The Ashford Affair (35 page)

Damn him. Damn him and damn that abominable smile of his.

Bea yanked the collar of her shirt back into place. “Weren’t you the one who said patience is only a virtue when there’s something worth waiting for?”

“One of my less esteemed ancestors. But close enough. Was that meant to wound me?” He pressed a hand to his heart. “I am slain. I die. Alas.”

Bea wasn’t in the mood. “Just take me up in the air.”

“I’ve upset you.” He cupped her face in his hand, stroking the hair back from her brow with his index finger, all tender solicitude. “My poor little earthbound angel. Still trying to get back to the heavens.”

Ordinarily, she might have laughed at him, but his words cut a little too close to home. She’d so hoped that Addie would provide a bridge back to Ashford—but she’d been expelled from the Garden as firmly as Bea. It was so bloody unfair. All she’d done was do what Marcus had done, trying to get some of her own back, but she had broken the cardinal rule. She had been caught. That, not her adultery, was the unforgivable sin.

Bea batted at his hand. “Where do you get these ridiculous lines? From the talkies? You need a better script, darling. I liked you better when you were taking your lines from—oh, whoever that poet was.”

“You really are appallingly ignorant,” he said.

In his smoky voice, even the insult sounded like a caress. That didn’t take the sting out of it, though. It was as though Fate was conspiring to assault her with her ignorance from all corners. She knew nothing about coffee farming, nothing about nursing; she couldn’t quote poets or bandy philosophers.

Last night had been dreadful. It had been bad enough standing by while Addie sewed up Njombo, but dinner had been an unmitigated nightmare, Frederick picking at her, Addie speaking coolly of her job and her flat and her friends, friends who weren’t Bea’s friends, people who weren’t in
Debrett’s,
people who did things, who made things. The new order.

When had it all changed? Not so very long ago, Addie used to look to her for advice and guidance, and not just Addie. An entire season of debutantes had taken their cue from Bea, copying her dresses, aping her hairstyles. If she wore a diamond clip, a hundred diamond clips would spring up across London. It had been a glorious game. Sometimes, she would commit absurdities just for the fun of watching others copy them.

It had all gone and she didn’t know how to get it back.

She felt a sudden surge of impotent rage against her mother, who had tossed her out into the world all unready. Nothing she had been taught had any bearing on this strange new world in which they lived. What did it matter that she could arrange a dinner for eighty in perfect accordance with the rules of precedence or snub an upstart baronet’s wife without even bothering to open her mouth? When it came down to it, her mother’s tutelage had prepared her for nothing, for nothing at all. She ought to have trained as a nurse, like Addie; read her way through the Ashford library, like Addie; gone to lectures and concerts, like Addie.

Oh, bother Addie. And bother Val, too.

“I hadn’t thought it was for my mind that you wanted me,” she said. “If you want a lady don, try the droopy-stocking brigade at Oxbridge. I’m sure you’ll all have a heavenly time quoting at one another.”

Val yawned, unconcerned. He had the thickest hide of anyone she knew. It would take nothing short of a charging rhino to pierce that armor of ego. “It was Donne, my little savage. John Donne, undone. ‘License my roving hands and let them go.…’” He swung his legs over to the side, sliding to the ground. “Only you aren’t in the mood to license anything today, are you?”

“It’s my license that’s at issue,” she said crossly. “You’re meant to be teaching me to fly.”

He leaned both arms against the side of the plane. “And don’t I do that?” The sun glinted blue off his black hair.

“Not that way. I’ll never get my A license if I don’t get this crate up in the air.”

“Don’t insult the Moth.” Val stroked the silver siding with more care than he ever exercised with her. “She’ll never fly you into the sun if you do.”

“You care more about that plane than you do any person.”

“But of course. People can be so tedious, with their claims, their duties, their obligations, their endless whining. All the Moth asks is a regular supply of petrol.” Val leaned an elbow against the cockpit and raised a brow. “Are you going to play, pet, or shall I put you into your nice little motorcar and send you back to your family?”

“No one
sends
me anywhere.” She saw the amusement in his eyes and knew he’d done it on purpose, to get a rise out of her. And she’d fallen right into it. “Damn you.”

“Dearest, dearest … You’re wasting your breath. I was damned long before I met you.” With exaggerated gallantry, he lifted her hand to his lips. “Not that you wouldn’t be worth a brief stint in the infernal regions, but I’m afraid you’ll have to get in line.”

Enough was enough. Besides, much as she hated to admit it, time was getting short. She’d meant to be back by lunchtime, before Addie and Frederick realized she was gone. It was already getting on towards ten. With an hour in the air, she’d be cutting it close.

“Take me flying,” she commanded. “Or I’ll go home.”

“All right,” he said. She should have known he was always his most dangerous when he was his most accommodating. He turned her hand over in his. She shivered as his lips grazed the inside of her wrist. “But first…”

She shouldn’t. Ten o’clock already, and when one gave in to Val he always took it as license to press even harder the next time.…

He expertly turned back her sleeve, his lips moving along the inside of her arm, and Bea’s brain turned to jelly.

“Unless, of course, you can’t.”

He looked at her disingenuously, daring her to say it, daring her to say she had to go, to admit that she was less free, shackled to a husband who didn’t want her and children who baffled her. She knew if she said it, he’d pat her on the shoulder and let her go. She’d fume all the way home, squirming with sexual frustration and rage and wanting him all the more because of it.

“It’s your choice,” he said.

Only it wasn’t, really, was it? She’d forfeited her choices years ago, when she’d got pregnant with Marjorie.

“Yes,” she said defiantly, “it is.”

And she dragged his mouth to hers, closing her eyes against the sky and the struts and the birds watching from the trees, kissing him as though she could suck out the secret of his marvelous unconcern and make it hers. She heard his breath quicken, felt his pulse beat faster, and felt a surge of triumph. In this, at least, she was master, not he.

There was more than one way to fly.

New York, 1999

“But I’ve seen the pictures,” said Clemmie. “The ones of Granny and Grandpa together in Kenya.”

There was the one on the table in the living room, the two of them in their coffee field together, Grandpa Frederick in a solar topee and Granny Addie in a pair of high-waisted trousers, and another that used to live on the bureau, Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick in the same stone house Clemmie had seen in Bea’s album, seated on the porch with Clemmie’s mother standing on one side and a sulky-looking Aunt Anna sitting on Grandpa Frederick’s lap. Clemmie was sure she’d seen others, too, if only she could remember where.

“Those are all later,” said Aunt Anna. “Take a closer look at them, you’ll see. She didn’t come out until 1926.”

Several years after Clemmie’s mother was born. “Did she send you to Kenya with Grandpa Frederick?”

Clemmie had heard of children left in England while their parents went off to the colonies, but never the other way around. On the other hand, people were strange. Perhaps they’d been going through a bad patch; perhaps Granny Addie needed to stay behind for business reasons. It could have been anything.

Clemmie’s mother cleared her throat and said, with difficulty, “I was born in Mombasa. Your aunt was born in Nairobi.” She cast a narrow-eyed look at Aunt Anna. “What your aunt is trying to get me to tell you is that biologically, your Granny Addie wasn’t my mother. Not that I can see why that should matter at this point, after so many—”

“Biologically?” Clemmie broke into her mother’s tirade. “What?”

“She wasn’t our mother,” said Aunt Anna.

“She was in every way that counted,” said Clemmie’s mother stubbornly. “She was far more of a mother to us than—”

“You can’t even say her name, can you? She doesn’t even exist to you.”

“We barely existed to her.”

“Whoa,” said Clemmie. She felt like Alice through the looking glass, everything upside down and topsy-turvy. “But she and Grandpa Frederick—they met when she was thirteen! She told me the whole story. With the mouse.”

“There were intervening events,” said her mother primly.

Aunt Anna gave her sister a look. “They were married in 1929. There’s probably a marriage certificate floating around somewhere if you don’t believe me. You do the math.”

By 1929, Mother would have been almost eight years old, Aunt Anna five. But there, in front of her, was an album dated 1926, featuring everyone but Granny Addie.

From a very long way away, she could see a manila folder, splayed open on the floor of Jon’s study, and the grainy photocopy of the cover of an old magazine. Another picture without Granny Addie. She could see the caption in front of her, ink smeared but still legible: L
ADY
B
EATRICE
D
ESBOROUGH AND
T
HE
H
ONOURABLE
F
REDERICK
D
ESBOROUGH.

Not Gillecote. Not Rivesdale. Desborough.

Clemmie pointed at the album. She was amazed at how steady her hand was. “It’s Bea, isn’t it? She’s the intervening event.”

It was easier to think of it that way. An intervening event was so cold and anodyne. Not a person, an intervening event.

Her mother nodded.

“She’s—” Clemmie couldn’t bring herself to say “my grandmother.” The words choked at the back of her throat. Her grandmother had been Granny Addie. Only she wasn’t. The words burst out of her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her mother’s throat worked. “It didn’t seem important.”

“Not important?” Clemmie had spent her whole life trying to remake herself in the image of a grandmother who wasn’t her grandmother. She was—Clemmie didn’t even want to try to do the genealogical plotting. Her voice wobbled as she asked, “Was Grandpa Frederick really my grandfather? Or was that a lie, too?”

“You have his eyes,” said her mother.

“You used to say I had Granny’s chin,” retorted Clemmie. “I just didn’t realize it was the wrong granny. Why didn’t you tell me?”

There was silence.

Clemmie’s nails bit into her palms. “What happened to her? To my real grandmother?”

It felt like a betrayal to say it, to even think it, here in Granny Addie’s room, with the ghost of Granny Addie still among them, in the pictures propped against the wall, the clothes in the boxes. Clemmie had spent so many hours in this room, bouncing on the bed that wasn’t here anymore, playing dress up with the clothes that used to hang in the closet, sitting by that horrible metal hospital bed. They’d spent so much time together, she and Granny Addie.

But Granny Addie wasn’t Granny Addie, and she had betrayed Clemmie, too, by keeping silent.

“Your sainted Granny Addie got rid of her,” said Anna. “She came out to Kenya and everything went to hell.”

“That’s not fair,” said Clemmie’s mother sharply. “You can’t blame it on Mummy. It wasn’t her fault.”

“Mummy?”
Aunt Anna made choking noises. “God, she had you so brainwashed! You just couldn’t wait to get rid of our real mother, could you?”

“You weren’t old enough to remember,” said Clemmie’s mother with dignity. “You don’t remember how it was before.”

“Yes, I do.” There were lines in Aunt Anna’s face that Clemmie had never seen before. “I remember our mother—our real mother. I remember her perfume. I remember her laugh.”

Clemmie’s mother rose to her feet. “Do you remember the fighting? Do you remember how she used to disappear for weeks on end? Do you remember any of that?” She clutched the back of the chair with both hands. “I remember. I remember the way the governesses used to come and go. I remember the nights she didn’t come home. You were only a baby—you wouldn’t remember. She never wanted us. She never—”

“Maybe she didn’t want you,” Aunt Anna tossed back.

Clemmie’s mother shook her head. “Addie was more a mother to both of us than she ever was.”

“Oh, yes,” said Anna. “She could afford to be. She got everything she wanted. Once she got rid of our mother.”

Tension sizzled between them. For a moment, they looked eerily alike, not in feature, but in expression, in the hostility radiating from each.

“Stop! Stop it, both of you!” Clemmie rounded on her mother. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

“You don’t understand how it was. Our own mother … left us.” Aunt Anna made an indignant noise, but Clemmie’s mother didn’t let herself be diverted. She looked steadily at Clemmie. “Your grandmother was my mother in every way that counted. She was my mother for seventy years. She’s the mother I would have chosen if I’d have the chance to choose.”

“She wasn’t my grandmother,” said Clemmie. Her mother’s voice was a buzz in her ears, her arguments going past her, making no sense. “If she wasn’t your mother, she couldn’t be my grandmother.”

“She didn’t think of it that way,” said Clemmie’s mother. “It would have hurt her to hear you talking like that. Your Granny Addie loved you,”

“She wasn’t my Granny Addie.” Clemmie felt as though she’d been pummeled. Every muscle in her body hurt. She felt slow and stupid. “She was my—what? My cousin two times removed? How could you keep that from me?”

“What good would it have done to tell you?” Her mother’s voice was almost pleading. “You had a grandmother, a real grandmother. Why would I take that away from you?”

“You should have told me,” Clemmie said stubbornly. She couldn’t get past the injustice of it, the not being told, the not knowing. A horrible thought struck her. “Did Dad know?”