New York - The Novel

had to give it to old Hetty, Rose thought grimly, she’d assembled quite a crowd. There were half a dozen Vassar girls—they should have known better, for a start. Rose was never sure what she felt about women going to college. Vassar and Barnard in the state of New York, Bryn Mawr down in Philadelphia, and the four colleges up in Massachusetts—the Seven Sisters as they were called, like a sort of female Ivy League. All respectable enough, no doubt; but did one really want girls from the old families getting a lot of foolish ideas put in their heads? Rose didn’t think so.
    Just look at the results. Vassar girls had been parading round the city with billboards supporting the strike. They’d been living down on the Lower East Side with the poor. All for what? To show they were enlightened? Well, at least they had the excuse of being young. And that certainly could not be said for the next figure to greet her eye.
    Alva Vanderbilt—at least that was her name in the days when she’d forced her daughter Consuelo to marry the Duke of Marlborough. Alva always got her way. After she’d divorced Vanderbilt for a pile of money, married August Belmont’s son and built a huge mansion up in Newport, Rose suspected Alva had got bored. So next she’d decided to make herself look important by demanding votes for women. One might argue about the rights and wrongs of female suffrage, but not about Alva’s unquenchable thirst for publicity. And it was wholly typical of Alva, seeing the strike in the garment district, to decide to hitch these unfortunate women to her own bandwagon and proclaim that their dispute was about women’s rights.
    To the astonishment of the factory women, she’d started turning up in the courts to pay their fines. She’d organized monster rallies. She’d even shipped in Mrs. Pankhurst, the British suffragist leader, to make an appearance. She certainly had a genius for publicity, and the Hearst and Pulitzer papers were trumpeting the cause. But her shrewdest move hadbeen to go to the woman who was approaching Rose and her two young charges now.
    “Hello, Rose. Didn’t expect to see you here.” Elizabeth Marbury was wearing a dark coat and skirt, with a small black hat on her head. She always filled any room she was in. It wasn’t just that she was broad in the beam; it was her presence. Literary agent to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and many others, she went where she pleased. Having taken up the cause of the women strikers, she’d brought support from the acting profession, and money from the wealthy Shubert family. She’d even hosted a lunch for a group of the strikers within the sacred portals of the ladies’ Colony Club.
    At least she hadn’t brought her friend. She and Elsie de Wolfe, the designer, had been living together for years. Women lovers. The fashionable worlds of New York, Paris and London accepted them, but Rose didn’t approve. Elizabeth Marbury eyed Rose calmly.
    “Who are your young friends?” she asked.
    Rose smiled, but shepherded them past her without explaining. The other people in the room were mostly society ladies, and a few old friends of Hetty’s. Lily de Chantal was in bed with the flu, but Mary O’Donnell was there, faithful as ever, and Rose went to greet her.
    “Are you going to Carnegie Hall tonight?” Mary asked. “I feel I ought to go with Hetty—she’s quite determined to be there. But if you or William took her,” she added hopefully, “I could stay at home.”
    For this was what the luncheon was all about. A gathering, a social rally, before the huge event.
    Tonight’s meeting at Carnegie Hall was going to be the climax of the last two months. It could even be the start of a general strike. It was actually a union meeting, but if anyone thought that was going to keep people like Alva out, then they didn’t know the rich and powerful women of New York. On behalf of her Votes for Women League, she had a private box.
    “I’m sorry, Mary,” Rose said, and Mary looked disappointed.
    “We’re only waiting for one more person now,” Mary said. Then, glancing toward the door, she added: “And here she is.”
    Even as Rose turned to look, she had an instinct who it would be. Alva Belmont and Marbury were bad enough, but if there was one woman in New York whom she truly hated, one woman she couldn’t forgive … well, she was walking into the room now.
    Anne Morgan. She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a fur stole and, thought