Paris, 1894
June
“What an appalling man.” It was all Georgie could trust herself to say.
“Yes. He is.” Bay summoned up a shadow of a smile as he offered Georgie his arm. “Shall we have that picnic?”
They purchased their hamper, but the savor had gone out of the potted goose liver. They set out their blanket near the large round fountain, too far from shade. The sun burned down on Georgie’s inadequate hat, and the colors of the garden seemed flat and hard, the flowers too garish, the water too bright. The squawks of the puppeteer and the delighted cries of the children grated on Georgie’s ears.
“What did you think of the Comte de Montesquiou?” Bay propped himself on one elbow, his pose a pretense of ease. “He is one of the sights of Paris.”
“I was a sight more interested in his companion. What did he say to you, Bay?”
Bay bowed his head, pretending great interest in a confection of chocolate and cream. “They say the crystal ring on Monsieur de Montesquiou’s finger contains a single tear, but he won’t tell anyone whose. Some say it’s Lamartine’s, others the empress Josephine’s.”
“In that case,” said Georgie tartly, “who did Sir Hugo stick to get the blood to fill his cravat pin?”
“It’s a ruby, I think,” said Bay helpfully, but dropped his eyes to his pastry again at Georgie’s hard look.
“What did Sir Hugo want, Bay? And don’t tell me it was merely to congratulate you on your nuptials.”
“He recognized you from the Ali Baba.” Bay set the pastry aside, uneaten. “I told him the truth.”
“Which is?”
“That you were a gentlewoman.” Bay didn’t raise his head. With difficulty, he said, “He … understood.”
Her husband was a very bad liar. Georgie supposed she ought to be grateful for that. It was one of the qualities she generally admired in him, his earnestness. “What was the price of his understanding?”
The color rose up to the tips of Bay’s ears. “Five hundred francs. I don’t mind the money, Georgie.”
“You might have told me.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.” Bay plucked a blade of grass, bending it between his fingers. “It was bad luck running into Sir Hugo.”
“You knew that we ran the risk of discovery when you married me.” She sounded sharper than she’d meant to. But she minded. She minded terribly that their peace had been disturbed. Over the past month, there were times she had believed herself entirely what she pretended to be. “He won’t be satisfied with five hundred francs.”
“No.” Bay hesitated and then said, “He has invited us to join his party at the Grand Prix. I am to pay him the next installment there.”
“To fund his adventures at Le Chabanais?” It was the most expensive whorehouse in Paris, patronized by the Prince of Wales, among others. Georgie found herself suddenly angry. “You can tell Sir Hugo to find another banker. You won’t frank him again.”
Bay pressed his eyes shut. “What else are we to do, Georgie? If he makes good on his threats—”
“Then we’ll tell the world a thing or two about him.” Her voice was strident. Georgie made herself lower it, leaning her head close to her husband’s. To the world, they must have been the picture of a courting couple, but her words were anything but lover-like. “Actresses hear things, Bay. There was a girl hurt a few years ago while Sir Hugo and his friends were playing at their Hellfire Club. An actress. And that’s only the tip of it.”
Kitty. Her face hard and old beneath her paints. Dozens of others. It would be a wonder if his lordship didn’t have the pox.
“Well? Don’t you imagine Sir Hugo’s rich fiancée might want to know some of the details?”
Bay sat back on his heels, lines on either side of his mouth. “Blackmail for blackmail?”
It was a good job he’d married her; her husband was too good to survive on his own. “Call it measure for measure. Or self-defense, if you will. You’d hardly hold your fire if someone pointed his pistol at you, would you?”
Bay cleared his throat. “That would depend on the circumstances, I would think.”
“This isn’t a discussion of the law in Blackstone, Bay!” There were times when it was well to look at all sides of a situation, others where one needed to act. “If you won’t defend yourself, let me. Let me deal with Sir Hugo.”
Bay made an instinctive movement of negation. “Did I … did I tell you I had a letter from my mother this morning?”
Georgie didn’t know whether to hug him or empty the dregs of their lemonade over his head. He might well have had a letter from his mother, but if it hadn’t been his mother, it would have been something else. Her husband, she was learning, shied from confrontation; his chosen weapon was diversion.
“How very timely,” said Georgie drily.
The color rose in her husband’s cheeks, but he said, doggedly, “It is, at that. She wants us to return to New York.” After a pause, he added, “My sister’s engagement is off.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that would cause you to repine. You didn’t sound very fond of the man.”
“It’s worse. He’s proposed to Anne.”
“Oh, dear.” Georgie was momentarily diverted. “Perhaps she sees something in him?”
“The chance of escaping my mother, perhaps.” Bay nudged a clump of grass with the polished toe of his shoe. “My mother is … well, let’s just say she’s not an easy woman.”
“And I imagine she’s about as pleasant as a nest of hornets about now.” Georgie leaned back on one arm. “Would you be so keen to do your filial duty if it weren’t for Sir Hugo?”
Bay’s eyes met hers, charmingly rueful. “I will admit, our present circumstances add a spur. But,” he added quickly, “I would have wanted to go anyway. For Anne.”
It was his sister, Georgie would have thought, who would be in need of sympathy. She was the one who had been jilted, and publicly. But that was all beside the point. “Sir Hugo won’t just disappear because we cross the ocean.”
“Won’t he? I can’t imagine he’ll follow us to New York.” Bay lifted the lemonade bottle, emptying the dregs over her glass. He offered it to Georgie. “You’ll like Newport, I think.”
He was doing it again, changing the subject. Georgie pushed the glass back at him. “It’s all very well to play ostrich, Bay. But burying your head in the sand doesn’t stop nasty things from creeping up on you. It just stops you seeing them before they strike.”
Bay reached for her hand, balked by the fact that he was still holding the lemonade. The expression on his face made Georgie chuckle. It was a bit rusty, but it was still a laugh. Bay’s face softened.
“You see?” he said. “It’s not so bad as all that.”
Georgie shook her head. “I don’t like to think that Sir Hugo is holding my past over your head. I’d rather be done with him, once and for all.”
“We’d meant to return to New York anyway.” At Georgie’s look, Bay set the lemonade carefully down next to the hamper. “All right. But let me deal with Sir Hugo in my own way? I’d rather not expose you to his unpleasantness.”
Georgie didn’t know whether to be frustrated or touched. “You know what my life was before, Bay. There’s no reason to wrap me in cotton wool.”
Bay reached for her, but paused, letting his hand rest on the blanket between them. “Maybe that’s why I want to wrap you in cotton wool,” he said quietly. “Because I know what you’ve suffered.”
He treated her like a porcelain doll. Not with his words; he was nothing but frank with her, or as frank as Bay could be. It wasn’t his mind he shielded her from, but his body. It was a strange paradox: when they were awake, clothed, strolling arm and arm in the gardens, Georgie had never felt closer to another soul, more loved, more protected. It was at night, in the marital bed, that she felt the gulf between them, that she felt him holding himself apart from her, afraid to hurt her.
It was maddening. From time immemorial, men and women had been coupling behind haystacks, but her husband was too much of a gentleman and she too craven to turn their tentative caresses to good purpose.
I’m not afraid anymore, she wanted to tell him, but she couldn’t find the words. And he would know her for a liar. She was afraid still.
But she was afraid of other things as well. No marriage was a true marriage until it was consummated. Bay had never indicated that he thought of her as anything but a true wife, no matter the irregularity of their courtship. He had written immediately to his mother to announce their union. He had outfitted her as his wife, introduced her as his wife.
But as long as the marriage remained unconsummated, the fear was there.
The lady or the tiger? The marriage bed or no marriage at all?
“Well, don’t,” said Georgie shortly. It was the closest she could come to broaching the topic that had been most on her mind. “You said once you wouldn’t put me in a glass case.”
“Not even a particularly charming one?”
“Bay…”
“Pax!” Bay held up both hands in mock defense. “Aren’t married people meant to have disagreements? We should toast Sir Hugo. He’s helped us to our first argument.”
“If you can call it that,” Georgie grumbled. It wasn’t much of an argument when the other party wouldn’t argue back. Although Bay did, she realized. It was just that he did it so quietly and in such reasonable tones that it was impossible to maintain any sense of being wronged. Carefully, she said, “It doesn’t feel real, does it? Being married.”
“I imagine,” said Bay wryly, “that it will feel more real than you like once you meet my mother. You will instantly be instructed in the vast responsibilities attendant on being a Van Duyvil—and you’ll wish I’d never set foot across the threshold of the Ali Baba.”
“Never that.” She hadn’t meant to speak so vehemently. Displaying that sort of emotion made Georgie feel more naked than she had ever been on the stage. She could say something frivolous, turn it all into a joke; Bay would laugh with her, she knew. But why? If she didn’t want to be set in a case, she shouldn’t put herself in one.
On an impulse, Georgie rose on her knees and pressed a kiss to Bay’s lips, clumsy, inexpert. She felt his start of surprise, his arm close around her waist.
Better to be hanged for a sheep than a lamb, she told herself. Her voice ragged, she said, “If we’re to leave for New York soon, then we’d best make the most of our time here, hadn’t we? It’s nearly time for the cinq à sept.”
“It isn’t quite three.” There was a question in his voice.
Georgie looked into Bay’s blue eyes and wished she were bolder, braver. Facing down Sir Hugo was one thing, propositioning her own husband quite another. Fear made her curt. “I don’t mind the time. If you don’t.”
Bay’s lips twisted in a crooked smile. She felt his fingers fan out against her back, warming her, steadying her. “Though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run?”
“Something like that.” Georgie drew in a shallow breath, wondering where all her words had gone. Her world had narrowed to the space between her body and Bay’s. “It is France, after all.”
Bay gave a choking laugh. “Truer words.” He rose to his feet and held out a hand to her, and Georgie saw that his fingers were shaking. He was, she realized, her own fears easing, as nervous as she. “Shall we retire, Mrs. Van Duyvil?”
“Yes,” said Georgie and put her hand in his.
New York, 1899
January
The bedroom Bay and Annabelle had shared was relentlessly tidy.
It made Janie feel more than a little unclean, pawing through Bay’s and Annabelle’s things, dresses that had never been worn and now never would, books with the pages still uncut, a pristine blotter on a new writing desk in Annabelle’s private sitting room.
Janie retreated to the baronial splendor of the breakfast room, where Mrs. Gerritt had set out tea and toast for her, both of which had long since gone cold. What had she expected, really? A page torn out of a parish register, with the details of Annabelle’s birth? She set the toast down on the plate, recalling, dimly, something Annabelle had told her in one of their rare conversations. Annabelle hadn’t been born in England. She had been born in India, she had said, in a hill station, whatever that was.
Did they keep parish records in India? They must, Janie supposed. One presumed that Colonel Lacey had had his infant daughter baptized. But India was such a long way off.
It was, she thought, really very clever of Giles Lacey to have created a story that could be neither proved nor disproved.
Odd. She hadn’t thought him clever. He’d seemed a poor actor, uncomfortable in his own lines, blustering and awkward when charm had failed. Cunning, then. One didn’t need to be clever to be cunning. One didn’t need to be able to work knots with words like Mr. Burke to achieve a successful deception.
“Will there be anything else, Miss Van Duyvil?”
For a large woman, Mrs. Gerritt was surprisingly light-footed. “No, thank you, Mrs. Gerritt.” The full oddity of the housekeeper waiting at table struck her. The sense of emptiness in the house might be more fact than metaphor. “Where is the rest of the staff?”
“Let go,” said Mrs. Gerritt. She had, Janie vaguely recalled, been a maid in her grandmother’s household when Janie was a child; her husband a tenant farmer’s son. They were as Van Duyvil as the Van Duyvils and stood on no ceremony.
Janie frowned up at her. “By whom?”
“Mrs. Van Duyvil.” The of course was implied. “She didn’t see the point of keeping a full staff for an empty house.”
But it wasn’t empty. The children were still here. And it was, Janie presumed, not her mother but Sebastian who was now the master of this great pile and all it contained. She hadn’t thought of that before. The reading of the will, like everything else, had been delayed while the coroner deliberated.
It was, she thought wryly, very much like her mother to have assumed the authority, without waiting for the imprimatur of law. And why not? It seemed unlikely anyone else would be appointed guardian. They had been an unlucky family, the Van Duyvils. Where there ought to have been a gaggle of them, in her generation there was only her and Bay.
And Anne. But Anne wasn’t a Van Duyvil. She was the daughter of Janie’s mother’s sister, a pale wisp of a woman who had married a war profiteer, a man whose immense energy had flared briefly and then been extinguished in scandal and ruin.
Which left only the two children upstairs in the nursery.
“Mrs. Gerritt?”
Mrs. Gerritt turned, waiting impassively. Her dress was of a dark, heavy fabric, plainly cut, enlivened only by the ring of keys at her waist.
“Has a man inquired here after the children? An Englishman?” Feeling foolish, Janie stumbled on, trying to come up with a story that wouldn’t sound like madness. “We had a call in town from a cousin of Mrs. Van Duyvil and, well, he seemed to think that the children belonged with their family in England.”
Lies, rank lies, but what else was she to say?
“That’s why I came, really,” said Janie, settling for a version of the truth, “to make sure Mr. Lacey didn’t try to remove the children.”
Was it her imagination, or was there a scuffling and scuttling in the walls? She couldn’t imagine Mrs. Gerritt would stand for mice. Even understaffed, the house was painfully clean. Or that might just be its newness.
“No one has been here,” said Mrs. Gerritt, making it sound like an unalterable law of nature. “If there is nothing else?”
So much for a comfortable coze with the housekeeper. When Sherlock Holmes went to call, Janie thought with some asperity, retainers fell over themselves to provide useful bits of information. Mrs. Gerritt just wanted her gone so she could get on with her dusting.
Or perhaps Mrs. Gerritt had a secret passion for French novels and only wanted to get back to her office so she could revel in forbidden love.
One could hope.
That scrabbling sound again. Moving very slowly, Janie pushed her chair back from the table, pretending to carry her plate to the sideboard. The breakfast room was decorated in a style Janie could only think of as ye olde monk’s parlor. The ceiling was coffered and painted with Tudor roses, thistles, and various other horticultural embellishments. The mullioned window that took up one wall was inset with numerous small panels of stained glass. The other three walls were all heavily paneled in dark wood, hung at intervals with tapestries that stretched from ceiling to floor.
Was it her imagination, or was the tapestry on the far wall moving?
Moving quickly now, Janie poked her head behind the tapestry. Not solid wall, but a narrow passageway and a small figure pressing itself into a depression in the wall.
“Sebastian?”
Nothing. Not even dust motes. The secret passage was too new—or Mrs. Gerritt too efficient—to harbor the sort of dust and cobwebs it seemed to demand. Janie wondered that her brother hadn’t ordered cobwebs crocheted from string and hung for effect. No cobwebs, but was that the tip of a boot she saw?
“Sebastian? I know you’re there. I can see your boots.”
A wisp of white. Not a boy’s smock, but the ruffle of a pinafore. “It’s Viola.”
“Hello, Viola.” Janie didn’t want to let the tapestry fall behind her, which left her stuck where she was, at the end of the corridor. “I would have come to see you last night, but I was told you were already in bed.”
A small figure emerged from around the corner. Her hair was the same tow color that Janie remembered from her own childhood, but the rest of her was pure Annabelle, from the three-cornered face to her dark eyes, too large in her child’s face. She held a doll clutched in her arms, the silk hair snarled around a painted china face.
“My mother and father have gone.” There was a challenge in the child’s voice. “That’s what Nurse says.”
Janie stood, holding the tapestry. “Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m very sorry.” It sounded so hopelessly inadequate. “Won’t you come out and join me? There’s toast.”
“I’ve already had toast.” Viola slipped under her arm, small and fierce in her pinafore and buttoned boots. She turned to face Janie, saying accusingly, “They won’t let me go home.”
“But … you are home. Aren’t you?” Janie felt as though she’d fallen through the rabbit hole. She didn’t know the first thing about speaking with children. She hadn’t spoken to children since she’d been a child, and rarely even then.
“This isn’t my home.” Viola’s shoulders hunched, her face twisting as she tried to maintain her expression of scorn. “I want to go home. I want my real home.”
“Oh, Viola.” Janie dropped down on her knees, her black worsted skirt pooling around her. If she was confused and miserable, how must Viola feel? Her parents had doted on her, spent far more time with her than parents were wont to do. Janie remembered the bleak days after her father’s death, when she would creep into the deserted library to sit in his chair, pretend his presence beside her. “Would you like to come back to town with me?”
“I don’t want to go to town, I want to go home.” Viola scowled at her, infuriated by the idiocy of adults. “Nurse and Mrs. Gerritt say we can’t go there. The house is closed.”
Her words had the conscious echo of Mrs. Gerritt. It was clearly a direct quote.
“What house?”
“My house.” Viola crushed the doll’s face under her arm in a punishing embrace. “The white house.”
“The … oh.” Understanding dawned. “You mean the old house?”
“My house,” Viola corrected her. And then, sensing, perhaps, that here was an adult that might be used, she took Janie by the hand and tugged her towards the window. “You can see the roof just there.”
It was a pleasant prospect, or would be in spring, when the trees were in flower and the walks lined with creeping herbs. The breakfast room looked out over Annabelle’s knot garden, the herbs she had tended with her own hands, less formal than the terraces that led down to the river, with a view to a high hedge with a gate set in it. In summer, when the trees were in leaf, that was all one would see. But now Janie could see straight through the bare branches, to the outline of a peaked roof, set with humble dormer windows.
“There,” said Viola, pointing emphatically.
What a fool she was. Of course the new house felt empty. It was Bay’s love offering, built from the ground up as an exact—or near exact—replica of Annabelle’s home in Lincolnshire. The original plan, Janie recalled, had been to enlarge the old house, but a conversation with Ruth Mills’s architect, at Staatsburg, had convinced Bay of the folly of that idea. So they’d left the old house, left it and lived in it while the new house rose stone by stone.
Janie glanced down at her niece, feeling a surge of pity. How much worse to lose one’s parents and one’s home, living in hollow splendor when remembered comfort was only yards away, just beyond the hedge. “Why won’t they let you go back?”
Viola shrugged. “We don’t live there anymore.”
That, too, sounded like a direct quote.
“Well, I don’t see why not,” said Janie. “Do you have a coat?”
She didn’t know whether to feel pleased or guilty when Viola’s haunted eyes lit with delight.