The Half-Hidden (Part Two)

By Marc-Yves Tumin
The midwife was uncertain if Danielle would survive the night, when she was brought into this world at a charity ward in Lower Manhattan. The infant's mother had toiled at menial jobs, up to the instant of her confinement, and failed to survive the ordeal, but she glimpsed her baby before she was taken, and the child proved to be uncommonly tenacious of life.

However, a kindly midwife from the docklands of the Emerald Shore -- who had held the fading mother's hand until the end, and had lifted the babe for her to view -- surreptitiously gave the new arrival a ration of warm milk, beyond the permissible allowance, and covered her with blankets taken from her own cot.

Against all odds, the little girl grew stronger, and by the time the society couple -- who seemed to have sprung from the pages of the Social Register -- took a tour of the foundling hospital, Danielle was animated with an inner dynamo, jouncing the counterpane, and endeavoring to stand by herself inside the crib.

It was her red-letter day. They picked her up, a dazzling smile crossed her visage, they looked at each other in a wild surmise, the flashbulbs erupted on the Speed Graphics, and they trundled her home forthwith.

Time passed and those who caught a glimpse of her agreed that Danielle was unusually attractive. Though her mien already was imbued with the serious business of life, and she was fond of ensconcing herself in arcane places, her head encompassed a wilderness of red curls, expansive green eyes, and especially pale skin, adorned here and there with a stray freckle.

She had learned to read at an early age and was a font of knowledge, which she kept to herself, however. Few realized that "her natural father was an Irish rebel," according to a nurse. (Certain family Solons apparently concurred that "the connection was lèse majesté and would have made for a degrading alliance," the woman asseverated.)

"He was on the run from Crown Forces, when he stopped by the wayside to help an abandoned Tinker girl. Despite being grievous wounded, he refused to discard the stripling, carried her to a church, and was cut down on its steps as he attempted to effect his escape."

"His widow was with child when she slipped across the waters to the New World," where she disappeared in the still-scape of the nonpareil port city, scrubbing floors on the Lower East Side until she little more than a tattered scarf of flesh and bone.

Danielle was uncommonly fortunate to have as her guardians those born to the purple. Her adoptive parents were greatly admired by both high and low. And they were an effortlessly glamorous pair, immensely fashionable, and imperially thin.

They were said to be connoisseurs with the common touch. And, though they fancied sailing their mahogany sloop with the blue bloods in Newport, and kept a stable of thoroughbreds, they wore their privilege lightly and were somewhat apologetic about their highborn station, entailing as it were the unselfconscious donning of the mantle of entitlement.

Indeed, though aristocratic in carriage, demeanor, and deportment, they were undistracted by the cynosure of pomp and circumstance, and steeled themselves to the destiny of those who sit above the salt.

They resided in a palatial double-townhouse, which learned critics had described as a triumph of museology, a touchstone of proportion, in harmony with the gilded age manners of its antecedents, a glittering pile of coffered ceilings and elaborate wainscoting, a demesne secured from the vulgar with iron gates and brownstone walls some 3 feet thick.

Their impregnable redoubt was a lagoon of high art and civilization. Situated on the Upper East Side, it was the definition of paradisiacal, at once an oasis, argosy, and provenance of gracious living, where precious manners prevailed and were kept up to snuff with the silken ferocity of a white-gloved serving staff.

It was a supernal property, exquisitely appointed, its atmosphere redolent of jasmine and woody fougère. It was, in all respects, cordon bleu tasteful, comme il faut Parnassian, an en-suite asterism of artistic pretension, an avalanche of china, crystal, paintings, drawings, sculpture, virtu, bibelot, chandeliers, manuscripts, lace curtains, antiquities, incunabula, leather-bound volumes, bronze doré appointments, imported objets d'art, provocative knickknacks, intellectual petit point, and intricate curiosities sufficient to impress the gentry, from perfervid artistes to formidable grandes dames and prêt-a-porter philosophes.

Above all, the manse was maintained in a martial display of elegance by a full panoply of cooks, servants, gardeners, housekeepers, and supererogatory secretaries of one thing or another. However, in the crescent glow of this hymn to wealth and power -- in which cosseting the guests was de rigueur -- at least one tenant -- the small, furtive girl -- rarely smiled.

(Continued next week)