THE BANBURY INN
BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
OCTOBER 2001
To understand the future Duchess of Marlborough, one must first understand her past.
Gladys’s mother was Florence Baldwin Deacon, a renowned femme fatale from a celebrated New England family. She wasn’t particularly intelligent but had the compensating attributes of extraordinary beauty and unmatched sophistication. Gladys’s father was bright-minded but cold and austere. He met his death at age fifty-seven, after contracting pneumonia in a mental hospital.
Florence Baldwin’s father, Gladys’s grandfather, was Rear Admiral Charles Baldwin, a man wealthy beyond description. He was so celebrated that five hundred marines escorted the coffin at his funeral. William Waldorf Astor was a pallbearer.
The duchess’s other grandfather was a real scrapper, coming up in American society through various bootstrap enterprises, including a whale boating business. Alas, his greatest accomplishment was marrying Sarahann Parker, a descendant of the breathtakingly wealthy Boston Parkers, a family that produced an unending line of adulterers and adultered-upon, all of them gorgeous and sad.
No Baldwin or Parker was ever happy, despite the money and gilt and their salacious sexual appetites. Gladys’s mother chased the ever-elusive joy for a while until she landed bang in the center of a worldwide scandal. One lover, one baby, and one international incident that changed the course of their lives, especially the life of her eldest, the beautiful, tempestuous Gladys.
—J. Casper Augustine Seton,
The Missing Duchess: A Biography
Annie crept through the hotel room door, backpack socked against her chest, book hidden safely in the bottom.
“Where have you been?” Laurel asked from the corner. She sat in a chintz chair, a stack of papers in her lap. “I was almost starting to get worried.”
“Oh,” Annie said, heart thumping like she’d just come home from a field kegger or sneaking out to meet a much older boyfriend. “I didn’t realize you were waiting. Or that you’d be back already. You haven’t been around, so…”
“Mmm.” Laurel bobbed her head in agreement, or in acceptance, as she thumbed through the papers in her lap, sticky notes jutting out from all sides. “I apologize. I’m sure you’ve been bored. This isn’t exactly the trip I envisioned, either.”
“Deal not going well?”
“That’s one way to put it. They’re playing hardball. Who ‘they’ are, the buyers, or the owners of the adjacent parcels, or the lawyers, I can’t decide. Everyone was desperate to get this done a month ago and suddenly nothing’s right.”
“I’m sorry,” Annie said, and lowered onto the bed. “What a gigantic pain in the ass.”
“It’s how these things go, I suppose. I’ve spent more than a few years as a corporate attorney and though my expertise isn’t exactly in U.K.-based land transactions, I’m not falling for any of their tricks.”
“You get ’em, Mom.”
Laurel straightened the stack of papers and tossed them onto the desk beside her.
“So what have you been doing all day?”
“Not much,” Annie said. “Wandering around Banbury. Having tea. The usual.”
“Specifics, girl. I want specifics. Where’d you go? What’d you see?”
“Banbury Cross. A few English gardens. Some bakeries. Endless limestone.”
Annie yanked a rubber band off her wrist and pulled back her thick, wavy, jumbled mess of a hairdo. Though the sky was clear when she stepped into the pub, it was drizzling by the time she left. On the short walk home, the dampness exploded her hair to three times its usual size.
“Yikes,” Annie said, accidentally catching a glimpse in the mirror. Once again, she envied her mom’s horses and their slick, shiny, never-frizzy manes.
“Did you eat anything?” Laurel asked. “Please tell me you had more than the so-called biscuits Nicola lays out each day.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I went to this pub? The George and Dragon?”
“Right. I think I’ve seen it. Nice place?”
“It was okay. Mostly I drank tea and read. Had a few bites of a sandwich.”
“Was it good?”
“The sandwich?”
“No,” Laurel said. “The book.”
“Oh.” She paused. “It’s funny. It’s a book you have, I think. The one about the missing duchess? I mentioned it the other day?”
Laurel stared at her blankly.
“I found it locally,” Annie continued. If the lie was good enough for Gus, it was good enough for Laurel. “I happened upon a used bookstore owned by a woman named Trudy and recognized it from your library.”
“How odd.”
“Mom, have you been here before?”
“Annie…”
“No offense, but you’re not a big reader. Yet you have this book. And it’s about a woman who lived in Banbury. Now we’re in Banbury and it turns out you own a piece of land in this very spot. But I’d never heard about any of this until now.”
“I’ve been here,” her mother said and stood. She looked not at Annie but over the top of her head, toward the cross. “I came through Banbury years ago. Decades.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell, really. During college I did the, um, backpacking-through-Europe thing.”
“You,” Annie said, amused. “You, who wouldn’t let me join Girl Scouts because of the camping requirement? You went backpacking? Voluntarily?”
“I know. It was a bit of an ill-fated trip.” Laurel shook her head. “In multiple ways. I came to Oxfordshire because … well, because I had the vague notion of some people I should see here, folks who might be family.”
“The people associated with the land you’re trying to sell?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Did you track them down?”
“Not really. The trip was a waste. I never found what I wanted, which is how most poorly planned odysseys end up. I left here feeling pretty dejected.”
“Well, at least you got some free property out of it.”
“Yes. At least there’s that.”
“Is that when you bought the book?” Annie asked. “The Missing Duchess? When you visited Banbury?”
“I don’t remember exactly.” Laurel’s eyes flittered away. “Probably, though. The duchess was big talk in this town, her own tourist attraction, though she’d died by the time I came through.”
“So you remember the book.”
“Yes. No. I mean. It’s not … it’s hard to explain, Annie.”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie. It’s hard to explain.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that. I thought lawyers never found anything hard to explain.”
“I was a different person then. Seeing the book.” Laurel bit down on her lip, then exhaled. “It’s not about the book. It’s about the memories the book brings up.”
“Proust,” Annie said.
“Excuse me?”
“Proust talked about the importance of memory when reading, the effect of setting and circumstance.”
“Did he? Well, you would know,” Laurel said with a smile. “I guess that’s why I paid the big bucks for your schooling.”
“Yes, so I can have knowledge of dead writers. A very useful life skill. It is so very perplexing that I don’t have a job.”
Annie didn’t mention that the knowledge came not from her spendy education but from chatting with a stranger in a bar.
“How have I never heard of you backpacking through Europe?” she said. “I mean … what? I can’t imagine you doing anything that free-spirited. Mostly you’re all business, all the time.”
“I did go to college in the seventies,” Laurel said. “We were all a little looser in those days. Or we tried.”
“But you graduated from an all-girls school with insane academic standards,” Annie pointed out. “How many ‘loose’ people could there have been at Wellesley? Or at Georgetown Law?”
“There were a few. And many more who were trying to be free spirits but didn’t necessarily pull it off. Ah, tales of misspent youth. Before you get married, make sure you have a few tales of your own.”
“I still don’t get it,” Annie said, her mother’s story nagging at her. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to beat a dead horse but—”
“You know I hate that expression.”
“How come you haven’t brought this up before?” Annie asked. “How did you not mention it on the plane ride to London, or during dinner last night, or even over coffee this morning? You’re a nostalgic person. You get teary-eyed about horses and summer interns. Then there’s this book, which stirs up all kinds of bittersweet memories. I say this with all due respect, but what the hell, Mom?”
Laurel inhaled deeply, as if to speak, then held her breath there, locked safely behind her chest. For the first time Annie saw not a rigid, rule-abiding horsewoman but instead a person with a past.
“Was he with you?” Annie asked, the answer suddenly so obvious. “When you came through Banbury with your friends? Was he backpacking, too?”
“Who?” Her mom blinked.
“My father. Who else?”
“No. God no. He was nowhere near my life then.”
“Then what is it?” Annie stood. “What happened?”
“Annie, if you ever decide to have children—”
“Of course I’ll have children!” she snapped. “Eric is dying to become a father!”
Laurel frowned.
“Not now or anything,” Annie added hastily. “But, Mom, we’re doing it. We’re getting married. You’re not going to talk me out of it.”
“I understand that,” Laurel said with a nod. “Listen, sweetheart. Teaching your children to be their own people, to exist outside of you, is tough. You want them to avoid repeating your past mistakes but you’re also wary of forcing them to repeat the good stuff, too. That comes with a whole set of expectations that doesn’t work for anyone.”
“Which is why you didn’t mind that I majored in English, instead of finance like you.”
“Something along those lines.”
Unlike her daughter, Laurel never would’ve graduated college without a legitimate career path. Not that fake researcher wasn’t growing on Annie. But when she first declared her major some two or three years ago, it was a half-assed rebellion, a test, which Laurel readily passed. Her mom put up exactly no fight.
“Annabelle, I’m having a very hard time with your engagement,” Laurel said, chin and voice trembling. “Eric is a lovely person but when I look at what you’re missing…”
Annie thought of Mrs. Spencer, a woman who had had her own apartment in Paris at age twenty, over a hundred years ago. She tried to picture her mom at twenty but it felt like trying to read a book in the dark.
“Maybe I’m not missing anything,” Annie said, to her mom and to herself.
“Maybe not. Listen, I’m not a perfect parent. Even now I’m trying to figure things out. I want you to be independent. I want you to see the world and experience the awesome. But I also want to save you from the pain. These desires, mostly they conflict.”
Annie wondered if her mother regretted it.
If Laurel regretted putting every ounce of everything into her daughter and her job. See the world? Experience the awesome? Perhaps Laurel had done these things before becoming a mom, but twenty years was a long time to hold the same pattern.
“I love you,” Annie said, for lack of anything better.
It was all she had left. Annie was hungry. And exhausted. And not sure where to go from there, their two minds unlikely to meet. Annie was having a hard time seeing her mother right then. She didn’t even know where to look.
“You’re a great mom,” she said.
This, if nothing else, was true.
“Oh. Thanks,” Laurel mumbled. “I try.”
“Seriously. The best. All my high school friends thought so.”
“Good Lord,” Laurel said with a laugh. “The endorsement of teenagers usually means you’re the opposite of a great mom.”
“Don’t worry, you were adequately strict. But nice. Normal. And people like horses.”
“The horses have saved the day more than once.”
Laurel walked toward the closet. She reached down to grab a pair of flats, which were lined up beside the rest of her shoes. Above them hung a row of carefully pressed slacks. Meanwhile, Annie’s clothes sat in a towering mound atop her suitcase.
“I have to go into London tomorrow,” Laurel said. “Only for the day. We’ll do a real sightseeing trip when this is all over, but do you want to join me? You can explore while I have another soul-sucking powwow. Other lawyers. Ugh. So, whaddya say?”
“Um, I don’t know,” Annie replied, surprised to be thinking of Gus, and of the duchess. “Ya know I’ll pass. Hang out here.”
“I thought you’d seen the sum total of Banbury proper?”
“Yeah. But.” Annie shrugged. “I don’t feel like schlepping around London alone. I’d rather go together, when we have more time.”
“Okay. But I’ll miss you.” Laurel said this distantly, her face not on Annie but turned toward the window, and the Banbury Cross outside. “Should we get something to eat? I’m famished. What about that place you mentioned earlier?” She flipped back around. “Do they serve dinner?”
“No!” she snapped. “No. I mean, they serve dinner but I ate there for lunch. Let’s try something else. Didn’t Nicola mention a nice restaurant in a neighboring town?”
“She probably did, though I tune out ninety percent of what she says.” Laurel tilted her head toward the door. “Shall we?”
“Sure, but can we stop by the lobby first? I want to shoot Eric a quick e-mail. Tell him about my day.”
“You poor thing. Thanks to my endless meetings, that’s going to be the dullest e-mail between two lovebirds since the dawn of time. Or the dawn of e-mail. ‘Dear Eric, today I did nothing while my mother committed various acts of child neglect.’”
“Actually,” Annie said with a smile. “The day wasn’t so bad.”
With that, Annie grabbed her bag, taking with her not only a wallet, but The Missing Duchess, visions of Mrs. Spencer, and the feeling of words left unsaid.