Read Online The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig - Free Book Online Page A

matched columns, overshadowed by a triangular portico. Long wings stretched out on either side, pilaster after pilaster, window after window, all in perfect symmetry. Even squished flat on an eleven-and-a-half-by-eight-inch piece of paper, the house had an imposing feel to it, the sort of place that was designed to overawe the peasantry and impress visiting monarchs.
    It didn’t look like anyone actually lived in it. It was a showplace, not a home, and certainly not Granny Addie’s home.
    “You’re pulling my leg,” Clemmie said. “Unless you’re going to tell me that she was a housemaid who made good or something like that.”
    Jon choked on a laugh. “What have you been reading? Barbara Taylor Bradford?”
    “What’s wrong with Barbara Taylor Bradford?”
    Jon made a face amply illustrative of his feelings.
    “Yeah, yeah, whatever. And Terry Pratchett is high literature?” That was the danger: they knew way too much about each other; they always had. That was why they hadn’t … well. Clemmie poked at the picture. “Can you really see Granny there? I can’t.”
    “Why not?” asked Jon.
    Clemmie leafed through the pages. After the big glamour shot of the façade, the next five pages were dedicated to interiors, some whole rooms, others detail shots of intriguing bits of masonry. She couldn’t picture Granny Addie there, playing hide and go seek on that great double staircase, with the elaborately carved gallery that ran all around, taking meals in that long, red-walled dining room with the massive silver epergne on the center of the table. There was a detail shot of the epergne, the base made of trumpeting elephants.
    There were no private areas, no bedrooms or nurseries. That wouldn’t have interested the author of the book.
    “She had to grow up somewhere, didn’t she?” said Jon reasonably. “Where did you think it was?”
    Funny, Clemmie had never really thought about her grandparents coming from anywhere in particular. They just were. Like pillars on a building. You never stopped to ask where the marble had been quarried and how it had been carved. It just was.
    Granny sometimes talked about Kenya, about their early days there, getting the hang of the farm, learning how to run a business, but that was all. That was as far back as it went and Clemmie had never thought to inquire further.
    “If it makes it better,” said Jon, “she wasn’t a housemaid, but she was a poor relation. She was the daughter of the sixth earl’s younger brother.”
    Clemmie was reminded of that line from Spaceballs , the bit about the father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate. What’s that make us? Absolutely nothing!
    Jon was in full lecture mode. “When her parents died in an omnibus accident in 1906, the earl and his wife took her in.”
    Clemmie did the genealogical math. “So that would make Granny Addie the earl’s niece.”
    “Yup.”
    Clemmie shook her head. “It doesn’t wash, Jon.” She pointed at the book. “According to this, it says the Earl of Ashford and his family still live there. If Granny Addie grew up there, why don’t we have any contact with them? Why wouldn’t she say that she still had family left in England?”
    “I gather,” said Jon carefully, “that she parted ways with them. There was a falling-out. Why do you think she doesn’t talk about this stuff?”
    Maybe she would have if Clemmie had been around more. Clemmie shoved that thought aside, wiggling out from under the book. It made her feel better to stand. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly the Brady Bunch. No one in my family is big on talking about their personal lives.” Except maybe Aunt Anna, and even she had managed to perfect the art of talking a lot while saying very little. “We don’t do the whole sharing thing.”
    Jon looked up at her from his comfy sprawl on the daybed. “There’s a difference between letting it all hang out and normal information flow. I don’t