“I like this Win character,” Annie said. “I’m glad Pru had the good sense to let him stay.”
“Ha!” Gus responded with a small arf. “Well, you can join the very short line of people who have ever shared that sentiment. You like him in what manner, exactly?”
“I don’t know. He seems funny, affable.”
“Yes, he seems that way, doesn’t he?”
“You’re a tough customer,” Annie said. “So this marginally affable Win Seton wrote a book called The Missing Duchess. In your story he’s writing about Mrs. Spencer. So voilà! Your not-really-a-mystery is solved. Mrs. Spencer is the Duchess of Marlborough. The duchess is she.”
“The mystery is hardly solved. My dear, you are a pretty thing, smart as a whip, but I feel as though you’re not listening with both ears. Win said he’d write the book with or without the woman’s assistance. He was exactly the kind of person who, if Mrs. Spencer had become the least bit troublesome, would’ve written whatever the hell he wanted just to put something on the page. And Mrs. Spencer was always troublesome.”
Gus started walking back down the road, away from the Grange. He indicated for Annie to follow.
“Wait,” she called. “Maybe we should try to—”
“Go inside?” he finished for her, smiling over his shoulder. “You are persistent. And cruel. Poor old man, one foot in the grave, and you want to get him thrown in the brig?”
“You’re not anywhere near the grave, much less one foot in it.”
Annie jogged to catch up.
“Sorry, mademoiselle, no trespassing for me today,” Gus said. “Let me walk you back to your hotel. The Banbury Inn? Nicola Teepers? Whew. She’s a chatty one, isn’t she?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Once her pace finally caught with his, Annie wrapped both arms around herself. Her teeth clattered. She could feel winter coming.
“Here.” Gus unwound his scarf and passed it her way. “Borrow this. What were you thinking, coming out here in nothing but a pair of skimpy shorts? It’s brass monkeys outside.”
“I was jogging.”
“You were doing nothing of the sort. Heaving, more like.”
“Hey!” she said, laughing as she wrapped the scarf around her neck.
Around them the air was damp and chilled. The sun shone overhead but the morning fog settled in the foothills. The cold was so much colder in England, so wet and final. It was nice to have something to guard against it. What was she thinking, indeed.
“I wish you were up for some breaking and entering,” Annie said, debating whether to tell him how easy it was.
“A tempting offer, but I must pass. This old codger’s not nearly nimble enough for such larks. You’ll have to find someone younger if you’re looking for a coconspirator.”
“Maybe I can suss out some of those Banbury hooligans,” she said. “The ones who used to torture Mrs. Spencer.”
“Those very hooligans are now the doctors, teachers, and councilmen of this great town.”
“How disappointing,” she said. “Though I guess that’s the way life turns out. People grow up. They mature.” Annie pretended to look at an invisible watch. “As for me, any minute now. I’m sure my mom is waiting.”
“I’ve been trying very hard to prevent maturation myself,” Gus countered.
“Hold on.” Annie turned to face him. “Were you one of them? A miscreant-turned-notable?”
“Lord no! Do I look like a town notable to you? What an insult.” He gave her a little wink. “I shudder at the thought.”
They walked a few more steps in silence, nothing but the sound of the road beneath their feet, the hum of cars in the distance.
“Who do you think controls it?” she asked. “The trust that owns the Grange? Not an old hooligan?”
“Last I heard it was more or less in the hands of developers, like all decent Oxfordshire parcels. Doubtless they’ll turn it into miniestates any day now.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the market’s hot around here lately,” she said, thinking of her mom.
“Aggravatingly so. Banbury is starting to get hip to Londoners, God forbid. Estate agents are crawling all over the place. Homes that have been in families for centuries are coming onto the market. Everyone’s a seller, at a price.”
Annie thought of Laurel’s own land deal, her mother one of the many selling out to the highest bidder. There was comfortable retirement on one hand, and sullying quaint countrysides on the other. Annie would not mention this to Gus.
“Basic economics, I suppose,” she said, feeling morose. “Which is why I’ve always preferred books. Much to the detriment of my bank account and long-term job prospects, of course.”
“I tell you what, Annie, this world would do better to have more like you in it. Practicality is overrated.”
“Someone needs to tell my mom.”
A few more steps and they stopped in front of the inn. Annie looked up at her room but couldn’t make out if anyone was in it.
“Are you traveling alone?” Gus asked. “Or with a companion? I can’t recall you mentioning one way or another.”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Mostly on my own.”
Eric would not like this conversation. He would not like it one bit, seeing as how he was convinced the Earl of Winton was either a pervert, a kidnapper, or both.
Sometimes Annie wondered if she’d told Eric on purpose, to make him mad. She promised to marry him but her mother’s qualms were beginning to infect her. God, how she loved that big Southern boy. But God, she was dumb to marry so young.
“On your own?” Gus said with a frown.
She started to nod, hearing Eric’s voice (“you told him you were alone?”). It seemed somehow weird to say she was traveling with her mom, as though Gus might write her off as a bored schoolgirl not worthy of his time.
“I mean, I’m not totally alone,” Annie quickly clarified. “I’m meeting some family members along the way. But, you know, mostly it’s just me.”
This was not so far from the truth.
“Are they expecting you any time soon?” he asked. “I have to be somewhere later this afternoon, but I might have time for another tale about the misanthrope you find so alluring.”
“He doesn’t sound too misanthropic to me,” Annie said. “Seeing as how he helped himself onto the property, then shacked up with two women he’d never met.”
“For a crack at the so-called duchess he was willing to manufacture some base level of sociable behavior. Make no mistake, though. Seton’s appearance in Banbury was about the book, and the book alone, and he planned to stay at the Grange until he squeezed every last drop from Mrs. Spencer and finally wrote the damned story he’d pined after for so long.
“Trouble was, though Win Seton felt so bloody sure that she was Gladys Deacon, he forgot the most elemental things about the duchess. Namely, that she lived only in half-truths and the best lighting, and, most important of all, the long-lost Duchess of Marlborough never, ever played by the rules.”
Twenty-five
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
DECEMBER 1972
At first, Pru thought the writer wasn’t permitted to leave his room.
Otherwise, why would he stay up there, day after day, pounding the devil out of his typewriter with a crazed, helter-skelter look in his eyes? Win Seton hardly ate, rarely drank, and was withering by the hour.
“Mrs. Spencer, you have to let him out,” Pru implored after nearly a week of suffering his uncomfortable presence. “You can’t treat him this way. It’s the holidays! Have a little compassion.”
“Treat who?” Mrs. Spencer said in her carefully honed pretend naïveté. “And, by the by, Christmas is over. The giving season is finit.”
“You know exactly who I’m talking about. You’ve locked the poor writer in his room. Forget the giving season, this is basic human decency.”
“Miss Valentine, that’s prepost
erous. Tell me, have you seen any chains? Any locks on his door?”
“Well, no, but I haven’t really—”
“I see you go in there,” Mrs. Spencer said with a snigger. “Toting food and companionship and Lord knows. Surely you would’ve noticed signs of bondage. Or is it that you want to find signs of bondage?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Did it ever occur to you that he relishes the situation? Maybe reclusiveness is his preferred state. The man is a writer.”
“Yes, but—”
“He’s come to write, not consort with pretty, if not slightly vaporous, young girls. As shocking as you may find it.”
True, he was there to write, but Win Seton hadn’t made a lick of progress on his book. Oh sure, the constant snap of the keys was fine and dandy but it couldn’t have been a biography he was writing. Mrs. Spencer had given the man precisely nothing to work with. Pru sat in on every confab, so knew this as fact. And every evening it went like this.
At seven on the nose, Mrs. Spencer would change into a dramatic silk dressing gown. She’d call Pru into her company and announce: “Time for my interview!”
It didn’t matter if Pru was in the middle of a chore, or if there were dogs half fed, half bathed, or half birthed. Mrs. Spencer would run Pru down and drag her upstairs to sit watch. The man was a “likely deviant,” Mrs. Spencer claimed, and Pru her chaperone.
“Are you ready to pen my memoirs?” she’d trill and plant herself at the edge of Win’s bed, highball in hand.
Her hair, the gown, those diamonds winking in the lamplight, all a far cry from her customary soiled trousers and straw hat. Even the cocktail was wrong. Mrs. Spencer didn’t drink, as a rule, and instead preferred laudanum to calm her nerves. Pru didn’t understand it at all.
“Start with my profile,” she’d say. “What do you think of my profile?”
“Perfect Hellenic proportions,” Win responded obediently.
From the outset the writer accepted his role and played it to the hilt. Flatter, flatter, and when all else failed, flatter some more. One could never go wrong when referencing “Hellenic profiles” and so Win did without abandon. It was a commendable perception for a man blessed with rascally schoolboy charm in lieu of intellect.
“Hellenic,” Mrs. Spencer said with a happy sigh, every time. “Yes. Thank you for noticing. God has blessed me well.”
As Win told it, if Mrs. Spencer was the duchess, then God had nothing to do with her legendary silhouette. Gladys Deacon was born with a small kink in her nose, a quirk that vexed her from the start. She also deemed her eyes unacceptably close together and therefore vowed to ameliorate her oh-so-many physical flaws.
To that end, a teenaged Gladys Deacon set off on a worldwide tour to survey the most prized busts and sculptures in creation. She studied each piece, diligently analyzing and recording the distance between eyes and the lengths of the noses. Eventually, she arrived at the ideal proportions and took her data to Paris, where she underwent a series of wax injections to achieve this artlike perfection.
“I’ve never heard such a thing!” Mrs. Spencer claimed whenever Win brought it up. “Wax injections! Honestly. No, silly writer, I was born with this most original and God-given face.”
And so it went between Win and Mrs. Spencer. He prodded. She denied. He wheedled. She demurred. Pru sat watching, wondering what the bloody hell they were all doing there. Everyone was haggling for something, but from very early on the end result was obvious. Not a one of them was going to get what they wanted. Not even Pru.
Twenty-six
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 1973
“Hello,” Pru said, standing sheepishly in the hall.
She had a sack in hand, in it a jumble of foodstuffs she’d acquired in town.
“I thought you’d like something to eat? May I come in?”
Win didn’t look up from his typewriter. Instead he made some sort of roll-nod gesture, which Pru took as invitation. With a begrudging smile, she stepped through the doorway.
“Hopefully Mrs. Spencer won’t mind me visiting her memoirist unsupervised,” Pru said, padding gingerly across the room. “I feel like, I don’t know, you’re not getting enough food or something. Silly notion, probably. But with the conditions downstairs…”
Hands trembling, Pru placed her offering on the desk: a handful of cabbage, two apples, a few links of sausage, and a wedge of Oxford Blue. Already beside him sat a mug of tea and a half-emptied sleeve of biscuits.
“Worried about my eating habits?” Win stopped typing and glanced up with a crooked smile. “I’ve never felt so loved.”
He was handsome for an old bloke who didn’t shower much, Pru decided, but then immediately shook her head. There was no use thinking about the man in flattering terms. She didn’t want to feel more toward him than she already did. Vague and distant pity was emotion enough.
“I’m not worried about your eating habits,” Pru said. “Seeing as how you don’t have any.” She paused, hand on hip. “Good grief. I really sound like a mother hen, don’t I? You’re a smidge old for that.”
“Right. A smidge old. What was your estimate when we met in the garden that day?” he said. “A thousand years or thereabouts?”
“Oh geez…”
“I’m only joshing,” he said with a droll wink. “Anyhow, I’m all for mother hens. My own mum wasn’t interested in any henning so it’s a nice change of pace.”
“I never really had a mom, either,” Pru blurted. “I don’t know why I just told you that.”
“Not to worry.” He put a cigarette between his lips but did not light it. “I never really had one, either.”
Win punched out a few more words while Pru stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, emptied bag dangling from her arm.
“Is there something else you need?” he asked from the side of his mouth not working to hold onto the unlit cigarette.
“Uh, er, not really.”
Win glanced up.
“So, I’ll be going…” she said.
“Wait,” he said, surprising them both. “Don’t leave. Do you … do you want to chat?”
Win rolled his eyes at himself. Fancy a chat? Blimey, how could a girl resist so compelling an invitation? What a wanker.
“That’s okay,” Pru said, wisely. “I don’t have much time for a chat.”
She took five quick strides toward the door but, much to his amazement, turned back around before leaving him altogether.
“I have to ask,” she said. “You’re not … Mrs. Spencer isn’t detaining you? Under lock and key? Or guns and poisoned arrows? You are allowed to come and go, yes?”
Win laughed. He was in a sorry state alright. A passerby couldn’t ascertain whether he was a prisoner or a free man.
“Believe it or not,” he said. “I choose to live and work in these conditions. A testament to my quality of life, it must be stated. But I understand your confusion.”
“Okay, but what are you writing?” Pru asked. “I’m sorry if it sounds rude but I can’t figure it out.”
“What am I writing? The book about the duchess. I thought I made that clear?”
“You did, but I’ve been here and … I’ve watched. And listened. Does Mrs. Spencer come in here without me sometimes? Is that it?”
“No. Never.”
“Then what the hell!” Pru said, exasperated, making a “halt” motion with both hands. “I mean, really! You’re up here typing like a madman. All day, all night. The incessant, relentless clacking. I’ve sat through your so-called interviews but she’s given you nothing. Nada. Zip. Unless I’m missing something, which is entirely possible.”
“No, you’re not missing a thing.”
Win stood. She could almost hear his knees creaking from disuse.
“Then what is it?” Pru asked. Nay, begged. “What are you doing in here?”
“It’s simple,” he said. “I’m playing the
long game.”
“The long game?”
He nodded and then grabbed several sheets of paper from the windowsill.
“My brother would argue that’s my life’s philosophy,” he said, turning the paper over in his hands. “But in this case, it means I’m willing to wait her out. The duchess is famous for her disobliging nature, universally known for conducting business on her own bedlamite terms. To expect anything less would go against natural order. So, for now, I work on the bits I’ve gathered through my preliminary research. She’ll come round on the rest. Eventually.”
“Assuming Mrs. Spencer is the duchess,” Pru said.
“Oh she is. One hundred percent.”
Win tossed the stack of paper onto the bed. Before realizing what she was doing, Pru shuffled over to snatch it.
“Hey now!” he said. “You can’t go nicking other peoples’ private correspondence.”
“Is this your book?” she asked, the pages hot in her hands.
“Well.” Win sighed. “Yes. It’s the start of it.”
Llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllldkfawawetwlcw
Werrejq32rjklwfe
Fuck. This.
“A riveting read,” Pru muttered.
Fuck this. Truer words had not been spoken.
So this drivel was what he’d been hammering out, early in the morning and well past midnight? It was gibberish. Nonsense. Pru considered that he might not be a writer and instead some homeless bloke on the make, just as Mrs. Spencer had suspected.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Win said and flicked his (still unlit) cigarette onto the floor. “Keep going. The first page is merely the accidental spill of some writerly frustrations.”
“I’ll say.”
Pru flipped to the next page and was relieved to find genuine, bona fide sentences. Paragraphs, even. She began to read.
They said you weren’t anyone until Giovanni Boldini painted you. But of all the famed women he rendered, the princesses and countesses and heiresses, the Duchess of Marlborough was deemed the most enchanting.
The future duchess was born Gladys Deacon in Paris on February 7, 1881, though she would later claim the date was 1883, and later 1885. Lady Marlborough loved to play with her birthdate, ticking it up a year or two for every decade that passed. A fair enough trade, when a person made it close to the century mark.
I'll See You in Paris Page 12
