That Summer

by Lauren Willig

  She subsided, trembling, her abdomen aching, the taste of sick in her mouth and the smell of it in her nostrils.

  “Here.” Gavin fished her own scented handkerchief from her sleeve and handed it to her.

  Imogen pressed it gratefully to her nostrils, concentrating on breathing in and out. Blindly, she stumbled along as Gavin put an arm around her shoulders, moving her away from the puddle of sick, into the relative shelter of an alleyway.

  The alleyway was narrow and dark and fetid, but the rays of the sun didn’t penetrate there, and for that Imogen was grateful. She rested her aching head briefly against Gavin’s shoulder. Her stomach appeared to have subsided, for the moment, but she felt dizzy and weak. And scared, with a fear to which she couldn’t quite put a name.

  Couldn’t, or didn’t want to.

  “I need to go home,” she said hoarsely.

  “I’ll take you,” Gavin said immediately.

  “No.” Imogen looked up at him in sudden panic. “The less we’re seen together, the better it will be.”

  She didn’t care for her own sake—what could Arthur do to her? Ignore her? Set her aside? He wouldn’t, not if there would be a scandal. It didn’t matter for her, but it mattered terribly for Gavin. Arthur had friends at the Royal Academy and among the world of collectors.

  Her fingers clutched at Gavin’s sleeve. “I will not see you ruined.”

  “And I won’t see you go off on your own like this.” Gavin’s accent was thicker when he was being stubborn. The burr went straight to Imogen’s heart. “Not when you’re ill.”

  “Please.” Imogen drew on her dwindling reserves of strength. “If you put me into a hack, I’ll be all right. It’s not so very far to Herne Hill.”

  The idea of going back to that cold and unfriendly house, to Evie’s hurt and Jane’s scorn and Arthur’s indifference, made Imogen want to curl into a little ball. She wanted to curl up in Gavin’s arms and burrow in against his chest and stay there, forever. She wanted, with every fiber of her being, to stay with him, even here, in this noxious alleyway. In a cottage, in a hovel. Anywhere.

  But she couldn’t.

  She felt as though she were on the wrong side of the gates of paradise, looking in to what she couldn’t have. There was a bittersweet knowledge to the fact that Gavin had been right, all those months ago, when he had tried to leave and she had made him stay. It hurt so much more now, knowing what they were, what they could be.

  Gavin grasped her hands. “Are you sure you want to go back there by yourself?” he said, his eyes intent on hers, and Imogen knew what it was that he was really asking. “Not that I believe it was your—that it was Mr. Grantham across the street. But if it was—”

  “If I have to, I’ll tell Arthur I was with someone else.” Imogen mustered a shaky smile. “I’ll tell him it was Fotheringay-Vaughn. That will serve the man right.” Fighting tears, she said tremulously, “You’ve too many beautiful paintings in you for my folly to be your undoing.”

  “Not yours,” Gavin said seriously. “Ours. And it isn’t folly.”

  The tenderness in his voice cut her to the bone.

  “Under the circumstances,” said Imogen shakily, “what else can it be?”

  Gavin lifted her gloved hand to his lips, uncaring of stains or smells, and pressed a kiss to the palm. Imogen felt the warmth of his lips straight through the fine leather. He looked up at her, his expression intent. “You know what I think it is.”

  The word hovered unspoken between them.

  Imogen lowered her head, avoiding his eyes. “I—should go home.” As if Herne Hill had ever been home. “Please.”

  Before she weakened and confessed her feelings. And what were they to do then? Especially when—Imogen shied away from the thought.

  “The sooner I am home,” she said quickly, “the less trouble there will be. Even if we were seen.”

  “All right,” Gavin said reluctantly. He squeezed her hand before letting it go. “If that is really what you want?”

  It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was for the best.

  What a miserably smug phrase that was, “for the best.” And why was it that doing what was right felt so dingy and wrong?

  Imogen managed an uneven nod. “Arthur will find me innocently ill in my bed.”

  Gavin’s face was like granite. “Just so long as he doesn’t share it,” he said grimly, and strode out to hail a cab, his movements abrupt and angry.

  The first to stop was one of the new, two-wheeled variety. Gavin spoke briefly to the driver, giving him the direction, before handing Imogen into the cab.

  His face softened as he stood by the side of the cab, her hand still in his. “Don’t eat any more of that fish,” he said.

  “I won’t.” Imogen leaned forward with sudden urgency. “Gavin—”

  He was all attention. “Yes?”

  The words caught in her throat. Imogen sank back against the seat. “Good afternoon,” she said, her throat tight.

  The last thing she saw as the cab pulled away was Gavin standing there, by the side of the street, two deep furrows in his brow.

  The hansom cab jostled along the uneven streets. The smell of the previous occupants of the carriage clung to the cushions, stale tobacco and unwashed wool and strong perfumes. Imogen fumbled for her handkerchief, pressing her eyes shut in an attempt to shut out the sights and smells of the city beyond.

  Fish, Gavin had said.

  She had felt like this before, and not from bad fish.

  Not the first time. The first time, it had all happened so quickly. She hadn’t even known she was with child until the cramps and the bleeding had made it painfully apparent that if she had been, she wasn’t anymore.

  But the second time—the second time she had carried the child long enough to feel just like this. That had been the year Jane had insisted on repapering the hall. The scent of the fixative had sent Imogen fleeing to her own room, vinaigrette in hand, prey to the kind of weakness she normally scorned. Meals had been a form of torture, the sight and smell of the food a barrage on her weak senses. She would have taken toast and weak tea in her room, but for Jane’s obvious scorn.

  Imogen had felt then just as she did now: weak and wobbly and constantly queasy.

  She could tell herself it was the fish—but how many days of fish? If she were to admit it, she had been feeling ill and tired for at least a fortnight. There was always a convenient excuse. She hadn’t slept well; the fish must be off; her stays were too tight.

  Her stays did feel tighter.

  Dear Lord. Imogen clung to the strap as the cab bounced over an uneven patch of road. How long had it been since she had last had her courses? July—or perhaps it had been early August. Time blurred. She had been too happy to count the months or days. Too happy to consider the possible, practical consequences of her actions.

  The carriage barreled over the river, past the spot she had stood with Gavin what now felt like a very long time ago.

  Imogen closed her eyes as the carriage rumbled its way out of the crowded streets of the city, out towards the country, towards Herne Hill. She had assumed, if she had thought of it at all, that after all these years she must be barren, or close to it. She had been married to Arthur for over a year before she had conceived the first time, and that had been back in the days when Arthur’s visits to her bedchamber had been expected occurrences.

  They had assumed, both of them, that the problem lay with her.

  The cab jolted to a halt before the house. Arthur’s house. The coachman ambled down from his perch to help Imogen out of the carriage. With numb fingers, Imogen reached into her reticule.

  “Keep your coin,” said the coachman laconically. “The gentleman paid.”

  The words had an ominous knell to them. Imogen murmured her thanks to the driver and hurried into the house.

  Jane was lying in wait for her by the door. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  It took Imogen a moment to remember h
er excuse for going into town. “No,” she said, walking quickly past Jane to the stairs. Her skirts dragged against her legs, nearly tripping her. “No. The trim we saw on Half Moon Street last week was by far nicer.”

  “I told you so,” said Jane. Imogen looked back to see Jane still standing there, in the hall, her arms folded across her chest. “But you did have to go gadding off to town.”

  She couldn’t take Jane’s smugness, not now. “Will you excuse me? I really don’t feel quite the thing.”

  With Jane’s watchful eye on her, Imogen fled to the privacy of her bedchamber, her stomach heaving and her mind in turmoil.

  Try to avoid it how she would, there was only one conclusion. She was with child.

  Gavin’s child.

  TWENTY

  Herne Hill, 2009

  It didn’t take Julia long to hit pay dirt.

  The first article to come up when she typed “Nicholas Dorrington” into the Google search bar was innocuous enough, a Sunday Times arts piece about his shop and some of the more interesting pieces.

  The second wasn’t quite so innocuous. The Daily Mail dealt with it rather primly:

  Dietrich Bank Director Investigated in Connection with Insider Trading Scandal as FSA Clamps Down on Market Abuse.

  The Sun wasn’t quite so wasn’t quite so subtle.

  Caught with His Hand in the Till: Top Banker’s Insider Trading Scam.

  Two more hits down, The Wall Street Journal reported:

  Dietrich Bank Director Resigns After Insider Trading Scandal.

  All of the articles were dated four years before, in the fall of 2005. Julia sat back in her chair. She remembered this one. She’d just started at Sterling Bates as a junior analyst. The story had been all over MSNBC and C-SPAN, a major moneymaker going down due to the sort of stupid financial shenanigans they warned you away from your first week in B school. There had been a lot of self-righteous head wagging and barely concealed smugness of the “there but for the grace of God” variety and a lot of surreptitious rechecking of the relevant rules and personal stock positions. It had been all over The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for about two weeks before the buzz had died down and the media had moved on to the next train wreck in the making.

  And that had been Nick. The same Nick with the shop in Notting Hill who had brought over curry on Friday night and offered to see her mother’s painting framed. Somehow, Julia couldn’t reconcile them in her head: the Nick she knew with the Nick who had committed financial fraud on a grand scale.

  Although, as Natalie had so charmingly pointed out, how much did Julia know about him anyway?

  Not much. She’d seen only the aspects of him that he’d wished her to see. There had been the illusion of intimacy created by that discussion of his family, but it had been just that. An illusion. He’d told her all about his grandparents but nothing at all about himself.

  Only that he had worked at Dietrich Bank in M&A. Until he’d inherited his great-aunt’s estate and opened shop.

  Julia clicked on the Wall Street Journal article. The details were simple and sordid. Nick had been the lead man in a major acquisition. The FSA had noticed a suspiciously heavy volume of trades in the target company’s stock the week before the deal closed. They’d had little trouble in tracing it back to Dietrich Bank.

  There were some mitigating details. He’d been investigated, not charged. He’d resigned, not been fired. Or, more likely, he’d resigned before he could be fired. Julia wondered what sort of deals had been struck behind the scenes, what kind of favors had been traded. She knew this world, and she knew just how scummy it could be.

  Any way she looked at it, the case seemed pretty grim. It was corporate malfeasance on a grand scale, driven by pure, unadulterated greed.

  So much for Nick’s charming tale of an inheritance from an eccentric aunt prompting his great career change.

  Maybe there had been an aunt. Maybe some of it was true. The best lies were all rooted in a grain of truth—even if it was only a lie by omission.

  Julia closed the lid of the computer with a snap. She didn’t need to read more. She hated that Natalie had been right. Not that she knew that Natalie was right in the larger sense—just because Nick had been involved in a major financial scandal didn’t mean that he was out to bilk Julia for what he could get.

  But it certainly wasn’t a point in his favor.

  Julia wrapped her hands around her coffee mug, feeling, suddenly, very isolated and very lonely. The old house whispered and creaked around her. Why did it feel like everyone was out for what they could get? Natalie … Nick … Everyone seemed to have an ulterior motive. There was no gesture of kindness that was untainted. She felt like a hedgehog, all rolled into a ball, prickles out, small and scared beneath her meager defenses.

  Stupid, Julia told herself, pushing the chair back. Her knees creaked as she stood. It wasn’t like she should be under any illusions about the goodness of her fellow man. Most people were out for what they could get in one way or another. Like the higher-ups at Sterling Bates. They had smiled and smiled and smiled at her and written her stellar reviews and told her what an asset she was to the firm right up until the day they had handed her a cardboard box and told her to pack up her pictures and potted plants—and, by the way, could she leave her badge and corporate card by the door?

  The milk of human kindness had long since gone off.

  Of course, she’d expected it from them. She hadn’t expected it from the cousin who had professed to be so delighted at her return and the man who—well, a man who had seemed to be genuinely nice.

  But that was the stock-in-trade of a con man, wasn’t it? It took a certain measure of charm to gull one’s victims. And what did she have to go on, anyway? A few kind words, a few family stories. She’d also seen him smoothly lie his way out of Natalie’s company, not once but twice; that ought to have clued her in.

  From now on, she was on her own. Nothing unusual about that. She was used to it.

  Too used to it.

  Julia told herself to stop the pity party. There was no reason she couldn’t track down the provenance of that painting on her own, without Nick. She’d been an art history major back in the day. Somehow, at twenty-one, she’d managed a fifty-page senior essay on Isabella d’Este, court patronage, and the construction of identity.

  Shouldn’t this be easier? At least the sources would all be in English.

  To hell with Nicholas Dorrington, whatever his real intentions; she could do this all by herself.

  * * *

  Nick made that resolution harder, by calling on Monday, just as he had said he would. Julia’s finger hovered briefly over the ACCEPT CALL button—but the memory of Nick, blithely making up stories about his change of career, stayed her hand.

  She let it go to voice mail.

  When she hadn’t returned his call by Wednesday, Nick texted her. You all right? If trapped under pile of debris, text SOS.

  It would be so sweet of him—if she didn’t have to worry about his motives. Life was too short to get involved with lying smootharses. She’d known enough of them back in her old job, Masters of the Universe who thought everything was coming to them, be it by fair means or foul.

  Every time she thought of the way he’d touched her cheek as he left, his offer to frame her mother’s painting, Julia felt more confused and angry. One thing if she could have ascribed all her feelings to lust. Lust was such an easily comprehensible emotion.

  But she’d genuinely liked him, too.

  At least, she’d liked the person she thought she knew.

  No need for SOS, just busy with house.

  Her phone bleeped again. Curry and snooker on Friday?

  Adorably persistent? Or more evidence against him. Either way, it was a moot point. Can’t, she texted back. Dinner plans with parent.

  It even had the benefit of being true. Her father got into town on Friday morning for his conference. They were slated for dinner Friday night, befo
re the conference got going.

  Sticking her phone firmly under a couch cushion, Julia went back to her research. She’d been trying to remember how she had done it back in her undergrad days, before her world had narrowed to numbers and charts and a glowing screen with red and green stocks on it, back when she still worked in words instead of equations.

  That, of course, had been before the ease of the Internet. She’d graduated in 2000, in the infancy of the Web, and well before “Google” became a verb. She hadn’t realized just how much had been digitized over the past decade. Forget university libraries, all she needed was her laptop. The piles of old clothes she had meant to take to the charity shop remained in a dingy heap in a corner of the dining room; the e-mails she had meant to send off to potential employers remained unsent. Julia’s world narrowed to the screen of her computer and the notepad next to her, on which she scribbled largely illegible notes to herself.

  Rossetti bio says frequent visitor to Thorne studio. Check Rossetti correspondence? Other personal papers?

  Who started New South Wales story? No attribution.

  The Granthams popped up once, in one of the Rossetti biographies. Of all the early Pre-Raphaelities, Rossetti really did seem to get the lion’s share of the attention. Julia suspected it was because, of all of them, he looked the most like the romantic conception of an artist, all tousled hair and brooding expression. Not to mention that whole romance with Lizzy Siddal and the sister who wrote poetry.

  Arthur Grantham got one line in the early pages of a 1982 biography as a collector of medieval antiquities, one of the stops along the way in Rossetti’s quest for models before the era of Raphael. Imogen wasn’t mentioned at all.

  Julia shouldn’t have been surprised. From the contemporary point of view, Imogen didn’t count. She wasn’t a person in her own right; legally, her being was subsumed within her husband’s. Her signature carried no legal weight; she had no possessions that weren’t also his. It was a distinctly chilling thought.

  By Thursday, Julia had a list of potential primary sources to check out, including a cache of Thorne’s letters at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Not to mention five hundred volumes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s collected correspondence. Maybe not quite five hundred, but close. The man had clearly been at no loss for words. And someone had saved all of them.