The Ashford Affair Page 23

  “We would—we would probably have broken up, right?” she said shakily. “I mean, being so young.”

  “Yep,” agreed Jon a little too quickly. “Probably. I would have wound up going to business school instead of grad school and you—well, you would have probably gone to law school anyway, but you would have resented me for not getting to date around. It would have been a disaster.”

  “A disaster,” Clemmie echoed.

  Her head was spinning with scotch and confusion. Her bare knee brushed his, skin to skin for the first time in years. She could feel the shock of it straight through her. So could he. She could tell.

  His hazel eyes were the same color as the liquid in her glass, gold and brown.

  “I wish—” she began brokenly, but she didn’t have time to finish the phrase; his lips stopped her words.

  What were wishes compared to this? She didn’t remember consciously closing her eyes, didn’t remember moving towards him. There was no thought, just sensation, the feeling of his lips, his hands, the nubby blanket beneath her knees, the feel of his bare skin under her palms as her hands slid up beneath his shirt. He kissed her fiercely, demandingly, as if his kiss were his argument. She clung to him as the world tilted, a confusion of impressions, her ears ringing.

  And ringing.

  They stumbled clumsily apart as the phone on the desk shrilled. The world had tilted; she was sprawled on her back on the couch, Jon above her, his shirt rumpled and his hair any which way. He was breathing hard, his chest moving in and out. The phone on the desk shrilled and shrilled again.

  Their eyes met, united in the same thought.

  “The hospital,” said Clemmie.

  “Damn.” Jon scrambled off the couch, stumbling on the edge of the rug and knocking over the empty bottle of scotch. He lunged for the phone, catching it just before the fourth ring. “Hello?”

  Clemmie rose stiffly, trembling all over. She’d heard that was an aftereffect of shock. Or maybe “shock” wasn’t the right word. She yanked down her borrowed T-shirt, her movements jerky. Her elbow bumped the pile of folders, sending the one on the top slithering sideways.

  Clemmie made a belated grab for it, but she was just a beat too slow. The folder slid off the side, spraying its contents across the floor.

  “Anna? Anna, you’re breaking up.” Cordless pressed to his ear, Jon stalked out into the hallway.

  Clemmie hunched down to pile the papers together, sifting them back into their folder as she strained to hear what Jon was saying outside. She shoved an early draft of a chapter into the folder, double-spaced paragraphs with lots of cross-outs and interlineations in red pen in Jon’s impatient handwriting. Chapter Five, it said on the top. The Great Divorce.

  “You’re breaking up again! Damn.” Jon hit “End” and began punching numbers into his phone. “Anna?”

  Under the notes were more gray photocopies, this time with pictures, pages from magazines, featuring the young and gilded of an earlier era, women in fur-trimmed coats and men in top hats. They weren’t very good photocopies; the ink left a gray film on Clemmie’s fingers as she piled them into the folder, only half-seeing, surreptitiously watching Jon as he paced in the hallway, shouting over the poor cell-phone connection, guilt and confusion warring with fatigue and concern and goodness only knew what.

  Her hands trembled, and a page dropped from her fingers onto the floor.

  The Tatler, it said, in curling letters on the top, in an Art Deco frame. Beneath it was a picture of Granny’s cousin Bea dressed in a smart traveling suit with fur at the throat, on what looked like a ship, her arms full of flowers, and a man, next to her, who looked, in the way that old photos did, very much like the old photos in Granny’s apartment of Grandpa Frederick.

  Underneath the photo a caption read: LADY BEATRICE DESBOROUGH AND THE HONOURABLE FREDERICK DESBOROUGH.

  “Clemmie?”

  She looked up. Jon was standing in the doorway, the cordless gripped between both hands. His knuckles were white. His face was bleak.

  Clemmie dropped the paper she was holding. She rose slowly to her feet, using the corner of the couch to brace herself.

  “That was Aunt Anna?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears.

  Jon nodded. He made no move to come to her, just stood there, in the doorway, holding the phone in both hands.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said hoarsely. “Clemmie … She’s gone.”

  PART TWO

  KENYA

  SIXTEEN

  Kenya, 1926

  “Shall we?” Addie moved away from Frederick, trying to hide her confusion beneath a veneer of cheerful chatter. “I’m so looking forward to seeing the farm—and the children, of course.”

  She wasn’t sure how she managed to sound so cool. There was a whistling in her ears, like the train as it clattered along on its path, trailing black smoke, a shrill, warning sound, several thousand miles too late.

  It didn’t seem quite fair that Frederick should look so very much the same, a shade more tan, clad in khaki instead of tweed, but the vital bit, that spark of personality that had caught and held her firm all those years ago, in a ballroom in Kent, caught and held her just the same. She had deluded herself that his attraction had been purely a matter of circumstance. She had made a tidy story of it over the years: She had been young and naïve and fresh from the country; he had seemed to her a man of the world. He had been the first man to take any kind of interest in her, independent of her connection to Bea—or, at least, had put up a good pretense of doing so.

  But here, in the unforgiving African sunlight, Addie’s pretty rationalizations fell to bits. It was absurd. She ought to be proof against him now, now that she knew him for what he was: A schemer. An opportunist. And her cousin’s husband.

  Wiping the sweat out of her eyes with a handkerchief long since gone soggy, Addie reached blindly for the handle of the black Ford. This had been a horrible, horrible idea. She ought to have stayed home in England with David, instead of chasing after some odd notion of vindication. “Is this the car?”

  “That? Oh, darling, no! That’s the estate car.” Bea shooed Addie towards a canary-yellow car with a flying stork on the front. She gestured towards it with palpable pride. “This is mine.”

  “It’s very grand,” said Addie. The hood seemed to go on forever.

  Bea cast her husband a limpid look. “It was my anniversary present, wasn’t it, darling? Five glorious years.”

  In the sun, Frederick’s face seemed strangely dark. “I’ll see to your trunks,” he said, and turned away.

  “Trunk,” Addie called after him. “Just the one. I didn’t bring very much with me.”

  Bea squeezed her arm, the familiar scent of her perfume warring with the unfamiliar smells of Africa. “It’s just like the first time, isn’t it? When you came to Ashford. I remember how you looked that first night in the nursery, such a little, wide-eyed thing.”

  “Yes, and you took me under your wing,” said Addie, trying not to sound too churlish. It was true; she had owed Bea so much. But was it really necessary to revisit it now? Addie’s eyes tracked Frederick as he moved easily through the crowd, shepherding the delivery of her trunk. She forced herself to look away. “I’ll never forget your kindness.”

  “We’re sisters, remember?” said Bea gaily. “You mustn’t worry about a thing. We can make something over for you—fix you a whole new wardrobe. It will be such fun! I’ve scads of things, heaps and heaps, all but unworn. We can go through them once we get to Ashford.”

  “Ashford?” Addie cast her a quick, startled glance.

  “That’s what I call our farm. Ashford Redux. It’s not at all unusual,” she added defensively as Frederick rejoined them. “Lots of people call their farms after places back home. Joss Hay called his place Slains. That was their castle in Scotland.”

  “Was,” contributed Frederick. “Didn’t they lose it a few generations back?”

  Bea bristled. “You would understand it i
f you had anyplace to lose. Do we have time for a drink at the club?”

  “Not if we want to get back before dark.” Frederick’s tone was pleasant enough, but there was an undertone to it that made the short hairs on the back of Addie’s neck quiver.

  Bea appealed to Addie. “Wouldn’t you rather stay the night at Muthaiga? It’s our club,” she added. “I know you’re longing for a bath, and we could have a drink and you could meet some of our neighbors—we could spend the night and go up early in the morning. Early in the morning is by far the best time to travel, before the heat becomes truly ghastly.”

  “It gets worse?” said Addie. Already the heat was weighing on her like a second skin, beating through her inadequate hat, sending rivulets of sweat dripping down the small of her back.

  Frederick chuckled softly.

  Addie just managed not to scowl at him. Once, she would have been thrilled to be the source of his amusement, pathetically pleased to make him laugh, but not anymore. As far as she was concerned, he was the lowest of the low and her only interest in him was as her cousin’s husband.

  “I’m happy to go wherever you’d like me to go,” she said to Bea. Assuming a heartiness she was far from feeling, she said, “Let’s go on to—Ashford, is it? I haven’t heard that name in ages. It’s a little disconcerting, hearing it here.”

  “The natives call it Kirinyaga.” She’d forgot how very green Frederick’s eyes were, forgot or trained herself not to remember. “It translates roughly to ‘it is glorious.’”

  “How interesting,” said Addie chillingly. She addressed herself deliberately to Bea. “One doesn’t usually think of names as having meaning, does one? Do you think ‘Ashford’ meant something once?”

  Bea shrugged. “I should imagine it would have something to do with a tree and a ford.”

  “Or some strange corruption from the French,” contributed Frederick in his smooth, deep voice. Addie remembered the power a mere word from him once had over her, all their long talks, all those ridiculous lectures and conferences. She hated that the sound of his voice still had the power to raise goose bumps on her skin.

  Pure habit, she told herself. Habit and memory. Nothing more.

  Bea examined her gloved hands. “Yes, the French are so very accomplished at corruption, aren’t they? Corruption and couture.”

  Bea still wore Marcus’ ring, a large sapphire framed in diamonds. It gave Addie a pang, seeing it, remembering Bea at Rivesdale House, back before the world had fallen to bits around them. She wondered if Marcus minded that Bea had kept it—or, more to the point, if Frederick did.

  “Aren’t ash trees meant to have magical properties?” said Addie at random. “Do you remember, Bea, how Cook used to tie bits of cloth around a branch when she felt ill? I’m not entirely sure it was an ash, though. It might have been something else.”

  “It might have been an ash,” said Frederick, entering into the conversation unbidden. “The Norse believed that the first man was formed from an ash log. It was their version of our Adam and Eve myth—without the apples.”

  “Would that make Ashford the Garden of Eden?” said Addie lightly. Sweat was dripping down her neck, making her back itch, and the strong sun made her head ache.

  “Do you mean, since we’ve been expelled?” said Bea. There was a horrible, awkward silence. She yanked at the wrists of her gloves, pulling them up. “If we’re not staying for a drink, we should go.”

  “How far is it?” Addie asked, trailing along behind Bea to the yellow car.

  It was Frederick who answered, reaching past her to unlatch the passenger door. “A little over three hours.”

  “Yes, the way you drive,” said Bea.

  Frederick gestured her courteously towards the car. “I’m sure Addie would prefer not to spend her first evening in East Africa in a ditch.”

  “Hardly her first evening in East Africa,” said Bea. “There was Mombasa, wasn’t there, and then a night on the train, and that hideous little station at Voi. Not that the drive is any better than the train. You wouldn’t believe the roads here, darling. They’re all made of red murram—too, too dust making!—and you just lurch along from pothole to pothole. There’s a trick to it, though. If you go fast enough, you simply fly.”

  “It sounds exhilarating,” said Addie, wishing herself back in London, where the omnibus didn’t fly, it plodded. That is, if one was lucky and it condescended to move at all.

  “It is,” said Bea. “Don’t worry, I’ll take you out when old fusspot isn’t around.”

  The old fusspot didn’t rise to the provocation. He simply held open the door, waiting for them to enter. There was, Addie knew, nothing more calculated to infuriate Bea than indifference. Addie suspected that Frederick knew it, too.

  Why hadn’t she had the sense to stay home?

  “After you,” she said to Bea, but Bea shooed her forward.

  “No, no, dearest, you go in the middle. You’ll have a better view that way.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t—”

  “Now that you’re here, you must see the place. To get the best view, you really must go up in the air.” Bea slid in beside her, neatly trapping Addie in the middle. “I’m learning to fly. It’s divine. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve gone over the Rift in an aeroplane.”

  “More daft than divine,” said Frederick, taking the other side. The door closed behind him with a click, locking Addie in between the two, Bea’s skirt whispering against her on one side, Frederick’s leg pressed against hers on the other, his side against hers. His elbow bumped against her breast as he moved the clutch. “Those things are death traps. We’ll take you out for a ride, Addie. You get the best view of the country that way.”

  “Addie hates horses,” said Bea. She adjusted her hat more firmly on her sleek blond bob. “Don’t you, darling?”

  “I don’t hate them—” hedged Addie. She caught the edge of the seat as the car lurched forward. A chicken flew squawking out of its path. “I just respect their desire not to have me on their backs.”

  “They can tell you’re uncomfortable,” said Bea, sounding much more like herself again.

  “They’re right.” Addie wafted a hand at the red dust flying up from the road. “Remember the secret riding lessons?”

  Bea winced. “I hadn’t realized one person could fall off so many times! But you kept on.”

  “Only because you kept at me. I would have given up, otherwise.” For some reason, it seemed terribly important to impress on Frederick just how thoughtful Bea had been. “Bea suborned the head groom, commandeered the gentlest old hack in the stable, and spent hour after hour walking me around the paddock. Even Dodo gave up, but Bea kept on.”

  “Really?” said Frederick, but he looked not at Bea but at Addie.

  “You know me,” said Bea flippantly. “I like a challenge. Oh, darling, do look over there. No, no, the other there. Did you see it? That was a rhino.”

  Addie craned behind her to see. “I missed it. Do they come right up on the road?”

  “When they think they can get away with it,” said Frederick. “They’ve had a time of it with the telegraph wires. The rhinos decided the poles made excellent scratching posts. They’d back up and rub against them. If that weren’t bad enough, the giraffe would wander through and get the wires tangled about their necks. It’s the devil of a nuisance when you’re trying to wire for supplies and a giraffe happens across the line.”

  “Yes, I can see where that would pose a problem,” said Addie primly, trying to shift sideways. “Are there lions?”

  “They tend to leave us alone if we leave them,” said Bea. “It’s the monkeys that are the true pests, snatching at everything and jabbering away with that endless jabber jabber jabber like a ladies’ sewing circle, you can’t imagine. And the hyenas! Foul things.”

  “They seldom come near the house,” said Frederick. “Not anymore.”

  “No, but you can hear them,” said Bea obstinately. “Late at ni
ght you can hear them laughing, like something out of Bedlam. They feed on the flesh of corpses. Not just animals, human corpses, too. You can hear them out there at night—laughing and waiting.”

  Addie felt a chill down her spine despite the heat of the day. “Goodness. It sounds like something out of one of those horrid novels we used to read—do you remember?”

  “Yes, but then we could close the book,” said Bea, and her voice sounded so forlorn that Addie looked at her in surprise, in surprise and pity. Bea hastily rallied, raising her voice to be heard over the motor. “Do you ever see Rosita and Geordie?”

  “Rosita and—? Oh.” Taken aback at the complete non sequitur, Addie took a moment to figure out what Bea meant. They had been part of her old crew in those faraway nightclubbing days. Addie coughed on red road dust, wafting her hand in front of her face. “Not really, no. Our paths don’t really cross. I don’t go to the Ritz much these days.”

  “I suppose it’s someplace new, then,” said Bea enviously. “It always is. What’s it like being one of the New Women, on your own in the fleshpots of London?”

  “Fairly staid, actually,” said Addie, aware of Frederick next to her, although his eyes never left the road. “I go to a fair number of concerts—David is very musical—and plays and lectures. It would bore you to bits.”

  “David is Addie’s intended,” said Bea over Addie’s head.

  “Oh?” said Frederick.

  “Frightfully brainy, too,” added Bea. “Isn’t he?”

  Addie squirmed on her patch of seat. “He’s a lecturer at University College. Philosophy and Political Economy and all that sort of thing.”

  “When is the wedding?” inquired Bea brightly.

  “We haven’t set a date yet.” Realizing how it sounded, she added quickly, “What with David’s classes and my work—well, you know. I expect we’ll be married when I get back.”

  “St. Margaret’s, Hanover Square?”

  Addie laughed. “Nothing like that!” She tried to imagine David’s colleagues or her more bohemian friends at a society wedding in St. Margaret’s. The mind boggled. Funny to remember she had once dreamed of that, she and Bea both, clouds of tulle and orange flowers and small children to hold one’s train. Bea had said she would settle for nothing less than a marquess.… “It will be the registry office for us.”