I'll See You in Paris (36 page)

“Tonight?” Pru gulped. “You're leaving tonight?”

“
We're
leaving. The three of us. You, me, the writer.” She rolled her eyes. “We're off to Paris. Seton, ring your brother. Tell him to make up the beds.”

 

Sixty-four

ÎLE SAINT-LOUIS

PARIS

NOVEMBER 2001

 

Almost immediately after Gladys and Sunny's wedding, the duke became a royal pain in the arse. He grew so quarrelsome Gladys took to bringing a revolver to the dinner table just to keep him in line.

On top of this, he began paying undue attention to a fifteen-year-old girl named Theresa Jungman, whom he sickeningly called Baby. Though Sunny professed his undying love for this Baby, he went on to have many other mistresses, including Canadian actress Frances Doble. After many years of trysting, he promised to marry Frances and asked Gladys for a divorce.

And wouldn't you know it, Gladys obliged. What did she need with Sunny and a title anyhow? They'd been wed for over a decade by then but in that marriage and throughout their home, Gladys proclaimed, “I still feel like a tourist.”

Alas, a third marriage for Sunny would not come to pass. He developed liver cancer and died in 1934, leaving Gladys with a permanent duchess title and most members of his family up in arms about her immutability in their lives.

Not that Gladys longed to hang around playing duchess. She hightailed it out of Blenheim as soon as practicable, loading up a half-dozen lorries, and spiriting her possessions out of town.

—J. Casper Augustine Seton,

The Missing Duchess: A Biography

Annie arrived in Paris in the late afternoon.

Winter was approaching. The sunlight fell low and flat across the city, casting long shadows, making the ground look as if it were perpetually dusk. Paris. She'd returned.

Annie's breath caught as the cab turned away from Gare du Nord and onto Rue Saint-Martin. It'd been eighteen months since she was last there, which somehow felt like both yesterday and forever ago. That's the way Paris was.

Had her French been less rusty, Annie would've asked the driver to take the scenic route: a jaunt down Rue Lafayette, with a quick circle around the Op
é
ra and its stunning green dome and golden statues. She never tired of the building, even if it was a little too close to the harried Galeries Lafayette, a place forever socked in by buses and tourists toting wheeled suitcases crammed with newly acquired clothes.

Had they gone that way, past the Op
é
ra, it would've been a relatively straight shot toward the Tuileries and la grande roue, the city's famous Ferris wheel. No matter how tired, physically or otherwise, Annie couldn't watch the carriages lift over the trees without feeling the lift of her heart.

Accessing the
Î
le Saint-Louis from there would require only a short trip along one of the roads running parallel to the Seine. Rue de Rivoli, for example—the very first street Mrs. Spencer ever called home.

As they traveled across the bridge and onto the island, Annie glanced toward Notre-Dame and smiled in remembrance. When she studied in Paris, her roommate was an aspiring architect. Because of this, the girls spent untold hours in and around the cathedral, pointing out its gargoyles and flying buttresses, studying the gallery of kings and the spectacular rose windows. At once, Annie felt every second of those months. Why had she waited to come back?

“Where are you staying, mademoiselle?” the driver asked as they crossed the Pont Marie. “Which hotel?”

“Oh, I'm staying with a friend.”

A “friend” she'd never met. One who didn't know she was coming. One who would be puzzled to see a girl show up on his doorstep in jeans, a slightly frayed T-shirt, and a backpack filled with cassettes. What the hell was she doing?

“The address, mademoiselle?”

“Yes, sorry. Twenty-four Quai de B
é
thune.”

Really. What the hell was she doing? Annie shook her head, at herself, at her folly, at the ridiculousness of the situation. Well, if nothing else, she was in Paris. As Mrs. Spencer would say, it was the best place to make a bad decision.

Annie turned toward the window as the roads narrowed and the buildings became less ornate. Though Napol
é
on III tasked Haussmann with turning Paris's crowded streets into wide avenues with parks and squares,
Î
le Saint-Louis maintained its medieval vibe. It was her favorite neighborhood in the city. Annie never could've fathomed the events that would lead her back.

“We have arrived,” the driver announced, stopping before an elegant seventeenth-century town home, one of the many lining the quays along the Seine.

“
Merci
,” she said, fumbling for her wallet. She'd taken out forty euros at the train station and hoped her mom wouldn't notice the missing funds.

After paying the driver, she slammed the taxi door and looked up at the building's tawny stone face, its white shutters, and wrought-iron balconies. So lovely, so simple, yet the interiors were probably grander than anything she'd seen in that city. Student housing was decidedly more pedestrian, even in Paris.

“All right,” she said to herself. “Let's see what happens.”

Just as she was about to ring the intercom, a smartly dressed couple punched a code into the keypad. They popped open the black door and Annie slipped in behind them. They didn't even notice she was there.

The couple kissed once in the lobby and then tumbled together into a ground-floor flat. Annie reached out for the second set of doors but found them locked. She glanced toward the brass-mounted directory, her eyes scanning the list. There he was. Seton, number six.

With an inhale that reverberated through the building's stone lobby, Annie pressed the black button beside his name and launched a quick prayer up to the sky.

“Allô?”
said a voice.

Allô.
A small word, three quarters of a word even, but enough to send Annie's stomach tumbling.

Once again, what the hell was she doing? Traveling to another country? Ringing the doorbell of a stranger? Granted, he was a man her mother once loved, but he was foreign to Annie. And probably to Laurel as well, decades having passed.

“Allô?”
the voice said again.

Annie's mouth felt gummed up and thick. The words were there but she could not spit them out.

Then, suddenly, she heard a loud buzz.

“Why don't you come up?” he said. “Top floor.”

 

Sixty-five

ÎLE SAINT-LOUIS

PARIS

NOVEMBER 2001

“It's been a long time since I've had a pretty girl show up unannounced on my doorstep,” the man said.

Annie stood in the doorway, dumbfounded.

He was tall, over six feet, and thin, almost awkwardly so. His eyes were dark, his features sharp, and he had a tangle of curly black hair. The man was attractive, in a goofy sort of way, but his looks were not what left her stupefied. He was familiar. Annie had met him before.

“Hello,” she said.

Where? Where had Annie seen him? Was this Win? Or some other person?

“You don't know me,” she went on. “But I know you. I think. You see…”

“You must be Annie. Come on in.”

“Um, what?”

Despite her confusion, or because of it, Annie stepped through the doorway. If she ended up hacked to pieces it would be her own damned fault. She'd not mention this in her next e-mail to Eric. That is, if she made it out alive.

“Yes, I am Annie,” she said. “Annie Haley.”

“Haley. Really?”

“Yes. And … how did you know who I was? I'm … I honestly feel like I'm about to pass out.”

The man laughed. Even
that
was familiar.

“My brother,” he said with a grin that also somehow rung bells. “I'd been informed there was a chance you'd show.”

“Your brother told you I was coming? Who's your brother? No one knew about this, not even me. The trip was very spur-of-the-moment.”

“Welp, somehow he knew. The old tosser said that a pretty American had my address and might try to make an adventure out of it. He never imagined you'd go through with it, mind you, but felt I needed due warning.”

Perhaps it was the smile, or the laugh, or the use of the word “tosser,” but suddenly it struck Annie. She
had
seen this man before. He'd been at the George & Dragon, talking to Gus.

“And that, my dear,” Gus had said at the time, “was no friend. That was my brother Jamie.”

Jamie. Gus's brother.

Jamie as in James as in James E. Seton. Annie felt for the luggage tag, her trusty good-luck trinket. All this time she'd been talking to the wrong brother. No wonder Gus was so dismissive of Win. Typical sibling rivalry, not that she knew anything about it.

“Well.” Annie exhaled and threw out a rigid, unpracticed smile. “You'll have to tell your brother he misjudged my fanatical interest in the story. Though I suppose you're acquainted with that level of zealotry. The chasing-down of Lady Marlborough, for instance.”

Jamie laughed again, same as before, same as Gus.

“Indeed I'm acquainted with that story,” he said. “Quite well as it happens.”

“I'm sure you're busy, but if I could steal a few minutes of your time.”

“Not busy at all. I'm pleased to have you here. Come. Let's go to the kitchen.”

Annie nodded and followed him deeper into the apartment, trying to concentrate on the gleaming parquet floors and ornate crown molding. Better to appreciate the architecture than remember she was in a stranger's home and that there wasn't a person alive who knew where she was, or that she was even in France in the first place.

“Your apartment is beautiful,” Annie said. “Mr. Seton…”

“Jamie, please.”

“Jamie, you must wonder why I'm here. I don't know what your brother told you. I don't even have a sense of how much he knows.”

“He had a few guesses as to why you might appear,” Jamie said as they walked beneath one chandelier, and then another. “Then again, he scarcely knows his arse from a hole in the ground.”

“I've heard that one before,” Annie said with a smile as her shoulders loosened.

They stepped into the kitchen.

“What can I get you?” he asked.
“Café? Vin?”

“Coffee for now, thanks.”

“Espresso okay? Have a seat.”

He gestured toward the long, oak farm table as Annie lowered onto a gray linen chair.

“So,” Jamie said, grinding the espresso beans. The smell was sharp and warm. Annie's shoulders relaxed. “Let's get to it, shall we? Why are you here, exactly?”

He packed the coffee grounds into a sleek, silver machine.

“It's about the book,” Annie told him.
“The Missing Duchess.”

“Ah, the book,” he said. “The famous book. Only joshing on the famous bit.” He fiddled with something on the espresso maker. “Rather, it was the white whale. The fool's errand of a lifetime. I presume you've read the dreadful tome.” He peered over his shoulder. “What did you think?”

“I enjoyed it. The writing is … excellent. Clever, funny at times.”

“Humph,” he said.

“But it's not about the book. I mean, the book started everything, but it's the story behind the story that I'm after now.”

“Always the best part.”

“Your brother has been telling me about the duchess and the…” She cleared her throat. “The man who came to write about her.”

“And the girl,” Jamie guessed. “Laurel.”

“That's the one. Full disclosure, Laurel is my mom.”

“Yes.” Jamie nodded. “I've gathered.”

“You've gathered?” she said as he delivered the coffee. “From what? We don't look anything alike and I only just figured it out myself.”

“You introduced yourself as Annie Haley. Another nosy and animated American with that particular surname. It all made sense.”

Annie looked at him cross-eyed.

“How did you … Haley is my mom's married name. You've been keeping track of her all these years?”

“Not especially.”

As Annie waited for him to speak, to describe how he could know the “Haley” without keeping track, her stomach roared. When was the last time she'd eaten? Had she even had breakfast that morning?

Jamie spun toward the refrigerator.

“You seem hungry,” he said, pushing aside wine bottles and lemons.

“Oh, um, I just ate,” Annie lied, a blush spreading across her cheeks.

“Rubbish! Your stomach speaks louder than you do. Hmm, my fridge is in a sorry state. I have positively nothing to eat unless you like olives or gherkins.”

“Really, I'm not hungry.”

“A tall tale if ever I've heard one. And I've heard a few. I have a proposition for you.” He spun back to face her. “Why don't you relax, watch some telly, enjoy a drink. Wine is one provision I have. In the meantime, I'll scamper over to the market and pick up a few supplies for dinner. It's early, but I'm happy to eat now.”

“That's very kind, but you don't have to feed me.”

“It'd be my distinct honor.” Jamie placed a hand to his heart. “I love to play amateur chef and since my wife left I haven't a person to cook for.”

With the words “wife left,” a sneaky, tight-lipped smile crossed Annie's lips. Win was unattached and so was “Pru.” Was it too ridiculous to think…?

“You have a wife?” Annie said.

“Believe it or not, yes. Alas, the ole ball-and-chain's been in Gstaad for two weeks visiting her parents.”