The Ashford Affair (16 page)

Sometimes, Bea motored down to join him. Other times, Addie would hear crashing and stamping from Bea’s sitting room and raised voices when Marcus came back. Aunt Vera didn’t need to know about that, or about the telephoning that happened in hushed voices, the smell of cigarette smoke where there shouldn’t be, gramophone music from the garden long after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

“Maybe they just haven’t invited me,” said Addie, trying to make a joke of it.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t,” said Aunt Vera with annoyance. “Sit up straight, girl! No one wants a Drooping Dolly.”

Addie shot up, her teacup rattling in its saucer.

Aunt Vera sighed.

“Dodo came to visit last week,” volunteered Addie, as a peace offering. Surely that was neutral enough. “She needed some things from Fortnum’s, so she came down herself.”

“I know,” said Aunt Vera grumpily. “I saw her. She’s brown as a savage. As for that creature she’s married—”

She broke off, constrained by her own social code. He was an earl, after all, even if he was an Irish one.

“They do seem happy,” offered Addie. The earl in question was ten years older and half a head shorter than Dodo, but the difference didn’t show on horseback, and since that was where they spent most of their time, Dodo didn’t seem to mind the discrepancy in the slightest. Dodo was as fond of her husband as Addie had ever seen her of anyone.
Best damn seat I’ve ever seen on a woman
was his lover-like assessment of his beloved, but it was plain to everyone that he adored her. They spent their year half in Ireland and half in Melton, and, in her own undemonstrative way Dodo was happier than Addie had ever imagined Dodo could be.

It had been rather a source of awkwardness when she had come to tea last week, her glowing happiness when Bea and her marquess were so very clearly not.

“Happy,” sniffed Aunt Vera. “What a child you are.”

At least, thought Addie, sneering seemed to buck her up a bit. Aunt Vera had been the bogeyman of her childhood, able to quell her with a glance, but, these days, the lines on her cheeks were graven a little too deeply, the shadows beneath her eyes too pronounced.

They never talked about the reason for it, just as they never talked about Uncle Charles’ hours in his study, hours and hours, late into the night, until he looked nearly as insubstantial as the pieces of paper on his desk, a thin sheet of aristocratic ivory parchment. They were very good at carrying on, at pretending that everything was as it had been, but Addie knew what the truth of it was; she could read it in the color of Aunt Vera’s dress, in the empty patch on the wall where a portrait had once hung, in the missing pictures among the clutter of silver frames on the boule table by the door.

There were Bea and Marcus on their wedding day, Aunt Vera’s tremendous lace veil incongruous with Bea’s skimpy, wartime dress, accompanied by a very satisfied Aunt Vera; Dodo and her husband at Melton, Dodo hanging on to the reins of a large horse and grinning like anything; and Edward in his uniform, posed so that one would never notice the empty sleeve where his left arm used to be. There were pictures of friends and family connections, the closer to royal the better, with minor princelings given pride of place, glittering in all their regalia.

There were no pictures of Poppy.

Addie could mark out the empty places where they used to stand, Poppy stiff and posed in her best taffeta dress, Poppy chasing butterflies with her nurse napping nearby, Poppy with a tennis racket in her hand, nearly fifteen and bursting with life. There was a family grouping from Bea’s wedding, Marcus and Bea in the middle, Uncle Charles and Aunt Vera to one side, Edward on the other. Addie could tell where the photo had been bent, as though Poppy had never been.

But she had; Addie still remembered the photographer’s pleas to
look this way, Lady Penelope, just for a moment,
as Poppy laughed over her shoulder at Bea or clutched at her hat to keep it from blowing away in the breeze or held up a hand to catch an imagined raindrop, never still, always in motion.

It seemed impossible to think of her eternally still, not racketing down the stairs with a
Hullo, Addie!
—never again nagging Bea into a game of tennis, or coaxing Edward out for a ride.

It had happened a little over a month after Bea’s wedding, while Bea and Marcus were still off on their wedding tour. Poppy had come back from a trip to the village complaining of a sore throat and an aching head. Nanny—Nanny was still Nanny—had put her to bed, prescribing a good night’s rest and some lemon and honey. But in the morning Poppy’s temperature had risen, and by evening they knew: It was the influenza.

Addie could still remember the smell of the sickroom: barley water and vinegar and the cloying smell of the dried lavender sachets Nanny scattered around the room to try to make the other smells go away. Nursing at Guy’s Hospital during the War had been hard, but, somehow, this was harder, because it was Poppy and there was nothing, nothing at all, she could do to save her. The influenza had hit the village hard. The postmistress was taken, and the butcher’s son, and a score of others, some connected to the estate, others not. The doctors hadn’t come for them, but they came for Poppy, and their verdict was the same; everything that could be done had been done. The disease took its course as it would.

It took Poppy.

For that, Addie was willing to put up with Aunt Vera’s sniffs and sneers. She was, Addie suspected, lonely. Not that Aunt Vera would ever admit to it. But she had no more daughters for whom to plan or scheme. Bea and Dodo were both married, out of her charge. And Poppy was gone.

Sometimes, despite the doctors, Addie wondered what would have happened if they had realized just a little bit sooner that Poppy’s sore throat was more than just a sore throat; if she had looked at Poppy that first night instead of leaving her to Nanny; if she had done something, anything, differently. The doctors said no. They cited statistics, so many deaths to the months, so many other people’s daughters, sisters, cousins gone. But those girls weren’t Poppy. They hadn’t been in Addie’s charge.

“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 she 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.