The Ashford Affair Read online

  “Most of the cuts?”

  “He’s banged up his hand rather badly. One finger is dangling by a … well.” She pressed her lips together. “I can try to sew it together, but the odds of infection…”

  “No one expects miracles,” said Frederick.

  For some reason, that seemed to annoy her. Her back straightened and she gave him what Bea could only describe as a look. “That’s no reason to shirk.”

  She disappeared back into the smoke, taking her spoils with her. Frederick watched as she knelt by Njombo, his expression abstracted. Addie had discarded her hideous hat. Her curly hair was in disarray, her face and arms streaked with soot and worse, and yet Bea felt a strange frisson of fear. It reminded her of the first time she had seen Marcus with Bunny, seen the way his eyes lingered on her.

  Nonsense, of course. But still …

  “You forgot something,” said Bea to her husband.

  “What?” Frederick was too immersed in what Addie was doing to respond immediately. “Yes?”

  “Our drinks,” said Bea, putting her chin up. “Make them strong.”

  EIGHTEEN

  New York, 1999

  “You’re drunk,” said Mother to Aunt Anna.

  Aunt Anna twisted away from Clemmie’s mother. “I may be drunk, but in the morning I’ll still be honest, and you’ll still be lying through your teeth. You spent your whole life sucking up to that bitch. What about her? What about our mother?”

  The words hung there in the air between them.

  Clemmie’s mother took a deep, deep breath. “Clementine, the caterers— See if they need anything.”

  “In a moment,” said Clemmie. Someone needed to put Anna in a cab—or to bed. She was making no sense. Clemmie didn’t like the way her mother looked either. Now that Granny Addie was gone, it was as though the last buffer between Clemmie’s mother and mortality had been removed. She was seventy-eight and today she looked every year of it. “Aunt Anna, do you want—”

  “No.” Aunt Anna’s long fingernails dug into Clemmie’s arm. “Come with me. There’s something you ought to see. You, too, Marjorie.”

  “See what?” Clemmie rolled her eyes at her mother as her aunt tugged her along, through the study and down the back hall.

  “I thought she’d destroyed them,” Aunt Anna said. “But, no, they were here all along.”

  She shooed Clemmie into Granny Addie’s room, strangely empty now without Granny Addie in it. Aunt Anna went straight to the closet. As in so many pre-war apartments, it was an oddly shaped afterthought of a closet, a triangular bend in the wall. She came out bearing an album Clemmie had never seen before, longer and flatter than the albums Clemmie was accustomed to, with clips that held it together on one side and a cracked red leather cover.

  Aunt Anna dumped it on the empty bureau. “I found this yesterday, at the back of the closet. Go on. Take a look.”

  Clemmie cast a puzzled look at her mother. Her mother’s lips were pressed firmly together, her expression stoic.

  Aunt Anna looked over her shoulder at Clemmie’s mother, raising her perfectly manicured eyebrows. “What do you think, Madge? Do you think Farve kept them? Or did Addie sit here and gloat over them?”

  “I think,” said Clemmie’s mother sharply, “that you need new tranquilizers.”

  Clemmie opened the album, half-expecting something to leap out and bite her. “They’re pictures from Kenya,” she said.

  She recognized that much from the few pictures Granny Addie had had framed, the sepia images of men in mushroom-shaped hats and riding breeches and women in saggy tops and calf-length skirts. There was a curious sameness to them all, the men in their hats and suits, the women in their clothes that looked so dowdy now but were probably the height of fashion back then.

  Clemmie wondered if this was what her college pictures would look like to future generations, if one woman with big hair and a denim jacket would look just like another.

  She looked over her shoulder at her mother. “It’s just an old album.”

  “Keep looking,” said Aunt Anna.

  Clemmie put the album on the edge of the dresser so they could all see. There were group photos with everyone standing around, looking awkward; posed shots of men next to their trophies, rifles in hand; more casual shots of people sitting on crates at a picnic, a wind-up gramophone next to them, no one paying attention except one woman looking over her shoulder.

  Clemmie recognized that woman. It was the same woman she had seen hanging on the wall of the Rivesdale House hotel a million years ago, with her pointed chin and her dare-me stare. Perhaps it was the cracked sepia of the photo, but she looked older here, more world worn. “That’s Granny’s cousin, isn’t it?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Aunt Anna.

  Clemmie’s mother said nothing.

  She’d run away, the marquis had said. What was the word he’d used? “Bolted.” Well, if one was going to bolt, Clemmie supposed Africa would have been a good place to bolt to, especially if Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick were already there.

  Bea was in the next picture, too, along with three other women, one holding a banjo, one inspecting a basket, while the other two sprawled on picnic blankets. Gently, Clemmie eased it out of the small triangles that held it to the page. On the back, it read: WANJOHI, 1924 in a writing that Clemmie didn’t recognize and, under that, DINA, COCKIE, ALICE, AND SELF.

  There were pictures of Grandpa Frederick, too, at first sporting a silly mustache, and then later, clean-shaven, with a little girl in miniature riding breeches, standing next to something that looked almost like a deer but wasn’t.

  “Mom, is that you?”

  Her mother nodded. “That was my pet dik-dik. Feather.” Her voice sounded cracked and unsteady, as if she was trying not to cry.

  There were more of Clemmie’s mother—with a pony, with Grandpa Frederick, sitting on a porch with a doll with a white-robed house servant standing by. No Granny Addie. Clemmie began flipping through faster, scanning for her grandmother. There were a lot of servants: house servants, and grooms, and bearers carrying animals hanging upside down from long poles. There were more photos of safari groups and picnic parties and a series of rather opulent ones labeled RACE WEEK AT MUTHAIGA, with women dressed like something out of a Masterpiece Theatre special, all long pearls and feathered headdresses. Lots of Bea—Bea and friends, Bea and Frederick, Bea with a baby who had to be Aunt Anna—but still no Granny.

  “Did Granny Addie take the pictures?” Clemmie asked.

  “No,” said Aunt Anna. She sounded very definite about it.

  Clemmie flipped over the last page. Granny’s cousin was decked out in full flapper chic, positioned between two men in evening dress, each with an arm around her shoulders. One looked half-blotto, his features blurred as though he’d turned at the last moment. The other smirked straight at the camera. He looked a bit like Rufus Sewell in Cold Comfort Farm, pure smoldering testosterone.

  On the back it read: NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1926. SELF, VAL, AND R’L.

  So this was Bea’s album, then. But where was Granny Addie? She hadn’t appeared in a single photo. The book ended with 1926. There was nothing more. Clemmie knew she had seen other photos, photos with Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick in their coffee fields, but there were none of those here.

  “Where’s Granny Addie?”

  Aunt Anna leaned against the wall. “Do you want to tell her, Madge? Or shall I?”

  Clemmie’s mother sat down heavily on a box of books. “She’s not in them because she wasn’t there.” She knotted her hands together in her lap and looked up at Clemmie. “She first came out when I was five years old.”

  Kenya, 1926

  Addie woke to the rhythmic swish of a twig broom brushing the path outside her window.

  Light shone through the gaps between the curtains, distilled and magnified like strong spirits. Addie burrowed deeper into the linen sheets, feeling the unfamiliar slide of silk against her skin. There had been pajamas
left for her on the bed last night. She had been too tired to hunt down her nightdress, so she had wiggled into the pajamas instead, flame-colored silk, the same color as the blossoms on the trees, slippery and decadent.

  Addie propped herself up against the pillow, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, as last night came back in bits and pieces: Bea and Frederick’s bickering, the smoky hut, the wounded man, strong drinks, a supper she barely remembered, set on a dining room table incongruously adorned with Irish crystal and Spode china, served by silent servants in white robes and bare feet. She hadn’t met the children or their mysterious governess; they dined separately.

  How long had she slept? The watch on her nightstand had stopped, but the household was already clearly awake. There was a pot of tea and some hard biscuits on a tray next to her bed, along with a vase with a flower she didn’t recognize and a note in a hand she did. It was from Bea, and all it said was: Gone out for a bit, back soon. Rest and enjoy!

  Addie took a sip of her tea. It was sickly sweet and stone cold. She shuddered and put it aside. During the years of austerity, she had trained herself to drink her tea unsweetened; by now, she preferred it that way.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch, went the broom outside her window. She was tempted to bury her head under the pillow, in the cool dimness of her room, but that would be hiding. She’d have to go out and face the world sooner or later. By “the world,” she meant Bea and Frederick. She hauled herself out of bed, her whole body feeling strangely achy, as if she were recovering from a fever. Or from a long ride in a train and a car.

  At least she was clean. Last night, Bea had insisted she bathe, in a vast jade tub like something from an Oriental emperor’s lascivious fantasies, scented steam rising off the top, candlelight reflecting off the murky waters. Between the gin and the jasmine-scented smoke, Addie had felt as though she’d stumbled into the Thousand and One Nights.

  Addie found the bathroom with the jade bath. In the light of day, it was just a bathroom, good for cleaning one’s teeth and washing one’s face. Cold water and her own clothes made Addie feel more herself again. Rest, Bea had said, but according to the grandfather clock in the hall, Addie had rested quite long enough; it was past ten, shamefully late. At home, she would have been long out of bed by now, sitting at her desk in the office after a long and shivering Tube ride, her umbrella drying out in a battered can by the office door.

  Not by inclination, though. Bea had always been the early riser, naturally alert and cheerful in the mornings, while Addie, left to her own devices, would happily stay burrowed under the covers as long as anyone would let her. It had always been a wonder to her, during their Season, that Bea could dance all night and still be awake for a ride in Hyde Park in the morning, seemingly untouched by the hectic schedule.

  Addie ventured out of her room, feeling as though she had wandered into someone else’s fairy tale. Outside, there were strange birds calling, bells tinkling, voices raised in languages Addie didn’t understand, but the stone walls of the house buffered and transformed them into a serene hum, wrapping the house in a peculiar sort of calm, Sleeping Beauty’s East African lodge.

  Addie helped herself to a cup of coffee from the breakfast room, taking it out onto the verandah. The acacias around the verandah filled the air with their scent; from their petals came the drone of insects, intent on extracting nectar.

  She wasn’t the only one on the porch, she realized. A little girl was curled up next to the balustrade, engaged in earnest colloquy with a tattered porcelain doll. As Addie came out, the girl scrambled to her feet, looking as though she was contemplating a retreat.

  “Good morning,” Addie said, setting her coffee down on a wood table. “You must be Marjorie.”

  The little girl looked up at her over the head of her doll. Her hair was a dark blond, not as blond as Bea, but blond enough that Bea needn’t have feared that Marcus would have suspected a cuckoo in the nest. Her eyes were a disconcerting pale blue. Gillecote eyes.

  Addie held out a hand, unsure of the protocol. She hadn’t dealt with children since she had been one. “I’m your cousin Addie. I’ve come for a visit.”

  The child kept a good grip on her doll, eying Addie from a distance. “Farve says you’ve come from England.”

  Farve? Child parlance for “Father,” she guessed. “Yes, on a very big boat. And a very smoky train.”

  “I wanted to see the train,” said the child. “Farve wouldn’t take me.”

  “It’s very noisy,” said Addie. “And very dirty. You didn’t miss much. It’s much nicer here.”

  “Karanja says it’s a snake,” said the little girl. “A great silver snake.”

  Well, that was one way of looking at it. Addie hunkered down on her heels. “If it is a snake, it must be under an enchantment.”

  “What’s ‘chantment’?”

  “A magical spell,” Addie elaborated. Had no one told the child any fairy tales? “You’d need a magical spell to make a snake grow that big. It goes on as far as you can see and it spits out fire and smoke like a dragon. Dragons are rather like snakes,” she said before the little girl could ask, “but bigger and scarier. And they can fly.” Feeling like she was getting rather out of her depth, Addie pointed quickly at the doll. “Who is that you’re holding?”

  Marjorie contemplated her for a moment, then held out the tattered china doll. “This is Annabelle.”

  “Good morning, Annabelle,” said Addie, since some introduction seemed to be required.

  “Good morning to you, too,” said an amused male voice from above Addie’s head.

  Addie shot to her feet so quickly that she nearly stumbled over the hem of her own skirt. “Oh, hullo. We were just—”

  “Farve!” shouted Marjorie, and catapulted herself towards her father, who swung her up high in the air, her booted feet narrowly missing Addie’s nose.

  The little girl wrapped her arms around Frederick’s neck, nestling trustingly against his shoulder. He squeezed her tight for a moment, rubbing his nose against the top of her head. They seemed so complete and entire together, so happy. Addie would never have imagined Frederick, not the Frederick she had known, as a doting father, and yet his daughter obviously adored him and he adored his daughter.

  It didn’t at all go with Addie’s notion of an evil seducer.

  Frederick set his daughter firmly down on her feet. “Lesson time for you. Miss Platt is looking for you.”

  “But Feather will be missing me.”

  “Feather is Marjorie’s dik-dik,” said Frederick to Addie. His expression was relaxed, amused. He looked fondly at his daughter. “After your lessons. Then you can introduce Cousin Addie to Feather.”

  “I shall look forward to it,” said Addie. “Oh, and you won’t want to forget this.” She leaned over and retrieved Annabelle.

  “What do you say?” said Frederick.

  “Thank you,” said Marjorie, and ran off back into the house.

  Addie would have liked to have followed, but that would have felt too much like flight. The last time she and Frederick had been alone together had been five years ago, a continent, a marriage, two children away.

  “I hate to ask,” she said, “but what’s a dik-dik?”

  Frederick’s face creased into a smile. It gave Addie a queer feeling in her chest. “It’s a sort of deer. Marjorie will show you.”

  “Yes, I’ll hold her to that.”

  They stood there for a very long moment, not quite looking at each other, and Addie realized, with some surprise, that he felt just as awkward as she did.

  With some hesitation, he said, “I’m just going down to the coffee shed. If you like, I’ll show you around the farm.”

  She knew it was a bad idea, but the sun was shining and the outdoors looked tempting and Bea was still nowhere to be seen. It would be like inoculation, she told herself. Exposure in the interest of indifference. “I won’t be interfering with your work?”

  “Not at all. When we say we work here, w
e really mean we have others do it for us. You’ll want a hat,” he added, and snagged one from a table on the verandah, dropping it onto her head. It was made of double-lined felt, beige on the outside, red on the inside, and it sagged down nearly to her eyes. “You’re courting sunstroke otherwise.”

  As they stepped out from under the verandah, the heat shimmered in a palpable haze, like the tulle on the gowns she had worn during that awful deb year; she felt she could reach out and scrunch it up between her fingers.

  To her surprise, it wasn’t unpleasant, not like the stifling heat of her compartment on the train. Instead, it settled over her like a second skin, warming her straight through. She always felt cold at home, a deep cold that had settled into her bones long ago, huddling in a closet in a long-forgotten house in Bloomsbury on a rainy day in November.

  Here it seemed as if no such thing as Novembers existed. The sky was bright and clear, a blue so intense it hurt the eyes.

  They took a path that led the opposite way, not towards—what had Bea called them?—not towards the huts they had seen last night, but along a narrow stream, through the high, brown grass, past jagged thorn trees and twisted erythrinas with their flowers the color of Bea’s pajamas. Insects sang on a high, clear note while a chameleon panted by the side of the path, its coat the same mottled green-brown as the grass around it. Addie could hear the tinkle of goat bells as a small boy, dressed in nothing at all, drove his flock, and, as Bea had warned, the chatter of monkeys conducting their own private business in the trees.

  Strange flowers flared at her feet; the brush rustled with life all around them. It was fantastical, all of it, the light, the heat, the flowers, the men with their hair in a fleece of short braids, their earlobes distended by dangling ornaments, the women wound in their coils of copper wire. She felt as though she’d wandered into an illustration in an old book, Robinson Crusoe or something by H. Rider Haggard.

  “It’s like something out of a novel, isn’t it?” said Frederick.

  Addie frowned at him from under her hat. “You shouldn’t read my mind; it’s not polite.”