THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
NOVEMBER 2001
Gladys’s father was arrested for murder. “Parisian flirtations” aside, you simply couldn’t shoot someone through a couch and expect to get away with it.
That is, unless you cried adultery. In those days, murder was an acceptable response to a cheating wife. Had Edward Deacon attested to Florence’s dalliance with the now-dead Coco, she would’ve been the one in the clink. But Mr. Deacon refused to turn her in. Noble or stupid? It was certainly up for debate.
Mrs. Deacon did feel some guilt about the outcome. Immediately after her husband’s sentencing, she canceled an engagement with the Princesse de Sagan. Florence didn’t care to endure a luncheon less than twenty-four hours after her husband was carted off. She may not have loved him, but Florence Deacon had some semblance of a heart.
Alas, the press did not take kindly to this social misstep. Famed dandy Count Robert de Montesquiou wrote a poem about the event, asking at the end, “Does disaster preclude politeness?”
Evidently, it did not. Florence would not make such a mistake again.
—J. Casper Augustine Seton,
The Missing Duchess: A Biography
“I like this Win character,” Annie said. “I’m glad Pru had the good sense to let him stay.”
“Ha!” Gus responded with a small arf. “Well, you can join the very short line of people who have ever shared that sentiment. You like him in what manner, exactly?”
“I don’t know. He seems funny, affable.”
“Yes, he seems that way, doesn’t he?”
“You’re a tough customer,” Annie said. “So this marginally affable Win Seton wrote a book called The Missing Duchess. In your story he’s writing about Mrs. Spencer. So voilà! Your not-really-a-mystery is solved. Mrs. Spencer is the Duchess of Marlborough. The duchess is she.”
“The mystery is hardly solved. My dear, you are a pretty thing, smart as a whip, but I feel as though you’re not listening with both ears. Win said he’d write the book with or without the woman’s assistance. He was exactly the kind of person who, if Mrs. Spencer had become the least bit troublesome, would’ve written whatever the hell he wanted just to put something on the page. And Mrs. Spencer was always troublesome.”
Gus started walking back down the road, away from the Grange. He indicated for Annie to follow.
“Wait,” she called. “Maybe we should try to—”
“Go inside?” he finished for her, smiling over his shoulder. “You are persistent. And cruel. Poor old man, one foot in the grave, and you want to get him thrown in the brig?”
“You’re not anywhere near the grave, much less one foot in it.”
Annie jogged to catch up.
“Sorry, mademoiselle, no trespassing for me today,” Gus said. “Let me walk you back to your hotel. The Banbury Inn? Nicola Teepers? Whew. She’s a chatty one, isn’t she?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Once her pace finally caught with his, Annie wrapped both arms around herself. Her teeth clattered. She could feel winter coming.
“Here.” Gus unwound his scarf and passed it her way. “Borrow this. What were you thinking, coming out here in nothing but a pair of skimpy shorts? It’s brass monkeys outside.”
“I was jogging.”
“You were doing nothing of the sort. Heaving, more like.”
“Hey!” she said, laughing as she wrapped the scarf around her neck.
Around them the air was damp and chilled. The sun shone overhead but the morning fog settled in the foothills. The cold was so much colder in England, so wet and final. It was nice to have something to guard against it. What was she thinking, indeed.
“I wish you were up for some breaking and entering,” Annie said, debating whether to tell him how easy it was.
“A tempting offer, but I must pass. This old codger’s not nearly nimble enough for such larks. You’ll have to find someone younger if you’re looking for a coconspirator.”
“Maybe I can suss out some of those Banbury hooligans,” she said. “The ones who used to torture Mrs. Spencer.”
“Those very hooligans are now the doctors, teachers, and councilmen of this great town.”
“How disappointing,” she said. “Though I guess that’s the way life turns out. People grow up. They mature.” Annie pretended to look at an invisible watch. “As for me, any minute now. I’m sure my mom is waiting.”
“I’ve been trying very hard to prevent maturation myself,” Gus countered.
“Hold on.” Annie turned to face him. “Were you one of them? A miscreant-turned-notable?”
“Lord no! Do I look like a town notable to you? What an insult.” He gave her a little wink. “I shudder at the thought.”
They walked a few more steps in silence, nothing but the sound of the road beneath their feet, the hum of cars in the distance.
“Who do you think controls it?” she asked. “The trust that owns the Grange? Not an old hooligan?”
“Last I heard it was more or less in the hands of developers, like all decent Oxfordshire parcels. Doubtless they’ll turn it into miniestates any day now.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the market’s hot around here lately,” she said, thinking of her mom.
“Aggravatingly so. Banbury is starting to get hip to Londoners, God forbid. Estate agents are crawling all over the place. Homes that have been in families for centuries are coming onto the market. Everyone’s a seller, at a price.”
Annie thought of Laurel’s own land deal, her mother one of the many selling out to the highest bidder. There was comfortable retirement on one hand, and sullying quaint countrysides on the other. Annie would not mention this to Gus.
“Basic economics, I suppose,” she said, feeling morose. “Which is why I’ve always preferred books. Much to the detriment of my bank account and long-term job prospects, of course.”
“I tell you what, Annie, this world would do better to have more like you in it. Practicality is overrated.”
“Someone needs to tell my mom.”
A few more steps and they stopped in front of the inn. Annie looked up at her room but couldn’t make out if anyone was in it.
“Are you traveling alone?” Gus asked. “Or with a companion? I can’t recall you mentioning one way or another.”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Mostly on my own.”
Eric would not like this conversation. He would not like it one bit, seeing as how he was convinced the Earl of Winton was either a pervert, a kidnapper, or both.
Sometimes Annie wondered if she’d told Eric on purpose, to make him mad. She promised to marry him but her mother’s qualms were beginning to infect her. God, how she loved that big Southern boy. But God, she was dumb to marry so young.
“On your own?” Gus said with a frown.
She started to nod, hearing Eric’s voice (“you told him you were alone?”). It seemed somehow weird to say she was traveling with her mom, as though Gus might write her off as a bored schoolgirl not worthy of his time.
“I mean, I’m not totally alone,” Annie quickly clarified. “I’m meeting some family members along the way. But, you know, mostly it’s just me.”
This was not so far from the truth.
“Are they expecting you any time soon?” he asked. “I have to be somewhere later this afternoon, but I might have time for another tale about the misanthrope you find so alluring.”
“He doesn’t sound too misanthropic to me,” Annie said. “Seeing as how he helped himself onto the property, then shacked up with two women he’d never met.”
“For a crack at the so-called duchess he was willing to manufacture some base level of sociable behavior. Make no mistake, though. Seton’s appearance in Banbury was about the book, and the book alone, and he planned to stay at the Grange until he squeezed every last drop from Mrs. Spencer and finally wrote the damned story he’d pined after for so long.
“Trouble was, though Win Seton felt so bloody sure that she was Gladys Deacon, he forgot the most elemental things about the duchess. Namely, that she lived only in half-truths and the best lighting, and, most important of all, the long-lost Duchess of Marlborough never, ever played by the rules.”