The Ashford Affair (27 page)

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What was I going to say? We weren’t exactly best buddies at the time, as I recall. Besides, it was a point of honor for Anna not to let your mother know. Your mother has this disapproving look—”

“I know,” said Clemmie quickly. “Trust me, I know.”

Jon leaned his head back against the back of the couch, balancing his glass on his stomach. His shirt rode up, showing a slice of well-muscled chest, still tanned from the Carolina sun. “What a goddamned mess. Your parents, my parents, Anna.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. He sat up abruptly, catching his glass just before it fell. “No wonder none of us can make a marriage work.”

“Hey!” Clemmie wasn’t sure why she minded, but she did. “You don’t know that. Besides, there’s Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick.”

“Yeah,” said Jon with a curious look on his face. “Them.”

Clemmie rose to her knees on the couch. “What, you’re going to give up because of one bad experience?”

Jon hand lightly skimmed hers, sending goose bumps up and down her arms. “Where’s that engagement ring, again?”

Clemmie snatched her hand back, rocking back on her heels. “At least I knew when to cut my losses! Maybe if you’d had the sense to break up with Caitlin—”

She broke off, appalled. Some blows were too low. But it was too late; it had already been said.

“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” said Jon. His expression turned dark. “But what the hell. Maybe it wasn’t Caitlin. Maybe it would have happened with anyone. Maybe this whole love-everlasting thing is just a sham.”

“That’s a cop-out,” said Clemmie sharply. “But why should that surprise me? You have a long history of copping out.”

Jon turned and looked at her very, very slowly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He knew exactly what she meant. But that had been their deal all along, their unspoken deal, that there were some things they just didn’t talk about. Brush it under the table, pretend it never happened, act like everything was okay.

Clemmie was sick of pretending. She’d had it up to here with brushing it under the table.

He wanted to know what she meant? Clemmie looked Jon in the eye. They were practically nose to nose, so close that she could smell the booze on his breath and the faint whiff of detergent on his clothes.

It was time to finally have it out.

“One word,” she said. “Rome.”

London, 1921

“When were you going to tell me? Or weren’t you?”

A gentleman, Hodges had said. A gentleman to see her. Bea closed her eyes against a sudden wave of dizziness. She should have told Hodges she wasn’t at home to him, but that would have caused talk among the servants and talk was the very last thing she wanted right now. One couldn’t bar the door to someone without begging the question why.

She had never thought he would come here. They had been so careful, so discreet. He hadn’t come here, not to Rivesdale House, not since Addie had brought him, so very long ago. But here he was, in her drawing room—no, in Marcus’ drawing room—stalking towards her, a piece of cream-colored writing paper crumpled in one hand.

He brandished the paper. “Did you just mean to leave it at this?”

She’d meant that to keep him away, not conjure him like a bad fairy. Goblin fruit … Bea felt panic rising in her and clamped it down, clamped it down the way she did the nausea that plagued her all the time.

“Darling! What a surprise. Do come have a drink.” Perhaps if she acted normal, it all would be normal; they could be sophisticated and civilized and pretend nothing had ever happened. She could close her eyes and everything would go back to the way it was meant to be, before Bunny, before Frederick, before everything. “Your usual?”

She reached for the shaker with hands that were surprisingly steady. Breeding will tell, her mother would say. Early training paid off. Her whole world would crumple around her and she could serve beverages in a hand that did not tremble. Tea and scandal, those had been the dishes in her mother’s parlor. What would it be for her? Gin and ruin? The stakes had changed. Her mother had lied; nothing in Bea’s early training had prepared her for this.

“Don’t play games,” Frederick said harshly. He held up the crumpled piece of cream-colored paper. “What do you mean by this?”

“Exactly what it says,” said Bea calmly, although she felt anything but calm.

“And in a good, clear hand,” he said, his dark eyes flashing. “‘My dear Frederick, as entertaining an interlude as this has been, the time has come for us to say adieu.…’”

“Would you rather I had put it in verse?”

He wasn’t amused. “You might at least have had the decency to break it off in person.”

Bea shrugged. “One does get so frightfully busy—”

“Don’t,” he said sharply, and the intensity in his voice made her set down the shaker. “Don’t.”

Bea looked at him, this man who had been her lover for three whirlwind months. Three months of smoky nightclubs, hurried embraces in the backs of taxis, clandestine meetings at his flat. They had known each other’s bodies, quite intimately, but in the most basic of ways he was still a stranger to her. She had never expected he would react like this. Although, to be honest, she had never thought much about how he would react at all; she had been too overcome with her own need, the need for revenge, and then, in a panic, the need to make it all go away. To make him go away.

Heavens, she felt ill.

It had been one thing to push the boundaries, to get back at Marcus for his neglect, to pay him in his own coin, a pretty little revenge, an adultery for an adultery, an affair for an affair. But this—she had never meant it to come to this, to skate so close to disaster.

Nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go; nothing had happened as planned. Marcus was meant to be bitterly jealous, to sweep her away, and they could go back to life as it was meant to be, her adored, he adoring, the smartest couple in London, her mother bragging about her daughter, the marchioness.

She wanted to make it go away; she wanted to make Frederick go away.

“Must you?” she said, and meant it honestly this time. “We never pretended our hearts were involved.”

His lip twisted. “Not hearts, perhaps, but do some justice to my pride. You might have done more than send a note. Or are you that overrun with engagements?”

Another wave of sickness swept her. Bea gripped the drinks trolley with both hands. Morning sickness? More like morning, afternoon, and evening sickness. She felt ill all the time, in every possible way. The sight of a plate of eggs and bacon turned her green; the scent of gin made her stomach churn. No one had warned her that childbearing made one bilious.

“Engagements?” Bea laughed, and there was an edge of hysteria to it. “Haven’t you heard, darling? I’m engaged in the greatest engagement of all.”

Frederick looked blank.

“I’m with child.” She smiled brittlely. “Just what everyone has been waiting for. The ceremonial bearing of the heir.”

Frederick didn’t say anything. He just looked at her and looked and looked and looked again, as if he were turning her inside and out. Bea’s hands instinctively went to her stomach, still flat, still so hard to tell, if only the other signs weren’t there. How her maid had smirked! And Marcus—how was she going to tell Marcus?

He could be made to believe; he had to be made to believe. All those nights he stumbled home, practically insensible—he’d never remember they hadn’t been together, not if she swore to him they had. He’d be too proud of getting an heir to contest it, all the congratulations from his friends, his mother, her mother. He’d have to give up Bunny. It would put everything back the way it was; it had to.

The silence made her ears hurt; it was too loud, all that not saying anything.

“Well?” she demanded. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

When he spoke, his voice was low, but not so low she couldn’t make out the words, the words she least wanted to hear:

“Is it mine?”

FIFTEEN

London, 1921

“Don’t be abominable,” snapped Bea.

Addie scarcely heard her. The only words that mattered were Frederick’s.

Is it mine?

That he asked that … That he
could
ask that … Addie’s stomach cramped. She had come down for her phenacetin tablets. She had given the bottle to Bea last week, and Bea had put it down on the drinks trolley, after bolting a tablet with a stiff chaser of whiskey and soda. Headache, she had said. Bea never had headaches. But Bea hadn’t been at all herself these past few weeks. She had been pale and strained, snappish and easily tired. Addie had watched her anxiously. Not influenza; Addie knew the symptoms of the flu by heart.

Just a headache, that’s all,
Bea had said snippily.
There’s no need to fuss.
Bea never had any patience with illness, with either others or herself. She was, as she herself liked to put it, healthy as a horse. The one time she’d been ill, Nanny had threatened to bolt her to the bed. Addie had begun to wonder if she would have to do the same, bolt Bea to the bed and call a physician, just to make sure there wasn’t something truly wrong.

Addie had never imagined this. When she’d heard Frederick’s voice, she thought he might have come for her. It had been so long since she’d seen him, not since that horrible night in December at that hideous nightclub, the least garden-like garden Addie had ever seen. There had been no more concerts together, no more lectures, no more tête-à-têtes over tea. He was gone from her life as though he had never been.

From time to time, she’d seen snaps of him in the papers. She’d never admit to anyone at the
Review
that she read the
Tatler,
but she did, flipping through guiltily, scanning for familiar faces, the girls from her deb year, the men who hadn’t danced with her, their faces pitilessly illuminated by the light of the flashbulbs. And there, behind Bea, in the shadow, had been Frederick, at one of those hideous clubs. Addie had asked Bea about it, tentatively, and Bea had shrugged and said he went about with the old crowd from time to time and could Addie pass the marmalade?

Went about with the old crowd. The full extent of the betrayal buffeted her like waves against a rock, slamming into her again and again. Bea—and Frederick. Frederick—and Bea. The two of them. Together. Lying to her.

How long had it gone on? Addie’s mind raced feverishly back, across all her carefully hoarded memories, all those months and months of gazing adoringly at Frederick, being so grateful to him for fetching her wraps and putting her into taxis, going with him to those nasty clubs where it was all racket and perfume, assaults on the ears and nose. Had it been going on even then? All the time he was dancing with her, had he been looking over her shoulder at Bea?

She’d thought he was so different. He was so worldly—not worldly in the way Bea’s set was worldly, not shallow and superficial, but well-read, cultivated, thoughtful, everything Addie had wanted to be, everything she’d wanted him to be.

“Is it mine?” The door to the drawing room was open, just a crack, but that crack was enough. Addie could hear everything. She knew she should feel like a fool, standing with her ear to the door like a guilty maidservant, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t leave.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your affair,” said Bea haughtily. Addie could just imagine her face as she said it, the tilt of her chin, the regal disdain.

She knew Bea’s face as well as her own, in all of its moods. Bea wouldn’t do something like this to her, surely, not when she knew how Addie had felt about Frederick. They were sisters, better than sisters, closer than sisters. Years and years and years of whispering confidences, sharing bites from the same apple, taking the blame for each other when something—usually Bea—would get them into trouble.

But if it was Bea who got them into trouble, it was always Bea who charmed their way out again, as sleek and slippery as a ferret.

Addie pressed her fist to her lips, trying not to think what she was thinking. She closed her eyes, fighting away a terrible certainty, the certainty that what she was hearing was true, that this was Bea, that Bea had, did, and always would do what she liked, regardless of the consequences, regardless even of Addie.

She had always known that about Bea, that Bea could be—well, less than entirely truthful. She had a politician’s flair for expediency, twisting facts to suit her ends, making virtue whatever she wanted it to be. Addie had seen that before, again and again, Bea’s way or no way. If sometimes other people’s interests were harmed, there was always an excuse, so and so was too fat to want that cake anyway, she shouldn’t have been dancing with him, really; Bea was doing them all a favor. It wasn’t that she was lying, as such. She always believed it herself by the end, as though truth could be created in the telling.

Addie could practically hear Bea now, all golden-tongued sympathy as only Bea could be, telling her, really, darling, it was for the best, he wasn’t at all what she had imagined him to be, goblin fruit, hadn’t she warned her?

No. Not to her. Bea wouldn’t do that to her. Bea wouldn’t have—Addie scrabbled after the words to put her thoughts into, but some things were too awful for words, too awful to face in plain prose.

But it was there, right there in front of her, through the drawing room door.

“Affair,” said Frederick, and Addie’s chest ached at the sound of his voice, so familiar and yet so strange.

That wasn’t the voice he had used with her. With her, there was always an air of reserve, as though he was holding himself back somehow, exercising special care, as if someone had set a protective guard over the blade of a knife. Now the blade was bared, his voice was all edge, razor sharp.

“Affair,” Frederick repeated. “An interesting choice of words. It was my affair. Until you sent me this. The question at issue is—what else is mine?”

“Nothing,” said Bea decidedly. “A child born in wedlock—”

Frederick broke in before she could complete the sentence. “When was the last time you had conjugal relations with your marquess?”