Alas, a third marriage for Sunny would not come to pass. He developed liver cancer and died in 1934, leaving Gladys with a permanent duchess title and most members of his family up in arms about her immutability in their lives.
Not that Gladys longed to hang around playing duchess. She hightailed it out of Blenheim as soon as practicable, loading up a half-dozen lorries, and spiriting her possessions out of town.
—J. Casper Augustine Seton,
The Missing Duchess: A Biography
Annie arrived in Paris in the late afternoon.
Winter was approaching. The sunlight fell low and flat across the city, casting long shadows, making the ground look as if it were perpetually dusk. Paris. She’d returned.
Annie’s breath caught as the cab turned away from Gare du Nord and onto Rue Saint-Martin. It’d been eighteen months since she was last there, which somehow felt like both yesterday and forever ago. That’s the way Paris was.
Had her French been less rusty, Annie would’ve asked the driver to take the scenic route: a jaunt down Rue Lafayette, with a quick circle around the Opéra and its stunning green dome and golden statues. She never tired of the building, even if it was a little too close to the harried Galeries Lafayette, a place forever socked in by buses and tourists toting wheeled suitcases crammed with newly acquired clothes.
Had they gone that way, past the Opéra, it would’ve been a relatively straight shot toward the Tuileries and la grande roue, the city’s famous Ferris wheel. No matter how tired, physically or otherwise, Annie couldn’t watch the carriages lift over the trees without feeling the lift of her heart.
Accessing the ?le Saint-Louis from there would require only a short trip along one of the roads running parallel to the Seine. Rue de Rivoli, for example—the very first street Mrs. Spencer ever called home.
As they traveled across the bridge and onto the island, Annie glanced toward Notre-Dame and smiled in remembrance. When she studied in Paris, her roommate was an aspiring architect. Because of this, the girls spent untold hours in and around the cathedral, pointing out its gargoyles and flying buttresses, studying the gallery of kings and the spectacular rose windows. At once, Annie felt every second of those months. Why had she waited to come back?
“Where are you staying, mademoiselle?” the driver asked as they crossed the Pont Marie. “Which hotel?”
“Oh, I’m staying with a friend.”
A “friend” she’d never met. One who didn’t know she was coming. One who would be puzzled to see a girl show up on his doorstep in jeans, a slightly frayed T-shirt, and a backpack filled with cassettes. What the hell was she doing?
“The address, mademoiselle?”
“Yes, sorry. Twenty-four Quai de Béthune.”
Really. What the hell was she doing? Annie shook her head, at herself, at her folly, at the ridiculousness of the situation. Well, if nothing else, she was in Paris. As Mrs. Spencer would say, it was the best place to make a bad decision.
Annie turned toward the window as the roads narrowed and the buildings became less ornate. Though Napoléon III tasked Haussmann with turning Paris’s crowded streets into wide avenues with parks and squares, ?le Saint-Louis maintained its medieval vibe. It was her favorite neighborhood in the city. Annie never could’ve fathomed the events that would lead her back.
“We have arrived,” the driver announced, stopping before an elegant seventeenth-century town home, one of the many lining the quays along the Seine.
“Merci,” she said, fumbling for her wallet. She’d taken out forty euros at the train station and hoped her mom wouldn’t notice the missing funds.
After paying the driver, she slammed the taxi door and looked up at the building’s tawny stone face, its white shutters, and wrought-iron balconies. So lovely, so simple, yet the interiors were probably grander than anything she’d seen in that city. Student housing was decidedly more pedestrian, even in Paris.
“All right,” she said to herself. “Let’s see what happens.”
Just as she was about to ring the intercom, a smartly dressed couple punched a code into the keypad. They popped open the black door and Annie slipped in behind them. They didn’t even notice she was there.
The couple kissed once in the lobby and then tumbled together into a ground-floor flat. Annie reached out for the second set of doors but found them locked. She glanced toward the brass-mounted directory, her eyes scanning the list. There he was. Seton, number six.
With an inhale that reverberated through the building’s stone lobby, Annie pressed the black button beside his name and launched a quick prayer up to the sky.
“All??” said a voice.
All?. A small word, three quarters of a word even, but enough to send Annie’s stomach tumbling.
Once again, what the hell was she doing? Traveling to another country? Ringing the doorbell of a stranger? Granted, he was a man her mother once loved, but he was foreign to Annie. And probably to Laurel as well, decades having passed.
“All??” the voice said again.
Annie’s mouth felt gummed up and thick. The words were there but she could not spit them out.