The Ashford Affair

by Lauren Willig

  “Beatrice, if we’re being formal. I was named after a particularly dreary aunt. One of Mother’s sisters, so you needn’t worry, she’s not one of yours. She gave me a miserable little spoon as a christening gift, not even an apostle on it. I do call that mean. Don’t you agree?”

  At this point, Addie would have agreed to anything. “I suppose,” she hedged.

  “If one is to be named after dreary aunts, they should at least give good presents,” said Bea with authority. “Dodo’s left her a tiara, not that it does Dodo any good.”

  “Dodo?”

  “Diana. You met her just now—well, not met, really, but she was there. She’s the older of us. Goodness, no one has told you anything, have they?”

  Addie shook her head, feeling the tears prickle at the backs of her eyes.

  “Well, you needn’t worry,” said Bea. “I’ll take care of you. It’s all very dull, really. There’s four of us, only Edward is off at school most of the time. Dodo likes horses better than people and Poppy is still at the babbling stage, so she’s not terribly much of a conversationalist. How old are you?”

  “Almost six.” Somehow, Addie had the sense that it was very important to be almost six rather than five. One wouldn’t want to be dismissed as still at the babbling stage. “How old are you?”

  “I’m just past seven.” Bea considered her. “I must say, you don’t look like a savage.”

  She sounded deeply disappointed.

  “What does a savage look like?” asked Addie.

  “Oh, you know, feathers and paint and that sort of thing. Nanny said you were raised by heathens,” said her cousin, bouncing on her bed. “Lucky old you. I was raised by Nanny and you can imagine what that’s been like. Dull, dull, dull.”

  It was hard to imagine anywhere Bea was ever being dull; she crackled with energy, like the sky before the storm. She looked more like Uncle Charles, but something about her exuberance reminded Addie just a little bit of Father. The thought made Addie feel warm inside.

  “Have you lived here all your life?” she asked shyly.

  “Yes, isn’t it awful? If we’re lucky, they take us to Aunt Agatha in Scotland in August, and it’s all grouse grouse grouse. I’ve only been to London once. You lived in London, didn’t you?”

  Addie nodded.

  “I am jealous. What is it like? Is it terribly exciting?” Without waiting for Addie to answer, she leaned forward and confided, “When I am older, I’m going to be a marchioness and live in London and have walnut cake for breakfast every morning.”

  Addie sensed that she was meant to be impressed by this, but she was missing some key information. “What’s a marchioness?” she asked humbly.

  Bea wrinkled her brow at her. “The wife of a marquess, of course. A marquess,” she said with satisfaction, “is grander than an earl, which means that I will outrank Mama. What’s this?” She had found Fernie’s copy of Goblin Market.

  “A book,” said Addie warily.

  “Silly, I know that! I can tell that much. But what is it?”

  Addie wiggled herself up into a sitting position. “It’s a poem, called Goblin Market.”

  “Read it to me.” There was a rustling as Bea heaved herself off the bed, rummaging for a candle and matches. There was electricity at Ashford, but it hadn’t yet made it as far as the nursery. “Here.” Bea struck a match and the candle blazed into life.

  Addie looked anxiously at the door. “Won’t someone see?”

  “Nanny sleeps like the dead. Snores, too,” confided Bea. “We’d hear her long before she got here.”

  “All right,” said Addie. It was Bea’s house; she should know. And it seemed nice to be the one who knew something when she was so ignorant about Ashford and marsh—well, whatever it was. She held up the blanket so Bea could scootch in next to her. “It’s about two sisters, Lizzie and Laura. That’s Laura.”

  She tilted the book to show Bea the frontispiece, Laura leaning forward, scissors in hand, preparing to cut off a lock of her long blond hair to barter for the goblin feast. Even in black and white, you could tell that her hair was moonlight pale, like Bea’s.

  Bea leaned over Addie’s shoulder to study the picture. “Are those goblins?” said Bea. “They look more like badgers. You wouldn’t believe the trouble we have with badgers.”

  “I’ve never seen a badger,” Addie admitted shyly. “Only pictures.”

  Bea frowned. “They don’t have them in London, do they? What does it say underneath?”

  Addie traced the text with her finger. “It says: ‘Buy from us with a golden curl.’” She looked at Bea’s blond braid, silver-gilt in the candlelight. “Like yours.”

  Bea punched the pillow into a more comfortable shape. “What happens?”

  “Every day, the goblins march by, shouting ‘come buy, come buy.’” Addie didn’t need to look at the text to know. It was written on her memory, the goblins marching two together, clucking and clacking, mopping and mowing. “They come with apples and quinces, damsons and blueberries. Laura and Lizzie know they’re not supposed to eat it, but Laura can’t resist.”

  “Can’t resist fruit?” said Bea.

  “It’s magical fruit,” said Addie. She permitted herself a delicious shiver. “Goblin fruit.”

  “Hmm,” said Bea.

  “Laura wants it so badly that she cuts off a lock of her hair in exchange for just one peach. But mortals aren’t supposed to eat goblin fruit.” The poem was very clear on that point. The yearning for it could drive a mortal mad. “Laura gets sicker and sicker, only yearning for goblin fruit she can’t have.”

  “How does it end?”

  “Lizzie saves her.” Scrunching up her eyes, Addie quoted from memory, “‘For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather; / To cheer one on the tedious way, / To fetch one if one goes astray, / To lift one if one totters down, / To strengthen whilst one stands.’”

  Bea was much struck by this. “How lovely,” she breathed. “How perfectly lovely.”

  In the candlelight, her tilted face looked almost uncannily like Laura’s in the woodcut, the shadows making Bea’s face older, creating planes and hollows that weren’t yet there.

  “I used to pretend I had a sister,” Addie confided. She caught herself on a yawn. “I called her Lizzie, after the poem.”

  “You don’t need to have a make-believe sister.” Impulsively Bea took Addie’s hand and squeezed. “You can be my sister.”

  “You’ve already got sisters,” Addie felt compelled to point out. The day was beginning to catch up with her. She had to cover her mouth to stifle a yawn. “Real ones.”

  “Dodo?” Bea wrinkled her nose. “She doesn’t care for anything but her horses. And Poppy? She’s just a baby. No,” she said decidedly. “We’ll be sisters. Real sisters. We’ll be the kind of sisters who save each other from goblins.”

  Addie liked the sound of that. “From goblins,” she said sleepily, “and from aunts.”

  The last thing she heard before she drifted off to sleep was Bea’s laughter, like fairy music in the darkness.

  New York, 1999

  For all of Clemmie’s good intentions, it was more than two weeks before she found the time to see Granny Addie.

  It was work again, always work. Reply briefs on the Dallas matter had been due yesterday, so the junior associates had been scurrying, scrounging for case law to refute the opposition’s last round. And then there was the London trip, coming up far faster than Clemmie had expected, with too much to prepare in too little time, too many binders and not enough time to read them. Her office looked like a war zone, half-filled coffee cups everywhere, shreds of lettuce under her desk from last night’s SeamlessWeb salad, those weird little white circles left by hole punchers blanketing the floor like snow. The cleaning lady who came around the floor at midnight had taken one look inside, seen Clemmie still at her desk, waved, and gone away again.

  It felt like heaven to be out of the office.

  W
hile she had been working, the seasons had changed, the post-Halloween warm snap giving way to winter. The sky was that chalky gray peculiar to December and there was the scent of wood smoke and roasting pretzels in the air.

  On an impulse, she cut down to Madison and bought a bunch of flowers for Granny Addie. She wasn’t quite sure what they were, but they were purple and they smelled nice.

  Donna took them from her at the door, mmming approvingly. “Your grandma will like these,” she said. And, “You can go on in.”

  “Is she doing better?” asked Clemmie, and was reassured when Donna nodded.

  “Better enough to argue with me,” said Donna.

  Clemmie grinned. “That sounds like her.”

  Donna went off on rubber-soled shoes to the kitchen, to put the flowers in water, and Clemmie did as she had told her and went on in, through the den and the tiny bathroom that had once been intended for a maid and into Granny Addie’s bedroom. The light paper and the chintz-covered chaise longue were still the same, as were the white-painted woodwork and the photographs on the walls, not family pictures, but landscapes, of sunsets somewhere out west. They had always struck Clemmie as slightly incongruous, not at all in Granny Addie’s usual taste. Where Granny Addie’s sleigh bed had once been there was a hospital bed instead, complete with official-looking buttons and a tray contraption that went back and forth so that she could take her meals in bed.

  “Granny?” said Clemmie, hovering in the doorway.

  Granny Addie put aside the book she had been reading. “Clemmie!”

  Clemmie felt her chest unclench. Granny Addie’s voice was weak, but she sounded like herself again. And she knew her.

  “Forgive me if I don’t get up, darling,” she said apologetically. “Donna would have my head.”

  “Don’t move, I’ll come to you.” Clemmie picked her away across the carpet. “May I?” She indicated the wheelchair next to the bed.

  Her grandmother’s eyes crinkled. “You always did like chairs with wheels on them. Your grandfather used to wheel you around and around on the chair in his office.”

  “I’d forgotten about that.”

  His “office” had really been the room that was now the den, then his study. He had an old swivel chair and he used to spin her around, like the teacups at an amusement park. Clemmie wondered what had happened to that old chair. Thrown out, probably.

  She leaned over her grandmother to kiss her wrinkled cheek. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like ninety-nine,” said Granny Addie. “More importantly, how are you?”

  Clemmie bit her lip. “I’m … okay. Working hard. You know.” She seated herself carefully in her grandmother’s wheelchair, smoothing her suit skirt down over her knees. “Granny, the other night, when you weren’t yourself … you called me Bea. Who was she?”

  Granny Addie closed her eyes, and, for a moment, Clemmie was afraid she had nodded off. “My cousin. Bea was my cousin.” She considered for a moment, thinking, before saying, abruptly, “We grew up together.”

  “Were you very close?” Clemmie asked tentatively.

  It took Granny Addie a long time to answer. “Very,” she said at last. “We were very close. Closer than sisters.”

  Then why did she never speak of her? Why hadn’t Clemmie heard of her before last week?

  Because you never asked, said Jon’s voice in her head.

  “Jon told me you grew up someplace called Ashford,” said Clemmie awkwardly. “He showed me a picture. It looked very … intimidating.”

  “It was,” said Granny Addie frankly. “It was absolutely terrifying.” She touched the back of Addie’s hand with one finger. “Open my night-table drawer. No, not that one. The other one. I want to show you something.”

  “The Sheik?” Clemmie held up the first thing she found. It was a lurid 1970s edition with a bare-chested man on the cover. He appeared to be wearing far too much eye makeup. “Granny, really!”

  “Don’t be such a prude, darling; it’s a classic now. Keep looking.”

  “I’m not sure I should,” joked Clemmie. “What else am I going to— Oh.”

  It was a picture, in black and white. It looked as though it had been folded at one point; there was a crease running down the middle. It was a large picture, nearly the size of a piece of paper from a legal pad. Clemmie recognized the building in the background. Even faded, with bits rubbed off, it was unmistakably Ashford Park.

  Unless it was Brideshead, but she didn’t think so. That wasn’t Jeremy Irons out front.

  “That,” said Granny Addie, “is Ashford.”

  “May I?” said Clemmie, and drew the picture out from the drawer. On closer consideration, it had to be a reprint of an older picture; the glossy paper felt too thick to be anything but modern and the picture had the blurry quality of an old photograph enlarged and remastered.

  There was a whole grouping of people in the foreground, posed around a man and a woman, the man seated, the woman standing.

  “That’s Uncle Charles,” said Granny Addie, pointing.

  The sixth Earl of Ashford. He looked the part: tall, thin, and imposing, immaculately garbed in a dark suit.

  “Where are you?” Clemmie asked loyally.

  Granny Addie readjusted her glasses. “There I am,” she said, pointing at a dark blur off to one side. “Behind Bea. That’s Dodo there on the side, and Poppy in the front—she was the youngest—and Edward right behind Uncle Charles. This was taken in 1908. Two years after I came to Ashford.”

  Two years after, but Granny Addie still looked curiously out of place in the family portrait. It took Clemmie a moment to realize why: Addie’s was the only dark head among the lot. It made her look as though she were blending into the shrubbery in the background. It didn’t help that she was standing off to the side, half-hidden behind her cousin.

  Clemmie tried to get a look at the famous Bea, but her grandmother’s favorite cousin had turned at the last moment to say something over her shoulder, giving only an impression of blond, blond hair and a profile blurred by movement.

  “Why didn’t you frame it, Granny?” The piano was covered with family pictures, but none before Kenya. “You look cute.”

  Clemmie slid the picture back into the drawer. There was another underneath it, a studio portrait of a woman, her head tilted. Her pale hair was crimped in stylized waves around her face and her pale eyes gazed soulfully into the distance. She looked, somehow, strangely familiar, her cheekbones, the shape of her lips, as if Clemmie had seen her somewhere before.

  “I should have told you more.” Her grandmother’s voice was scratchy. Clemmie looked up in surprise. “I’ve been selfish.”

  Dropping the picture, Clemmie bumped the drawer closed. “No! I’ve been selfish. It’s always me, me, me. I never really asked you about you. And I should have, years ago.”

  Granny Addie touched her cheek with a shaky finger. “I like you, you, you.”

  “You have to like me. You’re my granny.”

  “I would have liked you anyway. You were such a solemn little girl, so hardworking. So quiet. You reminded me of me.” She smiled a crooked little smile. “But your face is pure Bea. The world does work in strange ways.”

  “I have Grandpa’s eyes,” Clemmie said quickly. It was always a family party game, who had someone’s nose or someone else’s chin. It was freely acknowledged that any green eyes came from Grandpa Frederick.

  “So you do.”

  “Did you meet Grandpa Frederick at Ashford?” asked Clemmie. She felt like a toddler trying out a new word. Ashford. Ash-ford.

  “Yes. Yes,” said Granny Addie. “I suppose I did.”

  “How?” asked Clemmie. “You never told me.” Just Jon. Clemmie pushed aside the uncharitable thought. What was it he had said? I asked? Well, she was asking now.

  Not like it was a competition or anything.

  “It’s a rather silly story,” said Granny Addie.

  Clemmie scooted the wheelchair closer. “I l
ike silly,” she said encouragingly. Goodness only knew, she could use some silly.

  “Let’s see.” Granny Addie settled back against her pillows, trying to figure out where to begin. “It was the night of my cousin Dodo’s coming-out dance. Aunt Vera picked a date late in the Season. Dodo’s ball would be the end of the Season and the one everyone remembered afterwards. And so it was, although not quite as Aunt Vera intended.”

  After all this time, Granny Addie looked rather maliciously pleased at the memory.

  “I take it you didn’t overly adore Aunt Vera?”

  “The feeling was mutual,” said Granny Addie. “Aunt Vera had the dance at Ashford. I think she thought Dodo would make less of a cake of herself in the country. Dodo,” Granny Addie confided, “wasn’t the most graceful of girls.”

  “With a name like Dodo…” Clemmie muttered.

  “Her real name was Diana, but I don’t think anyone ever called her that—except Aunt Vera. She wasn’t one for pet names.”

  “So you went to the ball…” Clemmie prompted.

  Granny Addie shook her head. “Bea and I weren’t allowed to go. We were—how old were we? I was only thirteen, nearly fourteen, but Bea was fifteen and thought herself very grown-up. Oh, how she raged!”

  “If you weren’t at the party, how did you meet Grandpa Frederick?”

  Granny Addie’s lips turned up at the corners. “It was all the fault of Binky, the nursery mouse.…”

  FIVE

  Ashford, 1914

  “It is unfair,” said Bea, dropping onto the sofa hard enough to make dust rise from the cushions.

  It was the night of Dodo’s ball. Left out of the fun, Addie and Bea were moping in the nursery. They had watched the preparations over the preceding weeks: crates of champagne motored in from Berry Bros., ices from London, linens from Harrods. They had benefited from the bounty as Cook experimented with new recipes, dainties to please the most jaded London palates. But today the junior members of the nursery had been summarily banished from the kitchens, their trick of begging for treats being deemed rather less adorable than usual. Cook was usually a friend and ally; today she had dismissed them with a crisp Lady Ashford wouldn’t like your being down here.