The Ashford Affair Read Free

herself, at her carefully chosen traveling dress, soiled and sweat stained. So much for her grand entrance. So much for competing with Bea. She had lost before she’d begun. “What I need is a bath and my things.”
    “We’ll get you both. And a drink.” Bea linked her arm through Addie’s in the old way, drawing her effortlessly through the crowd. “Travel is always ghastly, isn’t it? Those hideous little compartments and those nasty little people crowing about tea from the sides of the track.” Bea had always had a gift for mimickry. She did it unconsciously, twisting herself into a pose and just as quickly twisting out again.
    “It wasn’t so ghastly,” said Addie, struggling to keep up. Her overnight bag was heavier than she had remembered, her shorter strides no match for Bea’s. She scrounged to remember some of David’s lectures. “I gather it’s much easier now that the railroad’s been put in.”
    “Much,” said Bea absently. She smiled and waved at a man in a pale suit. “That,” she said out of the side of her mouth to Addie, “is General Grogan. He owns Torr’s Hotel. We don’t go there.”
    “Oh?” Addie’s bag banged painfully against her knee. “Is it—?”
    “Common,” said Bea dismissively. “Of course, you wouldn’t be staying there anyway, since you’ll be with us, but if we’re in town, it’s Muthaiga. Or the Norfolk. Never Torr’s.” She gave the unfortunate owner a broad smile that made him trip over his own feet.
    “Right,” said Addie, although the names meant nothing to her. “Of course.”
    She craned her neck to look behind, but the man was already gone, and Bea was imparting more wisdom, something about race meetings, and drinks parties, and this couple and that couple, and whose farm had failed and who was worth knowing.
    “—don’t you remember, Euan Wallace’s first wife? You must have met them, surely?” Fortunately, Bea didn’t wait for an answer, plunging on, even as she plowed through the crowd. “She divorced him ages ago—or maybe he divorced her. It’s so hard to keep track. Joss is her new one, although not so new anymore. It’s been—seven years now? Eight?”
    “Mmm,” said Addie, trying desperately to keep from panting too obviously. Sweat blurred her eyes, half-blinding her, but she couldn’t get to a handkerchief to wipe it off. She blundered determinedly on, trying to ignore the nasty sinking feeling deep in the pit of her stomach, the one that told her that this had been a terrible mistake.
    Instead of being the worldly one, she was, instead, the neophyte, being introduced by Bea into the mysteries of her world, mysteries Addie would never perfectly understand, and which would, once again, render her dependent on Bea’s leadership and guidance.
    In short, straight back to the same old pattern.
    “How much farther?” she blurted out, breaking into Bea’s recitation.
    “Not so very far,” said Bea, looking at her in surprise. “Oh, darling, you do look done in. It’s the heat, isn’t it? It does take people by surprise in the beginning.”
    It hadn’t done anything to Bea; she looked perfectly cool and fresh. But, then, she wasn’t the one carrying a bag that seemed to have gotten considerably heavier over the past ten minutes. Nor had she spent the past twenty-four hours in a closed train car.
    “Don’t worry, darling,” she said, “we’ll be at the car in a tick. Oh, look! There’s Alice de Janzé.” Bea waved languidly at a woman dressed as smartly as anything you would see in Paris. “American, married to a Frenchman. I can’t think what she’s doing in Nairobi. She’s usually off at Slains.”
    The social catalog grated on Addie’s nerves. It was like being back in London, back in their deb year, Bea constantly surrounded by people, effortlessly making friends and friends of friends. What had happened to “we live quietly on our little farm”?
    Addie asked breathlessly, “Where are your