The young black groom dashed into the wide doorway and checked there, a silhouette against the sunlit mist. Stanley was startled by the strength of his own voice:
"Nothing wrong, Peter. Go about your work."
"I was too good to you," Isabel said, leaning her head against the stall and weeping. "Too good."
Blinking, Stanley said, "Yes, I would have to agree, even though I don't imagine it was intentional on your part. And when you were too good to me, you made a grave mistake, Isabel." He smiled. "Please be out of the house in twenty-four hours or I'll be forced to lock you out. I must excuse myself now. I'm thirsty."
He marched away into the mist, leaving her to stare at the filth on her skirt.
65
Richard Morris Hunt designed the mansion. It occupied the entire block between Nineteenth and Twentieth on South State Street. To lure so fashionable an architect to Chicago had been a great feat. As with most everything else, Will Fenway found that overpaying by a third got him what he wanted.
The extravagance didn't concern him. It was impossible to spend his money as fast as he made it. The Fenway factory had expanded three times, the firm was ten months behind with orders, and, late in '68, Will's sales director, LeGrand Villers, had added three more company travelers, based in London, Paris, and Berlin. Will was beginning to think there were more whorehouses in the world by far than decent Christian homes.
Will Fenway was already sixty-eight when he engaged Hunt. He knew he wouldn't live more than a decade or so, and he wanted to enjoy himself. He asked Hunt to build him the largest, most ostentatious house possible. Mr. Hunt had studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and was the foremost apostle of French Second Empire architecture, considered by people of taste to be no mere revival of an old style, but the essence of modernity.
Hunt designed a granite castle of forty-seven rooms with mansard roofs on its three wings, and a spendthrift use of marble columns, marble floors, and marble mantels throughout. Will's billiard room was large enough to hold a small cottage; Ashton's ballroom would have accommodated three. Only one incident marred construction of the house. At the top of each mansard slope was a cast-iron cresting. Ashton one day discovered that Hunt had ordered these manufactured from his design by Hazard's of Pittsburgh. She flew into a rage and sent a letter discharging Hunt. In reply, her husband received an angry telegram from the architect. Will was forced to leave the factory, where he usually worked a minimum of twelve hours Monday through Saturday, and jump on a train for the East. He begged for several hours to get Hunt to overlook the insulting letter.
The crisis passed, and the Fenways moved into the mansion early in the summer. They spent many pleasant hours discussing and selecting a name for the house. Every important residence had a name. He wanted to call it Chateau Willard; Willard was a miserable man's name, but somehow it had an impressive ring when connected to a house. In choosing the name he suspected that he lacked taste, but he figured his money compensated for it, and people would therefore excuse his lapses, so he might as well go ahead with whatever pleased him. "Chateau Willard," he declared.
Ashton rebelled. Instead of nestling sexlessly in his arms that night, she moved into her own three-room suite. She stayed four days and nights, until he came tapping at her door to apologize. She let him in on the condition that they modify the name to Chateau Villard, with the accent on the second syllable. He seemed relieved, and agreed.
The year 1869 brought a riot of prosperity to the owners of Chateau Villard. Will couldn't believe the sums flowing in, or the number of Fenway uprights shipped out. A magnificent Fenway grand piano was already in the design stage, and there were orders in hand for the unbuilt instrument. Given all this, Ashton realized she was finally in a position to explore ways to revenge herself on her family. As a first step, she asked Will for a personal bank account. After some consultation with the Fenway Piano Company's bookkeepers, he established it with an opening balance of two hundred thousand dollars. In February Ashton decided she'd pay a visit to South Carolina as soon as weather and her schedule permitted. She had no definite idea of how she would proceed against her brother and Orry's widow; she merely wanted to search for possibilities.
The staff of Chateau Villard expanded from three persons to twelve, including two stable hands, during the first three months of what was to become the 1869 spending spree. Ashton bought paintings, sculpture, and books by the crate. A two-thousand-dollar red morocco set of the works of Dickens excited Will's admiration — he touched and smelted the books reverently when they were delivered — but he remained an unpretentious man, and only read such things as Alger's stories of plucky and enterprising young fellows who succeeded, or the coarse frontier humor of Petroleum B. Nasby, or nickel novels like Spitfire Saul, King of the Rustlers. Although Will had seen the reality of the West, he seemed fonder of the falsification of it.
Ashton tried to get acquainted with the occupants of the mansions above and below Chateau Villard. To the north lived Hiram Buttworthy, a harness millionaire, a Baptist, a man who kept a spittoon in every corner of every room and had a wife so ugly she looked like she belonged in one of his harnesses. Mrs. Buttworthy, a society leader, didn't approve of the flamboyant Southerner who obviously had not married her husband for his youth, his looks, or his prospects for a long life.
To the south of Chateau Villard, apparently without a spouse, lived a suffragist named Sedgwick; whose outspoken views and tart tongue reminded Ashton of her sister — which was enough to engender permanent dislike at their first, and only, meeting. Ashton wasn't discouraged by her inability to get along with her neighbors. The fault was theirs. Isolation from jealous inferiors, she had long ago decided, was one of the prices of great physical beauty.
Will bought a summer cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey. He bought it sight unseen. If the seaside resort suited President and Mrs. Grant, it was good enough for him. He bought a sixty-foot lake sailer, a splendid gleaming yacht with an auxiliary steam plant, which he anchored in a costly slip near the mouth of the Chicago River. Ashton was asked to name the yacht. She christened it Euterpe after finding the muse of music depicted in one of the seldom-opened books in their large library. Reading the book for nearly an hour made her cross and gave her a headache. She was thirty-three, but her interests had changed little since girlhood. She valued her appearance, and men, and power and money, and found everything else both extraneous and annoying.
Will's money gained them certain entrées but not others. A choice table among the palm fronds in the Palmer House dining room was always available, no matter how many people were ahead of them. Yet older women of better background happily accepted Ashton's donations to charities such as the Chicago Foundling Center but they politely ignored her expressions of interest in joining the menu committee for the annual dinner.
Ashton's application for membership in the Colonial Dames was denied.
Her husband had simpler aspirations. He found a convivial group of friends in his lodge, the International Order of Odd Fellows. He hated organizations such as the Knights of Labor and the Patrons of Husbandry, collectives that threatened the capitalist — that is, him.
Ashton's planned visit to South Carolina was delayed by an inspection trip to the furnished cottage at the Jersey shore. She found the parlor walls decorated with gaudy chromos of the Rockies and the California coast. Will greatly admired the cheap art, and said this was his kind of place.