
    Charlotte was now twenty-four and as yet unmarried. She was becoming a cause of some concern to her father. She was not an unattractive girl, as I can attest from a daguerreotype of 1855, but she was difficult. She had frightened off at least two young men who were showing an interest because she was not sufficiently feminine. She was too intense, too loud. Too many opinions. Her father lost sleep over her, for in his gruff way he had a great tenderness for his firstborn child and wanted to see her safely settled in the world.
    None of which escaped Max Rinder. He had seen from the very outset that a man of property like Noah van Horn, with his three unmarried daughters, could provide the means of fulfilment of all his ambitions. He recognized Charlotte’s predicament, and he also recognized the depths of her father’s feelings for her even if no one else did, including Charlotte herself. He began to woo her. Not hard to conceive what a very odd wooing it was, not least because despite being at first rebuffed with some hilarity, he continued earnestly to insist upon the sincerity of his intentions until slowly his presence inthe house became accepted. In his pinched way he actually seemed to enjoy Charlotte’s extravagant talk, her smoking of cigarettes and her dangerous ideas. Charlotte was an abolitionist, and she believed in free love.
    Noah van Horn watched the courtship with quiet amusement and also with keen interest. He knew Max Rinder’s worth, and if, as I suspect, at root he thoroughly disliked him, that had no bearing on the younger man’s genius in the field of business. So the idea of binding him closer to the House of van Horn by bringing him into the family was one of which Noah shrewdly approved.