The Ashford Affair

by Lauren Willig

  Frederick grinned, striking ahead of him with his walking stick, a long, gnarled thing. “It wasn’t mind reading, just common sense. I felt the same way when I first saw it.”

  “It certainly makes a change from a Bloomsbury winter,” said Addie guardedly. She didn’t want him rooting about in her emotions. Arm’s length, that was what they would be. Polite and distant. “Marjorie is lovely.”

  Frederick’s face lit with pride. “Isn’t she? We’ll need a proper governess for her soon. She reads anything you put in front of her.”

  Addie shifted her hat. “Should I hide my novels, then?”

  The lines at the corners of Frederick’s eyes crinkled. “I’d forgot your taste for scandalous literature. Are you still editing The Mercury?”

  “The Bloomsbury Review,” Addie corrected him. “And I was never an editor, only a lowly dogsbody. No.”

  That Addie, the one who had worked at The Bloomsbury Review, who dreamed of changing the world through poetry—the Addie who had fancied herself in love with Frederick—was a different creature entirely. She knew better now.

  She said simply, “It folded three years ago. I took a job as a typist at an import-export outfit.”

  Frederick looked at her curiously. “What about university?”

  She might as well have cried for the moon. “I wasn’t going to go from one tower to another,” she said. “Don’t look like that; really, I like the work. It’s been good for me. I wouldn’t have thought it, but I’m far better at figures than I ever was at parsing poetry. My parents are probably rolling in their graves, but there it is. I seem to have a bent for business.”

  To her surprise, he didn’t mock her. “Strange what we discover about ourselves, isn’t it? I never thought I’d take to farming.”

  “You plant coffee?” Bea had said something the other day about coffee bushes.

  “Among other things. We experimented with indigo, but that turned out to be a bust. An informative bust, but a bust nonetheless. It’s still trial and error out here,” he said. “You can never tell what will hit.”

  “It sounds very exciting.”

  “Exciting and maddening all at the same time. We didn’t know anything about it when we came. I’d read books and thought that was enough.” Frederick smiled wryly at his own expense. There was a humility about him there hadn’t been before. It was not displeasing. Not at all.

  “I take it that didn’t work?” said Addie politely, maintaining a careful distance.

  There was something very disarming about his smile. “The experts go on about soil acidity and proper growing conditions and this altitude and that fertilizer, but when it comes down to it, you don’t know what will work until you try it. Then there are locusts, drought—all the things they never tell you about when they’re touting the benefits of growing coffee.”

  “Not exactly a golden goose, then?”

  “No. It’s worth it, though,” he added. “Despite all that. There’s nothing like seeing that first crop of coffee berries and thinking, How in the hell did we manage that?”

  “Like Candide,” said Addie, smiling. “Cultivating your garden.”

  Frederick leaned on his walking stick. “In the best of all possible worlds.”

  She couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not.

  “What’s that over there?” she said instead, pointing to a rectangular structure, open at the sides and roofed with closely woven fronds. “It looks like something Swiss Family Robinson might have built.”

  “That’s the coffee nursery. It’s where we keep the seedlings until they’re large enough to be planted.”

  As he explained the workings of the nursery and the vagaries of coffee planting, Addie let his words wash over her as she looked him over, older, browner, and yet, somehow, more solid. The brooding Rochester she had fancied herself in love with in London didn’t exist; it seemed as though he’d left that aspect of his nature behind along with London. She remembered him always surrounded by a cloud of smoke, in the unnatural half-light of an underground club. That man, urbane and cynical, had nothing to do with the man so enthusiastically propounding planting techniques.

  It made her more than a little uneasy. She’d known—or, at least, knew now—how to deal with that man. She didn’t know how to handle this one. She couldn’t reconcile this Frederick with the old one; it was like seeing two photographic exposures, one imposed over the other, the outlines blurring and neither quite right.

  “Sorry,” he said, breaking off. “I’m boring you, aren’t I? You didn’t come out here for a lecture on coffee cultivation.”

  “Why not?” she said. “It’s shameful. I’ve been drinking it for years with no idea where it came from. Is that the coffee? I’d never imagined the beans would be red. I always pictured them as brown.”

  “We call them cherries,” he said. “And they do turn brown, once they’ve been roasted.”

  Addie scrounged for something else to say, something safely impersonal. “Why is it only women working in the fields?”

  Frederick came to stand beside her, looking out over the fields. “We tried to recruit men when we started off here and they wouldn’t come. They were all right with the ploughing and digging, but once the plants were in the ground the weeding and picking are women’s work. It’s very different here,” he said, as Bea had said the night before.

  “Yes, I can see that,” said Addie. She lifted her face to the sun. In the coffee fields, the women were singing as they worked. To the far left, she could see the shadows of the mountains, purple in the distance. “But beautiful.”

  “It is, rather, isn’t it?” Frederick looked out across his kingdom, and his expression was something like what it had been when he had looked at his daughter, fond and proud. Bracing himself on his stick, he turned to look at Addie. “I never thanked you for what you did for Njombo last night. It was very good of you.”

  “Anyone with the proper training would have done the same,” she said quickly. “I’d seen worse, during— Well, you know.”

  Frederick looked out over the coffee plants, the shadowed hills in the distance. “Out here, the War feels a very long way away.” He shook his head. “It was a very long way away. I’m surprised you remembered all that.”

  Addie tucked her hair back behind her ear. “I volunteer once a week at a charity hospital in the East End. It’s the maternity ward,” she admitted, “so it’s not entirely applicable, but I do still see my share of needles and aether.”

  Frederick leaned against his stick. “You should talk to Joanie Grigg—Lady Grigg, I should say. She’s the governor’s wife. She’s just launched a project to open a maternity home in Nairobi. She’d be delighted to have someone else with some experience on board.”

  “I’d—” Addie caught herself just in time. What was she thinking? This was only a visit, after all, a chance to see Bea. “I don’t imagine I’ll be staying long enough for that.”

  Frederick plucked up his stick. “Of course,” he said. “You’ll be wanting to get back to your— What was his name?”

  “David.” She didn’t want to talk about David, not with Frederick. It made her feel somehow disloyal, although to whom and why she couldn’t quite say.

  Frederick started towards the coffee sheds, steps and words speeding up at the same time. “Do you mind terribly if we cut our walk short? I have some accounts to see to. It’s the one bane of my life here, the bookkeeping. Well, that and the locusts, and of the two, the bookkeeping’s the worse. The numbers never do add up.”

  “May I help?” She wasn’t quite sure why she offered. Curiosity, perhaps? Or simply boredom. She’d lost the habit of leisure years ago. “I do have some bookkeeping experience.”

  Frederick slowed, looking down at her in a way she remembered all too well. “You’re a guest,” he said.

  Addie shoved her too-large hat back on her head. “I do wish you and Bea would stop saying that. I like to work. I’ve got used to it. I’m not v
ery good at being idle gracefully.”

  “In that case, I’ll take you up on that offer.” He raised a brow. “I warn you, you’ll probably regret it. The books are on their way to being my own personal Augean stables.”

  Addie nodded briskly. “Take me to it and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Frederick squinted down at her. “Is there anything you can’t do? Build a submarine, translate from the Japanese?”

  Addie thought for a moment and then grinned. “Stay on the back of a horse. That’s Bea’s forte.” Back soon, Bea had said. It had to be nearly noon already. “Where is Bea?”

  Frederick looked out towards the road, his expression grim.

  “Riding,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  Kenya, 1926

  “Altimeter … Oil gauge…” Bea squinted at the instruments on the control panel. This was only her second time behind the controls, and, if all went well, her first solo flight. “It all seems in order.”

  “Seems?” drawled Val, perched on the tail behind her. “I know not ‘seems.’ Check it again.”

  Bea rolled her eyes but complied. It was his aeroplane, after all, and aeroplanes weren’t exactly thick on the ground in the colony, for all that there was talk of a new airstrip and an aerodrome. By the time that aerodrome was up, she fully intended to have her A license. It took sixteen hours of airtime to earn; so far, she’d clocked one. Val had a dangerous habit of providing other distractions.

  But not today. Today she was determined to get into the air. She’d woken at dawn, left a note for Addie, and made the drive to the makeshift airstrip in less than two hours, blazing down the potted red roads at a speed that would have horrified her husband. Of course, most things horrified her husband these days.

  It was at times like those that she felt free, with the engine thrumming in front of her and zebra fleeing from the road into the fastness of the bush. Racing through the still-sleeping landscape, the dew still crisp on the grass, she could pretend away the past six years and be back at Ashford again, the real Ashford, with the whole world to conquer. And that was nothing to the feeling of leaving the ground behind entirely, soaring into the air, with all of Kenya spread out beneath her.

  “Don’t forget the control stick.” She felt Val’s lips on the side of her neck, expertly navigating beneath her hair. His hands slid over her shoulders, cupping the sides of her breasts.

  Bea shrugged away. “Stop it, Val.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” His breath was warm in her ear. “Naughty, naughty, Bea.”

  She jerked her head away. “Not now,” she said.

  “Well.” Val leaned back, stretching his arms out above his head. “Aren’t we a little cat this morning. What’s put your claws in a clamp?”

  He looked feline himself, all boneless grace, with the measureless self-satisfaction afforded by knowing his ancestors had been dining off gold plate when others had still been scratching about in the dirt: the Honorable Theophilius Vaughn, the despair of an ancient line. According to his frustrated family, he had both the morals of a cat and all of its nine lives.

  Val called it hypocritical of them. We’ve been sinning for centuries and profiting from it, too, he liked to say. It’s the world that’s changed, not us. Why should we bow to their bourgeois morality? It wasn’t just lip service. He lived down to his creed. As far as Bea could tell, he got away with it because he was so bloody good-looking. She should have known. She’d been playing that game for years.

  The difference, of course, was that he was a man. He didn’t need to marry to secure his place; he didn’t have to ruin his figure having babies. No one called him passé at twenty-seven. He could tell the world to go to hell and live as he liked and everyone loved him for it, professing shock at his excesses in tones of horrified admiration that were more a compliment than a condemnation. Everyone had a story about Val. Many of them were even true.

  A fallen angel, that was what he was. Lucifer, in human form, as beautiful as an old statue and about a million times more carnal. He had the black hair and brilliant blue eyes of the Vaughns and something more besides, a restless carelessness that bordered on cruelty. It was all maddeningly attractive.

  Most of the time.

  “Nothing,” said Bea shortly. “Nothing at all.”

  Val took a small porcelain box from his pocket and flipped it open. “If you’re not going to entertain me…” He scattered a few grains on his wrist and sniffed, elegantly, before offering the box to her. “A vast improvement over snuff, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Bea waved it aside. “I’m not in the mood.”

  She’d partaken before, but the euphoria always faded, just like everything else. No matter how many men she took to her bed, how many fences she leaped, how much gin she downed, how many lions she stalked, it was always the same; the thrill was shorter and shorter lived, leaving her craving more. It was like trying to slake one’s thirst on champagne; each sip left one more parched than before.

  But flying—that was different. Up in the air, she didn’t have to care about anything, not the husband who despised her, the family who had disowned her, the adoring little cousin who was neither so little nor adoring anymore.

  Val snapped the lid of the snuffbox shut. “Goodness,” he said. “It must be serious.”

  Bea pushed back her goggles. “You promised me a lesson.”

  Val was obviously in one of his provoking moods. “I promised a lesson. I never specified the kind.” He ran a finger down the open collar of her shirt. “You need to be more careful when negotiating your devil’s bargains.”

  Despite herself, she leaned into his touch, knowing too well by now just what his hands and lips could do, the temporary oblivion they provided.

  “What else could you possibly have to teach me?” she demanded huskily.

  Dropping his hand, Val jumped lightly off the side of the plane. “Patience, perhaps?”

  Bea’s chest burned where he’d touched her. She could feel her nipples pebbling under the fine linen of her shirt. From his smirk, he could see it, too.

  Damn him. Damn him and damn that abominable smile of his.

  Bea yanked the collar of her shirt back into place. “Weren’t you the one who said patience is only a virtue when there’s something worth waiting for?”

  “One of my less esteemed ancestors. But close enough. Was that meant to wound me?” He pressed a hand to his heart. “I am slain. I die. Alas.”

  Bea wasn’t in the mood. “Just take me up in the air.”

  “I’ve upset you.” He cupped her face in his hand, stroking the hair back from her brow with his index finger, all tender solicitude. “My poor little earthbound angel. Still trying to get back to the heavens.”

  Ordinarily, she might have laughed at him, but his words cut a little too close to home. She’d so hoped that Addie would provide a bridge back to Ashford—but she’d been expelled from the Garden as firmly as Bea. It was so bloody unfair. All she’d done was do what Marcus had done, trying to get some of her own back, but she had broken the cardinal rule. She had been caught. That, not her adultery, was the unforgivable sin.

  Bea batted at his hand. “Where do you get these ridiculous lines? From the talkies? You need a better script, darling. I liked you better when you were taking your lines from—oh, whoever that poet was.”

  “You really are appallingly ignorant,” he said.

  In his smoky voice, even the insult sounded like a caress. That didn’t take the sting out of it, though. It was as though Fate was conspiring to assault her with her ignorance from all corners. She knew nothing about coffee farming, nothing about nursing; she couldn’t quote poets or bandy philosophers.

  Last night had been dreadful. It had been bad enough standing by while Addie sewed up Njombo, but dinner had been an unmitigated nightmare, Frederick picking at her, Addie speaking coolly of her job and her flat and her friends, friends who weren’t Bea’s friends, people who weren’t in Debrett’s, people w
ho did things, who made things. The new order.

  When had it all changed? Not so very long ago, Addie used to look to her for advice and guidance, and not just Addie. An entire season of debutantes had taken their cue from Bea, copying her dresses, aping her hairstyles. If she wore a diamond clip, a hundred diamond clips would spring up across London. It had been a glorious game. Sometimes, she would commit absurdities just for the fun of watching others copy them.

  It had all gone and she didn’t know how to get it back.

  She felt a sudden surge of impotent rage against her mother, who had tossed her out into the world all unready. Nothing she had been taught had any bearing on this strange new world in which they lived. What did it matter that she could arrange a dinner for eighty in perfect accordance with the rules of precedence or snub an upstart baronet’s wife without even bothering to open her mouth? When it came down to it, her mother’s tutelage had prepared her for nothing, for nothing at all. She ought to have trained as a nurse, like Addie; read her way through the Ashford library, like Addie; gone to lectures and concerts, like Addie.

  Oh, bother Addie. And bother Val, too.

  “I hadn’t thought it was for my mind that you wanted me,” she said. “If you want a lady don, try the droopy-stocking brigade at Oxbridge. I’m sure you’ll all have a heavenly time quoting at one another.”

  Val yawned, unconcerned. He had the thickest hide of anyone she knew. It would take nothing short of a charging rhino to pierce that armor of ego. “It was Donne, my little savage. John Donne, undone. ‘License my roving hands and let them go.…’” He swung his legs over to the side, sliding to the ground. “Only you aren’t in the mood to license anything today, are you?”

  “It’s my license that’s at issue,” she said crossly. “You’re meant to be teaching me to fly.”

  He leaned both arms against the side of the plane. “And don’t I do that?” The sun glinted blue off his black hair.

  “Not that way. I’ll never get my A license if I don’t get this crate up in the air.”

  “Don’t insult the Moth.” Val stroked the silver siding with more care than he ever exercised with her. “She’ll never fly you into the sun if you do.”