The Ashford Affair (7 page)

“Child, Vera,” said Uncle Charles tiredly. “That child. She’s only—what was it? Six? Seven? Young enough to be taught. I have no doubt,” he added dryly, “that if anyone can do it, it will be you.”

“Addie? Addie?” It was Fernie calling. “Are you hiding?” Addie heard her quick steps come to an abrupt halt. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

“There was no one to answer the bell.” It was the woman’s voice, heavy with disapproval.

“I let the servants go. Since—” Fernie’s voice caught. She went on determinedly. “You must be Lord and Lady Ashford? Thank you so much for coming for Addie. She’s—well, she’s as you can imagine. It’s been very hard for her. For all of us. It was all so sudden, so unexpected—” Her voice broke.

“Do you have the child ready?” said the woman, breaking off further confidences. “We have the car waiting.”

“Yes, everything is ready,” said Fernie distractedly. “But Addie— She likes to hide in the closet when she’s upset. It’s her private place.”

The door opened, letting in a pale triangle of light. Addie made herself as small as she could, scrunched up against the back wall of the closet.

“Addie,” Fernie said, and there was a pleading note in her voice. “Addie, come and meet your uncle and aunt, Lord and Lady Ashford. Please, darling, do come out.”

Reluctantly, Addie unfolded herself from her snug corner, wiggling out between old boots and discarded umbrellas. Her hair had come out of its ribbon and there were dark smudges on her face where she had wiped at her cheeks with dirty hands.

The first person she saw was the aunt, Lady Ashford, who stared at her as though she were a bug caught crawling out of the wainscoting. She wasn’t precisely tall, but she seemed to take up a great deal of space. Her hat went up at the sides and down in the middle. There was a feather sprouting from one side, too impossibly purple to have come from any bird Addie could imagine. Lady Ashford wore a fur stole around her shoulders, over a traveling costume of purple and black. Her collar was high and pointy and went up right under her chin, which might be, Addie thought, why she held it quite so high.

Next to her, Uncle Charles seemed faded in comparison, as if he were a watercolor that had been caught in the rain. Addie’s father’s hair had been blond, too, but Uncle Charles’ was several shades lighter, pale blond blending to silver, his eyes a pale blue that looked as though the color had been bleached out of them. Everything about him was tall and thin, from his long, narrow nose to the long, thin hand on his wife’s arm.

They were both staring at her. Addie scrunched her shoulders, wishing she had stayed in her closet. They weren’t at all like her parents’ friends, who bribed her into good humor with gifts of sweets or stood her on a chair and made her recite Fernie’s poetry for them, applauding vigorously as she did.

“Say hello to your aunt and uncle, Addie,” Fernie said nervously.

“Young ladies,” said Lady Ashford, “do not lurk in cupboards.”

Addie tucked her chin in. “Then I won’t be a young lady,” she said defiantly. “I’d much rather be a hedgehog.”

It was the sort of remark that made Fernie shake her head and kiss Addie on the cheek and her parents’ friends laugh.

The aunt and uncle weren’t amused. Lady Ashford looked triumphant. Lord Ashford looked grave.

Lady Ashford gave Lord Ashford a significant look. “Grubbing in the dirt, I see,” she said meaningfully.

“Oh, no,” said Addie quickly, amazed at this lack of comprehension. “Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle doesn’t grub. She washes Lucie’s handkerchiefs for her and makes them nice and clean. She washes Henny-penny’s stockings and Tabby Kitten’s mittens and—”

“Addie,” said Fernie, very softly.

“But she does!”

“Com
plete
ly ungoverned,” said Lady Ashford. She turned to Fernie. “Have you packed her things?”

Fernie nodded. “I’ve packed Addie’s clothes, but there are still—there are still Mr. and Mrs. Gillecote’s things. I didn’t know what you would want to do about them, if you want to bring them, or save them for Addie, or—” She looked anxiously to Uncle Charles. “The house was let furnished, but there are, oh, little things. And all their books, of course.”

“We shan’t be wanting any of that,” said Aunt Vera dismissively. “There are books enough at Ashford.”

“If you would like to have any of it as a keepsake…” added Uncle Charles to Fernie diplomatically.

Fernie dumbly shook her head. “No, I couldn’t. But, surely, Addie should have her mother’s books—not to read now, of course, but for when she’s older.…”

Aunt Vera ignored her. “I assume the child has a coat?”

Addie opened her mouth to protest, but Fernie put her hand on her shoulder and squeezed, hard. Addie glanced up at Fernie and Fernie shook her head, warning her to silence. Addie looked at the aunt and uncle and back at Fernie and held tight to Fernie’s hand. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, not in front of the new aunt with the hard, cold eyes or the uncle who ought to look like her father but didn’t.

As Aunt Vera and Uncle Charles’ chauffeur fetched Addie’s bags, Fernie buttoned Addie into her coat. “Don’t worry, darling,” she whispered. “Just pretend you’re a princess in a tower.”

Addie wrapped her arms around Fernie’s neck, squeezing as hard as she could, breathing in her rosewater scent for the very last time. “A very high tower.”

“But a very brave princess.” Fernie squeezed back, then let her go, gently untangling Addie’s arms from around her neck. “Wait. Wait here for a moment.”

She disappeared in a swirl of skirts and came back again a moment later, breathless, her cheeks pink with exertion.

“Take this,” she said, and pushed a thin volume into Addie’s hand, cheaply bound in pink, speckled paper.

It was Fernie’s own copy of Christina Rossetti’s
Goblin Market.

It was Addie’s favorite poem, with all the clucking and clacking and mopping and mowing. She had made Fernie read it to her again and again, acting out the goblins, alternately playing the parts of Lizzie and Laura, the daring sister and the prudent one.

“There.” Fernie closed Addie’s hands around the book. “Read that and think of me.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t let your aunt and uncle see it.”

Addie tucked it away under her coat. Somehow, she had the feeling that Fernie was right. Quiet and subdued, Addie took her place in Uncle Charles’ car.

“Ashford,” she heard him tell the driver.

The word echoed in her ears with the thrum of the engine and the rumble of the tires as they pulled away from Guilford Street, rolling their way mile by mile towards the home from which her father had so pointedly run away.

Ashford.

New York, 1999

“Isn’t that
Brideshead Revisited
?” Clemmie looked at the image on the page. It was
Masterpiece Theatre
come to life.

“Nope,” said Jon. “That was Castle Howard. But close. Same architect.”

The golden stone of Ashford Park gleamed in the sunshine, the dome dominating the landscape for miles around. A multitiered flight of stairs led up to the front entrance, a massive doorway dwarfed by its frame of matched columns, overshadowed by a triangular portico. Long wings stretched out on either side, pilaster after pilaster, window after window, all in perfect symmetry. Even squished flat on an eleven-and-a-half-by-eight-inch piece of paper, the house had an imposing feel to it, the sort of place that was designed to overawe the peasantry and impress visiting monarchs.

It didn’t look like anyone actually lived in it. It was a showplace, not a home, and certainly not Granny Addie’s home.

“You’re pulling my leg,” Clemmie said. “Unless you’re going to tell me that she was a housemaid who made good or something like that.”

Jon choked on a laugh. “What have you been reading? Barbara Taylor Bradford?”

“What’s wrong with Barbara Taylor Bradford?”

Jon made a face amply illustrative of his feelings.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. And Terry Pratchett is high literature?” That was the danger: they knew way too much about each other; they always had. That was why they hadn’t … well. Clemmie poked at the picture. “Can you really see Granny there? I can’t.”

“Why not?” asked Jon.

Clemmie leafed through the pages. After the big glamour shot of the façade, the next five pages were dedicated to interiors, some whole rooms, others detail shots of intriguing bits of masonry. She couldn’t picture Granny Addie there, playing hide and go seek on that great double staircase, with the elaborately carved gallery that ran all around, taking meals in that long, red-walled dining room with the massive silver epergne on the center of the table. There was a detail shot of the epergne, the base made of trumpeting elephants.

There were no private areas, no bedrooms or nurseries. That wouldn’t have interested the author of the book.

“She had to grow up somewhere, didn’t she?” said Jon reasonably. “Where did you think it was?”

Funny, Clemmie had never really thought about her grandparents coming from anywhere in particular. They just were. Like pillars on a building. You never stopped to ask where the marble had been quarried and how it had been carved. It just was.

Granny sometimes talked about Kenya, about their early days there, getting the hang of the farm, learning how to run a business, but that was all. That was as far back as it went and Clemmie had never thought to inquire further.

“If it makes it better,” said Jon, “she wasn’t a housemaid, but she was a poor relation. She was the daughter of the sixth earl’s younger brother.”

Clemmie was reminded of that line from
Spaceballs
, the bit about the father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate.
What’s that make us? Absolutely nothing!

Jon was in full lecture mode. “When her parents died in an omnibus accident in 1906, the earl and his wife took her in.”

Clemmie did the genealogical math. “So that would make Granny Addie the earl’s niece.”

“Yup.”

Clemmie shook her head. “It doesn’t wash, Jon.” She pointed at the book. “According to this, it says the Earl of Ashford and his family still live there. If Granny Addie grew up there, why don’t we have any contact with them? Why wouldn’t she say that she still had family left in England?”

“I gather,” said Jon carefully, “that she parted ways with them. There was a falling-out. Why do you think she doesn’t talk about this stuff?”

Maybe she would have if Clemmie had been around more. Clemmie shoved that thought aside, wiggling out from under the book. It made her feel better to stand. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly the Brady Bunch. No one in my family is big on talking about their personal lives.” Except maybe Aunt Anna, and even she had managed to perfect the art of talking a lot while saying very little. “We don’t do the whole sharing thing.”

Jon looked up at her from his comfy sprawl on the daybed. “There’s a difference between letting it all hang out and normal information flow. I don’t know much about my grandparents, but I do know the basic things, like where they grew up”—his face turned grim—“and where they died.”

Clemmie tilted her head in inquiry. All this looking down was making her neck hurt. She perched, gingerly, on the corner of the bed.

“Auschwitz. Both my dad’s parents.” Jon tapped a finger against the corner of the book. “Trust me, I’d trade you.”

“It’s just—it’s too weird,” said Clemmie. “It’s like something out of a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel.”

Jon grinned. “You make a very cute Little Lord Fauntleroy. Especially with the new haircut … What was that kid’s name?”

Clemmie held up her hands. “Search me. I was always more a
Secret Garden
girl.”

Jon plopped the book back in her lap, leaning over her arm to turn the pages.

“You see that?” He was pointing at the massive epergne, the one with all the elephants.

“It would be hard to miss it.” He smelled of generic dandruff shampoo, Old Spice, and laundry detergent. Guy smells. Lazy Sunday morning hanging out in bed smells.

She really needed to get back out there on the dating market. Clemmie forced her attention back to what Jon was saying.

“Apparently, Granny Addie’s uncle was almost appointed Viceroy of India.” At Clemmie’s blank look, he explained, “The viceroy was the Governor of India. It’s basically playing king on behalf of the king. The viceroy had semi-regal powers. Hence the name. Vice. Roy. Roy from the French,
roi.
Demi-king.”

“Your students must love you,” said Clemmie dryly. “So what happened?”

Jon grinned. “They appointed someone else. But apparently, Lord Ashford never really got over being passed over. He picked up any Indian knickknacks he could, to remind people that he might have been there.”

“That’s quite a knickknack.” Clemmie pushed her hair back behind her ears, asking the question that was eating at her. “Jon, how do you know all this?”

“Because I asked.”

Clemmie gave him the stare she used on annoying junior associates.

“This is my time period,” he reminded her. “Modern Britain. I stumbled on some stuff about the family—your family,” he corrected himself, “when I was working on my dissertation. So I asked Granny Addie about it.”

“When?” Clemmie asked.

Jon did some mental computation. “It was right after I did my research year in London. That would have been … nine years ago? Awhile.”

“So you’ve known this for a long time.” Clemmie moved the book away from him and closed it, resting her palms on the cover.

Jon sighed. “Look,” he said, and, for a moment, he sounded eerily like Aunt Anna, her favorite expression in her favorite tone. “I think it was easier for Granny Addie to talk to me. I wasn’t part of the family. It made things … simpler.”

Clemmie nodded slowly. “Okay,” she said, “I get that.” Although she didn’t, really. “And you asked.”

Jon leaned towards her, bracing an elbow on the bookshelf. “It’s not a unique art,” he said, his hazel eyes intent on hers. “You can ask, too. If you really want to.”

Yes, but would Granny Addie still be able to answer? “That sounds like a dare.”