I'll See You in Paris (34 page)

I beg of you, keep on your best behavior! Or they'll replace me with someone who can handle the job!

And she would've done it too, had Pru felt at all assured that Mrs. Spencer wanted her to stay. More likely she'd cackle and promptly toss Pru's baggage out onto the pavement.
Cheers and good luck!

“Why won't she discuss him?” Win said. Sunny, the latest topic he tormented himself with. “They were together for eons. Before the marriage. A dozen years after. Yet she treats him like a slightly dim and irritating neighbor best left ignored.”

“I'm not sure that's wholly unique,” Pru said. “When talking marriage.”

“She chased him for decades, though! Relentlessly! From the time she was a young girl!” Win slammed a pencil onto his desk. “That's it. I've determined Gladys Deacon is incapable of love.”

“She's had fifty-plus lovers and
that's
the conclusion you've made?”

“Lovers and love are two vastly different concepts. She's too cold for true love. Too calculating.”

“Come on, Seton,” Pru said. “Mrs. Spencer has been in love. She's fallen out of love and she's also had her heart broken more than once. You can't blame her for being a little cynical.”

“Who, exactly, did she ever love? Other than herself, of course.”

“Jesus, you really are thick,” Pru said. “Allow me to quote from
your
research. ‘You are not a person to me. You are an
état d'esprit et d'âme.
' In English: you are my spirit and my soul.”

“Bloody hell. You're back at it with the Berenson rubbish,” Win said, turning away from his typewriter and toward her. “Why are you so hung up on him?”

“I'm not hung up on him, but the duchess was. ‘Her spirit and her soul.' Surely you can see it.”

“It's all for show. GD's an unmitigated bootlicker. You know this. She called Berenson's wife a honey bear or some treacle. It's part of the veneer. She always ingratiates herself before moving in for the kill.”

“She is indeed a sweet-talker,” Pru said. “When she wants to be. But the buttering up of Mary was a case of keeping one's friends close and her enemies closer.”

“I can't buy it.”

“Mrs. Spencer called herself Maenad when she was with Berenson.
Maenad
. A mythological creature frenzied with wine and lust.”

“And he called her ‘mannequinlike and repellent.'”

“Yeah, after it ended,” Pru said. “You've seen the love letters.”

“As well as the thistle she mailed him to demonstrate her prickly disposition.”

“Okay, then, whom did she run to after the war ended?”

“Her mother's corpse. Dead in the salon at the unicorn castle.”

“And after that?”

“She went to find her sister,” Win said.

“Exactly. She showed up at Edith's door, not to break the sad news of their mother's death, which she'd already done via telegram, but to coax Edith into helping her find Berenson, who'd gone to America for good by then.”

“You're right, she did try to find BB,” Win said. “But you're looking at it the wrong way. Distraught by the war's fallout, GD first went to her mother, who was already dead. And then she went to her father. Her de facto father in the form of Bernard Berenson, since her real one was long since gone.”

“Jesus!” Pru said and smacked her hands on his desk. “Cut it out with the father figure nonsense. You're using it as an excuse. Fifteen years' difference. That's nothing.”

“I wouldn't call it nothing. It's a whole person. An almost-debutante.”

“There is no amount of time, of years, that love can't bridge.”

“Love? Bridging? You're not getting whimsical on me, are you, Valentine? I need one normal-acting person around here.”

“‘We will make long walks,'” she started.

It was a quote, from a letter written by Mrs. Spencer, which Win had in his desk. Several months before arriving at the Grange, he'd traveled to I Tatti, Berenson's Italian estate, which had been donated to Harvard upon his death.

Win flattered the woman in charge of the Berenson papers into letting him make copies and so all the evidence Pru needed was in Win's very possession. But when it came to Berenson and Mrs. Spencer and fifteen-year age gaps, it was as though Win was suddenly illiterate, unable to read.

“‘We will make long walks,'” Pru said again.

“Miss Valentine, that's enough…”

“‘You will tell me everything. In the aftermath we will come home bringing to your comfortable armchairs that slight weariness exquisite at twilight and it will be a year before dinner is served.'”

Pru paused, hand on hip. Win fought the urge to return to his typewriter. There was something about the way she quoted the passage that made his skin feel like it was burning.

“Nothing,” she said. “You have nothing to say to that?”

“The words are lovely. Dreamy, even. But that's all they are. Words. Now if you don't mind, I have to create a few of my own.”

“You are maddeningly dense sometimes.”

“Pru, she
married
the duke.”

“Yes! I know! Because he was the duke! And it's what she thought her mother wanted!” Pru flipped around to face the far wall, tears threatening her eyes. “She told us outright that she'd rather be with someone interesting than become yet another duchess.”

When she turned back around, Win was crooked over his desk, banging away.

“Look at me,” she said. “Look.”

“No time, luv. Gotta get this story pecked out,” he said, steadfastly maintaining his over-the-typewriter hunch. “We can chitchat about dukes and art connoisseurs later. I'm on a deadline here.”

“Stop typing and look at me,” Pru said. “If you have a single ounce of humanity in your entire godforsaken body, look at me.”

“Unfortunately I do not.”

“Win.”

Finally he removed his hands from the keys. Then he looked up.

“Can't you admit it?” Pru said.

She stared at him with such intensity, such a mixture of power and fondness, his heart began to flounder all over the place.

“Admit what?” he said with a squeak.

“That there was some chance Mrs. Spencer loved Berenson. That she has some modicum of regret about the way she conducted her romantic life. Does that?” She pointed toward the door. “Does that seem like a woman happy with whom she's loved?”

“I suppose it's possible…” Win said with a small gulp. “But their age difference.”

“Enough with their ages!” she cried out. “How can you say that when you know how I feel about you?”

“How you feel about me?” Another gulp. It was growing increasingly difficult for Win to breathe. “You called me tyrannical. Is that what you're referring to?”

He was trying for a laugh but falling short, like he so often did.

Dear God, he wanted her to say it. Win desperately wanted Pru to jump out of her reserved, smooth skin and make a passionate declaration about how much she loved him and how they'd be together, whatever it took. Screw the age difference. Sod off to visa expirations and return trips to America. They were meant to be together.

He needed her to say it because he could not.

“Is that how you're going to be?” she asked, the disappointment like gray paint spilling across her face.

“Well, ha-ha,” Win said. “If there's one thing you can count on with thirty-four-year-old bachelors it is their complete inability to break a pattern.”

“You're going to make me say it, aren't you?”

“Say what? Miss Valentine, I really need to get back to writing.”

“Fine, you pansy. I must be a lot more damaged than I give myself credit for because for some inexplicable reason I've fallen for you. I don't even care that the war is ending now instead of before and that Charlie is out of the picture. I don't! Because I'm a horrible person.”

“You're not horrible,” Win said in a whisper. “You're the greatest person I've ever known.”

“I'm supposed to be in mourning. But somehow, in this wreck of a house, in my wreck of a life, I've fallen in love. I've fallen in love with a salty, ornery writer who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

“Well, that is certainly true. Laurel…”

“I've fallen in love with you. And it pisses me off.”

 

Sixty-one

BANBURY RAILWAY STATION

BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

NOVEMBER 2001

 

On the twenty-fifth of June in the year 1921, Gladys Deacon became the Duchess of Marlborough. Gladys was forty years old to the duke's fifty-two.

In the months leading up to the nuptials, Gladys was headline news, mostly thanks to her own efforts. If she was going to retire to the marriage pasture, the duchess-to-be wanted to go out with fanfare.

And so she reveled in her waning glory days. Gladys invited sculptors and painters to her home. She arranged salon after illustrious salon and made Proust sign a blood oath promising he'd visit Blenheim no less than once per season. The First World War put an end to the Belle
É
poque but Gladys Deacon wanted to bid proper farewell to the Gilded Age.

Finally their June wedding arrived, twenty-seven years after Gladys first started pining for the duke. For the event, Sunny donned a gray, double-breasted suit with cutaway tails, a style that heralded a new trend in menswear.

Gladys wore a dress of old lace cut from a single piece, with a wreath of myrtle and orange blossom in her hair. Later in the day, she changed into a navy blue embroidered chemise.

Guests included Princess George of Greece, Gladys's youngest sister Dorothy (sister Edith was absent), the Maharajah of Rapurthala, Princesse de Polignac, Princesse Murat, and Edith Wharton. Proust also attended, dressed in a snakeskin gown that hung to his ankles.

Despite promises made in blood, this would be the last time Gladys saw Proust, her companion and closest friend. Shortly after the duke and duchess wed, Proust fell ill. He died in 1922, never once able to visit her as Lady Marlborough, never able to save her from Blenheim, or from herself.

—J. Casper Augustine Seton,

The Missing Duchess: A Biography

They stood in the train station, staring at the departures board. London Marylebone 10:07.

“Are you sure you don't want to come?” Laurel asked as she clung to the strap of her honey leather tote. “It's only a day trip but there's a lot you can see in a day. Or are you going to rebuff my London offer a second time?”

“I'm going to rebuff,” Annie said, feeling woozy as a result of too much wine at the previous night's dinner. “I'm pretty tired.”

Also, she didn't want to go to London. Not in that way. Short. Brief. A passing-through while Laurel signed the papers, disposing of the Grange forever. In twenty-four hours they'd be on a plane to Virginia. But in Banbury, backhoes and bulldozers would start rolling in.

“Tomorrow?” Annie had balked earlier that morning, as Laurel stood in the bathroom doorway wearing only a towel. “We're leaving tomorrow? Just like that, the negotiations are done?”

Nicola had given her advance warning, but it still felt like a fresh blow.

“Yep, all parties have come to an agreement,” Laurel said. “I was the last holdout and I finally caved. I'm practically giddy to be rid of that eyesore.”

Sure, Mom,
Annie thought.
Eyesore. That's all it was.

How Laurel felt about the building was as obvious as if she'd written it down, or recorded it on tape. When her mother walked into Win's room she clasped her stomach, then immediately dropped to her knees by the bed.

“Mom!” Annie shouted, unable to hide her surprise, despite knowing the story behind the room and the man who once lived in it.

Laurel was not the type for swooning, or vapors, or whatever it was that was happening. Annie had never seen her mom so weak.

“Are you okay?” she'd asked.

“Ha-ha! Yes!” Laurel jumped to her feet. She looked at Annie like she hadn't remembered she was there. “Yes, yes, I'm fine. I tripped. Clumsy me.”

The only clumsy thing was Laurel's struggle to hide her reaction.

“Annie, I'm sorry this trip has been such a debacle,” Laurel said, at the train station, as the board flickered overhead. “I didn't think it'd be like this.”

“It's not a debacle but I'm kind of ticked we're leaving. What about the ‘girl time' you promised? All the touristy stuff? And now we're going home? Tomorrow? What a waste of a trip.”

“Annie, we can't stay indefinitely.”

“Why not? You're retired. I'm unemployed as we all know. Seriously, we could hang around for another week. Two weeks! What do we have to get back for?”

“My riding students?” Laurel offered.

“They're in good hands with Margaret,” Annie said. “You've already talked about transitioning more lessons to her anyway. Come on, we can extend the trip. At this point, the horses are just an excuse.”

“No,” she said. “They're not. I promise we'll do a big trip in the spring to make up for this. Wherever you want! Turkey? Greece? New Zealand? Bangkok?”

“Bangkok?”

“Yeah, you're not really a Bangkok type.”

“Mom,” Annie said. “I want to be here. Taking this trip. Now.”

“Come with me to London, then! Or stay here and explore on your own. You have the rental car. Check out Blenheim Castle. The day is yours to do whatever you want!”

“What I want is to stay longer than a day.”

“I'm sorry, I can't do it. We have to go home. I don't know how else to explain it to you.”