The Van Alen Legacy

What was she doing in the Hamptons?

She was a stranger in her own life, a tourist in her own body. If someone had asked her what it was like, Bliss would have explained it this way: it’s like you’re driving a car, but you’re sitting in the backseat. The car is driving itself, and you’re not in control. But it’s your car, at least you think it is. It used to be yours, anyway.

Or like being in a movie. The movie is your life, but you don’t star in it anymore. Someone else is kissing the handsome lead and making the dramatic monologues. You’re just watching. Bliss was an observer of her own life. She was not Bliss anymore, but simply the memory of the Bliss that had been.

Sometimes she wasn’t even sure that she had ever really existed.





FOUR

Schuyler


The bus pulled to a stop up past the gates, and the group silently filed out. Schuyler noticed that even the most jaded of her coworkers, a rather haughty collection of moonlighting actors and actresses along with a smug culinary student or two, were looking around in amazement. The building and its immaculate grounds were as opulent and intimidating as the Louvre, except someone still lived here. It was a home, not a national monument. The H?tel Lambert had been closed to the public for much of its history. Only a vaunted few had been welcomed inside its massive doors. The rest of the world could leaf through pictures of it in books. Or enter as catering staff .

As they walked past the burbling fountains, Oliver nudged her. “All right?” he asked in French. One more reason to be thankful for the Duchesne School. Years of mandatory foreign language requirements meant they had been able to pass for two restaurant workers from Marseille at the job interview—although their textbook accents were in danger of giving them away at any time. “You look worried. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking about the investigation again,” Schuyler said as they made their way toward the service entrance located at the back of the house. She remembered that terrible day at the Repository, when she’d been accused so unjustly. “How could they have believed that of me?”

“Don’t waste any more time on it. It’s not going to change anything,” Oliver said firmly. “What happened on Corcovado was terrible, and it wasn’t your fault.”

Schuyler nodded, blinking back the tears that came whenever she thought of that day. Oliver was right as always. She was wasting energy wishing for another outcome. What was past was past. They had to focus on the present.

“Isn’t this place beautiful?” she said. Then, whispering so no one would hear, “Cordelia brought me here a couple of times, when she came for meetings with Prince Henri. We stayed in the guest apartments in the east wing. Remind me to show you the Hercules galleries and the Polish library. They have Chopin’s piano.”

She felt a mixture of awe and sadness as she followed the hushed crowd through the gleaming marble halls. Awe at the beauty of the place, which had been built by the same architect who had designed the Palace of Versailles, and displayed the same gilded moldings and baroque flourishes, and sadness because the building reminded her of Cordelia. She could sure use some of her grandmother’s brusque tenacity right then. Cordelia Van Alen wouldn’t think twice about crashing a party to get what she wanted, whereas Schuyler had too many doubts.

The party that evening was called A Thousand and One Nights, in homage to the extravagant Oriental Ball thrown at the residence in 1969. Like that party, tonight’s would feature dancing slave girls, half-naked torchbearers, zither players, and Hindu musicians. Of course, there would also be a few modern additions: the entire cast from a Bollywood musical would perform at midnight, and instead of having papier-maché elephants at the entrance, a pair of real Indian elephants had been borrowed from a traveling Thai circus. The pachyderms would be carrying riders under golden canopies.

The newspapers had already nicknamed it The Last Party. The party to end all parties. The party that would mark the end of an era. The last night that the fabled building would house royalty.

Because the H?tel Lambert had been sold. Tomorrow it would no longer be home to the surviving family of Louis-Philippe, the last king of France. Tomorrow the property would belong to a foreign conglomerate. Tomorrow the chateau would fall into the hands of developers who were rich enough to have met its steep asking price. Tomorrow it would be divided up, or renovated, or made into a museum, or whatever the conglomerate had planned for it.