The Ashford Affair Read Free Page A

girls?”
    Bea’s pace picked up. Addie had to practically run to keep up. “They’re at the farm. They’re happy there. Like Dodo with the stables. There’s no accounting, is there?”
    Addie sensed the edge of an argument, one not to do with her. Unsure how to respond, she said, instead, “Dodo sends her love.”
    Dodo was Bea’s older sister, the only one of the clan officially on speaking terms with her. With Dodo, though, it was hard to tell the difference between speakers and non-speakers; the only things she ever talked about were her beloved horses. She came down to town once a month, always to the Ritz, where her battered tweeds made an odd contrast to the other women’s tailored suits and Paris frocks. Perhaps that was the nicest thing about Dodo; she always was what she was.
    “Pity she couldn’t send cash,” said Bea flippantly. “You have no idea what it costs to run a coffee farm, no idea at all. No crops for the first four years and then whatever the market will bear. It’s vile.”
    “Is Frederick at the farm?” No need to worry about tone. Her voice came out in gusty pants.
    Bea winced sympathetically and slowed down. “No, he’s with the car. He’d have come to meet you, but he was waylaid by D.”
    “Dee?” Addie’s imagination conjured up a vamp with long, red fingernails.
    “Lord Delamere. Frightful old bore.”
    Addie laughed breathlessly. “Not one of the blessed?”
    That was how they used to refer to people they liked, she and Bea, back in the nursery days, part of their own private code. It felt rusty and raw on her tongue.
    Impulsively Bea turned and hugged her, nearly knocking her off her feet. A wave of expensive French perfume blotted out dust and sweat. “Oh, I have missed you! Are you hungry?”
    Addie swayed and caught her balance again. She set her bag down with a thump. She was hungry, she realized, hungry and a little dizzy with the heat and sun.
    “They fed us at Makindu.” There had been a British breakfast of eggs and porridge, looking oddly foreign in that setting, with strange, striped beasts grazing in the distance. Addie scrunched up her nose, trying to remember how long ago that had been. It felt like a different lifetime already. “But that must have been—oh, hours ago. Just about dawn.”
    “Don’t worry, we’ll see you fed, once we get you out of that frightful frock.”
    Addie tensed, instantly on the defensive. “What’s so frightful about it? Once it’s been washed and pressed…”
    Bea looked her up and down with an expert eye. “Oh, my dear, no.”
    Addie suddenly saw herself as Bea must see her, frowsy and wilted, in an off-the-peg dress that had lurched at fashion and missed. Bea had always been, and was, even now, effortlessly and glamorously fashionable. She could make a pair of men’s trousers look like a Worth gown. Addie had no doubt that on her that sad little traveling suit would look like Lanvin.
    “Don’t worry,” she said, as one might to a child, and suddenly Addie was back at Ashford again, six and shy and unprepared, harkening unto the Gospel according to Bea. “We’ll find you something much better.” Her expression turned speculative. Her pale blue eyes glinted as she looked at Addie from under her lashes. “And, perhaps, a man?”
    “I already have one of those,” Addie said tartly. She picked up her bag again, taking a firmer grip on the handle. “David Cecil. He’s a lecturer at University College. In Economics.”
    “My dear,” Bea said. “How frightfully clever.”
    “He is,” Addie said loyally, as though he hadn’t, over the course of the trip, become little more than a mirage in her imagination, David, whom she was supposed to love, and whom she might love, if only she could convince herself that the past was past.
    Wasn’t that what David was always telling her? The world of her youth, with its house parties and servants, Lord This and Lady That—that world was gone. She had been in it but not