The Ashford Affair

by Lauren Willig

  She smiled at Addie and Addie found herself smiling back at the memory of that old poem, of two little girls linking their pinkies and promising devotion. She’d always fancied herself more Lizzie than Laura, the sensible one, not the giddy one. “Are you afraid I’ll go off into a decline?”

  “Don’t worry, darling.” Bea’s lips curved in a wolfish smile. “I’ll take the bite on your behalf.”

  Addie knew she was only joking, but she couldn’t help it, she had a sudden, horrible image of Bea smiling up at Frederick, the way he had laughed only for her. She had never minded Bea’s beauty or her charm; it had only seemed fair that Bea should have first crack at their toys, at games, at men.

  She was happy to cede the first place to her, but not in this, not Frederick, not even if Frederick wasn’t hers to lose.

  Bea hastily put down her drink. “Don’t look like that, dearest! I was only joking.” She looked speculatively at the doorway. “I seldom bite.”

  London, 1999

  “I thought she looked like a slut,” Clemmie said without thinking.

  The marquess gave a shocked chuckle. “I thought she looked rather like you. Not like that,” he added quickly. “I mean … That is…”

  And he didn’t even know about the hot-pink underwear. “Thank you?” said Clemmie.

  The marquess was still trying to recover from his faux pas. “She was a great beauty,” he said quickly. “They called her the Debutante of the Decade. My great-grandfather was quite chuffed to have caught her.”

  Something about the way he looked at her as he said it made Clemmie’s cheeks warm. “Men wanted her, women wanted to be her?” she quipped.

  “Yes,” the marquess said quite seriously. “That’s it exactly. Before the scandal, that is.”

  “Scandal, hmm?” Clemmie wondered whether Paul had gotten his Sancerre yet and, if so, whether he would have arrived at an appropriate stage of mellow before she got back to the table.

  “Oh, yes,” said the marquess. “It was all dragged through the courts, divorce for adultery. Headlines in the paper, people lining up outside the courtroom.” He gave a polite little cough. “Or so I understand.”

  “Wow,” said Clemmie. And yet they kept her on the wall. Clemmie would never understand the English. “I’ll have to ask my grandmother about it.”

  She wondered, vaguely, whom Granny’s cousin had run off with, if they’d been happy together. There was something about that restless woman in the portrait that didn’t go with happy. She looked like the sort who toppled kingdoms and sunk ships, good fodder for poetry, but not necessarily material for a happy life.

  Dan had accused her of adultery, too. Only in her case, with the law firm rather than another man. He had said he was tired of never knowing when he was going to see her, of always coming second. “What do you care about more?” he had asked.

  It was, thought Clemmie, one of those idiotic questions. If you had to ask, it meant you probably didn’t want to know the answer.

  “Where’s the phone?” asked Clemmie.

  She must have sounded more brusque than intended, because the marquess gave her a cautious, sideways glance. “Right through here,” he said.

  They were back in the lobby where she had registered. It felt like decades ago. And she still had to deal with Scott, the nervous associate, placate Paul, find her room, review a pile of documents … The very thought of it made her want to curl up into a little ball, but it had to be done; there was no way any of it could not be done. But it would all be worth it in the end when she made partner. That was what she kept telling herself. She hadn’t busted her butt like this not to make partner.

  Take that, Dan.

  “Pamela will take care of you,” said the marquess, indicating the young woman on the other side of the desk. “Line three?”

  The woman nodded, her ponytail bouncing, and pressed a button, handing the receiver across to Clemmie.

  Clemmie covered the mouthpiece with one hand. “Thank you,” she said to the marquess. “And sorry about the whole cousin thing.”

  He smiled fleetingly.

  Clemmie put the phone to her ear. Back to real life.

  “Clementine Evans,” she said briskly.

  “Hello?” said a voice on the other end. It was a male voice, but it didn’t sound like Scott, the nervous fourth year. “Clemmie?”

  There was static and honking on the other end. “Hello?” she said. “Who is this?”

  For a crazy moment, she wondered if it was Dan, tracking her down to England. Not that it would be a very Dan sort of thing to do.

  “It’s Jon. Jon. Can you hear me?”

  “Just barely,” said Clemmie. What was he doing calling? Clemmie propped an elbow against the side of the desk. “What’s up?”

  There was a sound that might have been a deep breath, or just the poor connection. “I’m sorry to call you on a business trip.” The bad phone line made his voice sound much deeper than its natural tenor, the words slurring together. “Granny Addie is at the hospital—Mount Sinai.”

  “What?”

  In the background, she could hear the sound of sirens. The line was breaking up again; she heard only: “… mother … there … didn’t want … call … yet.”

  Clemmie seized on that one word. “What do you mean by ‘yet’?” said Clemmie sharply. “What are they saying? How is she? What happened?”

  There was a string of unintelligible gibberish.

  Clemmie clutched the phone cord. “Jon. Jon! You’re breaking up. I can’t hear you.”

  It sounded like a hurricane blowing in the background, all whistling winds and crackling noises, like trees going over.

  “Clemmie?” The static turned his voice to Darth Vader’s electronic crackle and heavy breathing. “Sorry. I’m—”

  More static. This was absurd. They could put a man on the moon, but they couldn’t maintain a decent cell-phone connection. She wasn’t sure whether it was Jon’s cell phone or the little gizmos straining to make their way across the Atlantic, but whatever it was, she wanted to punch something.

  “Jon,” she shouted into the phone. “Jon! How bad it is?”

  “Hang on.” He almost sounded clear. “I’m moving.”

  On the other end, Clemmie fumed, wrapping the cord again and again around her hand until it left angry red marks on her fingers. She saw the desk girl looking at her and hastily shook it off, stretching her lips in an unconvincing smile.

  Not bad, thought Clemmie. Don’t let it be bad.

  “Clemmie?” It was Jon again, still faint, but there. “You still there?”

  “Yes!” she snapped. “What’s going on? What happened? How bad is it?”

  From very far away she heard his voice. “It’s not good, Clem.” And then, “I think you should come home.”

  TWELVE

  London, 1920

  All Addie wanted was to go home.

  Without clocks or watch, she couldn’t tell what time it was, but it might have been any time between midnight and five in the morning, an artificial world of nighttime gaiety that began well past sundown and stretched on until dawn, populated by a revolving crowd of men in white tie and women in jewels, a blur of shrill voices and half-known faces.

  The evening had begun with the by now traditional cocktails at the Ritz, then on to a vertiginously high fifth-floor loft, reached via stairs and then ladder, done up in a sort of Arabian Nights theme with a band in turbans and a woman with a grating cockney accent wearing rather unconvincing gauze pants and a veil that kept getting tangled in her lipstick who took their wraps and gave them glasses of a dubious concoction that she called Turkish Delight but that tasted to Addie rather like turpentine mixed with raspberry jam. From there, they had made their way to the crowded, underground confines of Rector’s, where the overwhelming scent of the cheap face powder in the powder room made Addie’s stomach churn and the brass band made her ears ache. The band wore policeman’s helmets—Addie wasn’t quite sure why—but
Geordie Pillbrook pinched one, which had led to trumpeting and squawking and the whole group piling hastily out of the club and into taxis, not, alas, to go home, but to go on to this next place, as frigidly cold as Rector’s had been stiflingly hot.

  This one was called The Garden of Eden, the garden represented by a few bare flagstones of outdoor space done up with a handful of desolate-looking potted shrubs and hanging lanterns made to look like apples.

  It was official. Addie detested nightclubs,

  She had been to enough of them to make a survey. For the last month, she had racketed from one end of London to the other with Bea’s set. She had painted her lips an unbecoming red in a fruitless effort to blend in, pinning back her modest dresses to achieve the requisite low-backed effect. It always looked wrong on her, somehow. She looked wrong. She couldn’t mimic their drawling slang, their casual hyperbole. “Too, too utterly shame making!” shrieked one of Bea’s friends. They spoke of topics that bored Addie and of people she didn’t know.

  Addie knew they thought her boring. She couldn’t blame them. She was boring with them. All of her enthusiasms stuck in her throat. They wouldn’t want to hear about Fernie’s experiments in spiritualism (Fernie had been quite convinced that she had got a message from her dead fiancé on the Ouija board the other day, although no one, including Fernie, had been able to make the least bit of sense out of it), or Addie’s success in persuading the printer to allow the Review more credit or the hilarious spectacle of the office cat getting snarled in a typewriter ribbon, yowling furiously and leaving streaks of ink over everything and everyone as he led them a merry chase around the office until finally brought to bay behind the junior poetry editor’s desk. They didn’t want to hear about the lecture she had been to on political economy or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

  How could anyone hear the mermaids singing each to each among this din?

  It was her deb year all over again. Bored and boring, she trailed in Bea’s wake yearning to go home. She knew everyone thought Bea a perfect martyr for taking her on. So dull, darling! Too, too yawn making!

  In the midst of the fray, she could see Frederick making his way through, creating little eddies as he passed.

  He did look very handsome in his evening togs, Addie thought wistfully. Not in the way Marcus was handsome, full and fair and English, but with a wiry, dark poise, as if he were made out of paper stretched over wire, intricate and precarious. He had some of that quicksilver quality she had always envied in Bea, that odd combination of vitality and grace.

  Bea’s friend Rosita leaned close to shout something in his ear. Addie saw the flare of his lighter as he held it to Rosita’s cigarette. That was Frederick, lighter always at the ready, always game for another glass.

  Gone was the man who had debated poetry with Addie, and sat rapt through a concerto that sounded to Addie like the pounding of feet on the stairs of a bus. This was a different, worldlier Frederick, a Frederick whose smile touched only one side of his mouth and whose slightest statement was double-edged and honed to cut. He fit in beautifully with Bea’s set so beautifully that it was easy to forget he had originally been Addie’s discovery and not Bea’s.

  Addie wasn’t sure she liked this Frederick.

  “Here you go.” Frederick shouldered his way into her protected alcove. She had found a bit of high ground above the dance floor, two steps up, in the lee of a stone embrasure, guarded by a screen of those silly pots. There was a rickety wrought-iron table and chairs, uncomfortable and rust tinged but better than nothing. “Your libation, fair lady.”

  He had picked up their habit of speech, the insouciant, mocking tone; or maybe that had always been his and she just hadn’t realized it, hearing only what she wanted to hear.

  Was this what Bea had meant about the goblin fruit? That with exposure Addie would realize it tasted only of ash?

  “Thank you.” Addie took the cup from him, some sort of dubious mixture with a lemon peel floating on top. It looked as though they had haphazardly dropped in the contents of half a dozen bottles and stirred. If this was goblin fruit, it tasted not of ash but of very strong liquor, inexpertly mixed. She took a sip and tried not to gag. “It’s lovely.”

  “They call it an Adam and Eve.” He propped an elbow on the stone embrasure behind him, uncorking the silver flask that lived in the inside pocket of his jacket. “Designed to bring you straight back to a state of nature.”

  Addie hunched her shoulders. Her wrap had been designed for the interior of a warm ballroom, not a December garden. “I wouldn’t mind a few extra fig leaves right now.”

  Frederick blinked, then frowned. “Devil take it, you’re half-blue. Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Addie gamely lifted her glass. “I’m sure this will warm me right up!” If it didn’t lay her flat out in the process.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said briskly. “You’re all over gooseflesh.”

  He shrugged out of his jacket and set it around her shoulders. Still warm from his body, it smelled of tobacco, brandy, and Frederick.

  “Thank you.” Addie pulled the coat close around her shoulders, fighting an entirely unreasoning sense of pride at wearing his jacket. Idiot, she told herself. It meant nothing at all, other than rudimentary good manners. “But won’t you be cold?”

  Frederick unlooped the white silk scarf from his neck and draped it around hers. “Me? I’m steaming. Bloody hot for December.” He staggered a bit as he stepped back, and Addie noticed that his color was high, his eyes bloodshot. “Too much dancing.”

  “Perhaps you ought to go home,” Addie suggested tentatively.

  “And miss all the fun?” He gestured out at the dance floor. There was the inevitable jazz band blaring away on the other side, trombones and trumpets and someone making an unconscionable rattle with a pair of cymbals.

  Bea was in the midst of it all, ethereal in an ice-blue silk frock. She was modeling the policeman’s helmet Geordie had pinched from Rector’s, posing with it, evading mock attempts to pinch it back. Addie could hear her laugh, too high-pitched, too loud, just a little bit drunk. Addie would have gone over and hugged her, but she knew her sympathy wasn’t wanted, that it would destroy the impression Bea was trying to create.

  It was all about Marcus, of course. Addie had spotted him as soon as they came in, everyone fighting over the policeman’s helmet, elbowing one another back and forth. Bea had been laughing and jostling with the rest, until suddenly she wasn’t. It was only the briefest pause, a, What, darling? It’s the band—too deaf making! but Addie had looked where Bea had looked and seen him there, in an alcove with Bunny.

  Would you like to go? Addie had whispered to Bea quietly, so the others couldn’t hear.

  Why would I? Bea had said haughtily, and sailed off into the thick of the fray to make a spectacle of herself, a spectacle entirely wasted on her husband, cozy in his corner with Bunny.

  “I’m not sure ‘fun’ is quite the word,” said Addie, thinking of Bea watching Marcus watching Bunny.

  “You don’t like this, do you?” Frederick said suddenly. He peered at her with the concentrated stare of the inebriated. “Why?”

  Because I don’t fit in, she wanted to say. Because my pearls are paste and my dress looks wrong and you only dance with me because you have to.

  “I don’t like places where you can’t hear yourself speak,” she said priggishly. “As for the drinks—have you tasted them?”

  “Toss ’em down faster,” he said. “Then you don’t have to bother with the taste.”

  Addie looked with distaste at her Adam and Eve. “But if you don’t like something, why have it in the first place?”

  “If you don’t want it, I’ll have it,” he said, and took her drink from her.

  “It’s not just the drink,” said Addie unhappily. “It’s all of this. I just don’t see the point. Going from place to place, complaining that it’s just too boring or too hot or too crowded, only to go on to another just like
it, and then doing it all again the night after that.”

  “The point, my dear girl,” Frederick said, “is enjoying oneself. Enjoying oneself right into oblivion. Or, if the do-gooders are right, straight into damnation.” He eyed the liquid in his glass skeptically, shrugged, and downed a hearty swig. “But, then, damnation is waiting for us whether we will or no. At least we’ll have trod our measure along the way. A measure, a measure, a measure full of pleasure. Are you sure you wouldn’t like it?”

  He offered her the glass. Addie batted it away, and Frederick laughed. It was a singularly unpleasant laugh.

  Addie wiggled upright in her seat, grabbing at his jacket as it started to slide from her shoulders. “I just don’t see how one can countenance the idea of living purely for pleasure—especially when most of it isn’t so pleasant at all! Cocktails that taste like petrol and dancing to music that’s hardly music and laughing like loons at jokes that aren’t the least bit funny and then waking up with a bad head the next morning. It’s a waste.”

  “Oh?” said Frederick lazily, stretching an arm out across the back of her chair. Even through the jacket, his touch made her skin prickle. She hated herself for that, for wanting him despite all of this, all of these wasted, miserable evenings.

  “Yes,” she said sharply. “It’s a waste. It’s a waste of time and energy and intellect.”

  Frederick rolled his head slightly to the side so he could look at her. “You left out money,” he drawled.

  “I’m not concerned about money,” she said primly. “It’s the waste of talent that concerns me.”

  Frederick rummaged in his pocket for his cigarette case. “Don’t moralize,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “What does suit me, then?” she demanded. “Pinning back the backs of my dresses in the middle of December? Making conversation I can’t remember a moment later—and wouldn’t care to if I did? Competing for the attention of buffoons in dinner jackets who think it’s the height of wit to pinch a policeman’s helmet?” She could hear her voice rising and she didn’t care. She’d had enough, enough of being patronized and ignored and made to feel small. “I never knew before what Shakespeare meant by an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, but now I do. I see it right before me, night after night, and I don’t like it and I won’t pretend I do, not for anyone.”