Free Rumors by Anna Godbersen

velvet, which she filled out in a way that no one could have imagined when she was still lithe Lily Newburg. Her younger brother had said little on the way over, and did not now travel farther than the inner room of his family’s box, where he rested on the couch and smoked moodily.
    His young guest did not pay him any mind. She could barely contain herself from leaning against the polished brass rail to look down on the stage below. The music was surging and lively; she had always liked the sad mystery of those words in Shakespeare, and she loved them now in opera, too. For a moment, with the rise and fall of the orchestra, the prospect of seeing Henry almost slipped from her mind. But only almost.
    “I’d heard that Henry Schoonmaker was going to be out tonight,” her hostess said, lowering her diamond lorgnon from her eyes. “But I don’t see him in the Schoonmaker box.”
    Diana felt the urge to lift her own glasses so she might investigate the view herself, but managed to replace the desire with a demure “Oh?”
    “Pity your sister wasn’t able to marry him. He is a very charming, very marriageable young man,” Mrs. Gore clucked, unaware of the wounding potential of this comment, so consumed was she by the wasted currency of a handsome groom without a bride. Then she brought the lorgnon back up to her nose and began to survey the other boxes, in which sat all the New Yorkers of their kind, spying on one another and looming over the stalls below, where a very different sort of people went to enjoy music.
    “You know,” Mrs. Gore went on with the same tactlessness, “I heard a rumor that your sister hadn’t died at all, that there certainly would have been a body, and that none of the rest of the story adds up, and that she’s perhaps forgotten her identity or been taken up by a band of thieves…. I don’t suppose there’s any truth to it as far as your family knows?”
    Diana shook her head faintly and resolved not to look in the direction of the Schoonmaker box for at least another ten minutes. She was trying to appear a little scandalized, in the hope that this would prevent any future speculations on the part of Mrs. Gore about Elizabeth not being dead. She kept her eyes focused on the stage, where Juliette had now entered with dark curls cascading down her back. The chandelier glittered from the center of the room, illuminating the many diamond tiaras and chokers in the boxes, complementing the sumptuous silks of the dresses and the pale skin of their wearers. Diana felt the glow upon her skin too, and longed to be looked at. And so, after the passing of a lonely minute, she found herself turning to her left to see that, in fact, the Schoonmaker box showcased only Mrs. Schoonmaker—resplendent in petal pink—and the dowdy visage of Henry’s younger sister, Prudence. There was nothing to suggest movement in the crimson penumbra behind them.
    Diana looked away and tried not to feel disappointed. Her eyes were then drawn from the diva onstage, whose ample white bosom rose and fell with a passion that Diana felt sure she alone in the audience could comprehend, to the lithe form of Penelope Hayes a few boxes to their right.
    The lids of her enormous blue eyes were lowered in ennui, and her head was tilted just slightly to the side. She wore a black aigrette in her hair and a dress of black jet that was trimmed with black ribbon at the décolletage. Her long white arms were folded at her lap in a prim way, which must have been part of the saintliness the gossip columns had recently made such point of. Nonetheless, Diana was reminded—as she always was when she saw Penelope—of how Henry had described her on the evening when they’d talked all night. Savage was the word he’d used. Her sister, too, had warned her to watch out for Penelope. But what she felt at that moment was not distrust, but vulnerability.
    For she could not help but think that Penelope, sitting inthe Hayes family box in the new