The Ashford Affair

by Lauren Willig

  Worse than she’d thought! Uncle Charles seldom participated in punishment. When he did—well, she was for it now. She spared a thought for Perseus. Fictional sea serpants were one thing, aunts and uncles quite another.

  Addie stuck her head around the door, sidling the rest of her body reluctantly through. Uncle Charles was seated at his desk, Aunt Vera behind him, her face set and white.

  Addie gathered all her courage. “Ivy said you wanted to see me—about the mouse?”

  “An hour ago,” said Aunt Vera, and stopped, as though she didn’t trust herself to say more.

  “A mouse,” said Uncle Charles. There was a telegram in front of him, the ink smudged as though it had been snatched off the press and delivered too soon. He looked at her, but she had the impression he wasn’t seeing her, not at all. “It might as well have been. One mouse to make everything fall.”

  It hadn’t quite been everything, but Addie had learned long ago that she mustn’t speak in her own defense. That only made matters worse, generally.

  “It’s not as bad as all that,” said Aunt Vera, and Addie looked at her in surprise; she hadn’t thought to hear her aunt speak in her defense. It was on Uncle Charles’ clemency that she had been relying, Uncle Charles who occasionally remembered that she had been her father’s daughter. Aunt Vera looked at Addie and said harshly, “What are you still doing here?”

  Nothing made sense this morning. Addie swallowed hard. “The mouse?”

  “No one cares about a mouse, you daft girl!” Her aunt’s voice broke. “Go back to the nursery.”

  Addie went, but she stopped at the kitchen first. It was Cook who told her, Cook who had given a cup of tea to the postman’s boy and had heard the news: Germany had declared war on France.

  Within a day, England was at war.

  SEVEN

  New York, 1999

  Fatigue kicked in in a big way by the time Clemmie let herself back into her apartment.

  She dumped her coat on a chair and today’s pile of mail on the bookcase that doubled as a hall table. She didn’t need to open any of it to know what it was. Credit card offer, credit card offer, bill, bill, bill.

  Her apartment was what was optimistically referred to as a “junior one bedroom,” which really meant a studio with an alcove, an alcove too far removed from a proper room to justify a door. The people who had lived here before had hung a beaded curtain over the doorway; the hooks were still there on the ceiling, like an outré art installation. Clemmie had never bothered either to remove them or to hang anything on them, although sometimes she used them for drying laundry.

  There was room in the alcove for only a twin bed and a narrow chest of drawers. All other life activities took place in the living room, which housed a couch, bookshelves, and a card table that doubled as kitchen/dining room table/desk and general dumping ground for briefs, binders, mail, and whatever else happened to find its way there.

  The light on her answering machine was blinking. There were four messages. All of them were from Dan.

  Oh, damn. They had told her in the office that he had been calling, but she had been buried with work and—that was what he had complained about when they were together, wasn’t it? That she had never made time for him.

  What time? When?

  It wasn’t like she was sunning herself on a beach somewhere. Not everyone could earn a living playing competitive foosball with people who communicated in ones and zeroes.

  Oh, God. She wouldn’t be this bitchy if she didn’t feel, on some level, that he was right. She hadn’t made time for him. She wondered, tiredly, if that was because she hadn’t wanted to make time for him, if, deep down, it was because she had just never wanted him enough in the first place.

  And what kind of horrible human being did that make her?

  She was dragging her suitcase out from under the bed when the phone rang again. She paused for a moment, then let it go to the answering machine. In the mood she was in she was either going to tear Dan to bits or beg him to take her back, and neither of those was good.

  “Hey, Clemmie. This is Jon. I just wanted to let you know I found a place. I’ll be heading back to Greensboro next week, but I’ll be back in New York for good as of—”

  Clemmie snatched up the phone. “Hey!”

  “Oh, hi.” In the background the answering machine continued to do its thing. “I didn’t realize you were home.”

  “I was screening. Dan.”

  Bleep. “End of message,” announced the answering machine.

  “Gotcha,” said Jon. “Anyway, as I was saying, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be back in town as of December twentieth.”

  Clemmie wedged the phone under her ear and began folding shirts into her suitcase. “Shouldn’t you be teaching somewhere?”

  “I’m on sabbatical this term.”

  Sabbatical or post-divorce meltdown time? She knew just enough about academia to know that people generally had to apply for these things way in advance.

  “Does that make it easier or harder?” she asked.

  He didn’t ask her to explain what she meant. “Easier,” he said, “in that I don’t have to be in Greensboro for the rest of the year. But, generally? Harder.”

  “When do you start teaching again?” Clemmie wandered over to the dresser. Flying out Wednesday, getting in Thursday. That meant she needed underwear for Thursday through Sunday.

  “Next term. But only one class. I’m supposed to be working on a book right now. Decline and Fall—question mark. The English Aristocracy in the Aftermath of the Great War.”

  “Catchy.” She bypassed the sensible underwear, the whites, the beiges, and went for the impulse buy: hot-pink silk with lace trim. Why not, after all?

  “I got it from Evelyn Waugh. It’s not exactly original.”

  She dumped the underwear in the suitcase and went back for pajamas. “If you’re going with Waugh, how about Brideshead Regurgitated?”

  She heard Jon take a bite of something, chew. “You stole that from Stoppard,” he said thickly.

  “And you stole yours from Waugh, so we’re even.” Her pajamas were flannel, with fluffy pink sheep on them. She tossed the matching T-shirt on top. “So you really are writing about Granny’s people.”

  She heard him take a swig of something and swallow. “So you don’t think I’m making it up?”

  Clemmie kicked her suitcase to the side so she could navigate around it to get to the bathroom, where there were strange and exotic cultures growing in the grouting. If she couldn’t make a living as a lawyer, perhaps she could sell her bathroom to science?

  She flipped the light switch, trying not to look too closely at the soap rings on the sink. “I went to the horse’s mouth—although that’s not the most flattering way to put it, is it? Especially since it makes me a horse by extension. Of the lineage of the horse, at any rate.”

  Jon ignored the humor. “What did she tell you?”

  “Pretty much what you did.” Clemmie clamped the phone under her ear as she reached up for her makeup bag, way up on the top shelf of her bathroom organizer.

  “Oh?” Jon’s voice was carefully neutral.

  “She showed me a picture of the gang at Ashford Park.” The name still sounded strange on her tongue, the fact that Granny had lived there stranger still, a world away from a ninth-floor studio on 52nd and 8th. “Who calls a kid Dodo? It’s worse than Clementine.”

  “They had some weird nicknames,” Jon agreed. “It was part of the whole shtick, the feeling of being part of a small club. They created their own slang and changed it whenever it looked like the proles were catching up.”

  “Is that part of what you’re writing about?” She tugged on the makeup bag, and the pile of washcloths next to it began to slide forward. Clemmie hastily shoved them back. Crap.

  “Part of it.” He sounded decidedly cagy.

  “Hey, don’t worry. I’m not going to steal your ideas.” A pile of terry cloth slid slowly but inexorably i
n her direction. Damn, damn, damn. Clemmie slapped the washcloths down on the toilet lid. She’d put them back up later. “I just didn’t realize that was what you, well, did.”

  She had never really thought much about it. She had a copy of Jon’s first book, pristine and unopened, a Christmas present from Aunt Anna. Signed by the author, of course. There was even a little SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR sticker on the front to prove it. She couldn’t remember what the title was or, for that matter, where she had put it.

  “It’s okay,” said Jon dryly. “You’ve been busy.”

  “I know, but…” Why was she beginning to dislike that theme? Goodness only knew, she used it often enough, but something about hearing it parroted back at her made her squirm. On an impulse, Clemmie said, “Will you do me a favor? You’re around for the rest of this week, right?”

  “What kind of favor? Am I going to regret this?”

  “Now who’s thinking like a lawyer?” jibed Clemmie. “Don’t worry; it’s nothing too scary. Would you mind checking in on Granny Addie for me? She looked a lot better today, but … I don’t know.”

  “No problem,” was all he said, but there was a quiet assurance to it that made Clemmie feel about a thousand times better.

  Funny how things turned out. Ten years ago, if anyone had told her she would be looking to Jon for reassurance she would have told them they were on crack.

  She tucked her makeup bag into a corner of her suitcase and straightened, stretching the aching muscles in her back.

  “Thanks, Jon. Really. It’s good to have you back.” Silence. Awkward silence. Damn. Raising her voice, Clemmie said jokingly, “After all, you’re the closest thing I have to a brother.”

  There was a pause, then a snorting sound. “What does that say about your real ones?”

  “Dad got them in the divorce,” said Clemmie. She bit her lip. “I mean—”

  “It’s okay, Clem.” Clemmie flushed at the mockery in his tone, clear even through the static of her cordless, which tended to get cranky outside a two-foot radius. “I’m not going to start blubbering every time someone mentions the word ‘divorce.’”

  “Of course. I know that. Anyway, thanks for keeping an eye on Granny Addie for me.”

  “Stop thanking me. I would have gone anyway.”

  He probably would have, too. “Keep that halo shiny, Jon.”

  “I intend to. Get some sleep.”

  “You, too,” said Clemmie, and hung up.

  Way to go, Saint Jon, patron saint of grandmothers. What did it say that he was a better grandchild than she was—and he wasn’t even actually related?

  Aside from that one comment the other day, she didn’t know anything about Jon’s real grandparents. He didn’t talk much about his family. Instead, he had mostly hung around with hers. For the first time, Clemmie wondered what that felt like, being on the fringes of someone else’s family, always being reminded that you didn’t quite belong.

  Like Granny Addie at Ashford. Well, without the whole earldom bit.

  Clemmie had been six when Aunt Anna had married Jon’s father, too young to view him as a romantic interest but old enough to resent the inclusion of a competitor in the family circle. Until then, Clemmie had been the only grandchild in the immediate area, the center of grandparental attention. Her brothers were so much older; they were both in their late twenties, with wives of their own, and all the way off in California besides. Uncle Teddy was out in Greenwich, not so very far away, but Uncle Teddy’s kids were that half generation older than she was, already applying to colleges, going other places, getting married.

  Besides, Uncle Teddy and Aunt Patty didn’t leave Greenwich much. Clemmie knew, as children know, without being told, that there wasn’t much love lost between Granny Addie and Aunt Patty, Uncle Teddy’s wife. Granny found Aunt Patty pedestrian, dull, and unambitious. A housewife, Granny called her, with a dismissiveness that was worse than active criticism. In return, Aunt Patty kept her kids as far from Granny as Metro-North would allow.

  And then along came Jon. Aunt Anna and Jon’s father had moved into an apartment near Columbia, enrolling Jon at Collegiate. Not only was he close in age to Clemmie, but he was bright and he knew it, with that arrogance that Collegiate boys donned along with their blazers. Suddenly it wasn’t just Clemmie who was Ivy bound, there was Jon, too, and he was three years ahead of her, three years closer to success and grandparental approbation. He had mocked her indifferent Chapin Latin, criticized her calculus, raised his eyebrows over her recreational reading. She had retaliated with clannishness—her aunt, her mother, her grandmother—deliberately engaging him in reminiscences he hadn’t been there to remember.

  God, she had been a brat. But, then, so had he. They had each known how to hit where it hurt, struggling to find a place for themselves.

  They’d had truces, too. Jon had helped her with her college applications. Grudgingly, but he’d helped her all the same. And she hadn’t said anything when he kept on coming to Granny Addie’s, even after Aunt Anna had moved on, ditching his father for husband number three—or was it four? And then, of course, there had been Rome.

  They didn’t talk about Rome.

  Sighing, Clemmie flipped the lid of her suitcase closed, zipping it up the sides. Good thing they’d grown out of all that. So weird to think how old they were now. If she was thirty-four, that made Jon thirty-seven, well on his way to forty. He a professor, she a lawyer. What would the teens squabbling in Granny Addie’s kitchen have made of that? What would they have made of any of it? Clemmie would never have imagined Jon divorced. She would never have imagined herself alone and childless at thirty-four.

  Okay, that was enough of that. Clemmie shoved her suitcase into the living room and shut the lights. Retreating into her alcove, she shrugged into a nightgown. Something moved in the mirror above the dresser, and she had a moment of disorientation before realizing that it was her own reflection, rendered unfamiliar in the meager light of the bedside lamp, her hair still short and strange.

  For a moment—it was stupid, but there it was—for a moment, she thought she had seen the woman in the picture in Granny’s night-table drawer. Bea.

  Clemmie shook her head and the woman in the mirror shook her head, too, hair swinging around her face in a flapper bob. It was the haircut; that was what did it. The haircut and a trick of light and coloring. She didn’t really look that much like the woman in the photo.

  She wished she had taken a better look at it when she’d had the chance. She wondered what had happened to her, that Bea. Had she married her marquess? And why had Granny never spoken of her before?

  All long ago and far away.

  Clicking shut the bedside lamp, Clemmie clambered into bed, pulling the quilt up around her shoulders. The sheets were cold, and she curled herself up as small as she could, waiting for her body heat to warm the bed.

  On the nights when Dan had stayed over here, they had fit themselves together like puzzle pieces to keep from falling off the bed; she had bitched about it in summer, when heat made it irksome. Right now, it would have been rather nice to have someone cuddled up next to her, sharing his warmth.

  Maybe she should have married Dan.

  What if she had used up her chances? What if he was her last ever man? Clemmie rolled over onto her other side, shivering as she hit a cold patch. True, she hadn’t really loved him, but she had been fond of him. On a cold night, in a narrow bed, it was very easy to come to the conclusion that it was better to be with someone, even a wrong someone, than not to be with anyone at all.

  Clemmie buried her head in her pillow, feeling her strange, short hair tangling around her face. She fell shiveringly into an uneasy sleep, in which images of Dan warred with the remote face of the woman in the picture in Granny’s nightstand.

  London, 1919

  Her mother caught her as she was making her way to the powder room.

  Bea telegraphed her excuses to Camilla and Mary with a smile and a roll of the eyes. “Yes, Mot
her?”

  Her mother motioned her off to the side of the room. Her stiff social smile was firmly in place, nearly as stiff as her posture, but her voice indicated that she was Not Amused. “Did you just refuse Rivesdale a dance?”

  Bea had and quite deliberately, too, but she didn’t think her mother would appreciate the finer points of her grand strategy of flirtation. “Topper Bingham trod on my train. I need to pin it up.”

  Her mother was not appeased. “You don’t want to go putting Rivesdale off,” she warned. She looked around the ballroom, dismissing the progeny of her peers with one damning sniff. “You’re not going to do better.”

  Ah, those loving, maternal words that warmed the cockles of one’s heart. Bea stretched luxuriously, chest forward, shoulders back. “Maybe I can do worse.”

  “Beatrice,” said her mother sharply.

  “Yes, Mother.” It was easier to humor her than to fight with her. God, she was gagging for a gasper, but her mother didn’t approve of smoking; she’d be horrified if she knew Bea did.

  But, then, Mother was horrified right and left these days, ever since the War had turned the world topsy-turvy, decimating an entire generation of eligible gentlemen, loosening the old codes and rules. For other people, that was. Mother had staunchly refused to bend. Corseted like Queen Mary, she made the round of the same drawing rooms in the same houses, turning a blind eye on the missing faces, the bright lipstick, the new music. If she didn’t choose to acknowledge it, it wasn’t there. The new fashions hadn’t touched her. Jazz was “that caterwauling,” nightclubs someplace other people’s wayward children went.

  She wouldn’t hear of Bea taking any part in the war effort; that was for other people’s daughters, people whose lineage was lesser, whose marital prospects were scarcer. She had received the news that the Duchess of Rutland’s daughter had been allowed to train as a nurse with horror and indignation. Consort with the wrong sort of people, handle strange men, expose oneself to infection—most certainly not!

  Addie had gone instead. Addie was expendable. Her mother hadn’t said so in so many words, but Bea knew that was what was meant. It didn’t matter if Addie picked up coarse expressions from the troops or came down with Spanish flu; she wasn’t expected to uphold the family honor by making a grand marital alliance. Dodo had mucked in, too, poulticing wounded soldiers as though they were sick horses, clicking and clucking over them, tireless and cheerful. Dodo had been more popular in the sickroom than she had ever been in the ballroom; she had received a number of proposals. Most were unsuitable. Some, surprisingly, were not.