The English Wife: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  She was being sensible, that was it. Sensible. This was the sensible thing to do. But why did she feel like the word was about to choke her?

  She took a step away, a step away from Bay, not looking at him. “How many women have husbands who build them a house for their very own? It’s a romantic gesture, isn’t it? It will be the talk of the town.”

  “Georgie—” Bay’s voice was very low.

  “We’ll have Mr. Pruyn here to stay with us. It’s a big project; surely his other clients can spare him.” Georgie kept on talking, faster and faster, knowing that if she didn’t say this now, she never would, that she would stick her head back in the sand and try to pretend everything was as it should be.

  Until the next Mr. Pruyn, the next Charlie Ogden. Better to come to terms with this Mr. Pruyn, to keep it all under her own roof, under her control. She wouldn’t let Anne outmaneuver her.

  “If Mr. Pruyn should … if he should chance to wander into the wrong room…” Georgie couldn’t bring herself to be more explicit. “I will make no objection to it. Provided the children and the servants don’t know.”

  Bay said nothing.

  “Am I mistaken?” Georgie’s voice had a desperate edge. “Tell me if I’m mistaken.”

  Slowly, Bay moved his head. Just the slightest fraction, but it was enough.

  “I would have told you if I knew how,” he said, and Georgie felt his helplessness right down to her bones. He had tried to tell her, hadn’t he? About Charlie. And she hadn’t let him, any more than he had let her tell him about Annabelle.

  They had both wanted to hold on to their illusions.

  She could tell him now. She could even the scales. But the words were frozen on her tongue even as Bay dropped down to his knees in front of her, saying, “I should have told you. But I … I didn’t know what to tell.” In a softer voice, he said, “I couldn’t bear for you to despise me.”

  In England, they jailed men for relations with other men. It was something nice women weren’t supposed to know about, but she wasn’t a nice woman; she was an actress.

  “I don’t despise you.” She didn’t, not really. She despised herself more than him. Georgie reached for his hands and gripped them as tightly as she could. “I don’t want to expose you, Bay. Why would I? It would be horrible for all of us. I just want you … I want you to have what you want.”

  Bay looked up at her with something like hope. Raggedly, he said, “And what about you? What do you want?”

  “What I’ve always wanted,” she lied. “Lacey Abbey. I get a house out of this, don’t I?”

  She tried her best to sound cocky, but it was a desperate failure.

  “Georgie.” Bay rose to his knees, her hands in his, like a scene from an old painting, like a suitor in a garden, only this wasn’t what it seemed, was it? It had never been what it seemed. “I never meant to hurt you. I thought I could … I thought it would go away.”

  Georgie blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. It wouldn’t do to blubber. Hoarsely, she said, “It might be worse. You might keep mistresses like Teddy. Or have intrigues with my friends.”

  If she had any friends. The totality of her dependence on Bay weighed on her as it never had before. He wasn’t just her husband; he was her sole companion, her only friend. Vi and Bast were lovely, but they were only babies.

  Slowly, Bay rose to his feet, stroking the hair back from her face, looking at her with such love and concern and guilt that Georgie nearly forgot her resolve not to blubber. “I do love you, you know.”

  “I know,” Georgie croaked, standing a little unsteadily. “You’d be mad not to, paragon that I am.”

  Bay didn’t answer. He only wrapped her in his arms, holding her as though he could fold her into him, and Georgie clutched him back, grateful that he couldn’t see her face, grateful for the scratch of wool against her cheek, breathing in his scent like a sot downing his last bottle of gin.

  It was all right. It would all be all right. This was the sensible thing. And familiarity bred contempt after all, didn’t it? Bay could have his little intrigue and she would have her house and their children would grow and play and Mr. Pruyn would go away in time and she would still be here and it would all be as it was.

  As it was. Had anything ever been as she thought it was?

  But Georgie wouldn’t let herself think that, not now. She could only hold on to her husband with both hands and promise herself that the best way to keep someone was to let him go.

  For a time. Only for a time.

  Carmel, 1899

  February 9

  “Do you recall the time?”

  “It was just about midnight.” Janie could see the artists on the press bench sketching as rapidly as they could, trying to capture Anne in the act of answering. Anne was chic in deep purple banded with black, the appropriate level of mourning from a married woman to a first cousin.

  The coroner consulted his notes. “What made you notice Mr. Van Duyvil’s absence?”

  “As I said”—Anne spoke with exaggerated patience—“it was nearly midnight. My cousin and his wife were meant to be opening the German. The German,” she added graciously, “is a customary dance.”

  “I trust the members of the jury shall take note of that,” said the coroner, his voice as dry as the papers in front of him.

  The coroner was a slight, thin man in a rusty suit with an equally rusty set of whiskers, a seller of patent nostrums by trade. Janie knew that her mother had dismissed him on sight. But there was a shrewdness about him that belied the rustic air of his outdated suit and whiskers.

  It was only just past noon, and she had watched the coroner deal efficiently with the parade of official witnesses: the medical examiner, who testified that Bay had been killed by a single blow with a narrow-bladed knife; the police constable who had first been called to the scene; the detective who had been assigned to the case. Watching them, Janie realized that the sense she had had of being marooned, helpless, had been a mirage. While she had slipped away to The World’s offices, the police had been doing their work, interviewing servants, cataloguing evidence, dredging the river.

  There was little that was sensational in any of it. The press had begun to grow restless. The reporters from The World, The Journal, The Sun, and The Times fidgeted and checked their pocket watches and the train timetables, craning their necks to try to catch sight of more entertaining witnesses.

  But then Anne had been called, and it was as though the courtroom sat up again and took notice. Here was life! Here was color! No dull, droning lists of waiters interviewed or acres of ground searched, but the notorious Mrs. Newland herself, as beautiful in person as on the page.

  “Don’t she look like something out of the theater?” Janie heard one woman say loudly to another.

  Next to her, her mother’s lips grew a little more pinched. It couldn’t, Janie knew, be easy to see Bay exhumed, again and again, the fatal moment taken to pieces, polished, put back together. Again and again. Like Caesar being stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. Her mother hadn’t only lost a son, she had to relive his passing with each witness, men and women who had never known Bay, for whom this was just another death.

  Janie would have taken her mother’s hand, but for the fact that she knew any such gesture would arouse more ire than gratitude. To offer sympathy would be a sign that sympathy was needed and that her mother could not endure.

  “Had anyone else remarked on their absence?” inquired the coroner, making a note to himself.

  “No,” said Anne. Janie looked up sharply, at the familiar face beneath the purple hat with its short veil. Anne examined her own gloved fingers. “It was a lively event. Everyone was much occupied.”

  “And you?” the coroner prompted with remarkable patience. “Why were you not much occupied?”

  Anne looked at him over the luxurious fur stole that she had slung about her neck to keep out the drafts of the courtroom. “I had come to Illyria to help my cousin and his wife with
the preparations for the ball. My cousin’s wife had been raised in the country; she wasn’t used to entertainments on such a scale.”

  She lied so smoothly. Janie’s eyes flicked to the press bench, where the reporters were scribbling down Anne’s words with no appearance of doubt. If Janie hadn’t known better, she would have believed it herself. One of the members of the jury was nodding knowingly, as if in agreement. Of course she had come to help with the entertainment, what else?

  Only the coroner seemed unimpressed, although whether it was because he doubted Anne’s testimony or because he was generally unimpressed, Janie couldn’t tell. “Mrs. Newland, there have been”—he gave a delicate cough—“representations made that you might have been pursuing a private meeting with Mr. Van Duyvil.”

  Everyone in the courtroom sat up a little straighter. Janie’s mother stared straight ahead, her profile as wooden as the masthead on the prow of a ship.

  “Representations?” Anne repeated with scorn. “By the press, you mean? I should have thought that officers of the court would know better than to allow themselves to be led by the fancies of threepenny papers.”

  Some of the jurymen looked abashed; Janie had no doubt they had all been reading the threepenny papers and enjoying them, too.

  “If you would answer the question, Mrs. Newland?”

  Anne tilted her head delicately, setting her earrings glinting in the gaslight. “There was a question?”

  The coroner measured his words out carefully. “Did you have a meeting planned with your cousin?”

  “If I had an illicit tryst planned,” demanded Anne impatiently, “would I have brought my cousin’s sister with me as audience?”

  The coroner was unruffled. “My apologies, Mrs. Newland, but we must, within the bounds of decency, explore every avenue. You sought the aid of Mr. Van Duyvil’s sister?”

  “She wasn’t dancing,” said Anne with casual cruelty. Or perhaps she didn’t mean it to be cruel. It was a statement of fact; Janie hadn’t been dancing. But that wasn’t what Anne had said when she came to her, Janie was certain. Anne had told her that Mrs. Van Duyvil had sent her. Hadn’t she? “Janie—Miss Van Duyvil—thought my cousin and his wife might be overseeing preparations for the spectacle by the river. So we went out to find them.”

  There, for the first time, Anne’s voice faltered.

  In that pause, Janie could hear her cousin’s voice calling, over and over, Bay, Bay, Bay. The courtroom was humid with the press of bodies, but Janie felt cold suddenly, cold and alone.

  Bay, Bay, Bay …

  The coroner’s voice was calm and steady. “Can you tell me, in your own words, what happened after that, Mrs. Newland?”

  “You know what happened.” Anne’s voice was brittle. “We found my cousin’s body on the ground in the folly.”

  A shock went through the room. At the starkness of her words? Perhaps. Maybe it was just that they were used to innuendo and polite circumlocution. Maybe it was because they knew pain when they heard it.

  “Can you describe what you saw?”

  For a moment, Anne looked like she would object. But she closed her mouth again and began speaking flatly, methodically. “My cousin went first. I heard her say her brother’s name. I saw her kneel beside him.”

  No. That wasn’t how it had happened. Had it? The night was a blur of ice and snow, but Janie could swear, would swear, that it was the other way around. This was Janie’s story Anne was telling, not her own.

  Was Anne lying? She had lied before, but Janie couldn’t tell, couldn’t read anything into that closed face, that flat, unemotional voice. Or perhaps it was her own memory that lied.

  She had never realized before just quite how much Anne looked like her mother, like the Bayard side of the family. It was there in the lines of her face, the angles of her shoulders, the uncompromising sound of her voice.

  “Can you identify this shoe?” The coroner was directing Anne’s attention to the exhibits that had been presented and numbered earlier, the sad collection of items discovered by the river.

  “It was Annabelle’s.” Anne’s voice was very flat.

  “And this brooch?” A flash of light, a large diamond at the center, surrounded by smaller diamonds radiating out.

  “Also Annabelle’s.”

  But it wasn’t. Janie looked sharply at Anne. Had it been Anne’s? She wished she had more of an eye for costume. She could remember the necklace in the shape of a B Anne had worn, with its dangling pearls, copied for the occasion from a painting of Anne Boleyn. But had there been a brooch as well? Or had it been Annabelle’s?

  No. Annabelle’s costume hadn’t boasted large jewels, much less a diamond the size of a small sun. That, Janie remembered, had annoyed her mother. Which might have been the point of it.

  She hadn’t been sure at the time whether her mother was annoyed because Annabelle wasn’t putting on a good showing or because Annabelle’s own restraint had made every other woman look blowsy and overdressed in comparison.

  No, the diamond brooch was never Annabelle’s.

  But that she had seen it somewhere, Janie knew. It teased at the back of her memory, a glimmer of diamond set against brocade. Just like half the costumes in the ballroom.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Newland,” the coroner was saying, and Janie realized she had missed the rest of Anne’s testimony, whatever it might have been. “We shall have an hour’s recess.”

  There was the rustle of people stretching stiff limbs, the hushed murmur of voices that gradually grew louder as the coroner rose from his chair, the jurymen abandoned their box, and the aura of solemnity fell away. The room was a room again.

  The reporters were jostling each other to get to the telephone in the hallway, to phone their stories in to their editors. Some clever souls bypassed the rush, running to the post office to use the wire. At the back of the room, away from the press bench, Janie thought she caught a glimpse of a familiar brow beneath a battered black hat, but the crowd was shifting and pushing through the doors, and he was lost again.

  Janie turned to Anne. “I wasn’t first. You were.”

  “Was I?” There were lines on either side of Anne’s mouth; powder had fallen into the cracks, turning them into a spider’s web. “I forget.”

  “Does it matter?” said Mrs. Van Duyvil impatiently. “They should be looking for the true culprit, not putting on a show for the masses. One can only hope that Mr. Lacey can make the magistrate see sense.”

  “Mr. Lacey?” Janie looked quizzically at her mother.

  “English accent,” supplied Anne helpfully. “Curly hair.”

  “He is a man who has suffered much from the same scheming adventuress who murdered your brother. He deserves your sympathy, not your mockery.” Mrs. Van Duyvil looked thoughtfully out at the courtroom. “Perhaps I shall invite him to stay with us at Illyria.”

  “Forgive my tardiness. The crowd, you know.” Mr. Tilden appeared by their side with an apologetic cough. “I have arranged for a private parlor at the nearest hostelry.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil, her voice as dry as autumn leaves. “It will be a luxury to be free of the scrutiny of the press.”

  “Don’t you think they deserve their pound of flesh?” Anne was at her most flippant, her face shuttered, making up for her ordeal on the stand. “They’ve got little enough else. We might at least put on a show for them.”

  “I do not put on shows.” Mrs. Van Duyvil took Mr. Tilden’s proffered arm. “Come, Janie.”

  “Heel,” murmured Anne. “There’s a good girl.”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil shot her a look over her shoulder. “Your levity is singularly ill placed.”

  A clerk escorted them through the back regions of the courthouse, out a small door giving onto an alley, away from the hordes outside the courthouse. It felt very odd to be slipping through side doors, hustled through service entrances. An apologetic man met them at the back of the hotel, apologizing for conveying them through the nether
regions. Their luncheon was hurried and largely silent. They returned to the courtyard as they had come, like thieves, beneath a hard, flat sky from which no light shone.

  They had been returned early, but already people were milling about, making sure of their seats. No one wanted to miss the trial of the century. Never mind that last year there had been another trial of the century and another one the year before that. There were still ten months left to the century and this was the trial of it. For now.

  The people fell back, like courtiers at Versailles, as they passed. Janie’s mother stalked stone-faced through their midst, looking neither left nor right.

  “Miss Van Duyvil.” A man stepped out of the throng, his voice low. Even muffled in coat, hat, and scarf, Janie would have known him anywhere. It was in the way he moved, the way he spoke. “A word. If I may.”

  Janie could feel her entire being come alive, anticipation and trepidation and irritation, a hundred emotions roiling together beneath her black dress, her black gloves, her black half veil.

  It took all her training not to stop, but to turn slowly, very slowly. “One word. But you’d best be quick about it.”

  The crowd trailed after the scandalous Mrs. Newland. It was easy, too easy, to fade into the background, to melt around a bend in the corridor, where a mop and bucket stood abandoned, the water at the bottom of the bucket sporting a thin crust of ice.

  “Mr. Burke,” said Janie, resisting the urge to tug her hat back into place. “Have you phoned in your story to your editor? You’d best be quick. There’s a line for the telephone.”

  Burke made a swift, awkward movement. “There’s no story to phone in. I’m not covering the inquest.”

  “No?” Janie looked at him skeptically. “If you’re not here to report, why have you come? Don’t tell me it’s for the beauties of nature. You’ll hardly find them in the courthouse.”

  “Won’t I?” Mr. Burke removed his hat, clamping it under his arm. “I’m here because I needed to speak to you. When I saw the evening edition, I went through ten kinds of hell. Crazy, isn’t it? I know you think I’m dirt, but … I needed you to know. I didn’t write that story.”