The English Wife: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  “So what you’re saying,” said Janie, “is that we don’t know anything at all other than that Mr. Lacey is lying about something.”

  “Most people are lying about something, Miss Van Duyvil. The trick is discovering what.”

  Outside the window, the Hudson was a flat gray beneath a gray sky. Usually, the sight of the river glimpsed from the train never failed to lift Janie’s spirits; today, its very familiarity only made it the stranger.

  “Two weeks ago, the worst thing any of us could imagine was that Mr. Newland might sue my cousin for divorce.” Janie looked helplessly at Mr. Burke. “I feel as though I’ve stumbled into the wrong story.”

  Mr. Burke raised a brow. “Arthur Conan Doyle or Anthony Hope?”

  “Neither.” Both contained a certainty that Janie lacked, that good would triumph, that everything would be tied up tidily in the end. “Have you reported on other murders, Mr. Burke?”

  “Some.” He was silent for a moment, and Janie wondered what it was that he was seeing as he stared out the window. “Most tend to be fairly simple affairs, crimes of passion of one sort or another. Every now and then, you happen on something more complex, like the Guldensuppe case two years ago.”

  Janie vaguely remembered the furor. It wasn’t the sort of happening reported in the papers her mother read, but it had been hard to avoid hearing of it. A woman, with the help of a new lover, had dismembered her former lover, hacked him into pieces, and dumped the pieces in parcels about the city.

  “They found a headless torso in the river, didn’t they?”

  “And other pieces elsewhere,” said Mr. Burke grimly. “Bread crumbs to give you nightmares. Even there, the only confusion was in the execution of it. The actual motives were simple enough. They always are.”

  “That’s very cynical, Mr. Burke.”

  “I prefer to think of it as being realistic. It’s only in serial stories that murder is committed for fantastical causes. In real life, it always boils down to love or money—more often the latter than the former.”

  The train swayed beneath them; the heavy ceramic cups rocked on their saucers. The tea things seemed incongruously domestic, out of place among this talk of murder. Simple, Mr. Burke had called it, and perhaps it was, the age-old passion for gain, never quite quelled by any of society’s pious teachings. Love or money, Mr. Burke said. And more often the latter.

  It would, Janie thought, be reassuring to imagine Mr. Lacey as a murderer. If Mr. Lacey had killed both Bay and Annabelle for Annabelle’s inheritance, then Bay was innocent. Honor was restored.

  But Mr. Lacey, if the port officer was to be believed, had been somewhere on the Atlantic on Twelfth Night.

  A hired killer, perhaps? But that was fantastical, something out of a penny dreadful, or the serials in papers her mother didn’t care to acknowledge.

  As fantastical as imagining that Annabelle might not have been Annabelle?

  Janie shifted uneasily in her seat. “There was something else. Something I didn’t care to include in my letter.”

  “Yes?” Mr. Burke held up the teapot, cocking his head in invitation.

  Janie nodded, and Mr. Burke tipped the spout over her cup. She was glad for the distraction. It made it easier to say what she had to say. “When he called, Mr. Lacey took great pains to inform us that his cousin—Annabelle’s father—had a ward, who was raised as a sister to Annabelle.” Janie almost mentioned the bar sinister, but thought better of it. The waters were muddy enough already. She pinched the leather of the gloves that lay in her lap. “He claims that the woman we knew as Annabelle was really Georgiana Smith.”

  “If money is at stake, then it would be rather convenient for Mr. Lacey if Annabelle Lacey could be proved not to have been alive and well in New York.” Mr. Burke’s eyes refocused on Janie. “What do you think? You’re the one who actually knew her.”

  “Not well,” said Janie honestly. “Annabelle was Annabelle … I can’t think of her as anyone but Annabelle. But I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now.”

  Mr. Burke smiled without humor. “Radical doubt isn’t a pleasant exercise, is it? It might be true. Or Mr. Lacey might have invented Georgiana Smith out of whole cloth, or merely borrowed her. Georgiana Smith might be seventy years old with sixteen grandchildren. Or she might have been living in your house, wearing your jewels.”

  The words sent a shiver down Janie’s spine. She felt like a child, alone in a dark house, glancing over her shoulder for someone who wasn’t there. “Do you think … is it worth making inquiries?”

  “Do you mean, will I track her down for you? I can’t promise I’ll be able to help you—I’ve already cost The World a small fortune in telegrams—but I’ll do my best.” Mr. Burke leaned back in his seat. “It’s hard to prove a negative, you know. If what he says were true, there might be no records of this woman.”

  “What a very odd thing,” said Janie, “to live and leave no mark.”

  Unbidden, the image of her father’s books came to mind, some sold, some consigned to boxes, but all bearing his distinctive bookplate, with his name on the flyleaf. Someday someone somewhere would open Racine’s Berenice or Molière’s Malade Imaginaire and know that her father had lived.

  Mr. Burke’s lip curled. “I don’t want to disillusion you, Miss Van Duyvil, but that’s the fate of most in our great city. Children die every day without a trace. Men and women disappear. Life is cheap and fleeting.”

  Janie sat up straighter in her seat. “That’s a horrible thing to say. Most people have families, communities, even if they aren’t in the headlines of the evening news. In our Girls’ Club—”

  “Yes?”

  That one syllable was enough to make Janie feel like a fool, like a spoiled debutante on a jewel-studded soapbox. “We do our best to make a place for people who might not otherwise have one.”

  “Sewing piecework?”

  “It’s not just piecework. We have lectures and classes—” Janie felt herself foundering under Mr. Burke’s cynical gaze. Her mother looked the same way when she talked about her work. “But it’s more than that. It’s the friendships. For girls on their own, that matters. To have someone who cares.”

  Very softly, Mr. Burke said, “There but for the grace of God?”

  Stiffly, Janie said, “I am not unaware that I was born with more than most, Mr. Burke. But that circumstance was as much out of my control as … as the color of your eyes.”

  “Oh, it’s my eyes again, is it?”

  Flustered, Janie looked away. She had lost control of the conversation again, somewhere between the Girls’ Club and Mr. Burke’s green eyes. “It occurred to me, if our Annabelle was Annabelle Lacey, then it wasn’t just her life between Mr. Lacey and his inheritance.”

  Mr. Burke’s grin disappeared. “Her children.”

  “I keep thinking … I keep thinking of the princes in the tower.” There’d been an engraving in one of her books as a child, the two young princes, curled up together, vulnerable in sleep as their murderers drew back the bed curtains. “They’re only four years old.”

  “That’s why you bolted to the hinterlands.” Mr. Burke leaned forward on one elbow. “To take up your spear in their defense?”

  She made an unlikely shield maiden. “You make me sound very foolish.”

  “Not foolish,” said Mr. Burke unexpectedly. “Gallant.”

  His praise made her more uncomfortable than his censure. “It’s really selfishness on my part, removing myself from the city.” Retreat, her mother had called it. Unfitting for a Van Duyvil. “Do you know that they take sightseers past our house on the omnibus? We can hear them shouting, ‘See the home of Ballard Van Devil!’ They can’t even get his name right.”

  “That’s how legend works, isn’t it?” said Mr. Burke matter-of-factly. “Be grateful for it. A century from now, there’ll only be the gruesome tale of Ballard Devil, the demon lover of Putnam County, who killed eight wives and tossed them into the Hudson.”


  Janie forced herself to relax her hands. “Was that meant to be reassuring?”

  “In its way.” He looked at her without mockery, his green eyes thoughtful. “Myth is more durable than history and far more entertaining.”

  “I thought you were in the business of selling truth.”

  Mr. Burke’s lips twisted in a crooked smile. “When my editor allows it. Some truths sell better than others.”

  Mr. Burke got to his feet, just as the conductor lurched past, calling out, “Cold Spring! Cold Spring, next stop!”

  “Do you have a trunk?”

  “The porter has it.” Janie watched with interest as Mr. Burke retrieved a battered leather satchel from beneath the seat. “Is that all you have?”

  “What more does a man need?” He lifted a brow in deliberate provocation. “My people came over from the Old Country with less.”

  “Mine appear to have emigrated from Holland with several sets of Delftware and a butter churn,” said Janie dryly, surprising a laugh out of Mr. Burke. “There’s Mr. Gerritt with the trap.”

  Mr. Gerritt was sitting on the box of the governess cart that was used to transport guests the few miles from the station to the house. He was so wrapped in mufflers that only the bowl of his pipe could be seen, emerging from the wrappings. Her brother’s groundskeeper had always reminded Janie of a character from one of Mr. Washington Irving’s stories, with his long-stemmed pipe and taciturn air. At the sight of Janie, the pipe bowl lowered slightly in acknowledgment, which was, she knew, all the greeting she was going to get.

  “Would you like a lift to Carmel?” Janie asked doubtfully. She wasn’t quite sure how Mr. Gerritt would take to being pressed into service as chauffeur.

  “I’ve made my own arrangements.” Mr. Burke looked closely at her. “Is there a telephone at Illyria?”

  “Yes, in the butler’s pantry.” It had been a compromise between Annabelle’s desire for privacy and the incursions of the modern world. “If the lines haven’t come down again.”

  “I’ll be stopping for the night in Cold Spring. If anything makes you uncomfortable, you can find me at Hudson House.”

  “Mr. Lacey is hardly Jack the Ripper.” At least, she hoped not. They had never found the Ripper. Janie decided not to pursue that line of thought. With more confidence than she felt, she said, “I can’t believe he would hurt me.”

  “Can’t you?” Tipping his hat in farewell, Mr. Burke stepped back into the shadow of the depot. “Annabelle Lacey appears to have had a remarkably ill-fated history with bodies of water. If I were you, Miss Van Duyvil, I would stay away from the river.”

  Paris, 1894

  June

  A woman in a white gown, her hair piled on top of her head, knelt by the river’s edge, like Narcissus seeking his own reflection. But there was no sign of a reflection in the water, only a few fallen leaves skimming the surface.

  “Miroir de l’Eau by Emilie Clarkson,” read Bay, over Georgie’s shoulder. He stood back to take a better look at the photograph. “If it’s a mirror, shouldn’t there be a reflection?”

  They were at the opening of the Photo-Club de Paris’s first exhibition, held in the Galeries Georges Petit. The exhibition was thronged by the fashionable, who had turned out to inspect each other rather than the compositions. Scattered among the gratin were critics, artists, and aesthetes, the latter identifiable by their brightly colored waistcoats and exceedingly floppy cravats. Broken bits of conversation floated about the room.

  “But is it art?”

  “My dear, that dress!”

  “—his wife and both his mistresses! In the Bois de Boulogne!”

  Georgie took a step back, feeling the warmth of her husband behind her, cradling and protecting her. “Perhaps that’s the point of it, that there is no reflection. That is what she sees when she sees herself. Nothing but leaves drifting on the river.”

  “Or,” said her husband, squeezing her shoulders affectionately, “Mrs. Clarkson tried and failed to capture a reflection. The camera has its limits.”

  “Thus spake the solicitor?” Georgie teased. She still found it piquant that her husband, who lived as a gentleman of leisure, had trained as an attorney. It came out in odd ways; for all his whimsy, she was learning, Bay had a surprisingly practical bent when he cared to reveal it. She imagined it had something to do with being an American, this odd juxtaposition of luxury and practicality. “It’s a very limiting reading.”

  “Or maybe,” countered Bay, adopting the solemn expression of the expert about to expound, and adding a faint lisp for good measure, “the very failure of the composition to achieve its own aims is a commentary on the power of the paintbrush to depict more than might be visible to the lens.”

  “Behave,” Georgie cautioned, but she was grinning as she said it. They had been bored to tears five minutes ago by a writer for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts who had, apparently, attended purely for the pleasure of disapproving.

  “Just because the man didn’t pause for breath doesn’t mean there wasn’t something in what he said,” said Bay virtuously.

  “High praise,” said Georgie drily, but she took another look at the picture all the same, at the miroir that wasn’t.

  It would be comforting to dismiss it as a failed attempt, but there was something about the composition that haunted her. Perhaps it was the scattering of leaves on the surface, or the expression on the woman’s face as she gazed into the depths, seeing … what? Her own reflection? Or a mere nothing where there ought to be something?

  Turning away, Georgie said rapidly, “It’s a bit of a sleight of hand, isn’t it? One expects truth in a photograph. But it might obscure more than it reveals.”

  Bay moved obediently behind her. “Even the camera lies?”

  “Not so much a lie as an omission.” The words tasted sour on Georgie’s lips. Was she an omission or a lie? Taking a firmer grip on her program, she said brightly, “Shall we move on? We’re blocking the throng.”

  “They don’t seem to mind terribly,” said Bay, but he followed her all the same, past rural scenes and women dressed as Moorish maidens, past portraits and landscapes.

  Georgie knew it was foolish, but she still kept glancing back, checking to make sure her husband was there, that he hadn’t disappeared when she turned her back, nothing more than a figment of her imagination, a prince from a fairy tale brought to life only for a season. She still half expected the rich clothes on her back to disappear, to turn to rags at the sound of a bell, the enchantment gone.

  But it wasn’t an enchantment, was it? There was a gold ring on her finger and a piece of paper with their marriage lines, binding her to Bayard van Duyvil.

  Binding Annabelle Lacey to Bayard van Duyvil.

  The gallery was too small for the press of people, the perfumes too strong, the voices too loud. Faces in sepia tones stared out at them from every surface, caught in perpetuity by the lens of the camera. A girl with long, dark hair falling unbound about her face glared at Georgie; in another, a naked woman lolled in front of the camera, face and form deliberately blurred, nothing but a body, identity lost.

  The air felt stale to Georgie, the afternoon flat. “I hate to agree with our friend from the Gazette, but there doesn’t seem to be much to see. Shall we get a hamper and have a picnic in the Jardin des Tuileries?”

  “Will you let me ride on the donkey?” Their hotel was on the Rue de Rivoli, across the street from the gardens; they had spent many mornings strolling together, arm in arm, drinking milk warm from the cows who were brought there for that purpose, the froth clinging to their lips.

  “You’ll have to battle the nannies for it.”

  “Cruel woman.” Bay shuddered extravagantly. “Never mind, then. I’ll content myself with lemonade and the puppet theater. Si vous le permettez, monsieur?”

  Two men were blocking the door. One was the unmistakable figure of the Comte de Montesquiou, improbably garbed all in mauve with violets in place of a neckcloth. The other
was Sir Hugo.

  Bay halted, his hand on Georgie’s arm. “What a pleasant surprise. I didn’t know you were in Paris.”

  “You didn’t ask. One can only assume that you have been, er, otherwise occupied? Do you intend to introduce me to this charming creature, or must I live in suspense?”

  “This is my wife, Annabelle. We are on our honeymoon.” Bay’s voice was perfectly composed; only Georgie felt the way his fingers dug into her elbow, clinging to her like a sailor to a spar. “My dear, may I present Sir Hugo Medmenham? He was kind enough to introduce me to London.”

  “How do you do?” Georgie kept her chin down, hoping Sir Hugo would take her reticence for modesty. She deeply regretted her fashionable hat, a narrow confection crowned with false flowers that perched on the coil of hair at the back of her head and did little to shade her face. A good, old-fashioned poke bonnet would be far preferable for her current circumstances.

  “Far better for meeting you, Mrs. Van Duyvil.” Sir Hugo took her fingers, delicately, by the tips, and raised them to his lips.

  Georgie saw only dove-gray gloves and the bulbous red of a cabochon ruby set deep in the folds of a black silk cravat. Her heart was beating wildly against her stays; sweat beading beneath her chemise.

  Had she been herself, she might have snatched her hand away, but Mrs. Van Duyvil, proper and polite, could only wait until Sir Hugo released her hand, saying over her bowed head, “My felicitations, Bay. How very … expeditious of you. Monsieur le Comte, allow me to present my American acquaintance, Mr. Van Duyvil and his … wife.”

  Loathing coiled in Georgie’s stomach. He thought it was all a joke, didn’t he? A mock marriage, a mistress being paraded in public. A prank played on society, and never mind the woman whose heart might be broken by it.

  “Monsieur le Comte,” she said softly, in her governess-taught French, every inch the well-bred young lady, even as she engaged in bloodthirsty fantasies involving Sir Hugo and his ebony walking stick.