A Terrible Beauty (2 page)

I did not speak in the carriage during the procession from the church to the cemetery at Kensal Green. My mother, always at her finest when she had a captive audience, barraged me: I must keep the mirrors draped and must keep the curtains closed, though it would be acceptable to restart the clocks by the end of the week. When would my black-bordered stationery arrive? Had I ordered enough widows' weeds to get me through the winter? Wasn't it a pity to be stuck in mourning just when fashions had adopted a style so suited to showing off my figure? My father, next to her, pulled back the curtain with the tip of his walking stick and leaned toward the window. I knew he was not listening, and I did not so much as nod in reply to her. We both knew Mother's monologues allowed no room for the thoughts or opinions of others.

I wondered how many carriages formed the procession behind the hearse. So far as I was concerned, I might as well be the one in the coffin. Never before had I questioned my rash decision to accept Philip, the Viscount Ashton, when he proposed. At the time, my mother's constant hounding about the need to make a brilliant match had become unbearable and I determined that Philip, who seemed to like me well enough, would make as good a husband as anyone. I knew almost nothing about him when he asked for my hand, and had learned little more by the time he died in faraway Africa. I had succeeded in escaping from the prison I felt my childhood home had become, but I had never anticipated being trapped in another so soon. Marriage ought to have brought freedom; instead, it left me a widow. For two years I would be forced to mourn for a man who'd had so little interest in me he'd cut short our wedding trip to go on safari.

His time in Africa had proved the happiest of my life. I could come and go as I pleased without a chaperone, read what I wished, and have my friends over to dine whenever I wanted. For that brief time, the world had opened up to me, only for it all to be dashed in an instant. When my father, full of concern and kindness, had come to me at the house in Berkeley Square, taken my hands in his, and told me of Philip's death, I felt nothing. When the dressmaker came the next morning, the unrelenting black of his fabrics suffocated me. When Ivy, my dearest friend, came to me that afternoon, I could not cry with her. She wept instead, devastated by the idea that one could so quickly become a widow. This was not what young debutantes were promised during glittering balls and parties. Everyone around me waited, eager for visible signs of the despair they knew I must be feeling, but despair remained a stranger to me.

The carriage stopped. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of rain pounding on the roof.

“There is no need for you to do this, Emily,” my mother said. “It is not required. Her Majesty was too consumed by grief to attend her dear husband's funeral—”

“No,” I said, stopping her. “I must go.”

“It is somewhat unseemly, my dear. Ladies should not—”

This time my father interrupted. “Let her do what she must, Catherine.”

He rapped on the door. A footman opened it and then helped my parents alight, but my father insisted on taking my hand as I stepped down. He squeezed it, and then patted my cheek through the layers of veils.

“It will be all right, Emily. I will help you through this.” The kindness in his voice at last broke through the numbing stupor in which I had been trapped, and I felt a sob catch in my throat. He led me to the graveside, where I stood in front of the flower-covered coffin, the smell of lilies nearly overpowering me. My boots sank in the cold, wet ground, and I looked at the faces of the pallbearers, their expressions serious and somber. I recognized just one of them, Mr. Hargreaves, and he only because he had stood as best man at my wedding. I tried to conjure the details of that day, but found I recalled almost nothing, and shifted my attention back to the coffin. I could hardly picture the man inside—I remembered neither his voice nor his mannerisms—and this realization unleashed in me a flood of emotion.

It was not grief, it was guilt. Surrounding me were those who loved Philip, who mourned him, whose lives would be the poorer because of his death. Yet I, the one who ought to have felt the loss most keenly, had not known him at all, and was left to do my best to appear grieved. I was a fraud, a charlatan, a heartless woman who had not loved her husband. Two years of forced mourning, out of society, would not be punishment enough for my shortcomings. Nothing could ever erase my darkest sin—the relief that had filled me when my father had left me alone after delivering his bleak news. I had not been eagerly awaiting Philip's return; I had been dreading it, unsure of what our life together would be and loath to give up the freedom I had enjoyed while on my own in London. Now I would never have to adjust to his expectations, never have to learn to live with him, never have to play the role of obedient wife.

I hardly noticed when the vicar stopped speaking and the mourners began to return to their carriages. The rain was lashing against me, my umbrella proving to be of little use, and my soaked veils hung heavily, tugging at my bonnet. My mother was speaking to my sister-in-law; my father crossed over to the pallbearers. Philip's mother, devastated by the loss of her only son, had not come to the service. She was in no condition to leave her dower house. I ought to have shared her feelings. Instead I was grateful I would not see her today. She would recognize the depth of my offense, my failure as a wife.

I felt a hand on my arm. “There now, Em, that's finished.” Jeremy Sheffield, the Duke of Bainbridge, a close family friend, and playmate of my youth stood before me, rain funneling from the brim of his tall hat. “Wretched business. What a fool Ashton was. I say no loss to anyone. Scold me if you will, but a gentleman ought not desert his bride in favor of a safari. Got what he deserved for abandoning you so soon after the wedding. Now what are you to do with yourself? You're too young to be locked up at home wearing black. Wasn't thinking of that, was he? Wretched business. Wretched.”

My mother, not having heard a word he said, sidled up to him and took his arm. “My dear boy, you must stand by our girl now. She will need old friends more than ever in these dark days. Do promise you shall not abandon her.”

The coffin had not yet been lowered into the ground, and already she had begun her campaign to see me married again.

 

Spring, 1899

 

1

The words on the envelope began to blur as I stared at them in disbelief.

The Viscountess Ashton.

The rest of the address was correct, down to the number of our house in Park Lane, but the name—the name—nearly stopped my breathing. More than a decade ago, I had married Philip, Viscount Ashton, only to be left a widow in the space of a few months. I had given up the title of viscountess when I married again, four and a half years later.

Davis, my butler, who had handed me the day's mail on a silver tray, remained standing in front of my desk in the library. He did not speak and, as always, his countenance appeared impassive, but I suspected him of sharing my curiosity as to the contents of the letter.

“Is Mr. Hargreaves home?” I asked.

“No, madam, he is still at his club.”

I fingered the silver letter opener in my hand. One envelope ought not invoke such a pressing sense of ominous foreboding. “Very strange to be called ‘viscountess' again after all this time. Surely there's none among my acquaintances who is unaware I am no longer the Viscountess Ashton.”

“I could not comment, madam.”

“Oh, Davis, don't be so serious,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. I sliced open the creamy white paper and pulled out what was inside. “Look, it is nothing but a photograph from Greece. The Parthenon. Someone must have sent it as a joke. There is neither note nor signature.”

“Port, madam?” Davis asked. He knew me too well.

Memories of my first husband always filled me with mixed emotions. Our marriage had not been an arranged one, but neither had it been a love match, at least not on my part. I had accepted his proposal because I viewed becoming a wife as an inevitable, if unwelcome, step in my life. On the day he asked for my hand, living with him seemed preferable to staying any longer in my mother's house. He was kind and decent, a respectable gentleman, and I expected we would be happy enough, whatever that meant.

Nearly two years after he died, I found a journal—one volume out of the many he had kept from the time he was a schoolboy—and reading it made me feel as if I knew him better than I had when he was alive. On its pages I learned he had entered into our union with an attitude far different from mine: For reasons beyond my comprehension, he fancied himself in love with me. Since then, I have always felt a keen guilt at not having recognized this while he was alive, despite the fact that his death, only a few months after our wedding, had precluded me from ever getting to know him well.

My youth and inexperience might have rendered it impossible for me to recognize his feelings, but that is no excuse. The journal revealed the man he was, and I appreciated and loved that man, even though my feelings came far too late. Philip gave me a gift that enriched my life in ways I would never have thought possible. He fired in me, through his writings, a desire for intellectual pursuits, a longing to study Ancient Greek, to read Homer, and to travel to the land of Alexander the Great and gaze upon the monuments of Pericles' Athens.

What began as an attempt to emulate his interests grew into a deep intellectual passion, and over the years I had gained a reputation as a careful scholar. I translated both
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, and had written several well-received monographs on vase painting in Hellenistic Athens. Philip had left me a villa on Santorini that he'd had built as a gentleman's retreat, using traditional Cycladic methods, and from the moment I first set eyes on its brightly whitewashed walls, curved archways, and bright blue shutters, I recognized it as a place in which my soul would always rest easy. I spent as much time as I could manage to in its comfortable confines.

I owed a great debt to Philip. I would never have become the woman I am now if it were not for him. Furthermore, had I not married him, it is unlikely I would have made the acquaintance of his closest friend, Colin Hargreaves. Thrown together by circumstances two and a half years after Philip's death, we fell in love. After two more years passed, we married, both of us conscious of Philip's role in our happiness; but all those raw emotions conjured up by his death had long since smoothed away.

Until now. This envelope had, for me, brought them all back to the surface.

I accepted the port Davis brought me and tried to clear my mind, focusing on all the things I needed to accomplish during the fortnight I would be in London before we departed for Greece with two of our dearest friends, Jeremy Sheffield and Margaret Michaels. Margaret and I had organized the trip in an attempt to distract Jeremy from his multitudinous woes. The previous year, his engagement to Amity Wells had scandalized
le beau monde
. England's best had objected to his choice of an American heiress as his future bride, but this had paled next to the furor caused by her subsequent actions, which left him heartbroken and humiliated. He soldiered through the next season as best he could, maintaining an admirably stiff upper lip in the face of an onslaught of gossip, but he had no interest in dealing with more of the same this year.

Margaret and I had easily convinced him a holiday abroad was what he required, but the details of our itinerary proved far more difficult to agree upon. Margaret, a devoted Latinist, and I, a lover of all things Ancient Greek, clashed over what would better soothe our friend's soul. She wanted him to stand in the Forum in Rome and mourn Caesar. I wanted him to seek solace in the beauty of the Acropolis in Athens. In the end, I won the argument, but only because Jeremy intervened, insisting upon Greece because he knew we would include in our travels several weeks at my villa on Santorini, where we would find no expatriate society, no preening young ladies, and, best of all, no hope of useful occupation.

I did not require an entire fortnight in London to organize the journey, but I had other reasons to be in town. My husband, one of the queen's most trusted agents, is frequently called upon to investigate matters that might prove embarrassing to members of the royal family or the aristocracy. Together, not always in conjunction with his work for the palace, we have brought at least ten heinous murderers to justice. Over the years, my own detectival instincts and skills have been honed, and I beg the reader's forgiveness if it is immodest to admit I am quite good at my work. My talents, however, did not often interest Her Majesty; she nearly always required only Colin's services. He had just returned from St. Petersburg, where he had spent six weeks working, and we wanted some time in town with our twin boys, Henry and Richard, and our ward, Tom, all of whom had now passed their third birthdays.

I heard the door open, and looked up to see my husband. “You appear almost dour,” he said, crossing to me and sitting on the edge of my desk. “Davis tells me the mail disturbed you.”

“Davis speaks most freely to you,” I said. “I do wish he would offer me the same courtesy.” I handed him the envelope.

“The Viscountess Ashton,” he said. “I almost forgot you were once called that.” He barely glanced at the picture of the Parthenon before returning it to my desk.

“Do you not find it slightly unnerving that someone has anonymously sent this?”

He shrugged. “Not in the least. You do draw controversy, my dear. Between your scholarly pursuits, your campaigns for social justice, and your refusal to behave like a good little wife, you manage to scandalize society at least once every six weeks. No doubt some ill-mannered person who thinks himself very important sent this to remind you of your aristocratic connections. Poor bloke doesn't realize he's taken entirely the wrong tack.”