Chapter Text
It’s a mark of how much this is a done deal that her mother leaves her alone. She trundles off up to Newport and leaves Gladys behind as the Duke comes to stay, he’s in New York and she has to sit for that fucking painting and she swears if she is told to stretch her elbow out one more time she is going to stab a paintbrush somewhere where a paintbrush should not naturally go and so when the Duke trundles into New York her mother is setting up Newport perfect for long walks by the sea and where best it might be to have the picture perfect proposal.
It would bother her but it gives her an idea. Normally she would just ask for help but her father is about as much use as a potted plant and to be honest right now the plant is around more than he is, and Larry…well…Larry upon a frightening row with their mother over his intentions to marry Marian Brooke has stormed out of the house taken up his own house on the avenue and refuses any kind of correspondence with their mother at all and instead builds his dream house for the woman he loves with her help (signalling to the entire world their intention and openly turns his head away when he sees their mother in the street).
It’s a marvellous insult that their mother cannot stand even though she insists on telling everyone it’s not Marian she cannot stand but the sad acknowledgement that she is too small for the Russell name. Gladys only once tells her how sick that is and how repugnant considering Marian was her biggest champion and she gets a cold look in return and told that she doesn’t understand these things because she is too young. Too young to understand but young enough to get married and on and on and on it spins until they just cannot even be in the same house together.
It’s sad really, it’s a complete breakdown of her mothers relationship with her children and a complete lack of understanding on their father’s part. She doesn’t know if he is truly bogged down in work or if he just doesn’t want to come home when he knows what the mood of the house is going to be, she takes to having her meals in her room her mother goes off without saying goodbye and Gladys thinks honestly as shocking as it is, that if the woman died on route her first emotion would be relief.
And is that not a truly dreadful thing to say about one’s own mother? But what else can she say other than it is the truth? That their relationship has come to this, that there is nothing else for them but this…this is what it is, this is what it looks like now.
And…if the Duke was a nicer man she might be inclined to give him a chance but there is something about him…something…ugly and dark and insidious about him, something that makes her skin crawl. She trusts her instincts, her mother might tell her that is foolish but she trusts her instincts and when she watches him follow a maid or a young woman or even that little Montgomery girl with his eyes she feels herself shudder as if she is cold and she does not know why. But everything inside of her is screaming that this is not the man she wants to marry, the man she wants to make a life with. Every part of her is screaming danger and her mother who is the one person who should listen to her is telling her she is too young to know what she wants or what she feels but she is not too young to get married to a man of her choosing in a wedding that she plans with a dress she designs just so she can show the world that Bertha O’Brien is better than her potato digging family.
All in all it would be tragic if it was not true.
And there in lies the problem.
The line in the sand as it was.
And she is not sure which one of them is going to win, if her mother can convince her father to play ball then what’s the point. She’s better of hanging herself now to save herself the bother. To be honest she would but…well…she kind of wants to see her mother’s reaction and that defeats the point does it not?
Anyhow her only last ditch attempt is to make it clear to the entire world she does not want him, hard when her mother is throwing him down her throat but Gladys is not for nothing the daughter of a woman who cannot seem to conjure up any kind of genuine emotion. If her mother is capable of real love then Gladys has never seen it before maybe once before they were rich but certainly not since moving into this house.
So she has to get rid of him the only way she knows how. Cold indifference.
She thinks she might be getting the point across. Her mother is always there quick to sooth and placate as if he is a child but she doesn’t indulge him, she doesn’t spend time with him unless she has to, she doesn’t let him touch her, she flinches away and she can see Maime Fish has read that rightly. She doesn’t laugh at his joke or smile at him. He wants a chequebook and her iciness is an indication to all of the Old Breed that she is not consenting to this and her mother’s smile is brittle and false and the look she gives Gladys is like a woman going to war which is fine because that is what they are now.
Her father could stop it but he does not. What that means for either one of them, her and her mother and their relationship with him she simply cannot think.
But she thinks that if she can get him alone, if she can explain that for every one of her there really is another ten in this bright shiny new world where poor men become millionaires overnight and millionaires become poor men again by the end of the week she might be able to convince him. At the heart of it there is a man who wants a happy marriage or at the very least a wife who does not flinch at his touch in public. Carrie is prime for picking, Isobel Winthrop is an almost slavish bootlicker to him, Martha DeLancy wants to get out of her parents house as much as Gladys wants to get out of hers. Carrie hates her mother with a passion that rivals her own hatred of Bertha. It has to be a consideration.
But she does not want him.
And so on the day her mother goes to Newport she walks out of the house and ignores Mrs Bruce’s surprised look, she slams the door shut in Church’s face and she is down the street before the footmen can cough out and stamp on their contraband cigarettes.
She hails a cab to the hotel. Right now Church is probably frantically finding her father to let him know that for the second time his daughter has absconded but she does not care. She pays the driver respectfully and enough to keep his mouth shut and then she leans back. This is a dreadful mistake she thinks, one person gets wind she is doing this is her life over but she cannot help but think that if she does not do this then her life is over anyway. And really she thinks as she gets out of the hotel. If the choice is marriage to a man who makes her skin crawl or not being invited to the end of year Newport Ball then what choice does she actually have?
What choice has she ever had in her own life?
Bypassing people to get to his room is almost easy. She knows her mother did this about six months earlier, her mother who suddenly smiled that secretive little smile as if she knew the Duke was going to turn up and it wasn’t hard to tell why. Gladys should have known that night that she was the price. But she had been young enough to be happy then. Now at eighteen she feels drained, now at eighteen she knows her mother will move. She is old enough now that will be the excuse.
There is nobody guarding his room which is odd but then again what does she know. She thinks about knocking but as she puts her hand on the doorknob she hears it.
It’s faint and muffled but it’s the sound of someone in distress and she finds the door unlocked and so naturally as stupid as she can be at eighteen years old she pushes open the door and steps in and—
It’s like a scene out of hell.
He’s there all right the Duke of Buckingham but he seems to have his back to her because he is pressing down a child onto the table. Said child, said girl is about twelve she thinks maybe thirteen and her dark hair is loose over her dress which she dimly notes with all the expertise of the Tribune’s Best Dressed Debutante is good quality meaning this girl is of high (ish) society. She is screaming through the hand over her mouth and twisting and yanking herself out of his grip but the Duke is stronger than her, harder than her, he’s laughing as if her struggling amuses his belt is halfway undone and—
Oh Jesus Christ.
And suddenly she knows, she knows what this is, she knows it in her bones, she knows it in her gut and she knows, she knows, that this is why she doesn’t want to marry him, somewhere, someway her instincts started screaming and this was why, she doesn’t understand, in that contradictory nature that is being a woman she doesn’t understand but at the same time she does.
He’s a rapist.
Worse than that he’s a child rapist.
In reality she doesn’t fully intend to do what happens next.
She grabs the nearest thing she can find and she slams the lamp over his head. He goes flying to the floor and Gladys yanks the girl back to her side. She stumbles but rights herself at her side clutching her hand shaking. She barely looks at her though, all of Gladys attention is fixed on the man breathing heavily looking up at her.
“Oh fuck” he says in his English accent. “You”
“Indeed” she says grimly. Already she is aware that she is in the room with a rapist, that she is in fact one woman and she has never learnt how to fight thank you very much real men don’t hurt woman father! And she has a child trembling behind her back.
He gets to his feet shoving his pants up and she stares at him flatly.
“Well…” he says with a laughing kind of huff. “I can see the fire that your mother wants to put out—”
She grabs the nearest thing she can which is an iron pen holder and she throws it at him and catches him on the shoulder. He rebounds and snarls and she pushes the girl towards the door as he makes a snarling noise. She pushes backwards and grabs his umbrella by the door and then whacks it across his face.
He falls down and this time he does not get up. She has knocked the Duke of Buckingham down cold. The Duke of Buckingham and she Gladys Russell has knocked him out cold.
If this is not the very definition of a David and Goliath moment then she doesn’t know what is.
The girl behind her whimpers.
Gladys takes another step back and then another and then she shuts the door and then they both migrate back to the couch that is outside his hotel room. She sits down and the girl crowds next to her, she turns her entire body shaking to see her and thinks she is the same age and height and built as that Montgomery girl who looked at her hat and though the butterflies were so pretty and everything was magical. Girls at that age do. It’s only when they grow older that they realise how magical their childhood was.
She slides to her knees and unpins her hat throwing it to the side and then she turns to look at the girl.
“Can you speak?” she says her voice shaking.
The girl has dark hair loose down her back and her eyes are dark too framed by dark lashes, under her eye there is a bruise forming like she has been backhanded and she has a split lip and blood drying under her nose.
She looks at her and Gladys looks back and they both have a faraway expressions on their faces. Gladys takes her little face in her hands and thinks was she ever really that young?
“Did he touch you?”
Mutely the girl shakes her head and then—
“Its my fault” she sobs out big fat tears falling down her face. “It’s all my fault…oh God…” she wipes her eyes on her hands and her hands have glass in them. Gladys takes them in her own and doesn’t care about the blood on the gloves.
“It’s not your fault” she says gently. “None of this is your fault, you…what happened?”
“He…I was…” but she can barely talk and Gladys knows they cannot stay here.
“My name is Gladys Russell” she says quickly. “What’s yours?”
She looks at her endlessly young for a second and then—
“Alessia Masucci” she says through her split lip. “I…I…you saved me”
“I wouldn’t call it that” Gladys says because weather or not her father is waiting for her when she gets home there is going to be an almighty reckoning when she gets back and this innocent little soul is going to be dragged into the middle of it.
“Alessia do you have some family I can drop off but—”
That is clearly the wrong thing to say because the girl starts sobbing again.
Gladys holds her close letting her cry on her shoulder. Just as she is about to ask what is going on they hear footsteps coming up the stairs and she gasps. Without a second thought she drags the girl down to the service entrance and Alessia goes without a second thought letting herself be dragged along.
Gladys forgets her hat is there.
She doesn’t really have time to care.
They go down the stairs and down more into the servants quarters where in a back room two men are kissing. Both in chef’s livery and both jump apart when they see her but Gladys rolls her eyes. Like seriously? Is everyone blind when it comes to Oscar Van Rhijn and John Adams?
“Here” she says opening her bag and throwing what must be about five hundred dollars at one of them. “If you can get me a carriage discretely round the back and say nothing, I can pretend I didn’t see you and you can do the same”
They look at one another and then within twenty seconds she is in a carriage the girl by her side rattling away from the hotel and both of them still holding hands.
Alessia doesn’t speak. Gladys thinks it might be shock. God knows it feels like it.
She knew when she left the house this morning that something fundamental in her life was going to change.
She just didn’t know it was this.
She thinks not even her mother could have predicted this…