Page 90 of The English Wife

“And let the old cats call you ungenerous?” Anne reached across the table, seizing a tea cake. “Don’t worry. I always knew you didn’t want me.”

Mrs. Van Duyvil didn’t trouble to deny it. “It was your influence over Bay. You encouraged him to defy me. He would never have made such a disastrous marriage but for you.”

“Oh, Aunt Alva.” Anne made a show of lifting her lace-edged handkerchief to her lips as though overcome. “You haven’t the first idea about your son, have you?”

“And you did?”

Anne lowered her handkerchief. “Would you like to know a thing or two about your perfect boy?”

“Ladies, ladies,” pled Mr. Tilden. “Do not discompose yourselves.”

Mrs. Van Duyvil breathed in deeply through her nose. To Mr. Tilden, she said sharply, “How does one go about offering a reward in the press?”

Mr. Tilden blinked. “Dear lady?”

Mrs. Van Duyvil rose from her seat, catching a hand on the back of the chair to steady herself. “I want my son’s … concubine found. I want her found and brought to justice. And you,” she said to Anne. “You will endeavor to behave like a lady. Have I taught you nothing?”

Without waiting for an answer, she gestured imperiously to the silent footman to open the connecting door and swept into the adjoining car in a rustle of black crêpe.

Anne leaned back against the velvet cushions of the chair, her eyes narrowed on the gleaming mahogany of the door.

“Oh, no, Aunt Alva,” she said, very softly. “You’ve taught me a very great deal indeed.”

New York, 1896

May

“I’ve had tea set out in the conservatory,” said Anne brightly. “Annabelle, darling, won’t you join me while the men enjoy their port?”

It was very hard to say no to someone who was already leading you away, her arm clamped firmly through yours.

“Don’t hurry yourselves,” called Anne gaily over her shoulder. “It’s been ages since I last saw dear Annabelle.”

“It’s been a month,” said Georgie.

“You must come to town more frequently. Will we see you in Newport this summer?” Anne kept up a flow of inconsequential chatter as they passed through a medieval hall, a baroque music room, and a sitting room of indeterminate style to the semitropical confines of a miniature conservatory.

Georgie tried not to crane her neck to look back at the dining room. Bay was right. It had been a very good lunch. The linens were Irish; the porcelain English; the food and wine were French, course after course, delicately flavored, perfectly cooked, each dish paired with the appropriate wine.

But Georgie had taken very little pleasure in it. Something had made her uncomfortable, and it wasn’t just the unaccustomed snugness of clothes that were too old and too small. It wasn’t Anne’s archness. Anne was always arch, and worse since her marriage to Teddy, when her knowing laugh had become an armor against embarrassment.

No, it was Bay. He had been visibly awkward. Bay, who was always at ease in any situation. He had applied himself to his food, addressing any statements to the architect to somewhere in the vague proximity of the man’s right shoulder. As for Mr. Pruyn, he had devoted himself exclusively to the ladies, which might have been unremarkable but for the glances he cast to the far end of the table when he thought himself unobserved.

And then there was Anne. Anne who had been all too clearly relishing the tension at her luncheon table, forcing Bay to address Mr. Pruyn, loudly abjuring Georgie to admire Mr. Pruyn’s work, made in close consultation with Bay—“an attempt to turn your memories of your home into flesh, wasn’t that how you put it, Bay?”

The conservatory was too warm, humid with freshly watered plants. Rare orchids bloomed in pots; vines climbed the walls. Georgie could feel her petticoats sticking to her legs, wilting in the damp heat. In the winter, the room would be a paradise, a miracle of bloom in the face of frost. Right now, it was oppressive, too many strong scents in too small a space, too lush, too bright.

What if Anne hadn’t invited the architect to lunch? Bay hadn’t expected him to be there, that much had been clear. Georgie would have pictured a portly, bearded man with a cigar clamped between his lips, a man with a wife and daughters in a grand house on Long Island and a mistress tucked away in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It would never have occurred to her to imagine otherwise.

“Yes, right there,” Anne was saying to the maid, in her starched cap and apron, who wheeled in a tray laden with delicacies, as though they hadn’t just dined on turbot in cream sauce and veal roulade and vegetables so stewed in cream and butter as to bear no resemblance to themselves. “Sugar?”

“No. Thank you.”

“How brave,” said Anne, smiling at her over the Royal Crown Derby. “To take the bitter instead of the sweet.”

If that was innuendo, Georgie wasn’t even sure what it was supposed to mean. “Where is Teddy?” she asked bluntly.

Anne busied herself over her own cup, her golden head catching the sunlight refracted through the glass panels of the roof. “Oh, somewhere about a horse,” she said vaguely.