To understand the future Duchess of Marlborough, one must first understand her past.
Gladys’s mother was Florence Baldwin Deacon, a renowned femme fatale from a celebrated New England family. She wasn’t particularly intelligent but had the compensating attributes of extraordinary beauty and unmatched sophistication. Gladys’s father was bright-minded but cold and austere. He met his death at age fifty-seven, after contracting pneumonia in a mental hospital.
Florence Baldwin’s father, Gladys’s grandfather, was Rear Admiral Charles Baldwin, a man wealthy beyond description. He was so celebrated that five hundred marines escorted the coffin at his funeral. William Waldorf Astor was a pallbearer.
The duchess’s other grandfather was a real scrapper, coming up in American society through various bootstrap enterprises, including a whale boating business. Alas, his greatest accomplishment was marrying Sarahann Parker, a descendant of the breathtakingly wealthy Boston Parkers, a family that produced an unending line of adulterers and adultered-upon, all of them gorgeous and sad.
No Baldwin or Parker was ever happy, despite the money and gilt and their salacious sexual appetites. Gladys’s mother chased the ever-elusive joy for a while until she landed bang in the center of a worldwide scandal. One lover, one baby, and one international incident that changed the course of their lives, especially the life of her eldest, the beautiful, tempestuous Gladys.
—J. Casper Augustine Seton,
The Missing Duchess: A Biography
Annie crept through the hotel room door, backpack socked against her chest, book hidden safely in the bottom.
“Where have you been?” Laurel asked from the corner. She sat in a chintz chair, a stack of papers in her lap. “I was almost starting to get worried.”
“Oh,” Annie said, heart thumping like she’d just come home from a field kegger or sneaking out to meet a much older boyfriend. “I didn’t realize you were waiting. Or that you’d be back already. You haven’t been around, so…”
“Mmm.” Laurel bobbed her head in agreement, or in acceptance, as she thumbed through the papers in her lap, sticky notes jutting out from all sides. “I apologize. I’m sure you’ve been bored. This isn’t exactly the trip I envisioned, either.”
“Deal not going well?”
“That’s one way to put it. They’re playing hardball. Who ‘they’ are, the buyers, or the owners of the adjacent parcels, or the lawyers, I can’t decide. Everyone was desperate to get this done a month ago and suddenly nothing’s right.”
“I’m sorry,” Annie said, and lowered onto the bed. “What a gigantic pain in the ass.”
“It’s how these things go, I suppose. I’ve spent more than a few years as a corporate attorney and though my expertise isn’t exactly in U.K.-based land transactions, I’m not falling for any of their tricks.”
“You get ’em, Mom.”
Laurel straightened the stack of papers and tossed them onto the desk beside her.
“So what have you been doing all day?”
“Not much,” Annie said. “Wandering around Banbury. Having tea. The usual.”
“Specifics, girl. I want specifics. Where’d you go? What’d you see?”
“Banbury Cross. A few English gardens. Some bakeries. Endless limestone.”
Annie yanked a rubber band off her wrist and pulled back her thick, wavy, jumbled mess of a hairdo. Though the sky was clear when she stepped into the pub, it was drizzling by the time she left. On the short walk home, the dampness exploded her hair to three times its usual size.
“Yikes,” Annie said, accidentally catching a glimpse in the mirror. Once again, she envied her mom’s horses and their slick, shiny, never-frizzy manes.
“Did you eat anything?” Laurel asked. “Please tell me you had more than the so-called biscuits Nicola lays out each day.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I went to this pub? The George and Dragon?”
“Right. I think I’ve seen it. Nice place?”
“It was okay. Mostly I drank tea and read. Had a few bites of a sandwich.”
“Was it good?”
“The sandwich?”
“No,” Laurel said. “The book.”
“Oh.” She paused. “It’s funny. It’s a book you have, I think. The one about the missing duchess? I mentioned it the other day?”
Laurel stared at her blankly.
“I found it locally,” Annie continued. If the lie was good enough for Gus, it was good enough for Laurel. “I happened upon a used bookstore owned by a woman named Trudy and recognized it from your library.”
“How odd.”
“Mom, have you been here before?”
“Annie…”
“No offense, but you’re not a big reader. Yet you have this book. And it’s about a woman who lived in Banbury. Now we’re in Banbury and it turns out you own a piece of land in this very spot. But I’d never heard about any of this until now.”
“I’ve been here,” her mother said and stood. She looked not at Annie but over the top of her head, toward the cross. “I came through Banbury years ago. Decades.”