The Ashford Affair Read online

  “A whole Season and nothing,” said Aunt Vera fretfully, looking Addie up and down. “I don’t know what we are to do with you. Of course, you haven’t any fortune.…”

  Addie had heard this before, frequently. Uncle Charles made her an allowance, although Addie was never quite sure how much had come from Uncle Charles and whether any might be out of the small amount her parents had left. She was afraid to ask.

  “I had thought…” Addie said tentatively. “I had thought about a job.”

  The word sat strangely in Aunt Vera’s sitting room, somehow inappropriate among the rose and gold, the china fine as lace.

  Aunt Vera’s stays creaked. “A job? Nonsense! Modern nonsense,” she said. Then, as if to herself, “A younger son. Or a clergyman. That would serve nicely.…”

  On the mantel, a clock of malachite and gold chimed the hour, five delicate pings.

  Addie let out her breath in a silent sigh of relief.

  “Five o’clock already?” Aunt Vera hauled herself out of her chair. “Tell Beatrice I expect to see her Tuesday.”

  “Yes, Aunt Vera.” Addie set her plate down on the tray. There was something terribly forlorn about the uneaten bread and butter, half-shriveled on a Spode plate painted in flowers and edged in gold.

  “Adeline?” Addie shot to attention as Aunt Vera turned in the doorway. “No more of this nonsense about a ‘job.’ Do try to remember who you are.”

  Who she was? She’d had it pounded into her for years: She was a Gillecote, even if—there was always the “even if”—she didn’t look like one. It was one thing for Bea to stay out half the night or Aunt Vera to lick icing sugar from her fingers or Dodo to talk about breeding at dinner. They could. They didn’t have an errant father and a middle-class mother to make up for. She was, Addie had been told again and again, meant to be twice as correct, try twice as hard to make up for her unfortunate origins. The others were Gillecotes by right; she had to work to be one.

  What if, just what if, that wasn’t what she wanted to be? Addie felt a tiny spark of rebellion tingling as she passed through the hall beneath the massed portraits of Gillecotes, all up the sides of the vast mahogany staircase, pale and blond like Bea and Dodo and Uncle Charles. Jacobean Gillecotes, Georgian Gillecotes, Regency Gillecotes.

  Addie had no pictures of her mother, other than the blurry images in her own brain, more daydream than memory. All these years, she’d had no contact with her mother’s people. All she knew of them was that her mother’s father had been a country doctor. Addie had only learned that from Aunt Vera during the War, when she’d announced her intention to go to Guy’s Hospital and train as a nurse. Aunt Vera had seen it as a sign that blood will out—although the fact that the Duchess of Rutland’s daughter was also at Guy’s had quelled some of her objections.

  For the past fourteen years, Aunt Vera had done everything she could to refine any hint of her mother’s people out of Addie, leaving her pure Gillecote, unalloyed by baser stuff. It had been a relief to escape from Aunt Vera’s house to Bea’s, where one didn’t have to worry about having one’s clothes, one’s mannerisms, one’s habits picked at, one’s movements scrutinized.

  A maid handed Addie her hat and gloves and she stopped by the mirror to set the hat on her own head, her hair just a shade lighter than the wood paneling in the hall. Fernie told her that she took after her mother—except about the smile. That, said Fernie, was her father’s.

  Addie drew on her gloves, hugging her secret to her like a charm. Fernie! After all these years she had seen Fernie, an older, sadder Fernie, but still Fernie, with her red hair streaked with gray now, no longer masses and masses of it piled on top of her head, but daringly shingled, in a short bob that made her seem younger and older all at once.

  Addie had visited her in her little office in a rickety building in Bloomsbury, not so very far from where Addie had grown up, with a dying potted plant on the windowsill and a typewriting machine on the desk and people rushing in and out with open collars and ink-damp pages in their hands and a smell of cigar smoke about their rumpled clothes, a world away from the hushed grandeur of Gillecote House.

  The maid—once it would have been a footman, but the War had put an end to that—opened the door. Addie stepped out into a blaze of September sunshine, the dying sun concentrated for one last hurrah, shining right into her eyes.

  Addie felt a burst of exhilaration. Such heaven to be free of Aunt Vera for another week! There needn’t be any younger sons or earnest young clergymen. She had a plan of her own. Yes, Aunt Vera would hate it, but she didn’t need Aunt Vera’s permission. She’d be properly twenty-one in just two months, and then—

  “Ooph!” Sun-blind, she had blundered right into someone’s path, her shoulder connecting with an arm, sending a package tumbling onto the pavement. She could hear the dull thud as it landed.

  “Oh, good heavens, I am sorry!” Addie held up a hand in front of her eyes. All she could see was the silhouette of a man, dark against the light.

  “Not at all,” he said. He bent to fetch his fallen package, his gray homburg hiding his face. “It’s as much my fault.”

  Which was very generous of him when Addie was quite sure it was nothing of the kind. She stooped slightly. “I hope that wasn’t anything breakable.”

  “Just a book,” he said, straightening, so that she could see, for the first time, not just the hat but the face beneath it.

  For a moment, she thought it was a trick of the light, the rainbows still chasing their way across her eyes. It seemed impossible that it could be otherwise.

  “Mr. Desborough?” she said breathlessly, and he looked up sharply, surprised. Addie couldn’t blame him; she was equally surprised, surprised and giddy and delighted. She clasped her hands together. “It’s Captain Desborough now, isn’t it?”

  He looked at her quizzically, his eyes intent on her face. Addie wondered what he saw; with the sun falling full in her face, did he see her haloed in rainbows or simply a bleached-out blur?

  “Do I—?” he began, but caught himself. His face broke into a smile as he let out a shout of laughter. “Good Lord! It’s the girl with the mouse.”

  NINE

  London, 1920

  “I haven’t one at the moment,” said Addie. She held out a hand. “Adeline Gillecote.”

  “I remember now,” said Captain Desborough. “You do have a talent for a dramatic entrance.”

  Addie winced. “I don’t usually make a practice of knocking people over, I promise.”

  “Just unleashing livestock?” he said, and then, “Which way are you walking?”

  “This way,” she said, pointing vaguely down the street, only half-aware of what she was saying, still boggling over the unreality of it all, that she was talking to Frederick Desborough, that he was standing in front of her, alive, older, real. “I live with my cousin now, in Wilton Crescent.”

  “I’m just going that way as well,” he said. “Shall I see you there?”

  She must have nodded or shown some sign of consent, because, somehow, she was walking beside him, through the rows of white-walled houses with their wrought-iron grilles, the sun shining up from the pavement and the varied sounds of motorcars and horse-drawn carts muted to dullness against the roaring in her ears.

  She snuck a glance sideways, checking that she hadn’t imagined him, but he was quite definitely there, still, surprisingly corporeal in his gray flannel suit. He didn’t know, thank goodness, how often she had walked with him in daydream over the years. In the Ashford days, she had spun ridiculous fantasies about her debut, walking down the staircase of Gillecote House in Bea’s wake, all eyes on Bea—except for one set of green eyes. His. He would lift a glass to Addie, silently, and she would float down the stairs and spend the rest of the night dancing in his arms, a fairy-tale princess freed from her tower.

  Later, in the war years, she would go, exhausted, to bed in the nurses’ dormitory at Guy’s, wondering whether, in the next round of patients s
he would find a lean, dark-haired man who would struggle to a sitting position, exclaiming, Miss Gillecote! He was never badly wounded, of course, just enough to justify his being invalided home. You’ve turned nurse, he would say, admiration in his eyes. Something—it changed from daydream to daydream—would occur, a fire in the hospital, a bombing, an operation of the utmost delicacy, in which her unflappable calm would carry the day, at which Captain Desborough would take her hand and say, I’ve never known a girl like you.

  And they would live happily ever after.

  It was silly, she knew. But it was fundamentally harmless, this little dream of love, based on a fine pair of eyes and a passing kindness, just something to send her to sleep with a smile after a particularly trying evening of toting bloody basins or swallowing Aunt Vera’s maxims. Although Addie had half-guiltily followed his career where she could, searching for his name in the papers, she had never expected to meet Frederick Desborough again. He had become, to her, almost as fictional as Mr. Rochester, someone to be sighed over and then tucked away again.

  “Whatever happened to it?” he asked conversationally.

  “To—?” Addie looked up at him from under her hat brim, hoping that he couldn’t tell half of what she was feeling.

  “The mouse,” he said smilingly.

  “Oh, you mean Binky!”

  “Was that its name?”

  “Short for Bianca.” She tried for a tone of proper worldly boredom, clenching and unclenching her hands to stop them tingling. “She was a white mouse, you know. We thought we were so very clever.”

  “Was she put down for crimes against the state?”

  “You mean for spoiling Dodo’s ball? No. She died a perfectly natural death at the ripe old age of five.” How ridiculous it all seemed now, how absurd that once they had cared about such things as a mouse let loose at a ball. “It seems a very long time ago, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. It does.” His voice didn’t sound quite as she remembered. There was more of a drawl to it, an undercurrent of ennui. His face was thinner than it had been, thinner and wearier. “Are you in town for the Season?”

  “No. I wasn’t much good at it, so I decided to give it up.”

  “You gave it up?” Captain Desborough gave a little snort of amusement. “What do you mean?”

  “You mean aside from being an awful wallflower?”

  Somehow, it felt like a triumph to have made him laugh, to bring a smile to his too-thin face.

  Emboldened, she said, “It just seemed such a waste, all that, when so much has happened. The going to parties and standing about and just pretending that everything is all the same as it was when it can’t ever be again.” Addie glanced at him, trying to see his expression, but his face was shrouded by the brim of his hat. “And, of course, there’s the not liking the parties. So, really, I’m just making a virtue out of necessity.”

  “What shall you do with yourself now that you’ve given up society?” he asked politely, but Addie had the sense he wasn’t really there anymore, that whatever pleasure he might have taken in her company had been leached away.

  A bird trilled from an iron railing. In the street, an omnibus rumbled past.

  Addie clasped her hands together in front of her. “Look, don’t tell anyone, will you? It’s just that I’m bursting to tell someone. I’ve got a job. Well, not really a job. It’s more of an accidental unpaid apprenticeship—on probation—but at least it’s something.”

  “Let me guess,” said Captain Desborough. “You’ve got a place at a fashion house. No. Wait. Writing tittle-tattle for the tabloids.”

  Addie made a face. “No, nothing like that. I wouldn’t know one cut from another. As for tittle-tattle—by the time it got to me, it would be old news.”

  “What, then?” he asked lazily.

  The sun was shining full in her eyes, over the white-painted walls of the Georgian houses. Addie held up a hand to her hat brim. “The Bloomsbury Review,” she said with satisfaction.

  “Good Lord.” Captain Desborough didn’t ask her what it was, as Marcus would have. His eyebrows went up, more intrigued than shocked. “The Bloomsbury Review?”

  “It hasn’t the reputation yet of The Mercury, but it’s got such a lot of interesting people,” said Addie earnestly. “It looks to newer writers and critics, the ones who can’t get into the Mercury. I know there’s Wheels for that, but they only publish once a year, and only poetry. We have short fiction, as well, and criticism and philosophy and … oh, all sorts.”

  “Subversive reading material for a young lady. Does your family know you’re reading that?”

  Addie all but danced down the street. “I won’t just be reading it, I’ll be editing it! Well, if I’m lucky. Mostly, I’ll be fetching tea and whatever it is that the most junior of the junior are made to do.”

  “Isn’t Bloomsbury a bit off the beaten path?”

  “Not for me.” She thought about the narrow house in the narrow street, haloed in memory with rosy light and the smell of biscuits and pipe smoke. Over the years, it had flattened and softened in memory until it looked like an illustration out of a children’s book, all pastels and rounded corners. “I grew up in Bloomsbury, you see. Right off Russell Square.”

  He was looking at her, really looking at her, like an appraiser presented with a painting that had turned out to be rather more interesting than he had first surmised. “I thought you were a Gillecote of the Gillecotes. They aren’t precisely…”

  “They’re frightfully county. I know,” Addie agreed. “Horses and hounds and footmen at dinner. My father was the family scandal. He fell in love with a novelist and ran off with her. My uncle and aunt didn’t at all approve.”

  “No,” murmured Captain Desborough. “I can see where they wouldn’t. Who was she?”

  “Helen Layton. She wrote as H. R. Layton.”

  That stopped him dead in his tracks. “You are full of surprises.”

  Addie did her best to look glamorous and Bohemian, hoping he wouldn’t realize that none of the glamour was inherent to herself. While it might be rather dashing to have a mother who had written scandalous novels, they weren’t Addie’s novels any more than the articles in The Bloomsbury Review would be her articles. But, maybe, by association …

  He resumed walking, book swinging easily by his side. “You haven’t any uncles named Picasso, have you?”

  His voice sounded different than it had when they met, no longer avuncular, but playful, teasing. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was … Was he flirting? Addie’s pulse picked up as excitement warred with doubt.

  “No, and I haven’t the least relation to any of the dancers in the Russian ballet,” she said, striving for the same sophisticated, bantering tone. “It’s just my parents, really. My father wrote, too. Histories.”

  Subversive, Aunt Vera called them, although not when Uncle Charles was there to hear. Uncle Charles wouldn’t have anything said against Addie’s father, whether from affection or from a sense of family propriety she wasn’t quite sure. In effect, it had meant that no one said anything at all. Addie wished they had. There was so little she remembered and it was so long ago that she had long lost track of that fragile dividing line between memory and invention.

  Reading her mother’s books was like seeing the world turned inside out, familiar refrains and ideas turned on their heads. Only, reading her mother’s words, Addie couldn’t help feeling that it was the world as she had known it that had been inside out all along and she was only now seeing it right way up. She had never seen the beauty in poverty or the poorness in riches until her mother laid it out for her. She had never thought to question Aunt Vera’s codes or strictures, or to ask whether being correct was the same as being good.

  Aunt Vera had taught her what one did and, more forcefully, what one did not. Her mother had forced her to ask “why?”

  “Have you read my mother’s books?” she asked.

  “Yes. Before the War…” His face darkened
, his lips narrowing into a thin line, as though he didn’t trust himself to say more. Addie had seen that look before, on the men in the hospital, somewhere between anger and loss.

  “And what did you think?” Addie asked hastily.

  Captain Desborough blinked, his eyes focusing on her with difficulty. “About … Oh yes. Your mother’s books. There’s no good way I can answer that question, is there? I think she had a rare talent for seeing both the best and the worst in human nature and portraying them both faithfully. We see all the petty hypocrisies of both rich and poor.”

  “But also their power for redemption,” said Addie eagerly. If her mother’s books had taught her anything, it was that inevitability was only inevitable if one allowed it to be so. The best of her mother’s characters seized life on their own terms, made their own destinies. Addie only wished she had the courage to do the same.

  An automobile backfired and Captain Desborough flinched, his entire body snapping with tension.

  “Redemption,” he said heavily. There were dots of sweat on his brow that hadn’t been there a moment before. He began walking again, much faster than before. “You don’t really believe that rot, do you?”

  “It’s not rot!” Addie scurried to match her shorter stride to his. “Isn’t that the best part of the human experience? Our ability to learn from our mistakes and rise to a higher plane of consciousness?”

  “You’ve been attending free lectures, haven’t you?” He made it sound like a bad thing. “If you’d bothered to read anything in the papers other than poetry, you’d know that higher consciousness is hardly a human gift. We scurry like rats back into the same poisoned gutters … Like rats…”

  “That’s absurd.” Addie struggled with her skirt, hobbling herself. “We’re hardly rats. It’s the power of reason that distinguishes man from the animals.”

  Captain Desborough gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “I’ve seen precious little evidence of that.”

  “But that’s why poetry is so important,” said Addie excitedly. She hadn’t been able to discuss this with anyone from her ordinary life, not Bea, not Dodo, and certainly not Aunt Vera. “It forces people to think—to reevaluate. Surely, if we all make a concerted effort, we can change the world for the better.”