The Ashford Affair (20 page)

“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 circumference 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.

There was something so giddy making, so intimate, about that knowledge, that she knew his musical tastes as he knew hers. She could imagine herself saying it to someone: Frederick has more patience for atonality than I, don’t you, darling? It implied a sort of ownership.

Today they had been to a talk on poetry and politics. Addie had had to poke him in the arm to make him stop snorting. That, too, had made her thrill.

Oh, heavens, she was being a ninny, wasn’t she? Miracle enough that her hero had become her friend; she shouldn’t go spoil it by going all infatuated.

Even if she was.

“I didn’t think it was as bad as that,” she said, struggling with her hat. The footman blandly looked the other way. Addie suspected she was the source of a certain amount of merriment in the servants’ hall. Better not to know, really. “I thought there was something to it.”

Frederick handed his hat and gloves to the footman standing by the door. “Music soothes the savage beast?”

“You can mock all you like,” said Addie, exerting her will on the blasted pin, “but isn’t there a truth to it? Music
does
soothe us, and poetry is just music by another name.”

“Yes,” said Frederick, “but this notion of fostering world peace by sending anthologies of verse to world leaders—how would one know if Mr. Lenin likes Keats? He might be a blank-verse sort of man. It seems a shame to precipitate another war all for the wrong sort of poetry.”

“Now you’re just making fun,” protested Addie, craning towards the mirror to try to get a better view of the offending pin. “That wasn’t what they were saying at all. Not really.”

“If I didn’t make fun,” said Frederick flatly, “I might be offended by it. As it is, I can write it off as good-natured idiocy. Here, let me help you with that. No, stay still.”

His hands pressed briefly on her shoulders, indicating that she should stay where she was. It was no more intimate a caress, Addie told herself, than stroking the neck of a horse to make it stay. Even so, she could feel the tingle of it straight down her spine.

He was poking at her hat now, doing something with the brim. Her eyes sought his in the mirror, but he was blocked now by the absurd feather on her hat.

“It’s the pin,” she said as he examined the back of the hat, resisting the urge to wiggle. “It seems to have got caught on—ouch!”

“I think I’ve found the problem,” said Frederick.

“I think I felt the problem,” said Addie, managing to sound quite credibly insouciant and only the slightest bit breathless.

“There,” he said, and stepped back, away from her. He held up a tapered metal pin. “There’s a nick. That was the culprit. Your hair must have caught on it.”

Addie turned it over, glad to have something to do with her hands. “Where?”

Bea had given her a pretty hat pin for her birthday, with a bezel shaped like a flower and leaves, all inlaid with tiny, sparkling gemstones. Addie had kept it to admire and gone on using her old ones.

“There.” Frederick’s ungloved hand settled on hers, inching her hand down on the pin. “Can you feel it?”

“Mmm?” Addie kept her eyes glued on their joined hands.

“The nick,” said Frederick. “It’s right there, towards the bottom.”

Addie cleared her throat. “Yes, yes, that’s it. I can feel it.” There was a practically infinitesimal gouge at the bottom of the pin, scarcely visible, but just enough to snag her hair, which tended to snag at the least opportunity. “I should have noticed before.”

She started to retrieve it, but Frederick neatly snagged it from her. “I’ll take that, or you’ll forget and use it again,” he said.

“Most likely,” she admitted, turning away to remove her hat, which hadn’t been the least bit improved by the struggle with the pin. “Did you see the notice about Mr. Hardy’s appearance next week? He’ll be reading from his
Collected Poems.
”

Frederick looked down at her, his lips turning up at the corners in a rueful sort of smile. “You should go to university and read Literature,” he said, tweaking a lock of her hair as though she were a little girl. “I can just see you as a female don in a black gown with your hair all tucked away beneath a cap.”

She hated it when he did that, treated her like an adult one moment, like a woman, worthy of admiration, and then the next like someone’s little sister, chucking her under the chin and tugging her hair. It was maddening.

“I should have liked to go to university,” she said, “but Aunt Vera wouldn’t countenance it.”

Bea had needed her, too. She could remember how Bea had looked after Poppy’s funeral, so thin and pale.

“And must you always listen to what your aunt Vera says?”

“She pays my allowance,” said Addie pragmatically. “Or, at least, Uncle Charles does, which is really the same thing.”

“You still haven’t told them about
The Bloomsbury Review
yet, have you?”

“Noooo,” admitted Addie. “It hasn’t come up.” The only periodicals Aunt Vera read were the
Tatler
and the Court Circular. And thank goodness for that.

“If you liked,” said Frederick thoughtfully, “I still have a few chums at Oxford. One of them could have a natter with the Dean of Somerville, drop a word in her ear.”

Addie chewed on her lower lip. Frederick might think she was an attractive candidate, but she knew the truth, that she had almost no education other than that provided by making free of the Ashford library. Their governess had been primarily concerned, per Aunt Vera’s strictures, with such niceties as matters of precedence when seating a party for three hundred at a vice-regal palace.

Addie couldn’t admit that, though, not to Frederick, not when she so particularly wanted him to think well of her. He had been a Balliol man and, although he hadn’t told her so himself, had taken a first in History. How could she confess the inadequacies of her education to him?

“Maybe later,” Addie said, and was aware of how weak it sounded. “I don’t want to leave the magazine just when it’s all going so well! Besides, it would be a shame to leave London just when I’m beginning to enjoy it.”

“All right,” he said. “As long as it’s your decision, and not Aunt Vera’s.”

“It is,” she assured him. “I really do mean it about the
Review.
I’m beginning to feel like I might be useful to them.” She looked earnestly up at him. “Frederick, it’s the most harum-scarum sort of place, I can’t even begin to describe.”

His lips twitched. “I think I can imagine.”

“Nothing is ever ever where it’s meant to be. They have tradesmen’s bills all muddled up with proofs of poetry. We’re supposed to be a monthly, but the last edition came out seven weeks ago!”

“Not terribly surprising,” said Frederick, following her into one of the smaller, less baronial drawing rooms. “I’ve seen a number of these periodicals come and go.”

“Not this one,” said Addie determinedly. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

She had, she had been told by the rest of the staff, quite appallingly outmoded ideas about literature, but she had discovered in herself an unexpected talent for organization. She might make the faux pas of preferring Tennyson to Brooke, but when she had had the revolutionary idea of putting printers’ bills into one pigeonhole and incoming receipts—should there ever be such a thing—into another, she had been treated as a bringer of wonders and toasted with champagne in a chipped ceramic mug. She had begun, tentatively, putting forward ideas about how things might be done, advertising secured to fund their efforts, universities canvassed to increase their circulation. For the most part, these suggestions were cheerfully ignored, philosophy being preferable to practicality, but she was beginning to work out her own plans as to how to get them done.

“You sound very fierce,” said Frederick with amusement.

“Do I? I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. It’s just that I do so want to make this work—the magazine, I mean.”

He crooked a finger beneath her chin, tilting her face up towards his. “Don’t apologize,” he said, his green eyes intent on hers. “Not to me.”

She stared up at him, voiceless, not wanting to breathe, to blink, to do anything to upset their precarious balance. The room felt suddenly charged with electricity; she could feel it crackling between them. She hung suspended, waiting breathlessly, for him to lean forward, to—

“You didn’t tell me we had visitors.” A voice sliced through the silence, shattering it like glass.

Addie jumped back. Frederick dropped his hand and stepped away, as remote as if he had been on the moon. It was as if she had imagined it all, the way he was looking at her, how closely he had been standing, all something out of the pages of a book or a particularly vivid waking dream.

It was Bea in the doorway, looking cool and poised, one eyebrow raised, cigarette holder propped in one hand. The thin stream of smoke seemed to trace a question mark in the air.

Addie could feel herself flushing. “Oh, Bea, this is—I mean—”

It was absurd to feel as though she had been caught out in something when there was nothing at all to have been caught out in.

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” Strolling into the room, Bea gave Frederick a frank once-over. She paused, cigarette holder aloft. “At Oggie’s.”

Frederick’s eyes shifted. “I’m sure I would have remembered.…”

Bea gave a husky laugh. “You were with Dora Palliser. I’d be surprised if you remembered anything at all.”

Addie looked anxiously from Bea to Fredrick, wondering what they were talking about. She knew of Dora Palliser, vaguely. Her picture was constantly in the papers, usually paired with slightly lewd headlines. She was notorious for both her support of the more avant-garde arts and her very well-publicized affairs with several of the artists.

The jangle of Bea’s bracelets interrupted Addie’s train of thought. Bea flicked her wrist imperiously. “Darling, aren’t you going to introduce me?”

Addie belatedly did her duty. “Mr. Desborough, may I present you to my cousin, Lady Rivesdale?” It still felt odd referring to Bea as Lady Rivesdale, as though she were someone’s mother. Turning to Bea, she added, “We were just at a lecture on prosody and politics.”

“How frightfully interesting,” murmured Bea. She held out a hand to Addie’s companion. “Mr. Desborough.”

He bowed over it. “Lady Rivesdale.”

Bea twined her fingers through his before releasing them again. “Why so formal? Any friend of Dora’s is a friend of mine.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “Drink?”

Frederick glanced towards Addie. She felt, as always, that little spark of recognition, as if it were just them, cut off from all the world. But then he looked back at Bea again, and the moment was lost. “Yes, thank you.”

Bea meandered towards the drinks cart, originally Marcus’ toy, now hers, equipped with a complicated mess of bottles and shakers and strange implements that looked, to Addie, like something out of the Inquisition’s midnight imagination.

“Ring for more ice, will you, darling?” Addie obediently rang as Bea began expertly assembling ingredients in a shaker. “You must tell me all about this fascinating lecture.”

“You’d have been bored stiff,” said Addie frankly. “It wasn’t really your sort of entertainment.”