“I wish you were up for some breaking and entering,” Annie said, debating whether to tell him how easy it was.
“A tempting offer, but I must pass. This old codger’s not nearly nimble enough for such larks. You’ll have to find someone younger if you’re looking for a coconspirator.”
“Maybe I can suss out some of those Banbury hooligans,” she said. “The ones who used to torture Mrs. Spencer.”
“Those very hooligans are now the doctors, teachers, and councilmen of this great town.”
“How disappointing,” she said. “Though I guess that’s the way life turns out. People grow up. They mature.” Annie pretended to look at an invisible watch. “As for me, any minute now. I’m sure my mom is waiting.”
“I’ve been trying very hard to prevent maturation myself,” Gus countered.
“Hold on.” Annie turned to face him. “Were you one of them? A miscreant-turned-notable?”
“Lord no! Do I look like a town notable to you? What an insult.” He gave her a little wink. “I shudder at the thought.”
They walked a few more steps in silence, nothing but the sound of the road beneath their feet, the hum of cars in the distance.
“Who do you think controls it?” she asked. “The trust that owns the Grange? Not an old hooligan?”
“Last I heard it was more or less in the hands of developers, like all decent Oxfordshire parcels. Doubtless they’ll turn it into miniestates any day now.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard the market’s hot around here lately,” she said, thinking of her mom.
“Aggravatingly so. Banbury is starting to get hip to Londoners, God forbid. Estate agents are crawling all over the place. Homes that have been in families for centuries are coming onto the market. Everyone’s a seller, at a price.”
Annie thought of Laurel’s own land deal, her mother one of the many selling out to the highest bidder. There was comfortable retirement on one hand, and sullying quaint countrysides on the other. Annie would not mention this to Gus.
“Basic economics, I suppose,” she said, feeling morose. “Which is why I’ve always preferred books. Much to the detriment of my bank account and long-term job prospects, of course.”
“I tell you what, Annie, this world would do better to have more like you in it. Practicality is overrated.”
“Someone needs to tell my mom.”
A few more steps and they stopped in front of the inn. Annie looked up at her room but couldn’t make out if anyone was in it.
“Are you traveling alone?” Gus asked. “Or with a companion? I can’t recall you mentioning one way or another.”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Mostly on my own.”
Eric would not like this conversation. He would not like it one bit, seeing as how he was convinced the Earl of Winton was either a pervert, a kidnapper, or both.
Sometimes Annie wondered if she’d told Eric on purpose, to make him mad. She promised to marry him but her mother’s qualms were beginning to infect her. God, how she loved that big Southern boy. But God, she was dumb to marry so young.
“On your own?” Gus said with a frown.
She started to nod, hearing Eric’s voice (“you told him you were alone?”). It seemed somehow weird to say she was traveling with her mom, as though Gus might write her off as a bored schoolgirl not worthy of his time.
“I mean, I’m not totally alone,” Annie quickly clarified. “I’m meeting some family members along the way. But, you know, mostly it’s just me.”
This was not so far from the truth.
“Are they expecting you any time soon?” he asked. “I have to be somewhere later this afternoon, but I might have time for another tale about the misanthrope you find so alluring.”
“He doesn’t sound too misanthropic to me,” Annie said. “Seeing as how he helped himself onto the property, then shacked up with two women he’d never met.”
“For a crack at the so-called duchess he was willing to manufacture some base level of sociable behavior. Make no mistake, though. Seton’s appearance in Banbury was about the book, and the book alone, and he planned to stay at the Grange until he squeezed every last drop from Mrs. Spencer and finally wrote the damned story he’d pined after for so long.
“Trouble was, though Win Seton felt so bloody sure that she was Gladys Deacon, he forgot the most elemental things about the duchess. Namely, that she lived only in half-truths and the best lighting, and, most important of all, the long-lost Duchess of Marlborough never, ever played by the rules.”
Twenty-five
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
DECEMBER 1972
At first, Pru thought the writer wasn’t permitted to leave his room.
Otherwise, why would he stay up there, day after day, pounding the devil out of his typewriter with a crazed, helter-skelter look in his eyes? Win Seton hardly ate, rarely drank, and was withering by the hour.