I'll See You in Paris (16 page)

“For a crack at the so-called duchess he was willing to manufacture some base level of sociable behavior. Make no mistake, though. Seton's appearance in Banbury was about the book, and the book alone, and he planned to stay at the Grange until he squeezed every last drop from Mrs. Spencer and finally wrote the damned story he'd pined after for so long.

“Trouble was, though Win Seton felt so bloody sure that she was Gladys Deacon, he forgot the most elemental things about the duchess. Namely, that she lived only in half-truths and the best lighting, and, most important of all, the long-lost Duchess of Marlborough never, ever played by the rules.”

 

Twenty-five

THE GRANGE

CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

DECEMBER 1972

At first, Pru thought the writer wasn't permitted to leave his room.

Otherwise, why would he stay up there, day after day, pounding the devil out of his typewriter with a crazed, helter-skelter look in his eyes? Win Seton hardly ate, rarely drank, and was withering by the hour.

“Mrs. Spencer, you have to let him out,” Pru implored after nearly a week of suffering his uncomfortable presence. “You can't treat him this way. It's the holidays! Have a little compassion.”

“Treat who?” Mrs. Spencer said in her carefully honed pretend na
ï
vet
é
. “And, by the by, Christmas is over. The giving season is
finit
.”

“You know exactly who I'm talking about. You've locked the poor writer in his room. Forget the giving season, this is basic human decency.”

“Miss Valentine, that's preposterous. Tell me, have you seen any chains? Any locks on his door?”

“Well, no, but I haven't really—”

“I see you go in there,” Mrs. Spencer said with a snigger. “Toting food and companionship and Lord knows. Surely you would've noticed signs of bondage. Or is it that you
want
to find signs of bondage?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Did it ever occur to you that he relishes the situation? Maybe reclusiveness is his preferred state. The man
is
a writer.”

“Yes, but—”

“He's come to write, not consort with pretty, if not slightly vaporous, young girls. As shocking as you may find it.”

True, he was there to write, but Win Seton hadn't made a lick of progress on his book. Oh sure, the constant snap of the keys was fine and dandy but it couldn't have been a biography he was writing. Mrs. Spencer had given the man precisely nothing to work with. Pru sat in on every confab, so knew this as fact. And every evening it went like this.

At seven on the nose, Mrs. Spencer would change into a dramatic silk dressing gown. She'd call Pru into her company and announce: “Time for my interview!”

It didn't matter if Pru was in the middle of a chore, or if there were dogs half fed, half bathed, or half birthed. Mrs. Spencer would run Pru down and drag her upstairs to sit watch. The man was a “likely deviant,” Mrs. Spencer claimed, and Pru her chaperone.

“Are you ready to pen my memoirs?” she'd trill and plant herself at the edge of Win's bed, highball in hand.

Her hair, the gown, those diamonds winking in the lamplight, all a far cry from her customary soiled trousers and straw hat. Even the cocktail was wrong. Mrs. Spencer didn't drink, as a rule, and instead preferred laudanum to calm her nerves. Pru didn't understand it at all.

“Start with my profile,” she'd say. “What do you think of my profile?”

“Perfect Hellenic proportions,” Win responded obediently.

From the outset the writer accepted his role and played it to the hilt. Flatter, flatter, and when all else failed, flatter some more. One could never go wrong when referencing “Hellenic profiles” and so Win did without abandon. It was a commendable perception for a man blessed with rascally schoolboy charm in lieu of intellect.

“Hellenic,” Mrs. Spencer said with a happy sigh, every time. “Yes. Thank you for noticing. God has blessed me well.”

As Win told it, if Mrs. Spencer
was
the duchess, then God had nothing to do with her legendary silhouette. Gladys Deacon was born with a small kink in her nose, a quirk that vexed her from the start. She also deemed her eyes unacceptably close together and therefore vowed to ameliorate her oh-so-many physical flaws.

To that end, a teenaged Gladys Deacon set off on a worldwide tour to survey the most prized busts and sculptures in creation. She studied each piece, diligently analyzing and recording the distance between eyes and the lengths of the noses. Eventually, she arrived at the ideal proportions and took her data to Paris, where she underwent a series of wax injections to achieve this artlike perfection.

“I've never heard such a thing!” Mrs. Spencer claimed whenever Win brought it up. “Wax injections! Honestly. No, silly writer, I was born with this most original and God-given face.”

And so it went between Win and Mrs. Spencer. He prodded. She denied. He wheedled. She demurred. Pru sat watching, wondering what the bloody hell they were all doing there. Everyone was haggling for something, but from very early on the end result was obvious. Not a one of them was going to get what they wanted. Not even Pru.

 

Twenty-six

THE GRANGE

CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

JANUARY 1973

“Hello,” Pru said, standing sheepishly in the hall.

She had a sack in hand, in it a jumble of foodstuffs she'd acquired in town.

“I thought you'd like something to eat? May I come in?”

Win didn't look up from his typewriter. Instead he made some sort of roll-nod gesture, which Pru took as invitation. With a begrudging smile, she stepped through the doorway.

“Hopefully Mrs. Spencer won't mind me visiting her memoirist unsupervised,” Pru said, padding gingerly across the room. “I feel like, I don't know, you're not getting enough food or something. Silly notion, probably. But with the conditions downstairs…”

Hands trembling, Pru placed her offering on the desk: a handful of cabbage, two apples, a few links of sausage, and a wedge of Oxford Blue. Already beside him sat a mug of tea and a half-emptied sleeve of biscuits.

“Worried about my eating habits?” Win stopped typing and glanced up with a crooked smile. “I've never felt so loved.”

He was handsome for an old bloke who didn't shower much, Pru decided, but then immediately shook her head. There was no use thinking about the man in flattering terms. She didn't want to feel more toward him than she already did. Vague and distant pity was emotion enough.

“I'm not worried about your eating habits,” Pru said. “Seeing as how you don't have any.” She paused, hand on hip. “Good grief. I really sound like a mother hen, don't I? You're a smidge old for that.”

“Right. A
smidge
old. What was your estimate when we met in the garden that day?” he said. “A thousand years or thereabouts?”

“Oh geez…”

“I'm only joshing,” he said with a droll wink. “Anyhow, I'm all for mother hens. My own mum wasn't interested in any henning so it's a nice change of pace.”

“I never really had a mom, either,” Pru blurted. “I don't know why I just told you that.”

“Not to worry.” He put a cigarette between his lips but did not light it. “I never really had one, either.”

Win punched out a few more words while Pru stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, emptied bag dangling from her arm.

“Is there something else you need?” he asked from the side of his mouth not working to hold onto the unlit cigarette.

“Uh, er, not really.”

Win glanced up.

“So, I'll be going…” she said.

“Wait,” he said, surprising them both. “Don't leave. Do you … do you want to chat?”

Win rolled his eyes at himself.
Fancy a chat?
Blimey, how could a girl resist so compelling an invitation? What a wanker.

“That's okay,” Pru said, wisely. “I don't have much time for a chat.”

She took five quick strides toward the door but, much to his amazement, turned back around before leaving him altogether.

“I have to ask,” she said. “You're not … Mrs. Spencer isn't detaining you? Under lock and key? Or guns and poisoned arrows? You are allowed to come and go, yes?”

Win laughed. He was in a sorry state alright. A passerby couldn't ascertain whether he was a prisoner or a free man.

“Believe it or not,” he said. “I choose to live and work in these conditions. A testament to my quality of life, it must be stated. But I understand your confusion.”

“Okay, but what are you writing?” Pru asked. “I'm sorry if it sounds rude but I can't figure it out.”

“What am I writing? The book about the duchess. I thought I made that clear?”

“You did, but I've been here and … I've watched. And listened. Does Mrs. Spencer come in here without me sometimes? Is that it?”

“No. Never.”

“Then what the
hell
!” Pru said, exasperated, making a “halt” motion with both hands. “I mean, really! You're up here typing like a madman. All day, all night. The incessant, relentless clacking. I've sat through your so-called interviews but she's given you nothing. Nada. Zip. Unless I'm missing something, which is entirely possible.”

“No, you're not missing a thing.”

Win stood. She could almost hear his knees creaking from disuse.

“Then what is it?” Pru asked. Nay, begged. “What are you doing in here?”

“It's simple,” he said. “I'm playing the long game.”

“The long game?”

He nodded and then grabbed several sheets of paper from the windowsill.

“My brother would argue that's my life's philosophy,” he said, turning the paper over in his hands. “But in this case, it means I'm willing to wait her out. The duchess is famous for her disobliging nature, universally known for conducting business on her own bedlamite terms. To expect anything less would go against natural order. So, for now, I work on the bits I've gathered through my preliminary research. She'll come round on the rest. Eventually.”

“Assuming Mrs. Spencer is the duchess,” Pru said.

“Oh she is. One hundred percent.”

Win tossed the stack of paper onto the bed. Before realizing what she was doing, Pru shuffled over to snatch it.

“Hey now!” he said. “You can't go nicking other peoples' private correspondence.”

“Is this your book?” she asked, the pages hot in her hands.

“Well.” Win sighed. “Yes. It's the start of it.”

Llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllldkfawawetwlcw

Werrejq32rjklwfe

Fuck. This.

“A riveting read,” Pru muttered.

Fuck this
. Truer words had not been spoken.

So this drivel was what he'd been hammering out, early in the morning and well past midnight? It was gibberish. Nonsense. Pru considered that he might not be a writer and instead some homeless bloke on the make, just as Mrs. Spencer had suspected.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Win said and flicked his (still unlit) cigarette onto the floor. “Keep going. The first page is merely the accidental spill of some writerly frustrations.”

“I'll say.”

Pru flipped to the next page and was relieved to find genuine, bona fide sentences. Paragraphs, even. She began to read.

They said you weren't anyone until Giovanni Boldini painted you. But of all the famed women he rendered, the princesses and countesses and heiresses, the Duchess of Marlborough was deemed the most enchanting.

The future duchess was born Gladys Deacon in Paris on February 7, 1881, though she would later claim the date was 1883, and later 1885. Lady Marlborough loved to play with her birthdate, ticking it up a year or two for every decade that passed. A fair enough trade, when a person made it close to the century mark.

“Nicely done,” Pru said, though didn't wholly mean it.

His prose was sufficient, but the story was not exactly groundbreaking. Whatever “preliminary research” he'd conducted was for shite.

“What else have you got?” she asked and turned another page.

It was blank. She flipped again. Still blank. After thumbing through the rest, Win shirking in the corner, Pru realized this was all he'd written. Two bleeding paragraphs.

“Well,” she said. “I see what you mean about the long game.”

“The young American said with tangible disdain.”

“I'll be in the book? Not sure how I feel about that.”

“Look. You said it yourself. She's given me bugger all to go on and you're the liveliest person in this joint, even if you blush if forced to utter more than two words.”

“You're some kind of charmer,” Pru said with a roll of her eyes. “So what happens if Mrs. Spencer doesn't give you the rest of it? Will you write her story anyway? Make something up? Or will you just leave?”

“No. I won't leave.”

Win sighed again and then sat on the edge of his bed.

“This may sound positively bonkers,” he said. “To someone like you, so young and with limitless possibilities. But this writer nonsense? It's all I've got.”

“Surely not
all.
”

“It certainly is. And if I give up on it, then what do I have? Nothing. And to suddenly have nothing, no direction, no future at all, is a terrifying prospect. I can't explain it.”

“You don't need to explain it,” she said. “I've—”

“You'd simply never understand.”

Pru turned away as a blanket of red spilled across her powder-white face. She'd been on the cusp of telling him she knew a thing or two about dim futures, but the miserable bloke made it so damned hard to create a real human connection.