The Ashford Affair (6 page)

“Oh.” So much for
I’ll see you at eight.
“Do you think she’ll be long?” There was work piling up back at the office.

Jon grimaced. “She took a sleeping pill last night. She’s going to be dead to the world for a while.”

Her mother would tell her it served her right, listening to Aunt Anna. Clemmie felt like an idiot on multiple levels, standing here, in Aunt Anna’s hallway, holding her scarf in her hands with her coat half-unbuttoned. “Look, Jon, if Aunt Anna said anything to you about Granny—”

“Let me take this,” said Jon, and relieved her of her scarf. He held out the other hand for her coat.

Clemmie moved back. “I don’t really have time. Aunt Anna was going to be tell me about—”

“Bea,” said Jon. He took her coat from her and dumped it on a chair, her scarf trailing out below, classic guy hospitality. “I know.”

“And I suppose you know who this Bea person is?” Clemmie said sharply.

Jon crossed his arms over his chest, obliterating the lower half of
YALE
. “What do you know about where your grandmother came from?”

“She came from England,” said Clemmie haughtily. She had no idea what this had to do with Granny’s medication, but she certainly wasn’t going to admit that to Jon. Or his snowmen. “By way of Kenya.”

“That’s it? ‘From England?’”

“Don’t forget the Kenya bit. Don’t give me that look. You know Granny Addie wasn’t exactly big on the childhood reminiscences.” Clemmie squeezed her eyes shut, hating herself. “I mean isn’t. Crap. Isn’t.”

Jon raised a brow. “Did you ever ask her anything? About herself? Or her youth?”

“I am a horrible, self-centered, ungrateful granddaughter and I am going straight to hell,” said Clemmie through her teeth. “Point taken. She’s dying and I suck.”

“Clemmie—” Jon scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. Really.”

She could feel the tension crackling between them, old rivalries and complications. And, if she was being honest, old attraction. She could feel the ghosts of their old selves between them, twenty-one and fearless.

That had all been a long time ago. Before Dan. Before Caitlin. Before any of this.

Clemmie took a safe step back, breathing in through her nose, employing all those tricks she had learned to stay calm during difficult depositons. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m just— I really wasn’t prepared for how much she’s changed.”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “I know what you mean.”

For a moment, they stood in silence, united by mutual memories. Granny Addie playing grandmother to them both, making sure they did their homework, got their applications in on time.

“Does Aunt Anna know anything?” Clemmie asked urgently. “About her condition? She said she had something to tell me and I thought—”

“It’s not that,” said Jon quickly. “Nothing like that.” Clearing his throat, he said, “Would you like some coffee or anything? I know where Anna keeps the good stuff.”

“No, that’s okay. I’ll hit the coffee machine at work. It’s not very good, but it’s there.” Clemmie glanced down the hallway. “I should probably get going anyway. Tell Aunt Anna I was here? Honestly, I’m not really sure why I came.”

Mostly to piss off Mother. It wasn’t a terribly noble thought, but there it was.

“Last night was tough,” said Jon quietly. “For everyone. Anna doesn’t usually take sleeping pills.”

“What are we going to do when she goes?” Clemmie hadn’t meant to say the words, but there they were, stark and cold. She looked down at her hands. “And you’re right. I don’t know anything about her. I never bothered to ask.”

“She didn’t volunteer,” said Jon.

Clemmie grimaced at him, trying to keep her cool. “Are you being
nice
to me?”

“Don’t get used to it.” Jon looked at her for a moment, head tilted, considering. He said, slowly, “Can I show you something?”

“That depends on what it is.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jon. “You’re not going to get that lucky.” Clemmie snorted. Jon jerked his head sideways. “This way.”

She followed him into a room that looked like it was ordinarily a study of some kind. The walls were lined with built-in bookcases in a dark wood. There was squishy chair in one corner and a table that looked like it could double as a desk. The room also obviously doubled as the guest room. Clemmie avoided looking at the rumpled sheets on the daybed. There was something weirdly intimate about it. Jon’s suitcase, a plain black wheelie, lay on the floor next to the chair, closed but unzipped, the corner of a pair of khakis bulging out of one side.

Last night’s blazer was tossed over the arm of the desk chair, still smelling faintly of Granny Addie’s apartment: potpourri and lemon oil.

Clemmie nodded to the daybed. “I thought you said I wasn’t going to get that lucky.”

“Control yourself, you animal you. I’m still a married man. Technically.” Kneeling on the bed, Jon scanned the bookshelves, his finger moving from one spine to the next.

Clemmie stood awkwardly behind him, just far enough back to keep her knees from bumping into the bed. “What are you looking for?”

Aunt Anna’s library ran heavily towards glossy hardcover coffee table books on art and architecture. She had gotten her degree in art history, Clemmie dimly remembered that. It had been one of the bones of contention between Aunt Anna and Clemmie’s mother, that Aunt Anna had gotten her degree and Mother hadn’t. And, then, as Mother saw it, Aunt Anna had thrown it all away, pursuing first one man, then another. It was something that had been drummed into Clemmie from an early age, the importance of picking a career and sticking with it, of being self-driven and self-supporting. Being a success. Like Granny Addie.

“This.” Jon pulled a large folio-sized book from the shelf, his T-shirt stretching across his back with the movement. For a professor, he kept in pretty good shape. There was something to be said for those free university gym memberships. “Clem? Clemmie?”

“What?” She looked down at the book he was shoving under her nose. There was a castle on the front of the book, atmospherically shot in the midst of a fantastical garden of topiary, the sun setting behind the battlements.
Great Houses of England
?

“She reads!” said Jon.

“I do card tricks, too,” said Clemmie. She sat down with it on the daybed, bracing the heavy pages on her knees, trying not to think of her BlackBerry buzzing away in her bag. “What exactly am I meant to be seeing here?”

Jon flipped through the pages with a sure hand, his eyes on the book. “There.”

The makers of the book had spared no expense; the paper was glossy and double-weight, with more pictures than text. The page on the left featured a glamour shot of a square building built of golden stone, its dome both echoing and dominating the hills beyond.

“ASHFORD PARK,” read the heading on the right-hand page, all big black letters. Beneath it, in a prissy, curly script, was inscribed:

Thou still unravished bower! Token of England’s greatest hour!
Ne’er knew I true beauty ere I saw Ashford.
—J
OHN
K
EATS
, 1795–1821

Clemmie hadn’t realized that the Romantic poets had been for hire for marketing and publicity.

Although the Earls of Ashford trace their heritage back to a Sir Guillaume de Gillecote, the lands comprising the Ashford family seat were first acquired in 1486, following a successful bid on the correct candidate during the Wars of the Roses.

Successive generations of Gillecotes enlarged and expanded the initial structure, turning a Jacobean showhouse into a neo-classical fantasyland. With 135 rooms …

“It’s pronounced ‘Gill-cott,’” said Jon helpfully. “The
G
is hard.”

Clemmie looked up from the text. “I don’t get it. What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Or Granny Addie?”

Jon plonked down on the daybed beside her. She could feel the mattress sag, tilting her towards him.

“This,” he said, tapping a finger against the dome. “This is where Granny Addie grew up.”

THREE

London, 1906

“Impossible!” said a female voice. “Simply impossible.”

Addie huddled in the hall closet, buried among the coats. The heavy leather coat her father used for motoring formed a wall to her left, the cracks and seams in the leather tracing their own peculiar geography. Her mother’s brown duster brushed Addie’s cheek, still smelling vaguely of her scent, soap and lilac. Addie scrunched herself up small between the bootjack and a set of old fire irons that someone had meant to be taken to be mended and forgotten.

Usually those fire irons became a castle portcullis or sometimes a garden gate, but today her imaginary worlds had failed her. Camelot with its bright pennants, the hidden gardens of the Hesperides with their golden fruit, Goblin Market with the goblins clucking and clacking, moping and mowing, all were flat and cold. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she squinched her eyes shut, trying to pretend that she wasn’t there.

They were coming to take her away, Fernie had told her. An aunt and uncle she had never met, who lived in a place of which she had never heard.

“You’ll like it there,” Fernie had said tearfully, packing up Addie’s dresses, her boots, her pinafores, and, on the very top, where she could reach it easily, her copy of
The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.
Addie was very attached to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. “You’ll have cousins to play with. Won’t that be nice?”

“I’d rather stay with you,” Addie had said, wrapping her arms around Fernie’s waist.

Fernie was properly Miss Ferncliffe and her governess, but there was nothing governess-like about Fernie. She wrote poetry and sometimes tried it out on Addie, who didn’t understand most of it but liked the cadence of Fernie’s voice and the way she tilted her head as she read. She was only twenty-two, Fernie, and very pretty, with long red hair that she wore piled on top of her head in loops and puffs that she promised she would teach Addie to make just as soon as Addie was old enough. Her dresses all had pretty flounces on the bottom, and lace trim, and she always smelled of rosewater. Addie wanted to be just like her when she grew up.

“I’d rather that, too,” said Fernie gently. The flounce on her dress swished gently against the wood floor as she moved from dresser to bed, tucking Addie’s brush and comb, the ones with her initials on them, into the corner of the bag. “But where would I keep you?”

“We can stay here! I’ll be a laundress like Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Fernie squeezed her in a quick, rose-scented hug. Her lips brushed Addie’s hair. “You haven’t much luck keeping your own pinafores clean. I wouldn’t trust you with anyone else’s.”

Addie bit her lip, bunching together the front of her pinny to hide the telltale smudges on the fabric. “I’ll try harder?”

But Fernie had been obdurate. Usually, she could be wheedled and cajoled, but not on this. Addie’s aunt and uncle were coming for her and she was to go with them and be a good girl and
always remember I love you,
Fernie had said,
and that your mother and father loved you, too.

If they loved her, why had they gone away?

It had been an omnibus, they said, coming around a sharp corner. The night had been dark and wet. Addie’s parents, heads lowered, one umbrella shared, had been picking their way back from a concert across the rain-slick streets. They had decided to walk, rather than take a cab; it was like them, everyone agreed. Like them, too, to be too absorbed in their discussion to know where they were going or see the vehicle before it was upon them.

Father had died instantly; Mother had lived long enough to be taken to hospital, but not long enough for Addie to see her. By the time Addie had been told, it was over; they were both gone. Everyone agreed that she wasn’t to come to the funeral, that it was too much for a child her age. Instead, she had sat at home, watching the endless rain weep outside the window as Cook sobbed into her pots and Mary, the one maid, clattered up and down, setting out tea and cakes for Mother’s and Father’s friends who had come to say their final good-byes.

That had been yesterday, and the house was empty again, cold and empty. Mother’s papers were still where she had left them, on her writing table in the parlor; Father’s pipe was in its saucer. But, already, they had an air of abandonment about them, as though they knew their owners weren’t to come back.

It was cold in the closet, cold and damp, surrounded by musty coats that no one would ever wear again.

“
Is
there anyone in this ridiculous house?” There were people in the front hall, a woman and a man. The woman’s voice dropped. “I have a bad feeling about this, Charles, a very bad feeling.”

“What else is to be done? We are her family.” It was a man’s voice, clipped, aristocratic, unutterably weary.

“There are places.…” It was the woman’s voice again.

“Would you have it said that a Gillecote of Ashford was sent to the poorhouse?”

“Don’t be pompous, Charles,” said the woman irritably. “You make me sound like something out of Dickens! Hideous, underbred man. I wasn’t suggesting we send her to the poorhouse. But, surely, there are options other than taking her ourselves. What about her mother’s people? She must have come from
somewhere.
”

“Vera—”

“Or the cousins in Canada. They have so many, they’d scarcely notice another. Good hearty, colonial air. Just the thing, surely.”

“I’m not putting a little girl alone on a boat,” said the man. Uncle Charles. Addie didn’t know anything about him, other than that he was Father’s brother and they hadn’t seen each other since Father had married Mother. “She’ll come to us and that’s an end to it.”

Addie could hear the click of shoes against the tile of a hallway, the swish of a skirt navigating the narrow corridor between closet and hall table. “I don’t like the idea of her in the nursery with our girls. When you think of her parents—”

“My brother,” Uncle Charles interjected.

“Half brother. And
that woman
. Do you really think I’d have that woman’s child—”