The Ashford Affair Read online

  Bother Bunny. Bother Bunny and bother the Gang. Marcus was still married to her, wasn’t he? It was time he remembered that. She would make him remember that.

  Bea reached a painted fingernail to touch her husband’s cheek, once so familiar, now so foreign. She could smell the special shaving lotion his valet made up just for him, bay rum and citrus. That, at least, hadn’t changed. “Another weekend with Deadly Dull Dick. Poor darling. I do feel for you.”

  Marcus held himself stiffly. “He’s a good chap,” he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

  Bea trailed her finger down his cheek. “You used to find it amusing when I called him that,” she said softly. “You used to laugh.”

  He caught her hand and drew it away from his face. “Well, yes,” he said awkwardly. “I didn’t know him so well then. He gets better once you know him.”

  Once one knew Bunny, he meant. “Oh, and he improves so much on acquaintance, does he?”

  Marcus didn’t rise to the bait. He stood there, looking down at her, a small furrow between his brows. “What do you want, Bea?”

  I want my husband back.

  She wanted his eyes to light up as she entered the room; she wanted his front pressed to her back at night, his arms tight around her; she wanted someone to tell her what had gone so hideously, horribly wrong, what Bunny ffoulkes had that she lacked.

  “Stay,” she said fiercely. “We’ll go to the clubs, see a show, have a laugh. It will be just like before. You’ll see. And then…”

  She reached out to him, twining her arms around his neck, pressing her body against his. How long had it been since they had last slept together? Months, at least. She nuzzled his ear with her nose, breathing in the familiar scent of him, splaying her fingers across his back to hold him close.

  “Stay,” she murmured.

  She felt Marcus’ muscles tense beneath her fingers, but not in the right sort of way. He patted her awkwardly on the back before untangling himself from her embrace. “Sorry, old thing. I promised Vinnie I’d be at Haddleston by supper. Maybe another time?”

  Pride and rage boiled up together, choking her. Bea’s hands curved into fists, her nails digging into her palms. She wanted to fly at him, to shove him, to rake her nails across his smug face. It took every ounce of her training to restrain her.

  “Of course,” she said nastily. “You couldn’t possibly go back on your word to Lavinia. What was I thinking? It doesn’t matter that you see the Gang four nights out of five; how could you possibly miss a day of them?”

  Marcus looked wary. “I know you don’t like my friends.…”

  “Wherever did you get that idea?”

  “Dislike” was far too mild a term. Bea hated, loathed, and reviled them. They were like a pebble in one’s slipper, insignificant but maddening and nearly impossible to dislodge.

  Bea waved a languid hand, trying not to let him see how it was shaking. “Go off. Have a ripping old time. I’ll be enjoying myself here in London.”

  Let him just imagine how she might be entertaining herself in London without him. It would serve him right.

  “Would you like to join us?” said Marcus hastily. “You’re more than welcome.”

  “Thank you so very much,” said Bea with heavy sarcasm. “I can’t tell you how flattered and thrilled I am by your invitation. I imagine it will be utterly divine. Such a pity you didn’t ask me sooner. I would have simply expunged everything else from my calendar. But as it is…”

  “That’s a pity,” said Marcus, with obvious relief. “Some other time, then.”

  He turned to go and Bea felt panic well up in her chest. He was walking away from her; he was turning and walking away and there was nothing she could do about it. This wasn’t the way this was supposed to end. Not now.

  “What other time, Marcus?” asked Bea tautly. “What other time?”

  He sighed and scratched his left cheek with his right hand. She used to tease him about that gesture; it was what he did when he was tired or distracted, a strangely childish gesture. Seeing it caused a lump to form at the base of her throat, like the first stages of the influenza. He looked at her, looked down, and shook his head.

  That was all, just a shake of the head and a little shrug of his shoulders.

  “I’ll see you on Tuesday,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  Bea felt herself shaking as though with cold, shaking so hard that her teeth chattered with it. He wasn’t … He hadn’t …

  But he had. He had walked out on her, just turned and walked out. Any moment now, she would hear the motor of the car in the courtyard, and off he would go, off to Haddleston and Bunny, who would stroke him and tell him not to worry about that hag of a wife. He hadn’t even bothered to stand and fight with her. He had just walked out.

  Oh, God.

  She drew in a long, choking breath, resting her wrists on the windowsill, her forehead against the cool glass pane. She had told herself again and again that this would pass; men had their flirtations, they strayed, they returned. But this, this had been going on too long now, was too entrenched, too public, too obvious.

  How had it come to this? They’d been married little more than a year ago, a year and four months, hardly enough for the bloom to have worn off. In the early fall twilight, Bea could already see her own shadowy reflection in the window glass, turning her into a shadow of herself, older, paler. Only a year and a half ago, she had been the most sought-after woman of her Season. How had she gone from that to this?

  Her pride smarted with it and, beneath the wounded pride, an undercurrent of fear. It had been one thing in her parents’ day, when divorce was a scandal, a sort of social Black Death. But now … there had been Idina Gordon and others, new wives like her, divorced, handed off for younger, more complaisant brides. If he had to dally, why couldn’t he have found a nice, married woman, someone who would play the game as it used to be played, someone who would pose no threat to Bea?

  Bea’s hands clenched into fists, her nails biting into her palms. No. She refused to allow herself to be reduced to a drab domestic creature, sitting idly by while her husband dallied. If Marcus could find his amusements elsewhere, so would she.

  She wasn’t going to go gently.

  London, 1999

  “Only two years?” echoed Clemmie.

  She glanced back at the portrait, no longer a generic flapper, but Granny’s cousin, rendered tragic by this new information.

  That would explain Granny Addie’s reluctance to talk about the mysterious Bea. Clemmie wondered what had happened. Childbirth? She had a vague idea that people frequently died from childbirth in the bad old days.

  “Why is she still on the wall?” asked Harold, earning a dirty look from Paul. Junior associates were meant to be seen and not heard.

  “Why is she still on the wall?” asked Paul loudly.

  The marquess directed his answer to Clemmie. “She was said to be one of the great beauties of her time. I’ve always wondered if the old boy wasn’t still just a little bit in love with her.”

  Clemmie contemplated the portrait. Yes, Bea was pretty enough, but it wasn’t her porcelain-perfect features that caught the eye; it was her attitude. The woman in the portrait simmered with raw sex appeal. Despite the restrained color palette of the portrait, the black dress, the pale pearls, the silver-blond hair, the painting crackled with vitality. It was almost as if the woman in it were bound to the canvas only by the strips of paint and at any moment she would break free, stand up, and undulate her way into the room, snapping those long, tapered fingers for someone to bring her a cigarette.

  “That’s so sad,” said Clemmie. “He lost her in life so he kept her in paint?”

  “And the plaster was cracking on that part of the wall,” added the marquess prosaically. “It would have been a job to find something else to cover that spot. Not that the broken-heart theory isn’t more fun.”

  Clemmie tilted her head up at him. “I’m sorry if my great-great, er, co
usin broke your grandfather’s heart.”

  “Don’t be,” said the marquess. “I, for one, am rather glad that his second marriage came off.” At their blank looks, he clarified, “His second wife was my grandmother.”

  “So he did marry again?” Clemmie wondered what the second wife had thought of having the first one still hanging on the wall.

  The marquess smiled, looking rather adorably dopey. “Went forth and was fruitful and multiplied. So, you see, I owe your great-great-cousin rather a debt.”

  “In that case,” said Clemmie, “I’m glad?”

  The marquess’ eyes met hers, the corners crinkling with amusement. “I won’t tell your great-great-cousin that you said that.”

  Clemmie felt her lips quirk into a grin. “You’re the one who has to live with her.”

  His eyes were the color of melted milk chocolate; it made her think, somehow, of winter days and ceramic mugs and her old stuffed bunny, the one she used to trail around by one leg.

  “Hey!” Paul drummed his fingers against the tabletop. “This is all very interesting, but can you send the waiter over? We need to get moving. Early meetings tomorrow,” he added, as though that explained everything.

  “Certainly,” said the marquess, doing, Clemmie thought, an admirable job of hiding his irritation. His nod neatly encompassed the entire table. “Enjoy your evening.”

  Clemmie wasn’t quite sure, but she thought he might have winked at her. She reached for the roll on her bread plate, nibbling on a corner, trying to shake a sudden wave of vertigo.

  As Paul snatched up his BlackBerry, Harold leaned towards Clemmie. “That’s so cool that you’re related to the owner.”

  “Not really,” said Clemmie dismissively. She didn’t like the way Paul was frowning over his BlackBerry. This boded ill. “I mean, we’re not really related. It’s just one of these weird things.” She leaned towards Paul. “What’s up?”

  Paul didn’t look up from his BlackBerry. “Gordon isn’t happy,” he said.

  Gordon was the general counsel at PharmaNet, the man directly responsible for the fact that Clemmie had been wearing the same suit for the past twenty-eight hours. PharmaNet was a United Kingdom company, but they were being sued in the United States, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, over an anti-depressant that the class-action plaintiffs claimed had been deliberately mislabeled and mismarketed. After a two-week crash course and four exhausting hours in the PharmaNet headquarters, Clemmie knew more than she had ever expected to know about the pharmaceuticals industry, the inner workings of PharmaNet, and SSRIs.

  “Why isn’t Gordon happy?” asked Clemmie. “We’ve got a strong case for limiting their scope of discovery.”

  She should know; she’d been up until four in the morning working on the brief just two nights ago. Only two nights ago?

  Paul shook his head over his BlackBerry, sending it back to the main screen with one quick jab. “He didn’t like the questions you were asking the marketing VP. Too much about the nursing homes.”

  The FDA approved drugs only for specific uses and populations, in this case for the treatment of depression in those over eighteen. The class-action suit claimed that the company had been illegally marketing the drug for teens, despite lack of FDA approval, as well as pushing it on old-age homes and hospitals as a cure for unspecified geriatric ills. It was the teen marketing that was the heart of the case, fueled by a few spectacular suicides of teens on the drug, but it was the geriatric issue that had caught Clemmie’s attention.

  “It could come back to bite them,” argued Clemmie. “It has come back to bite them. I know it’s a side issue, but the opposition will use it to go to our overall probity. If they can show that it was mismarketed for seniors, they have an easier time convincing the jury that we went off-label for teens.”

  “Look,” said Paul. “If some reps got a little overzealous in their sales pitch, that’s not the company’s fault. They can’t help it if a few guys get a little overenthusiastic.”

  “But what if it’s not just a few guys?” asked Clemmie. “Those marketing boards they showed us—that’s a clear paper trail leading back to the central management team. You can’t write that off as a few rogue salesmen.”

  “There was nothing,” said Paul forcefully, “nothing in those training slides that specifically directed off-label marketing.”

  Is your patient feeling anxious? Lost? Confused? That had been the wording on one of the slides. Beneath was a picture of a white-haired woman in horn-rimmed glasses, holding a cane. Try Soprexa!

  It was the picture that had struck Clemmie. The cartoon figure on the screen, shapeless house dress and permed blue hair, didn’t look anything like Granny Addie in her signature Chanel suits. But there was a vulnerability about the image that went straight to Clemmie’s gut. She could picture Granny Addie’s eyes, unfocused, as they had been that day at the birthday, hear the nurse soothingly saying, It’s just something wrong with her meds.

  “Anxious, lost, and confused” covered a frighteningly broad amount of ground. Hell, Clemmie felt anxious, lost, and confused half the time.

  “Not explicitly, no,” said Clemmie, “but the implications…”

  “What are you, working for the plaintiffs? Making their argument for them?”

  “No, but we should be prepared to refute—”

  “We don’t refute it unless they argue it,” said Paul dismissively. “Until then, the last thing you want to do is build a paper trail for them or get the PharmaNet people talking about things they shouldn’t be. What?”

  It was the marquess again, standing hesitantly next to their table, looking as if he didn’t want to be there. Clemmie couldn’t blame him. She didn’t want to be there either.

  “Miss Evans?” he said, avoiding looking at Paul. “You have a call. From the States.”

  Clemmie scraped back her chair. “It’s probably the Cremorna matter.” Another way in which real lawyering differed from the television version: they didn’t have cases, they had “matters.” Dropping her napkin on the seat, she looked to Paul. “Will you excuse me?”

  “Mmph,” said Paul. He was assiduously clicking into his BlackBerry, using only his thumbs, probably placating Gordon by promising he had had the offending associate whipped and how did Gordon feel about a round of golf on Sunday?

  “Do you want me to order for you?” asked Harold, with a wary glance at Paul.

  “Thanks. I’ll have the Scottish salmon, done however the chef wants to do it.” Trying not to trip on the strap of her computer bag, which was protruding from beneath her chair, she turned to the marquess. “Thanks for waiting.”

  “This way,” he said, ushering her towards the lobby with ceremonial care. Lowering his voice, he said, “I take it that was an opportune interruption?”

  “Very,” said Clemmie, with feeling.

  By the time she got back to the table, Paul would be tucked into his bottle of Sancerre and feeling more mellow. She’d worked directly for Paul for more than a year now and learned that while he had a reputation for being a screamer—firm parlance for abusive partners—it tended to blow over quickly. He hadn’t thrown a stapler at anyone since that second-year associate had threatened to sue.

  “Thanks, again. This is the second time today you’ve come to my rescue.” Struck by a sudden thought, she said, “Wait—is there actually a phone call?”

  “There is,” he said apologetically. But, then, everything he said seemed to come out as half an apology, a sort of self-deprecatory style entirely foreign to Clemmie. “You don’t mind taking the phone call at the desk? Or we can have it put through to your room.…”

  Three flights up? “That’s okay,” she said quickly. “I don’t mind taking it at the desk. It should be quick.”

  The fourth-year associate dealing with the Cremorna matter while she was away was the nervous type. He was probably just calling to make sure he’d dotted all the appropriate i’s, with anxious questions about the exact circumfer
ence of the ideal dot. Clemmie kept trying to explain to him that there were times when any dot would do.

  “As you wish,” said the marquess courteously, sounding rather like Wesley in The Princess Bride. Clemmie wondered whether it had been intentional. She suspected not.

  On a whim, she leaned towards him. “I have to ask. What did happen to my great-great-whatever? Was it childbirth?”

  “Childbirth?” He frowned down at her, a floppy lock of hair grazing one eye. “I’m afraid I don’t…”

  “I mean, how she died. The woman in the portrait.” It sounded very crass put that way. But, then, there was something about talking to the English that made Clemmie feel crass by default, crass and very stridently American. It was a reflex her mother used to advantage. “You said they were only married two years.”

  “Ah.” The marquess looked at her in surprise. “They were, but she didn’t die. Not then, at least.”

  Clemmie’s brows drew together in confusion. “Then—?”

  “She didn’t die; she bolted.” Taking pity on Clemmie’s American ignorance, the marquess translated, “She ran off with another man.”

  ELEVEN

  London, 1920

  “Utter rubbish,” said Frederick.

  “Really?” Addie glanced up at him from under her hat, trying to unmoor a pin that had gotten stuck in her hair.

  They were just back from a lecture at the London Literary Society and she had, feeling quite bold about it, invited him back to Rivesdale House for a drink. It still amazed and thrilled her whenever she thought about it, that he was standing here next to her in Bea’s entryway, that he had escorted her to a lecture, that she could think of him as Frederick now, instead of Mr. Desborough.

  They had fallen, over the past few months, in the habit of attending talks and lectures together. No other suppers had followed that first, impromptu one, but there had been long walks in the park and rock-hard cakes at Lyons and any number of improving talks and ear-shattering concerts. In accordance with the strictures of The Bloomsbury Review, Addie was trying to improve her ear with modern music, but she found some of it very hard going. Frederick liked it more than she did.