The Ashford Affair (17 page)

And they would live happily ever after.

It was silly, she knew. But it was fundamentally harmless, this little dream of love, based on a fine pair of eyes and a passing kindness, just something to send her to sleep with a smile after a particularly trying evening of toting bloody basins or swallowing Aunt Vera’s maxims. Although Addie had half-guiltily followed his career where she could, searching for his name in the papers, she had never expected to meet Frederick Desborough again. He had become, to her, almost as fictional as Mr. Rochester, someone to be sighed over and then tucked away again.

“Whatever happened to it?” he asked conversationally.

“To—?” Addie looked up at him from under her hat brim, hoping that he couldn’t tell half of what she was feeling.

“The mouse,” he said smilingly.

“Oh, you mean Binky!”

“Was that its name?”

“Short for Bianca.” She tried for a tone of proper worldly boredom, clenching and unclenching her hands to stop them tingling. “She was a white mouse, you know. We thought we were so very clever.”

“Was she put down for crimes against the state?”

“You mean for spoiling Dodo’s ball? No. She died a perfectly natural death at the ripe old age of five.” How ridiculous it all seemed now, how absurd that once they had cared about such things as a mouse let loose at a ball. “It seems a very long time ago, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. It does.” His voice didn’t sound quite as she remembered. There was more of a drawl to it, an undercurrent of ennui. His face was thinner than it had been, thinner and wearier. “Are you in town for the Season?”

“No. I wasn’t much good at it, so I decided to give it up.”

“You gave it up?” Captain Desborough gave a little snort of amusement. “What do you mean?”

“You mean aside from being an awful wallflower?”

Somehow, it felt like a triumph to have made him laugh, to bring a smile to his too-thin face.

Emboldened, she said, “It just seemed such a waste, all that, when so much has happened. The going to parties and standing about and just pretending that everything is all the same as it was when it can’t ever be again.” Addie glanced at him, trying to see his expression, but his face was shrouded by the brim of his hat. “And, of course, there’s the not liking the parties. So, really, I’m just making a virtue out of necessity.”

“What shall you do with yourself now that you’ve given up society?” he asked politely, but Addie had the sense he wasn’t really there anymore, that whatever pleasure he might have taken in her company had been leached away.

A bird trilled from an iron railing. In the street, an omnibus rumbled past.

Addie clasped her hands together in front of her. “Look, don’t tell anyone, will you? It’s just that I’m bursting to tell someone. I’ve got a job. Well, not really a job. It’s more of an accidental unpaid apprenticeship—on probation—but at least it’s
something.
”

“Let me guess,” said Captain Desborough. “You’ve got a place at a fashion house. No. Wait. Writing tittle-tattle for the tabloids.”

Addie made a face. “No, nothing like that. I wouldn’t know one cut from another. As for tittle-tattle—by the time it got to me, it would be old news.”

“What, then?” he asked lazily.

The sun was shining full in her eyes, over the white-painted walls of the Georgian houses. Addie held up a hand to her hat brim. “
The Bloomsbury Review,
” she said with satisfaction.

“Good Lord.” Captain Desborough didn’t ask her what it was, as Marcus would have. His eyebrows went up, more intrigued than shocked.
“The Bloomsbury Review?”

“It hasn’t the reputation yet of
The Mercury,
but it’s got such a lot of interesting people,” said Addie earnestly. “It looks to newer writers and critics, the ones who can’t get into the
Mercury.
I know there’s
Wheels
for that, but they only publish once a year, and only poetry. We have short fiction, as well, and criticism and philosophy and … oh, all sorts.”

“Subversive reading material for a young lady. Does your family know you’re reading that?”

Addie all but danced down the street. “I won’t just be reading it, I’ll be editing it! Well, if I’m lucky. Mostly, I’ll be fetching tea and whatever it is that the most junior of the junior are made to do.”

“Isn’t Bloomsbury a bit off the beaten path?”

“Not for me.” She thought about the narrow house in the narrow street, haloed in memory with rosy light and the smell of biscuits and pipe smoke. Over the years, it had flattened and softened in memory until it looked like an illustration out of a children’s book, all pastels and rounded corners. “I grew up in Bloomsbury, you see. Right off Russell Square.”

He was looking at her, really looking at her, like an appraiser presented with a painting that had turned out to be rather more interesting than he had first surmised. “I thought you were a Gillecote of the Gillecotes. They aren’t precisely…”

“They’re frightfully county. I know,” Addie agreed. “Horses and hounds and footmen at dinner. My father was the family scandal. He fell in love with a novelist and ran off with her. My uncle and aunt didn’t at all approve.”

“No,” murmured Captain Desborough. “I can see where they wouldn’t. Who was she?”

“Helen Layton. She wrote as H. R. Layton.”

That stopped him dead in his tracks. “You
are
full of surprises.”

Addie did her best to look glamorous and Bohemian, hoping he wouldn’t realize that none of the glamour was inherent to herself. While it might be rather dashing to have a mother who had written scandalous novels, they weren’t Addie’s novels any more than the articles in
The Bloomsbury Review
would be her articles. But, maybe, by association …

He resumed walking, book swinging easily by his side. “You haven’t any uncles named Picasso, have you?”

His voice sounded different than it had when they met, no longer avuncular, but playful, teasing. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was … Was he flirting? Addie’s pulse picked up as excitement warred with doubt.

“No, and I haven’t the least relation to any of the dancers in the Russian ballet,” she said, striving for the same sophisticated, bantering tone. “It’s just my parents, really. My father wrote, too. Histories.”

Subversive, Aunt Vera called them, although not when Uncle Charles was there to hear. Uncle Charles wouldn’t have anything said against Addie’s father, whether from affection or from a sense of family propriety she wasn’t quite sure. In effect, it had meant that no one said anything at all. Addie wished they had. There was so little she remembered and it was so long ago that she had long lost track of that fragile dividing line between memory and invention.

Reading her mother’s books was like seeing the world turned inside out, familiar refrains and ideas turned on their heads. Only, reading her mother’s words, Addie couldn’t help feeling that it was the world as she had known it that had been inside out all along and she was only now seeing it right way up. She had never seen the beauty in poverty or the poorness in riches until her mother laid it out for her. She had never thought to question Aunt Vera’s codes or strictures, or to ask whether being correct was the same as being good.

Aunt Vera had taught her what one did and, more forcefully, what one did not. Her mother had forced her to ask “why?”

“Have you read my mother’s books?” she asked.

“Yes. Before the War…” His face darkened, his lips narrowing into a thin line, as though he didn’t trust himself to say more. Addie had seen that look before, on the men in the hospital, somewhere between anger and loss.

“And what did you think?” Addie asked hastily.

Captain Desborough blinked, his eyes focusing on her with difficulty. “About … Oh yes. Your mother’s books. There’s no good way I can answer that question, is there? I think she had a rare talent for seeing both the best and the worst in human nature and portraying them both faithfully. We see all the petty hypocrisies of both rich and poor.”

“But also their power for redemption,” said Addie eagerly. If her mother’s books had taught her anything, it was that inevitability was only inevitable if one allowed it to be so. The best of her mother’s characters seized life on their own terms, made their own destinies. Addie only wished she had the courage to do the same.

An automobile backfired and Captain Desborough flinched, his entire body snapping with tension.

“Redemption,” he said heavily. There were dots of sweat on his brow that hadn’t been there a moment before. He began walking again, much faster than before. “You don’t really believe that rot, do you?”

“It’s not rot!” Addie scurried to match her shorter stride to his. “Isn’t that the best part of the human experience? Our ability to learn from our mistakes and rise to a higher plane of consciousness?”

“You’ve been attending free lectures, haven’t you?” He made it sound like a bad thing. “If you’d bothered to read anything in the papers other than poetry, you’d know that higher consciousness is hardly a human gift. We scurry like rats back into the same poisoned gutters … Like rats…”

“That’s absurd.” Addie struggled with her skirt, hobbling herself. “We’re hardly rats. It’s the power of reason that distinguishes man from the animals.”

Captain Desborough gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “I’ve seen precious little evidence of that.”

“But that’s why poetry is so important,” said Addie excitedly. She hadn’t been able to discuss this with anyone from her ordinary life, not Bea, not Dodo, and certainly not Aunt Vera. “It forces people to think—to reevaluate. Surely, if we all make a concerted effort, we can change the world for the better.”

“One cup of tea at a time?” he said derisively.

She looked at him in dismay. He was mocking her, she realized. Put that way, her job at
The Bloomsbury Review
did seem remarkably silly, as silly as working for a fashion house or a gossip column. Shame made her cheeks heat. So much for flirtation or sophistication. She’d made an utter fool of herself, and all for what? The memory of a mouse?

She held out a hand with all the dignity she could muster. “Thank you for seeing me home, Captain Desborough. It was very good of you. I do hope I did not incommode you too greatly.”

It was a horrible, stilted little speech.

Captain Desborough didn’t take her hand. He stood, looking down at her, his lips pressed tightly together. “No, it wasn’t good of me,” he said baldly. “That was beastly of me. And entirely uncalled for.”

Addie shrugged uncomfortably. “You were only being honest. It is rather silly when you look at it that. To be so proud of getting to make the tea…”

“Don’t forget the old saw about oaks and acorns. All great things come from small beginnings—and poetry from a pot of tea.” Captain Desborough tilted her hat back until he could see her face. “I didn’t mean to belittle your new venture. Forgive me?”

She blinked up at him, afraid to move, to break the spell. “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said breathlessly.

His eyes were very, very green in his pale face, like jade, ancient and earnest. He was still standing too close, close enough that her skirt brushed against his trousers, close enough that Addie could practically hear the kitchen maids whispering about it through the railings.

“Look,” he said. “I feel like the worst sort of cad. Let me make it up to you?”

“There’s no need,” said Addie, feeling suddenly shy again. She stepped back, her skirt whispering against the iron railings. “There’s nothing to make up.”

Captain Desborough’s gaunt face lit with a sudden smile. “But I want to,” he said. “And I want to hear more about your excursion into bohemia. Can I stand you supper?”

London, 1999

Clemmie ate supper at Rivesdale House.

It was only seven o’clock London time, still early for dining, as the almost empty dining room attested. Right now, Clemmie didn’t care about being fashionable; she was just glad she was still awake. They’d had a full day of meetings, going from Dorchester House to co-counsel’s office on Silk Street to the PharmaNet offices in trendy Docklands. Clemmie didn’t like to think how long she’d been wearing the same clothes.

She had to hand it to Brooks Brothers; their non-iron shirts really did hold up well. Especially after—she did the mental math—twenty-seven hours of continuous use. Weird to think that she’d put it on yesterday morning in her own apartment and hadn’t changed since. Yesterday felt like a million years ago. International travel did strange things to both one’s sense of time and one’s billable hours. Paul liked to brag that he frequently billed more than twenty-four hours in a day, with a little help from the Concorde.

“Not exactly the firm cafeteria, huh?” whispered Harold, the junior associate.

“Huh?” said Clemmie. “Sorry. What did you say?”

Harold poked her in the arm. “This. Pretty impressive.”

There was no arguing with that. The walls were hung in a rich mulberry brocade, although it was hard to see the fabric beneath the paintings, row upon row of them, hanging from cords from the moldings. There wasn’t much of a theme to them. It looked like someone’s ancestors had gone on a rummage in Rome circa 1700 and picked up whatever was going cheap: battle scenes, biblical scenes, landscapes, portraits of smirking courtiers. There were the requisite dead fowl and large bowls of fruits and spaniels with liquid brown eyes, as well as a brawny woman holding someone’s head suspended over a silver platter.

There were two fireplaces, one on either side of the room, bracketed by recessed pillars that looked, to Clemmie’s untrained eye, like real marble, rather than its painted imitation. Large portraits hung above each, one of a woman in the tight-waisted garb of the late nineteenth century, the other in one of the waistless creations of the twenties. They appeared to be glowering at each other across the room, locked in a timeless generational battle. Even preserved in paint, Edwardian Woman didn’t approve of Flapper Girl.

What was it the magazine cover had called the place? A country house hotel in London? Yup, she could see that. The menu bore that out. Printed on a single sheet of heavy card stock, deeply embossed, it boasted mostly fowl in various forms: partridge, grouse, pheasant. For the pescatarians, there was a fish option: wild Scottish salmon. For the price, it ought to come dressed in a kilt and dancing a reel.