I'll See You in Paris (4 page)

“Could we get married on the farm?” Annie tried over breakfast one morning. “We'll keep it low-key, of course. A real bootstrap kind of affair.”

Best to broach prickly topics with talk of budgets, she decided. Laurel wouldn't be able to resist such levelheadedness and thrift.

“You never have to ask to use the farm,” Laurel said. “It's as much yours as it is mine. In any case let's not worry about that now. When we go to London, what plays do you want to see?”

“We'll keep it small. The wedding. Close friends, family. Not that we have much of either.”

Annie had been awake most of the night, trying to figure out how she'd track down her father's side of the family to invite them to the wedding. Maybe she'd get Oprah involved, though illegitimate horse farm girls were not so sad a tale.

“Annabelle, what's that face?”

She mentally cursed Eric and his sweet-talking, married-three-decades parents. She had met them once, at a semidisastrous meal in Georgetown. Over a plate of fried calamari, they asked what her daddy did. Annie admitted she didn't know and the whisky pounding ensued. At the time she hadn't even known he was dead.

“Are you all right?” Laurel asked.

“Oh, um. Yes. I'm fine.”

“Well, what's your answer?”

“Answer? About what?”

“The shows you want to see! Are you sure everything's okay? You don't seem yourself.”

Funny. Laurel didn't seem herself, either.

“Annie?”

“Yes, yes.” She shook her head. “Everything's good. Whatever. We can see whatever. Just, uh, don't make me see
Les Miz
again.”

She liked
Les Miz,
but what did it matter? Annie had very little faith the trip to London would happen at all.

 

Five

THE GEORGE & DRAGON

BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

OCTOBER 2001

“Hello!” Annie stood in the doorway, searching for a host. She caught the bartender's eye. “Table for one?”

“Sit wherever you'd like.”

He gestured to the room.

“Thanks!”

She grinned her big, toothy American smile and took a booth by the back, even as she contemplated whether she really wanted to stay. The outing was Nicola's brainchild as the innkeeper had grown weary of watching “forlorn tourists sit by the fire gnawing on biscuits and old straws.”

According to Nicola, the George & Dragon was the best pub in town. It was also the only pub in town and “filled with a bunch of old goats most days of the week,” but they had palatable food and plenty of pints for desolate American travelers. It would do for the likes of her.

Once seated, Annie glanced around. The pub's diners did indeed include a distribution of grizzly souls, plus a family trying to control their toddler son to no success. Annie ordered tea plus a bacon and brie with cranberry. She told the waiter to take his time.

As the man walked away, Annie reached into her bag and pulled out the book. She turned to the spot where she'd left off earlier that morning when she stole a few pages while Laurel showered. It was marked with a photograph of Eric, which she pressed against her chest before reading on.

What happened to the duchess? What happened to the woman who dated kings and princes and statesmen? In 1934, the duchess left her castle as well as society and the very foundation of her existence. Or, as friends and family would tell it, Gladys Deacon vanished into the pink horizon.

“Pardon me,” said a voice.

A man appeared beside her. Annie had noticed him when she first walked in. Most of the pub's customers were short, molelike, with Rudolph the Reindeer noses and exaggerated, furry ears. But this guy was tall, tanned, and had a thick mass of wavy white hair. He looked like an aging film star, the other patrons his background players.

“That book,” he said, without introduction. “Where'd you get it?”

“Oh.” She paused. “A local bookstore?”

The words were out of Annie's mouth before she could question why she said them. What was it about
The Missing Duchess
that made people want to lie?

“Trudy's place?” he asked. “She had a copy?”

“Yeah. Sure. I guess.”

She glanced away, hoping he wouldn't think to verify her story with this Trudy person. The man continued to stand there and so Annie returned her eyes to the page.

As reports would go, the duchess left Blenheim Palace at dawn, taking her innumerable belongings as well as her title. All her possessions, loaded onto lorries, destination unknown.

People inquired after her, and how could they not? Gladys Deacon's visage was so superior, her looks so fabled, John Singer Sargent refused to paint her portrait for fear of not possessing the talent to properly capture her beauty.

“The duchess.” The man tapped her book. “She used to live in this town. As the legend goes.”

“So I've gathered,” Annie replied without looking up. “Though I haven't made much progress. No spoilers please.”

“Is it good? The book?”

“Like I said, early innings, but it's okay so far. The author tends to digress though.”

“Well, the guy was a hack. Only thing he ever published.”

“The book is swell,” she said, vigorously keeping her gaze down. “I was kidding.”

Go away, you old geezer,
she thought, though did not mean it. Truth be told, it was nice to have company, to hear another person's voice.

“Why'd it catch your eye?” he asked. “At Trudy's?”

Annie studied the cover. It was blue, textured, and plain, the original jacket long since gone. Why
would
it catch her eye? It'd not stand out in a library of two.

“I was, uh, already apprised of the Duchess of Marlborough,” she said. “Seemed like an interesting subject. I hadn't run into the book before.”

“I think there are approximately three people on planet earth who've run into the book before.”

“So she wasn't a hot topic in town?”

“Oh, she was a ‘hot topic,' all right. Imagine a woman, a rumored duchess, with spooky blue eyes who ran round Banbury helter-skelter, shooting guns and shouting obscenities. People bolted in the opposite direction whenever they saw her.”

“Sounds like a reasonable reaction, given the firearms.”

“Well, you do have to pay attention to the crazy ones.” He tapped his forehead. “Either they're dangerous or the exact kind of people you want to know.”

“Why would you want to know them?” Annie asked, finding herself amused.

She slipped Eric's photo back between the pages and closed the book.

“Because, young lady,” he said. “The dens of the mad often hold the greatest riches.”

“Um, okay.”

She laughed nervously. Though he was charming and older-man handsome, Annie couldn't help but wonder which den of madness this guy might've crawled out from.

“The woman denied it, however,” he told her. “Said she wasn't a duchess. Called herself Mrs. Spencer.”

“When I'm ninety years old, if people want to confuse me for a duchess, I won't stop them. Heck, I might even insist upon it. Hello, sirs! The Duchess of Middleburg calling. Where's my tea?”

The man removed his glasses, dropped them into his pocket, and sat down across from her.

“I'm sure you'll have no shortage of men willing to bring you tea,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

“I think you already have. So. You seem to be one of the regulars.” She motioned toward the other white-hairs in the pub. “How long have you lived here?”

“In other words, I am fairly advanced in years. Was I one of the wary townsfolk?”

“You said it, not me.” She smiled. “So, did you know her? The supposed duchess? Were you two friends?”

“Friends?” He grimaced. “Gawd blimey. How old do you think I am? She was born a hundred and twenty years ago. No. Lord no. We weren't friends.”

“I wasn't trying to offend—”

“Trying and doing are two different things. No, young lass, I've not seen one hundred and twenty summers just yet. But I was here when that cut-rate author came to Banbury to write his stupid book of nonsense. My name's Gus.”

He extended a hand.

“Annabelle,” she said. “But I also go by Annie.”

“And I also go by the Earl of Winton.”

She laughed at the joke but Gus's face remained stern.

“Something funny about that?” he asked.

“Well, yes. No. I mean … the Duchess of Marlborough and now the Earl of Winton?” she said. “I didn't realize there was such a stronghold of peers in this village. Does Burke's know about this?”

Gus cracked a smile.

“Yes, of course they do,” he said. “That's the very point of their existence. How are you familiar with Burke's? You are an American.”

“Sometimes we read books,” she said. “Or hear about things that happen outside of the United States. Shocking, but true.”

“I find you suspicious,” he said.

“
I'm
suspicious? I was sitting here reading quietly, minding my own business, when you walked up. If anyone's suspicious it's strange men in pubs at one o'clock in the afternoon.”

“Touch
é
. What I meant was, I thought Americans were staying home right now. Avoiding air travel. Waving flags. Setting off fireworks.”

“Not all Americans,” she said, prickling.

Eric was in the middle of an ocean right then, floating at no discernible place. The fireworks he might soon set off she could not contemplate.

“I'm sorry,” Gus said, and gently touched her hands. “I'm not trying to poke fun. This has been a grievous tragedy. For the entire world.”

“No. It's not that.” Annie shook her head. Well, it was that. But also more. “It's fine. Not fine, exactly. I don't like thinking about it.”

“Understood. I'm sorry. I have atrocious social skills. They're pitifully out of practice living in this ‘derelict hamlet,'” he said, using the duchess's own words and offering a sly grin. “And what hamlet are you from, my new American friend? Do I detect a Southern accent?”

“Yes and no,” she said, amazed to find herself smiling.

Whoever this Gus was, this Earl of Winton, he had a certain salty appeal.

“I'm from Virginia,” she said. “Which is Southern to anyone who doesn't live in the South.” For a wistful moment she thought of her Alabama boy. “Do you get many of my compatriots around here?”

“Oh, we've had a few. We used to get all kinds before the coffee-processing facility closed a few years back. So why
are
you here? Visiting someone?”

“For work,” she said, then blushed. It was—what?—the second lie she'd told him? The third?

“Working bloody hard, I gather. Reading all day in a pub. Sounds like my kind of job. Is your company hiring any dashing, slightly older Brits these days?”

“Very funny. I'm … I'm a scholar actually.”

Again she cringed. Lie number three? This one was not as egregious. A scholar was the most recent thing she had been. Plus last week she'd perused a few grad school catalogs. A scholar she could be again.

“I'm getting my master's,” she continued, rolling out the lies with a startling smoothness. “Concentrating in Victorian and Edwardian British literature.”

These fabrications were not completely off base, Annie assured herself. British literature had been her concentration in undergrad, which of course explained the lack of employment to anyone who asked.

“Ah,” Gus said. “So you're here on an academic tour.”

“Something along those lines. Research, mostly. For my thesis.”

Annie could almost believe that it was true. In Oxfordshire, with Laurel, she hoped to prove something. Of course “who's my daddy” would impress nary an English department, or even an old guy in a pub.

“Poking around used bookstores in a ‘derelict hamlet' seemed like a decent start,” she added.

Did it? So many lies, Annie couldn't even keep how she felt about them straight.

“Well, do you have something there?” Gus asked. “For your thesis?”

“I don't know. Maybe?”

“Most people didn't believe him, you know,” Gus said. “The author.”

“Believe him about what?”

“About her title. About her love for the duke and their doomed romance. His thesis was never really proved, which was probably the prime reason his book was such a spectacular bomb.”

He said this almost happily, with a notable spark of Schadenfreude. Gus was glad for this man's failure.

“Do you know him?” Annie pointed to the name on the cover. “Seton?”

“I did. We all did. Alas, the man who wrote that book is long since gone.”

“Oh.” She frowned.

“Chin up! Nothing morbid. Unfortunately for the poor bastard. He simply … moved on.”

“Moved on to where?”

“Not through the pearly gates, if that's what you're imagining,” Gus said. “No, the old fellow went to Paris in 1973 and in Paris he remains.”

“So you do know him?”

“That man is unknowable.” Gus glowered. “We were acquainted at one time but he's now hazy in my mind. He first came here, to Banbury, from London in … let's see…” He squinched his eyes. “Around Christmas 1972. Have you reached the part where the duchess despises Christmas?”

“I haven't.”

“Yes. Christmas 1972. Seton wasn't too well received, by the duchess or anyone else. Can't fault them for it. He was the exact kind of arsehole you'd expect.” Gus gave a little grunt. “Young. Spoiled. Thinking he had tremendous literary talent. His parents were tired of his unfulfilled ambitions. They wanted him to get a real job. This book was his last attempt at a career. Not sure the poor bastard ever succeeded at a single damned thing he tried.”