The English Wife: A Novel

by Lauren Willig

  Annabelle stared out at Janie under the arms of passersby, but not Annabelle as Janie knew her, an artist’s imagination of an Annabelle who was part urchin, part Becky Sharp.

  Mr. Burke’s doing? Janie hadn’t spoken to him since their confrontation two days before. The news had broken last night, in the evening edition of The World. The Journal, The Times, and The Sun scrambled to catch up in the early morning hours.

  Someone tugged on Janie’s skirt. “Miss Van Duyvil?”

  It was one of the newsboys, his ragged jacket inadequate for the weather, his toes showing through the cracks in his shoes.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m to give this to Your Hand Only.” A crumpled piece of paper traveled from his dirty hand to Janie’s.

  “Janie!” It was her mother, turning with outraged majesty.

  Janie hastily tucked the note in her pocket. “A paper, please,” she said in a louder voice and handed the boy a silver dollar. She echoed a phrase she had heard Anne use. “Keep the change.”

  The boy grinned at her and skipped away, leaving her in possession of the morning edition of The World featuring her sister-in-law’s name blazoned in type fully three inches high. It left dark smudges on Janie’s lilac gloves.

  “Janie!”

  “Coming, Mother.”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the broadsheet. “There’s no need to encourage them by purchasing that trash.”

  “Those boys need to earn their bread somehow.” Janie hadn’t expected herself to speak back. Neither had her mother. “Didn’t Great-Grandfather Bayard own a newspaper?”

  “That was different.”

  “Yes,” drawled Anne, who was as much a Bayard as Janie, a fact their mother liked to forget. “His didn’t sell.”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil favored her daughter and her niece with an expression of equal displeasure. “Come this way and don’t dawdle.”

  Anne rolled her eyes at Janie in a rare moment of good kinship, but picked up her pace all the same. One tended to do what Janie’s mother commanded.

  But not Annabelle. Annabelle or Georgiana, or whomever she was. Annabelle had never leapt at her mother’s command.

  Falling a little behind, Janie wiggled the piece of paper out from her pocket. It only took a quick glance to scan the contents. The ink was bold and black, the writing angular, but strangely delicate. Elegant.

  They didn’t hear it from me. JB

  Janie shoved the note back in her pocket, torn between a curious sort of elation and fury. Giving Mr. Tilden her hand, she allowed the lawyer to help her into the private train car her mother had borrowed from an acquaintance for the occasion. The interior was sumptuously decorated in mahogany and blue velvet, a gilt-edged pier glass reflecting Janie’s scowling face.

  “Don’t purse your lips like that,” said her mother automatically.

  “No, Mother.” Janie folded her hands in her lap and crossed her legs at the ankle as the train set off, the incriminating edition of The World sprawling on the table between them like an obscenity.

  It had been on a train like this that she had told Mr. Burke about Mr. Lacey’s visit. On a train like this but not like this. In the obscene silence of the private car, Janie found herself yearning for the bustle of the public carriage, for the tea that slopped over the sides of the cheap train cups, served with milk past its prime and sugar in discolored lumps.

  It wasn’t Mr. Burke’s name on the byline. Which didn’t mean anything, of course. But Janie didn’t believe—couldn’t believe—he would lie to her straight out. By omission, perhaps. By wiggling around the corners of truthfulness. But this was too blatant.

  Tentatively, Janie put out a finger, drawing the paper a little closer. Her mother was occupied in her own thoughts, her face a tragic mask. Anne was prowling about the car, inspecting the appointments. Mr. Tilden was attempting to hide behind a large sheaf of official-looking papers, clearly wishing himself anywhere but where he was.

  FULL STORY ON PAGE SEVEN. Janie flipped to the seventh page. There was a fulsome account of the consequence of the Laceys of Lacey Abbey, sketches of the abbey, a family tree dating back to the Conqueror. Mr. Giles Lacey declares definitively that the wife of Mr. Bayard Van Duyvil was not his cousin, but a ward of his late uncle, a charity child.

  Janie gave up pretending not to read the paper. She held it in both hands, flipping through from front to back. Mr. Giles Lacey had a great deal more to say on the matter. But there was no mention on page seven, page eight, or any of the related editorials, of the Ali Baba Theatre or a play called Eleven and One Nights.

  “I should never have allowed Bay to go abroad.”

  Her mother’s voice startled Janie. The paper flopped from her hands, onto the carpet. Janie scrambled for it, but her mother didn’t seem to notice, sitting straight-spined on the settee, staring out at the winter gray sprawl of the growing city.

  “Don’t you think Bay might have had something to say about that?” Anne rested a hand against a cherrywood table, swaying gracefully with the motion of the train. “He was well past his majority.”

  “Age has nothing to do with it,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil fiercely, and Janie felt herself pull back a little at the force of her mother’s gaze. “At home, I might have protected him from fortune hunters.” Her face contorted as her eyes fell to the paper in Janie’s lap, to Annabelle’s engraved image. “I might have saved him from her.”

  “We have no proof of it.” Janie flinched at her mother’s displeasure, but soldiered on. “That Annabelle was … someone else.”

  George, murmured her brother’s voice.

  “It’s in print,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil repressively, and Janie wasn’t sure whether she was being facetious or serious. “They wouldn’t have printed it if they didn’t believe it.”

  “That’s not what you said a week ago,” commented Anne, eying her aunt coolly. “Lies, lies, all lies.”

  “Sometimes,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil, the words coming out in staccato, “justice works in strange ways. That is all I desire. Justice. For my son.”

  “Justice?” Anne raised a well-shaped brow. “You turned Mr. Lacey from the door, as I recall. For casting aspersions on the family name.”

  “Perhaps…” Mr. Tilden spoke with the diffidence of one used to dealing with difficult patrons. “An action for libel…”

  “No.” The word shivered through the room. Mrs. Van Duyvil raised her chin. She looked, Janie thought irrelevantly, like Joan of Arc, leading soldiers into battle. First to victory and later to the pyre. “As much as it pains me, I believe these … scandal mongers have the right of it. My son fell prey to a scheming adventuress. Had I known … had I known…”

  The words had the quality of a dirge, a lament for what might have been, had there been no Grand Tour, no English wife.

  “What of the family name?” Anne leaned forward in a whisper of taffeta and lace. “What of your grandson’s reputation?”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil’s lip curled. “When have you ever cared for either?”

  “I,” said Anne silkily, “have no name. Isn’t that what you keep reminding me? But Annabelle was a Van Duyvil.”

  “Annabelle,” said Mrs. Van Duyvil, “killed my son.”

  Janie shivered at her mother’s words. Not angry, no. But cold. So very cold. So cold and sure. Her mother had always been implacable in her opinions, ruthless to those she believed had wronged her, but her dislikes had always been human in scale. This was what hatred sounded like, not the little grudges of daily life, but true hatred, the sort that ground continents to dust and acknowledged no cost in the pursuit of vengeance.

  “Tea?” said Mr. Tilden. A liveried footman stood swaying at the gap between the cars, holding a heavy silver tray, laden with whisper-thin porcelain.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Anne. “Train travel does make one’s throat terribly dry, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Tilden eagerly. “There was one occasion where it was nece
ssary for me to take the train to Saratoga Springs. When I arrived in Florida, it was to discover that I had entirely lost my voice.”

  He looked hopefully at his client, but Mrs. Van Duyvil sat impervious, ignoring the tea tray that had been set in front of her. Janie busied herself with the cups.

  “Tea?” she said tentatively, holding out a cup to her mother.

  Her mother looked at her as though she were speaking another language. “She killed him. She killed my son.”

  Janie bit down on her lip. “We don’t know—”

  “Why?” Her mother’s voice was like a lash. “Because the coroner hasn’t pronounced on it? Mr. Lacey knew. I know.”

  Anne lowered herself into a gilt-backed chair. “It’s amazing that shouldn’t be sufficient for a jury. Mrs. Van Duyvil says it is so, and so must it be.”

  There was a horrible pause as Mr. Tilden attempted to disappear into his teacup.

  Mrs. Van Duyvil looked silently at Anne. “I should never have taken you in.”

  “And let the old cats call you ungenerous?” Anne reached across the table, seizing a tea cake. “Don’t worry. I always knew you didn’t want me.”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil didn’t trouble to deny it. “It was your influence over Bay. You encouraged him to defy me. He would never have made such a disastrous marriage but for you.”

  “Oh, Aunt Alva.” Anne made a show of lifting her lace-edged handkerchief to her lips as though overcome. “You haven’t the first idea about your son, have you?”

  “And you did?”

  Anne lowered her handkerchief. “Would you like to know a thing or two about your perfect boy?”

  “Ladies, ladies,” pled Mr. Tilden. “Do not discompose yourselves.”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil breathed in deeply through her nose. To Mr. Tilden, she said sharply, “How does one go about offering a reward in the press?”

  Mr. Tilden blinked. “Dear lady?”

  Mrs. Van Duyvil rose from her seat, catching a hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. “I want my son’s … concubine found. I want her found and brought to justice. And you,” she said to Anne. “You will endeavor to behave like a lady. Have I taught you nothing?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she gestured imperiously to the silent footman to open the connecting door and swept into the adjoining car in a rustle of black crêpe.

  Anne leaned back against the velvet cushions of the chair, her eyes narrowed on the gleaming mahogany of the door.

  “Oh, no, Aunt Alva,” she said, very softly. “You’ve taught me a very great deal indeed.”

  New York, 1896

  May

  “I’ve had tea set out in the conservatory,” said Anne brightly. “Annabelle, darling, won’t you join me while the men enjoy their port?”

  It was very hard to say no to someone who was already leading you away, her arm clamped firmly through yours.

  “Don’t hurry yourselves,” called Anne gaily over her shoulder. “It’s been ages since I last saw dear Annabelle.”

  “It’s been a month,” said Georgie.

  “You must come to town more frequently. Will we see you in Newport this summer?” Anne kept up a flow of inconsequential chatter as they passed through a medieval hall, a baroque music room, and a sitting room of indeterminate style to the semitropical confines of a miniature conservatory.

  Georgie tried not to crane her neck to look back at the dining room. Bay was right. It had been a very good lunch. The linens were Irish; the porcelain English; the food and wine were French, course after course, delicately flavored, perfectly cooked, each dish paired with the appropriate wine.

  But Georgie had taken very little pleasure in it. Something had made her uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just the unaccustomed snugness of clothes that were too old and too small. It wasn’t Anne’s archness. Anne was always arch, and worse since her marriage to Teddy, when her knowing laugh had become an armor against embarrassment.

  No, it was Bay. He had been visibly awkward. Bay, who was always at ease in any situation. He had applied himself to his food, addressing any statements to the architect to somewhere in the vague proximity of the man’s right shoulder. As for Mr. Pruyn, he had devoted himself exclusively to the ladies, which might have been unremarkable but for the glances he cast to the far end of the table when he thought himself unobserved.

  And then there was Anne. Anne who had been all too clearly relishing the tension at her luncheon table, forcing Bay to address Mr. Pruyn, loudly abjuring Georgie to admire Mr. Pruyn’s work, made in close consultation with Bay—“an attempt to turn your memories of your home into flesh, wasn’t that how you put it, Bay?”

  The conservatory was too warm, humid with freshly watered plants. Rare orchids bloomed in pots; vines climbed the walls. Georgie could feel her petticoats sticking to her legs, wilting in the damp heat. In the winter, the room would be a paradise, a miracle of bloom in the face of frost. Right now, it was oppressive, too many strong scents in too small a space, too lush, too bright.

  What if Anne hadn’t invited the architect to lunch? Bay hadn’t expected him to be there, that much had been clear. Georgie would have pictured a portly, bearded man with a cigar clamped between his lips, a man with a wife and daughters in a grand house on Long Island and a mistress tucked away in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It would never have occurred to her to imagine otherwise.

  “Yes, right there,” Anne was saying to the maid, in her starched cap and apron, who wheeled in a tray laden with delicacies, as though they hadn’t just dined on turbot in cream sauce and veal roulade and vegetables so stewed in cream and butter as to bear no resemblance to themselves. “Sugar?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “How brave,” said Anne, smiling at her over the Royal Crown Derby. “To take the bitter instead of the sweet.”

  If that was innuendo, Georgie wasn’t even sure what it was supposed to mean. “Where is Teddy?” she asked bluntly.

  Anne busied herself over her own cup, her golden head catching the sunlight refracted through the glass panels of the roof. “Oh, somewhere about a horse,” she said vaguely.

  “A mare, no doubt,” said Georgie, taking a sip of her tea, which had been brewed too weak. Americans, no matter how they aped English manners, no matter how they imported hampers from Fortnum’s, failed to understand tea.

  “No doubt. My husband is very fond of horseflesh. And he has the means to indulge himself.” Anne dropped a lump of sugar into her tea with a set of elaborate silver tongs. A jester in motley formed the handle, his legs the pincers. “Not all of us expect our husbands to live in our pockets.”

  Georgie fought the urge to snap back. “We are simple souls,” she said, in a fair imitation of her husband’s mild tones. “Content with country matters.”

  Bay would have caught the double meaning in that.

  “Oh, yes, very simple,” said Anne, dropping the silver jester down among the sugar lumps. “Tell me, my dear, how do you like the plans for your new house?”

  Georgie bared her teeth in a smile. “I had never imagined that Bay planned anything so extravagant. But it’s very like him. He knows I have no interest in mere jewels.”

  Anne’s hand went instinctively to the diamond-and-ruby brooch at her neck. Teddy’s guilt offerings kept the jewelers of New York and Paris very happy indeed.

  Anne straightened in her chair. “It was only to be a doll’s house at first. For Violet.”

  “Viola,” Georgie corrected her.

  “But once Bay met Mr. Pruyn, why, the design simply blossomed. They’ve been plotting and planning for months now.” Anne paused, to allow that salient detail to sink in. She rearranged a fold of her skirt. “You would be astounded at their devotion to detail.”

  “Bay has an eye for beauty,” said Georgie, for want of anything else to say. She had put too much sugar in her tea. Its sweetness set her teeth on edge.

  Anne leaned back, seductive even when there was no one to seduce. “But does he, real
ly? Bay has never been a fool for a pretty face.” She arched a brow at Georgie in what Georgie was fairly sure was meant to be an insult. Georgie waited, impassive, until Anne, with a shrug, resumed. “If anything attracts Bay, it’s … a quality of the mind. Ideas act on him like a slender ankle on my husband. When he met Mr. Pruyn…”

  “Yes?” said Georgie, looking Anne in the eye, and wishing her hands weren’t shaking quite so much on her saucer.

  “Well,” said Anne brightly. “Bay has been so dull in the country. The poor man deserves a new interest.”

  She looked so smug, Anne, so pleased with herself.

  Georgie felt a sick weight at the base of her stomach. That was what this was all about. Not just a new interest, but a new interest of Anne’s choosing. Something to bring Bay back to her, to bind him to her.

  Georgie breathed in through her nose, feeling her dress too tight around her ribs. Beneath her lids, she could see the beads of a reticule glinting in the sunlight as Bay kissed Charlie Ogden—no, as Charlie Ogden kissed Bay. It was there, in the triumph Anne didn’t bother to conceal, the fact that she knew something about Bay that Georgie didn’t, that she had found something that Bay wanted. Dangling a man in front of him like a bauble, like a toy.

  “Bay has plenty of interests in the country,” said Georgie tightly. “His children, for one.”

  “My dear, have you ever known a man who could abide the nursery? It’s all very sweet to play milkmaid for a season, but, eventually, the fantasy has to end.” There was a sharp note in Anne’s voice. “I’m sure Bay has been enjoying his bucolic pleasures, but one must return to reality eventually. Frankly, I never expected to see Bay married.”

  “And why is that?” There was a buzzing in Georgie’s ears, even though there were no bees in the flowers. This was a sham paradise, the flowers rooted in pots, rather than the ground. Everything was a sham, and Georgie was sick of it, of the pretense and lies and double entendres.