“I’ll say.”
Pru flipped to the next page and was relieved to find genuine, bona fide sentences. Paragraphs, even. She began to read.
They said you weren’t anyone until Giovanni Boldini painted you. But of all the famed women he rendered, the princesses and countesses and heiresses, the Duchess of Marlborough was deemed the most enchanting.
The future duchess was born Gladys Deacon in Paris on February 7, 1881, though she would later claim the date was 1883, and later 1885. Lady Marlborough loved to play with her birthdate, ticking it up a year or two for every decade that passed. A fair enough trade, when a person made it close to the century mark.
“Nicely done,” Pru said, though didn’t wholly mean it.
His prose was sufficient, but the story was not exactly groundbreaking. Whatever “preliminary research” he’d conducted was for shite.
“What else have you got?” she asked and turned another page.
It was blank. She flipped again. Still blank. After thumbing through the rest, Win shirking in the corner, Pru realized this was all he’d written. Two bleeding paragraphs.
“Well,” she said. “I see what you mean about the long game.”
“The young American said with tangible disdain.”
“I’ll be in the book? Not sure how I feel about that.”
“Look. You said it yourself. She’s given me bugger all to go on and you’re the liveliest person in this joint, even if you blush if forced to utter more than two words.”
“You’re some kind of charmer,” Pru said with a roll of her eyes. “So what happens if Mrs. Spencer doesn’t give you the rest of it? Will you write her story anyway? Make something up? Or will you just leave?”
“No. I won’t leave.”
Win sighed again and then sat on the edge of his bed.
“This may sound positively bonkers,” he said. “To someone like you, so young and with limitless possibilities. But this writer nonsense? It’s all I’ve got.”
“Surely not all.”
“It certainly is. And if I give up on it, then what do I have? Nothing. And to suddenly have nothing, no direction, no future at all, is a terrifying prospect. I can’t explain it.”
“You don’t need to explain it,” she said. “I’ve—”
“You’d simply never understand.”
Pru turned away as a blanket of red spilled across her powder-white face. She’d been on the cusp of telling him she knew a thing or two about dim futures, but the miserable bloke made it so damned hard to create a real human connection.
“You want to write her story that badly?” Pru asked, face hot. “That you’d subject yourself to poor ventilation, middling food, and a general lack of hygiene? Not to mention all the damned dogs. You are that committed to telling the duchess’s tale?”
“Yes,” Seton said, after a great, long while. “It may sound crazy, but apparently I am.”
Twenty-seven
THE GRANGE
CHACOMBE-AT-BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
JANUARY 1973
They sat in Win’s room as snow swirled outside.
The house bent and wailed in the wind, the three of them warmed by the fire, which Mrs. Spencer kindled with letters from “unexceptional lovers.”
“Were they unexceptional in social status?” Win wanted to know. “Or in sexual performance?”
Pru blushed, despite the cold. She pulled the bearskin throw farther up onto her shoulders with one hand and held a book to her face with the other. She’d taken to reading during these interviews, to pass the time between Mrs. Spencer’s filibusters. No one seemed to mind, or even notice at all.
“Ha!” the old woman barked. “Sex or status. That is the question, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about the men,” Win said. “Unexceptional or otherwise.”
“I don’t have ample time left on this earth to tell you about the men.”
“Fair enough. I’ll be specific. Let’s begin with the Duke of Marlborough.”
“Nice try. But no.”
“Why not? Because you can’t speak to his sexual prowess? Or you don’t want to?”
Mrs. Spencer pretended to take a sip of bourbon. It dribbled onto her purple silk gown.
“All right,” he pressed on. “If you won’t yield on the duke, surely you can regale us with stories of your prior betrothals, the broken hearts you’ve left along the way.”
“Ah!” Mrs. Spencer’s face brightened. “Well, there were quite a number of them. I was very attractive in my youth. As your friend Miss Valentine can attest, if a woman has the beauty, she will also have a history of affiancing. She’s already one down.”
“Mrs. Spencer!” Pru said, and yanked her gaze from the book.
That night it was H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau. Dog-Man, Hyena-Swine, and Fox-Bear Witch were appropriately ghoulish for a dark and howling winter’s night at the Grange.