The Ashford Affair

by Lauren Willig

  “Right,” said Addie, although the names meant nothing to her. “Of course.”

  She craned her neck to look behind, but the man was already gone, and Bea was imparting more wisdom, something about race meetings, and drinks parties, and this couple and that couple, and whose farm had failed and who was worth knowing.

  “—don’t you remember, Euan Wallace’s first wife? You must have met them, surely?” Fortunately, Bea didn’t wait for an answer, plunging on, even as she plowed through the crowd. “She divorced him ages ago—or maybe he divorced her. It’s so hard to keep track. Joss is her new one, although not so new anymore. It’s been—seven years now? Eight?”

  “Mmm,” said Addie, trying desperately to keep from panting too obviously. Sweat blurred her eyes, half-blinding her, but she couldn’t get to a handkerchief to wipe it off. She blundered determinedly on, trying to ignore the nasty sinking feeling deep in the pit of her stomach, the one that told her that this had been a terrible mistake.

  Instead of being the worldly one, she was, instead, the neophyte, being introduced by Bea into the mysteries of her world, mysteries Addie would never perfectly understand, and which would, once again, render her dependent on Bea’s leadership and guidance.

  In short, straight back to the same old pattern.

  “How much farther?” she blurted out, breaking into Bea’s recitation.

  “Not so very far,” said Bea, looking at her in surprise. “Oh, darling, you do look done in. It’s the heat, isn’t it? It does take people by surprise in the beginning.”

  It hadn’t done anything to Bea; she looked perfectly cool and fresh. But, then, she wasn’t the one carrying a bag that seemed to have gotten considerably heavier over the past ten minutes. Nor had she spent the past twenty-four hours in a closed train car.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” she said, “we’ll be at the car in a tick. Oh, look! There’s Alice de Janzé.” Bea waved languidly at a woman dressed as smartly as anything you would see in Paris. “American, married to a Frenchman. I can’t think what she’s doing in Nairobi. She’s usually off at Slains.”

  The social catalog grated on Addie’s nerves. It was like being back in London, back in their deb year, Bea constantly surrounded by people, effortlessly making friends and friends of friends. What had happened to “we live quietly on our little farm”?

  Addie asked breathlessly, “Where are your girls?”

  Bea’s pace picked up. Addie had to practically run to keep up. “They’re at the farm. They’re happy there. Like Dodo with the stables. There’s no accounting, is there?”

  Addie sensed the edge of an argument, one not to do with her. Unsure how to respond, she said, instead, “Dodo sends her love.”

  Dodo was Bea’s older sister, the only one of the clan officially on speaking terms with her. With Dodo, though, it was hard to tell the difference between speakers and non-speakers; the only things she ever talked about were her beloved horses. She came down to town once a month, always to the Ritz, where her battered tweeds made an odd contrast to the other women’s tailored suits and Paris frocks. Perhaps that was the nicest thing about Dodo; she always was what she was.

  “Pity she couldn’t send cash,” said Bea flippantly. “You have no idea what it costs to run a coffee farm, no idea at all. No crops for the first four years and then whatever the market will bear. It’s vile.”

  “Is Frederick at the farm?” No need to worry about tone. Her voice came out in gusty pants.

  Bea winced sympathetically and slowed down. “No, he’s with the car. He’d have come to meet you, but he was waylaid by D.”

  “Dee?” Addie’s imagination conjured up a vamp with long, red fingernails.

  “Lord Delamere. Frightful old bore.”

  Addie laughed breathlessly. “Not one of the blessed?”

  That was how they used to refer to people they liked, she and Bea, back in the nursery days, part of their own private code. It felt rusty and raw on her tongue.

  Impulsively Bea turned and hugged her, nearly knocking her off her feet. A wave of expensive French perfume blotted out dust and sweat. “Oh, I have missed you! Are you hungry?”

  Addie swayed and caught her balance again. She set her bag down with a thump. She was hungry, she realized, hungry and a little dizzy with the heat and sun.

  “They fed us at Makindu.” There had been a British breakfast of eggs and porridge, looking oddly foreign in that setting, with strange, striped beasts grazing in the distance. Addie scrunched up her nose, trying to remember how long ago that had been. It felt like a different lifetime already. “But that must have been—oh, hours ago. Just about dawn.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll see you fed, once we get you out of that frightful frock.”

  Addie tensed, instantly on the defensive. “What’s so frightful about it? Once it’s been washed and pressed…”

  Bea looked her up and down with an expert eye. “Oh, my dear, no.”

  Addie suddenly saw herself as Bea must see her, frowsy and wilted, in an off-the-peg dress that had lurched at fashion and missed. Bea had always been, and was, even now, effortlessly and glamorously fashionable. She could make a pair of men’s trousers look like a Worth gown. Addie had no doubt that on her that sad little traveling suit would look like Lanvin.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, as one might to a child, and suddenly Addie was back at Ashford again, six and shy and unprepared, harkening unto the Gospel according to Bea. “We’ll find you something much better.” Her expression turned speculative. Her pale blue eyes glinted as she looked at Addie from under her lashes. “And, perhaps, a man?”

  “I already have one of those,” Addie said tartly. She picked up her bag again, taking a firmer grip on the handle. “David Cecil. He’s a lecturer at University College. In Economics.”

  “My dear,” Bea said. “How frightfully clever.”

  “He is,” Addie said loyally, as though he hadn’t, over the course of the trip, become little more than a mirage in her imagination, David, whom she was supposed to love, and whom she might love, if only she could convince herself that the past was past.

  Wasn’t that what David was always telling her? The world of her youth, with its house parties and servants, Lord This and Lady That—that world was gone. She had been in it but not of it, not really. It was David with whom she would build a life, share a flat, share a bed, grow old and grow roses—or whatever other plant it was among which they would gently potter, surrounded by children and grandchildren, all as clever as he.

  “We’re to be engaged when I get back,” she said, and it came out more belligerently than she had intended.

  “So you’re engaged to be engaged?” It did sound rather ridiculous when put that way. Bea smiled a crooked little smile. “Isn’t that funny. I had thought—well, never mind. Look. Here we are.”

  “Here” appeared to be a monster of a car, a massive square thing that reminded Addie of the estate cars back at Ashford, designed for moving both men and game. There were two men standing by the side, deep in conversation, in which she could hear “elevation” and “fertilizer.” The one on the right was shortish, on the wrong side of middle age, with a face like an amiable turtle beneath a round hat with a wide brim.

  The other man had his back to them, but Addie would have known him just the same. He had always been thin, too thin the last time she had seen him, but the casual clothes of the colony suited him; he looked rangy rather than lanky, the short sleeves of his shirt displaying skin that had acquired a healthy glow. Unlike his companion, he wore no hat. The sun had burned lighter streaks into his dark hair.

  “Look who I’ve found!” called Bea, and he turned, his face breaking into a smile of welcome.

  “Addie,” he said. “It is. It’s really Addie.”

  He smiled, and Addie’s heart turned over with a sickening lurch, five years gone in five minutes.

  Addie felt suddenly cold, cold despite the warmth of the day. She looked at Bea, shin
ing in the sun, at Frederick. The mustache he had once sported was gone; he was clean-shaven now, his face tan where it had once been pale. There were lines by his eyes that hadn’t been there before, white in the brown of his face, but they suited him. The circles of dissipation were gone, burned away by sun and work.

  From far away, she could hear David’s voice. Why?

  This was why. This had always been why. Addie fought against a blinding wave of despair and desire, all mixed up in sun and sweat, dust and confusion. She wanted to curl into a ball, to cry her frustration out into the dust, to turn, to flee, to run away.

  David was right; she should have left well enough alone. She stood have stayed home in the cool of England, in her safe flat with her safe almost fiancé, instead of poking at emotions better left buried.

  Frederick held out a hand to her, and there it was, glinting in the sun, the gold ring that marked him as Bea’s.

  “We didn’t think you’d come,” he said.

  I can still go away again, she wanted to say. Forget that I was here. But that was the coward’s path. There was, as Nanny used to say, no way out but through.

  Addie set her bag carefully down by her feet, flexing her sore hand. By the time she had straightened, she had her pleasant social smile fixed firmly on her face.

  “Well, here I am,” she said, and took Frederick’s hand. His ring pressed against her palm, a reminder, a warning. “How could I stay away?”

  PART ONE

  ASHFORD

  ONE

  New York, 1999

  Clemmie hurried beneath the awning of her grandmother’s building, panting a quick hello in response to the doorman’s greeting.

  He started to say something, but she kept on going, heels click-click-clacking on the marble floor. She tossed a “hello” over her shoulder, flapping her hand in a wave.

  It was Granny Addie’s ninety-ninth birthday party and Clemmie was late.

  She steamed through the foyer, loosening her coat and scarf as she went. Despite the November cold, she felt sweaty straight through, clammy with perspiration beneath the layers of bra, blouse, suit jacket, and coat. She’d meant to change into a dress, but there hadn’t been time, so here she was, disheveled and blistered, hair any which way and lipstick a distant memory. Her mother would be appalled, but she wouldn’t say anything. She would just telegraph her distress with tightened lips and raised brows. She was good at that. Clemmie’s mother’s brows were better than sign language, complicated concepts conveyed with a minimum of movement.

  Clemmie jabbed at the elevator button and made the mistake of glancing at her watch. Eight fifteen. Cocktails had started forty-five minutes ago. They might, in fact, already be sitting down to dinner. No wonder the doorman had looked at her like that. Her mother had probably been calling down every ten minutes to ask if she had been spotted yet. She was past the realm of acceptably late and well into the kingdom of unpardonably tardy.

  Shifting her large Longchamp bag from one shoulder to the other, she mentally mustered her arsenal of excuses, none entirely a lie, but none entirely true either: a meeting at the last minute, the BlackBerry in her bag that wouldn’t stop buzzing, that damn deposition in Dallas that needed to be prepped before she flew off on Thursday. Then there were all the standard-issue disclaimers: no cabs, delayed subways, the impossibility of getting directly from her office, all the way west on 49th and 8th, to Granny Addie’s, safe in the fastness of the Upper East Side, on 85th and 5th. That, at least, was pure, unvarnished truth. Clemmie had wound up walking most of the way, half-speedwalking, half-running, slipping and sliding in her high-heeled pumps as she scanned for cabs, all of which seemed to be full, their occupants smug silhouettes in the backseats, inside while she was out.

  Clemmie shifted feet, discreetly easing her left foot out of her black pump. Matte black leather, now slightly scuffed, with a three-inch heel. These shoes looked very nice under a conference table, but they had not been made for walking.

  Her stocking clung stickily to her heel. Lovely. Not just a blister, but a burst blister. It was going to hurt like hell tomorrow when she limped into work.

  The elevator pinged, the doors opening.

  Clemmie jammed her foot back into her shoe and hobbled inside. The elevator was lined in rosewood, the buttons set in polished brass. It hadn’t changed much over the past thirty years. She hit the 8, her finger finding the number by rote, and the elevator began its ascent. As she always did, she glanced at the shield-shaped security mirror in the corner. As a child, she used to entertain herself by moving her head this way, then that, watching as her features moved in and out of focus, like a Barbie head when you took the rubbery features between your fingers and squeezed.

  Now she checked for obvious signs of wear and tear, applying a hasty coat of lip gloss from the blunted stick in her bag. Mascara? There was still more over her eyes than under them. Good enough. The wind had taken the part of blush, pounding her pale cheeks into color. Unfortunately, it had also encouraged her hair to make a desperate bid for liberation, standing up any which way.

  She hadn’t had this problem when it was long; then she could just bundle it back, clipping it up with a slide or holding it back with a headband.

  It was such a cliché, wasn’t it? End a relationship, cut your hair.

  She had had it chopped off last week, ostensibly so it wouldn’t keep getting caught under the strap of her bag, defiantly taking a whole hour away from the office in the middle of the day. Screw it, she had told herself. She had spent the better part of six years in the office, eating meals at her desk, taking personal calls on her office phone, watching the seasons change from behind the thick glass windows. If she wanted to take an hour to go to Fekkai, she had damn well earned it. One hour away wouldn’t cost her the place in the partnership for which she had so desperately worked, the partnership she was so close to achieving; while the stylist clipped away Clemmie had kept her BlackBerry in her lap, typing away with two fingers on the miniature keyboard.

  Her hair was supposed to be easier to manage like this, the hairdresser had said, but the short, fine strands seemed to have a mind of their own, sticking up any which way and flying into her eyes. She missed being able to pull it back, the comforting nonsense task of bundling it up and letting it down again. She found herself constantly reaching for hair that wasn’t there anymore.

  The elevator doors opened onto the eighth floor, a small landing decorated with burgundy silk flowered paper and a spindly gilded table beneath an equally spindly and gilded mirror. A bronze bucket provided a home for stray umbrellas. Grandpa Frederick’s walking stick still stuck out in pride of place in the middle. Clemmie touched it lightly with her fingers. The head was shaped like a terrier. Grandpa Frederick used to make it yip and bark for her as Clemmie would shy back, alarmed and delighted.

  Grandpa Frederick had died when Clemmie was six, but she remembered him, just vaguely, a seamed face and white hair and a lopsided grin and a lifelong smoker’s hacking cough. It was odd to think that he had died that long ago; even gone, he had been a presence throughout Clemmie’s childhood, like Victoria’s Albert, always there in memory. Granny Addie’s apartment was still full of him, even thirty years on. There were pictures of him in grainy black and white, wearing the comical clothes of the 1920s, pictures of him bending over the plants on their coffee plantation in Kenya, and then, later, shiny color photos of a much older Grandpa Frederick, with Granny Addie, with children, with grandchildren, clothes changing to suit the era.

  They were, Clemmie had always thought, rather an inspiration. They had met when Granny Addie was still, as they quaintly put it, in the schoolroom, and married when she was in her twenties. Together, they had taken a little farm in Kenya and turned it into a thriving coffee company. The business had been sold back in the seventies, swallowed up by Maxwell House, but the back hallways of Granny Addie’s apartment were hung with old posters, now framed, advertising KENYAN COFFEE—FOR THE DISCRIMINATING PALATE.
Some even featured a younger-looking Granny Addie, poised and impossibly aristocratic, a coffeepot in one hand, a cup and saucer in the other.

  They had been together so long, Granny Addie and Grandpa Frederick.

  Even if Clemmie met someone tomorrow, even if by some miracle she stumbled upon her dream man in an elevator or on the subway, she would still never be with anyone as long as Granny Addie had been with Grandpa Frederick. It was an incredibly depressing thought. The idea of starting over, having to go on the same awkward first dates, recite the same tired personal stories, made her want to curl into a little ball and whimper.

  Why was it so easy for some people and not for others?

  Birthday, she reminded herself. She was meant to be celebratory. She couldn’t go in and mope all over Granny Addie. Not with all the cousins watching, at any rate. Clemmie’s mother was a big believer in Keeping Their End Up, which generally seemed to boil down to smiling whether you wanted to or not and never ever telling Aunt Anna how you really felt about anything.

  Mother had a thing about Aunt Anna. Clemmie had never been able to discover any malevolent tendencies on her aunt’s part—yes, she was kind of ditzy and a little phony, but evil?—but Clemmie’s mother remained convinced that Aunt Anna lived to exploit the chinks in her armor. Clemmie tended to think that Aunt Anna lived for Aunt Anna, which was a very different thing.

  Clemmie hung her coat on the rack in the hall, shoving it in between a fur-trimmed cashmere cape that could only belong to Aunt Anna and someone else’s well-used Burberry. Someone had left the door to the apartment slightly ajar. Through it, Clemmie could hear the unmistakable noises that denoted a cocktail party: the staccato rhythm of voices, the click of heels against hardwood, the soft-soled shuffle of the waiters bearing crab cakes or smoked salmon squares.

  “There you are!” Her mother must have been lying in wait; she pounced as soon as Clemmie opened the door. “You’re the last one here.”