The Ashford Affair (49 page)

Jon regarded her with frank admiration. “Points to you. That’s some good sleuthing.”

“Not such good sleuthing,” said Clemmie. “The batting on the back was ripped. It practically jumped out at me.”

Jon fingered the tear on the back of the frame. “This doesn’t look torn,” he said. “This looks cut.”

“Now who sounds all Nancy Drew?” Clemmie mocked before the meaning of what he was saying hit her. “Jon—do you think—Mom told me she left them to me. Specially.”

Jon lifted the file in his lap. “She made sure this was left to Anna.”

Their eyes met over the sheaf of papers. “I don’t know if that counts as amends or a taunt,” said Clemmie. “To know that she’d known all that time and never told her.…”

“We don’t know that that was Addie’s choice,” Jon pointed out. “Bea might have had some say in it as well. She’d made herself into a completely different person by then—in every possible way. She might have had some trouble explaining away a prior family to her new family.”

“Okay, so who was she?” Clemmie wasn’t sure if she was asking the right question. It was more a matter of what was she, this woman who was part of her, but not.

Jon consulted his papers. “In 1972, Beatrice Desborough was living under the name Eliza Goldsmith. She was a Canadian citizen married to an American named Carl Goldsmith. They were married in 1946.”

The facts sounded so spare put like that, just names and dates. “Was there anything about how she got there?”

“Not much,” said Jon. “She did have a war record—she flew for the Royal Canadian Airforce Women’s Division in World War II. But that’s it. Nothing about how she got from Kenya to Canada.”

And nothing about how she felt about it, nothing about what drove a woman to pick up and leave her husband and children behind. “Did she ever have other children?”

Jon shook his head. “No. Just stepchildren.”

Something in the way he said it touched a nerve. “Hey.” Clemmie touched his hand. “Jon—”

“There’s more,” he said quickly. “Check this out.”

Drawing his hand away, he extracted a photograph from between the pages of the report. It was a normal three-and-a-half-by-five print, a snapshot, taken on an inexpensive camera. The photo hadn’t aged well. It had been overexposed, making the whole strangely orange tinted, the people indistinct. But she could still make out the scene. It was a poolside, with two women on lounges, one wearing a sort of caftan and a floppy hat, the other in a bathing suit with a little skirt on it. There was a small table between them with drinks and books.

Clemmie flipped it over. There were no names, just
DOVE MOUNTAIN, 1974.

The prints on the wall had been labeled
1976
.
“Granny used to go to a spa in Arizona every year.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Jon. “I think you found her spa.”

Clemmie looked at the picture, at the two women lying so companionably on their lounges in the Arizona sun. Bea’s floppy hat hid her face. Granny Addie’s was obscured by the shadow of the beach umbrella. There was nothing to say how they’d felt, what they were thinking. But Clemmie thought, if she squinted hard enough, that the two women were smiling.

Year after year Granny Addie had gone off to Arizona in February, on the anniversary of Grandpa Frederick’s death. It was her alone time. Better than Florida, she had joked.

The trips had stopped while Clemmie was in college—possibly right around the time she was throwing up on Jon’s shoes in Rome. She hadn’t thought anything of it. Granny Addie was in her mid-eighties by then, and long plane trips weren’t a good idea. Besides, Clemmie had had other things on her mind. Midterms and job interviews and Jon.

Clemmie held up the photo, tilting it to try to get a better view. “All those years and she never told.”

“It would have been pretty awkward. She’d have to explain why you had an extra grandmother.”

“And Aunt Anna would have gone ballistic.” Clemmie wished she could see Bea better. That hat was maddening. “She was so convinced that Granny Addie was deliberately keeping her mother from her.”

“Well, now we know,” said Jon practically. “She didn’t know until 1972.”

The two women looked so happy together on their lounge chairs.
Bea
 … Granny had said. Clemmie remembered the way Granny had spoken of Bea as a child, with so much love. “I’m glad they found each other again.”

She heard the slide of papers as Jon pushed the folder back on the table, felt the warmth of Jon’s hand against the small of her back, ready to hold her up if she needed it. “You okay?”

Clemmie looked at the taller woman, the one in the caftan and floppy hat. Her grandmother. Beatrice Gillecote Rivesdale Desborough Goldsmith. This was the face she might see in the mirror in forty-odd years. And she felt no connection to her at all. Just idle curiosity.

She looked up at Jon. “It just—I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I’d thought I’d feel something else—I should be feeling hurt that she left or that she was alive and never came back—but it’s just not there. It’s like she’s a character out of a novel.”

“Her life certainly reads like one,” said Jon. “And we’ll never know all of it.”

At the poolside, the two women looked like one of those comical postcards, the ones with conversation bubbles, two elderly ladies taking the sun. “They really lived, didn’t they?” said Clemmie. “Not just Bea, both of them.”

“Those were dramatic times,” said Jon. “The twilight of the aristocracy, two world wars—we’re kind of tame in comparison.”

“More than kind of tame.” Clemmie looked around the apartment that she had never liked. It was so small. Not just small in space, but in scope. The books on the shelves were books she’d read in college, nothing more recent. There were no recent photos, no albums, no souvenirs. It was the sterile record of a life lived in a cocoon. These women, in their crazy bathing outfits, had experienced so much more in their lives than she ever would. They’d traveled the world, swapped husbands, flown planes, run companies.

Clemmie looked at Jon’s familiar face, at the streaks of gray in his brown hair, at the laugh lines around his eyes. “I’m tired of playing it safe,” she said.

Those laugh lines deepened as he took both her hands in his. “Would you like to start a farm in Kenya?”

“I think a new job in a new country should do it,” Clemmie said, choosing her words very carefully. She squeezed Jon’s hands, hard. “I think we both need some time. Just a little bit. You still have a divorce to finalize. And papers to grade. And I—I need prove I can stand on my own for bit.”

“A bit?” said Jon, but she knew that what he was asking was something else entirely.

Clemmie braced herself. “I love you. I do.” Amazing how difficult it was to throw the caution of years aside and say the words, even now. Getting them out there made her feel slightly giddy, as if a large weight had lifted. “I love you. And I don’t doubt that we’re—”

“Soul mates?” suggested Jon, cocking one brow. “Destined?”

“Something like that.” Why was it that the most important things always sounded the most cheesy? “But if we’re going to do this, let’s do it right this time, nothing rushed, nothing hurried. No mixed messages, no miscommunication.”

Jon studied her face for a long, long time. “All right,” he said, and Clemmie thought how much she liked that about him, his innate sense of fairness, his ability to see a story from all sides. “Fair enough. I take a lot of research trips to London.”

Clemmie felt her heart lift. “And PharmaNet has a New York office. I’m pretty sure I can find a lot of excuses to come back here. I’ll need someplace to stay, though, since I’m giving up my apartment.”

Jon gave the matter deep thought. “There’s a fairly reasonably priced hostel on 111th Street, if you’re interested.” He gave her a look that could only be termed smoldering. “You may have to share a bed though.”

Clemmie’s body tingled. “I think—I think I can manage the hardship.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jon drew her to him for a long, thorough kiss. “And when the time is up?”

Clemmie grinned at him. “I’ll meet you in Rome.”

The New York Times, March 25, 2001

WEDDINGS
Clementine Evans, Jonathan Schwartz

Clementine Evans was married Saturday evening to Jonathan Schwartz at the Metropolitan Club in New York. The bride’s stepfather, the Honorable Carl Sandberg, a District Judge for the Southern District of New York, officiated at the ceremony.

The bride, 35, is a director in the legal department of the New York office of PharmaNet, the London-based pharmaceuticals firm. She graduated from Harvard cum laude and received a J.D. magna cum laude from Columbia Law School. The bride’s father, William Evans, retired after a career in real estate development. The bride’s mother, Marjorie Desborough Evans Sandberg, is a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The bridegroom, 38, is an associate professor in the History Department at Columbia University. He is also the author of
Decline and Fall? The Twilight of the English Aristocracy in the Aftermath of the Great War
. He graduated from Yale magna cum laude and received a Ph.D. from Stanford University. The groom’s father, the late Leonard Schwartz, was one of America’s foremost playwrights of the 1960s and ’70s.

The couple intends to honeymoon in Kenya.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is my tenth book, but, in many ways, it felt like my first: both exhilarating and terrifying. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jennifer Weis for traveling with Addie from the initial train ride to Nairobi all the way through several sets of revisions; to Mollie Traver and the rest of the team at St. Martin’s for shepherding the manuscript from idea to book; and to my agent, Joe Veltre, for waving the pom-poms and urging me on when I broached the notion of leaving my Napoleonic spies for a new century and a new continent.

This book wouldn’t be here but for my friend Christina Bost-Seaton, who loaned me her copy of
The Bolter,
and inadvertently set off a chain of “what if.…” Thanks also to Susan Pedersen for hiring me, years ago, as her TF for Second British Empire and showing me that there was more to twentieth-century Kenya than
Out of Africa,
and to the wonderful Deanna Raybourn for so generously sharing her Kenya sources with me and not dropping her drink on me when we discovered that we were both writing books set not only in the same place but in the same year.

Hugs and thanks go to Liz Mellyn, who spent hours walking along the Arno with me last spring, rethinking the nature of the Addie and Bea relationship, and to Alison Pace for our Writing Thursdays, where much coffee was consumed and very little writing written. Sometimes, you just need to talk the book through to someone. (Or, as my little sister prefers to phrase it “at” someone.)

The biggest thanks of all goes to my family for bringing me up on a diet of
Masterpiece Theatre
and British classics, for supporting me in all things, and for being nothing like Clemmie’s family. Thanks, Mom, Dad, Spencer, and Brooke, for being you and for always being there. Last but not least, to James, who puts up with manuscript pages on the couch, imaginary people at dinner, and copyedits in lieu of wedding planning. I love you more than I can say.

ALSO BY LAUREN WILLIG

THE PINK CARNATION SERIES

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

The Masque of the Black Tulip

The Deception of the Emerald Ring

The Seduction of the Crimson Rose

The Temptation of the Night Jasmine

The Betrayal of the Blood Lily

The Mischief of the Mistletoe

The Orchid Affair

The Garden Intrigue

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LAUREN WILLIG is also the author of the
New York Times
bestselling Pink Carnation series and a RITA Award winner for Best Regency Historical for
The Mischief of Mistletoe.
She graduated from Yale University and has a graduate degree in English history from Harvard and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City, where she now writes full time.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE ASHFORD AFFAIR.
Copyright © 2013 by Lauren Willig. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover design by Michael Storrings

Cover photographs: woman © Peter Zelei/Getty Images; couple in Kenya © John Rowley/Getty Images; mountains and tree © Mark Owen/Arcangel Images; pattern © Irina_QQQ/
Shutterstock.com
; flourish © Pashtet82/
Shutterstock.com

ISBN 978-0-250-01449-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-03893-7 (international trade paperback)

ISBN 978-1-250-02719-1 (e-book)

First Edition: April 2013