The Ashford Affair Read online

  “Me, too,” said Clemmie. Her throat felt dry and scratchy. She poured herself a little bit of club soda, watching the bubbles fizz themselves out. “I wish she would.”

  “Mmph,” said Aunt Anna. “Is that all you’re drinking? Here.” She poured a large shot of vodka into Clemmie’s soda. “Drink up, kid. Cin cin.”

  “Thanks—I think.” Clemmie toyed with her glass, turning it around and around in her hands. “I didn’t know any of that stuff about her.… About her nursing or her starting a hospital in Kenya … It’s all pretty amazing.”

  “Yeah,” said Aunt Anna dryly. “Amazing. You have to give her credit, she did a great job creating her own legend.” She raised her glass to the portrait of Granny over the mantel. “Here’s to Addie. The greatest spin doctor since Evita decided to go respectable. Lloyd Webber should do a musical. We could get Patti LuPone to play her. Or maybe Tyne Daly. It’d be like Gypsy with an English accent—and less nudity.”

  Even for Aunt Anna, this was a bit over-the-top. Grief made people do strange things. So did prescription medication combined with white wine.

  “Would you like to sit down?” Clemmie tentatively put a hand under her aunt’s arm. Damn Jon, anyway. He knew how to manage Aunt Anna better than Clemmie ever had. So much for blood being thicker. “Those shoes have to hurt.”

  “No.” Anna shook her off. Her carefully applied makeup had cracked, revealing a network of fine lines. “I’ve had enough of this Saint Addie crap. All hail Addie, the great and powerful! Do you want to know what she really was?” She rocked forward, so close that Clemmie could smell the combination of perspiration and expensive powder on her cheeks. “She was a selfish, grasping bitch.”

  Clemmie choked on her vodka.

  Aunt Anna waved a hand, yellow diamonds and white gold winking in the light. “Good, kind, wonderful Saint Addie, sitting there like a spider, weaving webs to trap other people’s lives … She didn’t steal things; she stole souls. She got her clammy little fingers in and she didn’t let go. She held on and on and on.”

  “Um…” Clemmie had no idea how to deal with this. “More wine?”

  “Do you know I tried to run away once?” Aunt Anna was off and rolling. “We were in boarding school in England, your mother and I. It was the perfect opportunity. She brought me back. She came over herself and tracked me down.”

  “She was probably worried about you,” said Clemmie tentatively, looking around for her mother. This was the sort of thing designed to make her blood pressure rise. “If any of your kids—”

  Aunt Anna slurped her wine. “I let my kids live their lives. Not that any of them were really mine—that’s what your mother would say. I’ve heard her. I know she says it. Like it doesn’t count if you didn’t ruin your figure for them. Pretty fucking hypocritical when you think about it, considering.”

  “It isn’t about the stretch marks,” said Clemmie’s mother sharply, making Clemmie jump. “But, then, you wouldn’t understand that, would you?”

  “Are the caterers okay in the kitchen?” Clemmie said desperately. She wished, desperately, that Jon were here to help. Only Jon had pecked her cheek and left. Just like last time. “Mom, maybe you should—”

  Neither of the women paid the least bit of attention to her.

  “Oh, you’re back to that again, are you?” said Aunt Anna. She leaned back against the makeshift bar. Bottles clanked, but it didn’t seem to derail her. “Why don’t you just dump some more salt in the wound. Have fun with that.”

  “Don’t play the victim with me,” said Clemmie’s mother. “Just because you—”

  “Come on. Say it.” Aunt Anna’s face was as hard and cold as an old funeral mask. “Because I had an abortion. Yes, that’s right,” she said to Clemmie. “If you want to know what’s lurking under the carpet, that’s just the top of the dust pile. I had a fucking back-alley abortion and they skewered my womb. Happy now?” she said to Clemmie’s mother.

  “No,” said Clemmie’s mother, looking decidedly gray about the mouth. “No. You know I never wanted that for you. If you’d only gone to—”

  “Saint Addie to the rescue?” Aunt Anna laughed wildly. “Who do you think gave me the money for it? Nothing could be allowed to upset Farve.”

  There was enough vitriol in her voice to make Clemmie take a step back.

  Clemmie’s mother came back swinging. “You were only seventeen! She was only trying to help.”

  “Help. Oh, yes.” Aunt Anna swigged back the last of her wine. “She was so helpful. She helped herself right into everything—and everyone else out of it.”

  Kenya, 1926

  “I can help,” said Addie. “At least, I might be able to help. I do know something about nursing.”

  Bea could feel a headache starting, just above her left eye. This entire drive had been a nightmare from start to finish. She and Frederick hadn’t spent this much time in the same space for—weeks? Months? They’d managed to avoid each other rather effectively, which was harder than one would think on five hundred acres of land. Her hangover hadn’t helped. It wasn’t that she drank too much—no more than anyone else—but drink hit hard at this altitude. The best way to counteract the effect of too many drinks the night before was to start again as soon as possible the following afternoon. And so it went on.

  She’d been ratty when they set off and the three-hour drive into town hadn’t helped, silence broken only by stilted commentary about the weather and loaded questions. They couldn’t seem to speak to each other without sniping these days, she and Frederick. She didn’t mean to do it, but it just came out that way, every statement a preemptive strike, hitting out at him before he could strike at her. He’d made it all too clear what he thought of her. She could feel it now, in the simmering frustration held in check only by Addie’s presence. Bea knew what he was thinking, that if she were a different sort of wife, they wouldn’t have to send for Miss Platt or Mrs. Nimmo, that she should be the one calling for medical kits and boiling water and all that rot.

  And why? She hadn’t been bloody trained for this.

  Somehow, it made it worse that Addie had been. She’d forgot about that, Addie’s stint as a nurse during the War.

  Bea squinted against the too-bright light, saying, as brightly as she could, “Yes, but that was years ago, and you’re our guest. We couldn’t possibly—”

  “I volunteer at St. Mary’s once a week,” Addie said briskly. “Surely that’s better than waiting for the governess to come back. If he’s as sick as they say—” She looked expressively at the bloodstains on Mbugwa’s robe.

  “It isn’t going to be pretty,” warned Frederick.

  Addie stared him down, five foot nothing of sheer determination. “I’ve seen guts spilling out of a ruptured stomach before. These things are never pretty. Do you have a medical kit?”

  Frederick didn’t hesitate. “What do you need?”

  “I won’t know until I see him. We will need to boil water, to sterilize it. If that’s possible?”

  “We’re hardly so primitive as that,” said Bea sharply. Too sharply. Frederick frowned at her. “Why don’t you see to the water?” she said to Frederick. “I’ll take Addie to the shamba.”

  “Right, then,” he said, giving Bea a long, hard look. She hated it when he looked at her like that. “Boiled water, medical kit—anything else?”

  “Strong spirits,” said Bea.

  “Oh, yes!” said Addie. “To sterilize the wound.”

  “No, for us.” Addie hadn’t the slightest idea what she was getting into, what she might find in the native encampment behind the house. Bea caught her cousin’s hands between her own, such small, square hands in their cheap gloves. “Darling, you don’t have to do this. We can send for Miss Platt or for that hideous Scotswoman on the next farm over.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t mind at all.” Addie firmly but gently drew her hands away, leaving Bea feeling, somehow, bereft. “Will you show me the way?”

  Bea s
hrugged, swinging her long legs out of the car. “It’s your funeral, darling.”

  “Hopefully it won’t be anyone’s funeral.” Addie scrambled inelegantly out after her. “Who’s the boy who was hurt?”

  “Hardly a boy. He must be at least twenty, although it’s hard to tell. They don’t reckon age from birth the way we do. It’s all done by circumcision year.”

  Addie’s eyebrows rose. “Circumcision year?”

  “When you ask how old a boy is, you’ll be told he was of the circumcision year of the locusts, or the year when all the rains failed. They’re all circumcised at puberty, boys and girls. They make a big ritual of it, feasts, dancing, slaying of cattle. Our cattle,” added Bea. “Somehow, the best beasts always seem to break a leg just on the eve of a festival. Quite the coincidence.”

  She led Addie around the house, past the straggling acacia bushes planted by the previous owner. They’d been lucky—or so Frederick liked to tell her. Most of their peers had done a stint living in a grass hut, waiting for a house to be built. They’d got theirs already made, off a chap who had sold up to pursue a cattle-ranching proposition in Uganda. As houses went here, theirs wasn’t bad. It was solid stone, built in the bungalow style, long and low with a wide porch that ran along the front of the house and a courtyard in the middle. They had plumbing, such as it was, and electricity that ran as long as nothing bumped too hard against the generator. Opulence by Kenya’s standards, poverty compared to what they had left behind.

  The previous owners had made some attempt at landscaping. There was a terrace at the back of the house and some overgrown rosebushes, but the scent of the roses couldn’t mask the other smells, smoke and sweat and goat.

  They didn’t have far to get to Mbugwa’s encampment, an entire settlement of round, grass-roofed huts, each leaching its own haze of blue-gray smoke through the thatch. Maize grew in neat plots around the huts, tended by slender women in leather aprons whose anklets jingled as they hacked at the weeds with their pangas. They worked all but bare in the hot sun, their arms encircled by copper wire wound so tightly that the flesh bulged on either side. Some wore babies strapped to their backs in slings; older children played in the dust outside the huts as a chicken idly scratched at the dirt.

  “These are the native shambas—farms,” Bea translated. “They squat on our land. Or we squat on their land, depending on how you look at it. It works out rather well all around. They work the coffee and we give them a place to herd their goats.”

  “It sounds very feudal,” said Addie.

  “It is.” Bea nodded towards one of the huts. “That’s Njombo’s hut.”

  It was an easy guess, based on the number of people gathered around. They drew back as Bea and Addie approached, making way for them. Bea could see Addie try not to goggle at the men, dressed only in short blankets tied toga-style on one shoulder, or the women, with their shaved heads and bare breasts.

  Bea had had an image of how Addie’s arrival was meant to be, the house servants lined up in their white robes, drinks on a tray, the lamps lit, everything sparkling and just a touch exotic. “This isn’t how I meant your visit to be.”

  Addie looked up at her and smiled, as if they were ten again and at Ashford, the real Ashford. “I don’t mind. Did your headman say anything about the nature of the wound?”

  “Gloom, doom, and general dismemberment. It usually is.” In this case, though, it actually might be. “It might be bad. He tried to hammer a detonator into an ornament.”

  “Into a—?”

  “Anything metal seems to be fair game,” said Bea. “We can’t keep nails; they turn them into anklets and earrings. The detonator must have looked suitably shiny. According to Mbugwa, Njombo took a rock and tried to beat the detonator into an anklet.”

  Addie breathed in sharply through her nose. “He’s lucky to be alive.”

  “Do you want me to see if Platt is back? They can’t have gone far.”

  Addie shook her head. “I’ll do what I can.” She poked her head into the doorway, then turned her head, blinking. “The smoke—”

  “It’s the cook fire,” said Bea. “They’re all like that.”

  Addie nodded and plunged into the smoke, shoulders hunched, keeping her head down below the worst of it.

  “I’m here to help you,” Bea heard her say in the sort of cheerful voice nurses always used, the voice that made one want to thump them with a bedpan. And, “Where does it hurt?”

  Bea stood by the doorway, twiddling her thumbs and feeling generally useless, as Addie crawled on her hands and knees, making soothing noises, comforting Njombo with a hand on the side of his head. Her skirt trailed dangerously near the fire at the center of the hut. Slipping inside, Bea pushed the fabric back.

  “I don’t want you immolating yourself,” she said gruffly. “Not with Platt not back yet.”

  Addie smiled her thanks. “Can you see if the water’s here yet? I can’t do much without it. The clotted blood needs to be sponged away before I can see how bad it is.”

  “Of course it does,” murmured Bea. The smell in the hut was almost unbearably strong, sweat and blood and the peculiar pong of the monkey skins that were marks of status. “I’ll see what’s keeping them.”

  She seized on the excuse to duck out again, hating herself for her weakness.

  No one had warned her of any of this. Come to East Africa, they had said. Fortunes to be made! Reputations to be repaired! More old Etonians than Mayfair! But they hadn’t told her about this, about the very basic realities of living, about jiggers that burrowed under your toes or the flies that clustered around children’s eyes or strange pests and diseases that drove horses mad before they killed them.

  She hated it here.

  Bea twisted Marcus’ ring around on her finger. In those fairy stories Addie used to whisper to her when they were little that should summon a genie or some other spirit, and she’d be able to close her eyes and wish herself back to before, to Rivesdale House and the world before Bunny. Before Frederick. If she had known then … But wasn’t that always the rub? At the time, Marcus’ infidelity had seemed insurmountable, a slight that needed to be avenged. Now, she wished she had followed her mother’s advice and looked the other way. Bea had never thought, never imagined, that it might end like this.

  Marcus and Bunny had married. Bea had seen the pictures in a six-month-old Tatler, the blushing bride with her bevy of attendants. He hadn’t wasted much time; they were engaged as soon as Bea was on the boat, married almost immediately after. They had two little boys, an heir and a spare.

  Those were meant to be her children, her boys. It was unpardonably perverse of Fate to have got it so backward, to have expelled Marcus’ child from her womb while the other, the cuckoo in the nest, had clung so stubbornly to life.

  Marjorie, Frederick had called the cuckoo, such an ugly name, like someone’s maiden aunt, but Bea had been beyond caring. She knew it wasn’t fair to blame the child for the circumstances of her birth, but Bea couldn’t seem to help it. She had looked at that red, squalling thing and knew it to be no part of her, this parasite who had lodged in her gut and cost her everything, her family, her home, her reputation, the man she had thought she loved.

  Instead, he had married Bunny, and Bea had found herself in Kenya, a social outcast, married to a man who seemed more and more a stranger, a stranger who buried himself in agricultural journals and regarded her with thinly veiled disdain—that was, when he bothered to look at her at all.

  Still, there were compensations. Idina’s parties. Safaris. Race Week at Muthaiga. Raoul, who swore he’d marry her, even if his Catholic family cut him off, an empty promise, but flattering nonetheless. It was nice to know that someone still wanted to marry her, even if her husband wished he hadn’t.

  And, of course, Val. Val, who promised nothing, who cared about nothing. Val, who took her flying.

  “Memsahib, memsahib!” It was a small boy, clothed only in a loincloth. One arm was hideously scarr
ed, remnant of a fall into the fire in babyhood. So many of the children boasted similar injuries, scars and wounds that would have felled their counterparts back in England. “Bwana say bring.”

  He hoisted the old leather bag that held their store of medical supplies. Bea hadn’t the foggiest notion what was in it. That was Platt’s province. Behind him followed Frederick with a large bucket of steaming water held in one hand, clean cloths hanging off his arm.

  “Here you go,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Bea stepped between Frederick and the door of the hut. “We have it in hand,” she said regally.

  Frederick looked over at Addie, bent over Njombo, and then back at Bea. “Yes, I can see that you do.”

  Bea bristled. There was certainly no magic to telling a boy to fetch water. It wasn’t as though Frederick were in there, sewing the man up. She’d yet to see Frederick apply a sticking plaster, and yet he had the gall to look down his nose at her, just because she hadn’t been taught something she’d never had the least idea she would have to know—and she wouldn’t have had to know it if he hadn’t blundered into her life at the worst possible time.

  “There wasn’t much call for this in Mayfair,” she said defensively.

  “We’re not in Mayfair anymore.”

  “Don’t you think I know it?”

  “Sometimes?” Frederick raised his brows. “No.”

  “Oh, hullo.” Addie stumbled out, her face smoke grimed, her eyes tearing. She braced one hand against the wall of the hut. “Do you have the water?”

  “Water and medical kit,” said Frederick, handing over the bucket and snapping his fingers at the boy, who stepped smartly forward.

  “Thank you.” Addie bundled the cloths over her arm. She glanced back over her shoulder into the hut. “It’s not as bad as it seems. He’s bled a great deal from a scalp wound. I can’t promise anything, but it looks as though most of the cuts are superficial. He seems to have got scraped up with the flying rock.”