The Fake Debutante and the True Billionaire novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Pinckney Table
Jess passes the Cabell quiz at the Pinckney supper, answers Sabina's needle in front of the table, and learns the billionaire has booked the club floor.
The Pinckney house on South Battery had a view of the harbor and a roof that needed fixing.
I saw the bucket in the front hall before the butler took my coat.
It sat in the shadow of a stair rail, catching drips from a ceiling that looked freshly painted.
"Miss Cabell," said Marcelline Pinckney.
She came toward me down the hall with a cane she held.
Her silver pageboy did not move when she did.
She had Sabina's grey eyes and none of her sugar.
"My daughter says you came with a prior engagement," she said. "How good of you to break it."
"It was a pleasure to."
"We'll see."
Dinner was for twelve at a table meant for thirty.
Candles, old silver, a soup nobody ate.
Sabina had put me in the middle, across from her mother, with an empty chair on my left.
"Mr. Landis was meant to sit there," Sabina said brightly. "But he works so late he forgets his friends."
"I'm sure he'll be along," I said.
"I'm sure he'll be wherever he's wanted most."
The woman on my right smiled into her glass.
Marcelline touched her napkin to her mouth.
"Now, Rosamond," she said, as if we'd been introduced for years. "You'll forgive an old woman her curiosity. Your people are Cabells of Atlanta."
"Of Aiken, originally."
"On your father's side."
"My grandmother's."
"Her name?"
"Lucille Cabell, born Hartsfield." I put down my spoon. "She kept the Aiken house after the hall was sold."
"Ah, the Aiken house." Marcelline's cane tapped the floor once. "Then you'll know her Bible."
The table went quiet.
I knew the trap when I heard it.
Every old Southern family had a Bible, and every Bible had a flyleaf, and nobody who was not family knew what was pressed in it.
It was the sort of question a stranger fails.
I had read the lawyer's folder over and over, the way I had once memorized bones.
"Of course I know it," I said.
"Black cloth, the spine cracked.
"On the flyleaf, a camellia, pressed so long it's gone the color of tea."
"How charming."
"My grandmother said it was the only thing she took from Hartsfield that she didn't have to apologize for."
Marcelline looked at me for a very long time.
Then she smiled, wide and warm, for the first time that night.
"Perfect," she said.
It was the wrong word.
A person who catches a stranger out says "interesting."
A person who is merely relieved says "good."
Nobody says perfect about a Bible.
I filed it away, in the same drawer where I kept the bucket.
"Rosamond," Sabina said, lightly, from across the candles. "What do you do all day? In Atlanta?"
"I volunteer."
"How nice. It must be hard for girls like you."
"Girls like me?"
"Girls who rent their way into a Season.
"Gowns by the week.
"Pearls on loan."
She turned her wineglass slowly by the stem.
"I always think it must feel so odd, being paid for."
I felt my pulse in my ears.
Nobody at the table was laughing now.
They were waiting.
They wanted to know whether I'd break.
"I pay for my own rent, Miss Pinckney," I said, pleasantly. "I understand some people prefer to have it paid for them."
The woman on my right choked on her soup.
Marcelline's eyes flicked to the bucket in the hall, and back.
Sabina's smile didn't move.
But her thumb whitened against the stem of her glass.
"There you are," said Carlisle Landis from the door.
He stood in the light with his tie loosened and his jacket over one arm.
"Forgive me, Mrs. Pinckney. A ship was late."
"Of course, Carlisle."
He took the empty chair beside me and shook out his napkin.
He did not look at me even once.
Under the tablecloth, his shoe found mine.
Slow and warm and perfectly polite, the side of his foot settled against the side of my foot.
I picked up my fork.
I ate every bite of a very bad soup, and when I swallowed, I felt him feel it.
At eleven-thirty I put my hand to my forehead.
"A headache," I said. "I'm so sorry."
"Naturally," said Marcelline. "You'll need your rest."
She said it with enormous kindness.
She said it as if she knew precisely how late I would be up.
My phone buzzed in the cab, halfway down Meeting Street.
Tavy.
He booked the whole floor. 1:30. Mask on, hon.
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