The Notorious Lady Grantham: A Grantham Girls companion novella Page 8

  “What are you talking about? Archie doesn’t have any money. He’s an artist.”

  The waiter shrugged. “That’s just the story he told you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Turns out he’s a toff. A great lord with a title.”

  “No, he’s not. We can’t be talking about the same man.”

  The waiter sighed in exasperation and dropped his rag. “A man arrived this morning. Had a word with him upstairs. Then just like that, your man packed his things and left, with his visitor ‘my lording’ him all the way.”

  The man’s words refused to sink in and make sense. It was like he was telling her a fairy tale about someone else entirely. “But…what about me?”

  “You?” He lifted his eyebrows and smiled mockingly at her. “You were just his little Parisian entertainment, dolly. Happens all the time with these rich, fancy toffs. They slum it a bit, sample the local wares, and then they’re off. Don’t take it too hard.”

  Gen was beginning to shake all over. Her legs felt as if they might not hold her up any longer. How could this be? Archie wasn’t Archie at all? He was some fancy, rich lord? What about Rome? Why would he have asked her to go to Rome with him when he meant to leave without her? But he hadn’t asked, had he? He’d explained why he couldn’t ask her, and Gen had offered. He’d never meant it at all. He’d never meant any of it.

  Everything about him—had it all been a lie? Was he just putting on a show for her? She thought back to all the little things—his schoolroom-perfect French, his polished manners, his formal waltzing… And his disappearance was proof, right? If he was who he said he was, he’d be here right now.

  Oh, what a masterful show he’d put on for her. Gen thought back over the last two nights. She’d gazed at him with adoring eyes and gobbled up every lie he’d fed her. She’d offered to leave her life behind and support him in Rome. As if he’d needed her help. What a joke. How he must have laughed at her naïve eagerness. She’d let him strip her bare and use her body until he’d thoroughly slaked his thirst for her. And, apparently, once he was satisfied, he was gone. She was just a used-up vessel, to be tossed to the side when she no longer suited his needs.

  Gen turned away, stumbling out of the café, making it to the base of a tree in the square before her stomach emptied itself. She kept retching, her body convulsing as if it were trying to expel this horrible new reality. She vomited until there was nothing left, until she was spitting bile, her eyes watering, her throat burning.

  Gone.

  He was gone. And standing here outside his flat, a pathetic, abandoned woman, wasn’t going to bring him back. Her troubles still pressed in from all sides. She still had to leave Paris—now, tonight. Even now, the police might be on their way back to Belleville for her.

  Straightening up, she glanced around the little square, to the café where they’d laughed and drunk just last night, up to the tiny, dirty windows of his studio, just above the bed where he’d made love to her for hours.

  Good riddance.

  Wiping the tears from her cheeks, she resolved they’d be the last she’d ever shed for Archie—or whatever his name might be. She would leave the memory of him behind her in Paris, along with her old life. When she reached London, she would become a new person, and never—not once—would she allow herself to look back on this with sadness.

  She knew something was wrong the second she turned onto their street. Gen shrank back into a doorway, peering at the crowd in front of her building, terrified that she was too late, that the police had come to arrest her. But there were no uniforms in the crowd that she could see.

  It was all her neighbors, nearly everyone on the block, clustered outside her building, talking and…Madame Perneau was crying, dabbing at her wet eyes with the corner of her apron. Monsieur Hébert, who ran the café, was patting her arm and making the sign of the cross.

  In a panic, Gen stumbled out of her hiding place, running toward them. “Maman?”

  Every face turned to look at her, and their eyes were filled with pity.

  “Maman?” The shrill scream of panic sounded as if it came from someone else entirely, but that was her. She could feel the pain in her throat as she screamed again for her mother.

  Monsieur Hébert and Raymond Gosse, the greengrocer, stepped forward out of the crowd, grabbing her arms when she would have shoved her way through to the door.

  “Let me go! Where’s Maman? Let me through.”

  Gen felt herself being pulled back, surrounded by well-meaning neighbors who reached for her, patted her cheeks, stroked her hair, but all she could think about was getting upstairs to Suzette.

  It was Madame Perneau who said the words, wrapping her arms tightly around Gen and murmuring in her ear.

  “She had a little pistol, the poor dear. Marguerite on the second floor heard the shot, but we were too late. She was gone by the time they got inside. I’m sorry, my dear, so sorry.”

  Once again, the awful words someone was saying refused to take hold in her brain. Maman, who couldn’t be moved to get out of bed, had taken a pistol and—

  Someone was crying, great ugly, raw sobs. It was many minutes before Gen realized it was her. Before she realized she’d collapsed into a heap on the ground. Madame Perneau hugged her against her ample breasts, rocking her back and forth as the horrible wails kept churning up from some deep well of pain inside.

  Gen heard Raymond Gosse speaking softly over her head. “The police are coming to inspect the scene.”

  The police. That was supposed to frighten her, wasn’t it? She was supposed to be careful. But why? There was someplace she was going, but it was so hard to remember now. Hard to remember anything at all.

  “I’ll take her to our flat, poor dear,” Madame Perneau told him. “Just say you haven’t seen her.”

  Upstairs, someone produced a bottle of laudanum, and a small dose was coaxed into Gen’s mouth. When the cottony darkness overtook her, she welcomed the oblivion. Anything to avoid facing the loss of everything, and everyone, she’d loved.

  When she woke in a fog many hours later, she was disoriented and unbearably thirsty. She cracked her eyes open, making out the confines of the small, white-washed room in the darkness. She lay fully dressed on a narrow metal-framed bed. Her eyes were gritty from crying, and her throat was raw from screaming.

  Slowly, everything came back to her, like jagged pieces of broken glass being fit back together. Maman…gone. Archie…gone. Leo…gone. And she was still in danger from the police. Like in Place du Tertre when facing Archie’s betrayal, she shoved it all into a room in her mind, a dark place she would not look into again.

  There were hushed voices coming from the adjoining room. That’s what had woken her from the haze of the drug. She fought her way back to clarity, focusing on the words, trying to discern who was speaking.

  Madame Perneau and…that other voice was her husband, Henri.

  “She can’t stay here, Flora. The police have left, but they’ll be back.”

  “The poor dear’s just lost her mother, Henri.”

  “She’s got to have people somewhere who can take her in. For that matter, the girl’s fully grown. She can take care of herself.”

  “If we cast that girl out of our house, she’ll end up just like her mother. You know that foul Baron LeVeq has been nosing around after her.”

  There were more muffled words, the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, a heavy sigh. “A day or two,” Henri conceded. “Then she’s got to go.”

  Gen waited until she heard them both shuffle off to bed and the flat had grown silent. Slipping out of bed, she found her boots side by side on the floor by the bed. There was a pitcher and a basin on top of a chest of drawers. First, she drank deeply to soothe her throat and quench her thirst. With the water that was left, she washed her face and hands, and tidied herself as best she could. There were a handful of hairpins in a chipped china dish on the chest. With them, she pinned up the long, heavy
fall of her dark hair into a severe twist. The young girl who’d worn it down died tonight. She would leave Paris as a new woman and leave that stupid, gullible girl behind forever.

  Checking the pocket of her skirt, she found all the money she’d been able to get for Maman’s jewels. With only one person traveling, she could make it all the way to London on the money easily.

  Quietly, so as not to wake the Perneaus, she slipped out of their flat over the bakery and out into the darkened street. The crowd was gone now. The windows of her flat, across the way, were dark. No doubt they’d already taken Maman away.

  She wouldn’t think on that.

  She thought of nothing at all as she set out across Paris for the train station on foot. She didn’t think as she bought her ticket to Calais and boarded the train. She didn’t think as she watched the dark countryside of France slide past her window. She didn’t think as, in the pearly gray light of dawn, she found the first boat leaving for England and paid for passage. And she didn’t think as the boat pushed away from the dock.

  The sun came up over the Channel as France receded in the distance. Gen didn’t look back even once. Her life in France was over, and Geneviève—the girl who’d lived it—was dead.

  Chapter Six

  “Well, if you’re going to wash up in London after having grown up abroad, at least it was Paris. The British have a deep, abiding distrust of the French, but they can’t resist the language. With your accent, you’ll be seen as chic and cosmopolitan. And as for that, about your clothes—”

  “Black,” Gen interjected. “I’ll wear all black.

  Great Aunt Philomena turned to look at her over her pince-nez, her pile of invitations momentarily forgotten. “Yes, dear, for the next year, assuredly. But after that—”

  “I’ll still wear black,” Gen insisted. “Always.”

  Philomena considered that for a moment. “It would help you to look older. And if you’re going to step into the business with me, that’s essential. As it is, you’re barely older than some of my girls.”

  She was the exact same age as Philomena’s eldest girl, actually. It was laughable, how far removed she felt from Philomena’s fresh-faced American heiress and the girl’s bright enthusiasm. Gen felt decades older than Sally Cookman, and she certainly acted older. Now all that remained was to make herself look that way. The black would help. And it would be a reminder. Gen wasn’t just in mourning for her mother, she was in mourning for herself, that girl who’d died the night she left Paris.

  Philomena turned back to her invitations as Gen pushed her breakfast around on her plate. She’d been here a week already and still had no appetite. All her soft, girlish curves were disappearing, leaving her face pale and angular. The severity suited the new Genevieve.

  “What about my name?” she asked.

  Philomena frowned absently. “You’ll be Genevieve Grantham, of course.”

  “But you’re Lady Grantham.”

  “And so will you be.”

  “But my father was French. I can’t inherit your title.”

  “Yes, the less said about him, the better. Thank heaven Susannah had the fleeting good sense to marry him before he got himself killed in that bar fight. At least you’re legitimate.”

  “I know I don’t know much about the aristocracy—”

  “You don’t know anything,” Philomena corrected. “And that will have to change. We begin studying Debrett’s today. Your knowledge of European noble families must be encyclopedic.”

  “But how am I going to inherit your title?”

  Philomena tsked and shook her head. “Silly girl, I didn’t inherit my title. There hasn’t been a legitimate Lady Grantham since my grandmother passed. We just continue on as if there were. It’s good for business.”

  “And no one minds? I thought the English were terribly snobby about their titles.”

  “Erase that judgment from your tone. The English nobility will now be your bread and butter. You will become one of them as if you were born to it.”

  “Yes, Aunt Philomena.”

  Although she could be a bit chilly in her manner, Gen had found Great Aunt Philomena to be surprisingly kind under her starched surface. When Gen had arrived on Philomena’s doorstep in London without warning, Philomena hadn’t hesitated to take her in. She’d even been moved to shed a few tears at the news of her niece, Suzette, whom Philomena still called Susannah. Suzette had left that name behind when she’d run off to Paris with Gen’s father, a handsome, charming, penniless—and soon-to-be-dead—French gambler.

  “And as for our nonexistent claim to the title, there has been a Lady Grantham presenting debutantes in London Society since the days of King George the Third. As many have said, it wouldn’t be the London Season without Lady Grantham and her girls. So, for the sake of tradition, everyone is willing to overlook the fact that there is no such person as Lady Grantham. If there’s one thing the British love more than their titles, it’s their traditions. I will be Lady Grantham until such a time as I retire from it, and then you shall be Lady Grantham.”

  Philomena had never married, and her sister, Gen’s grandmother, had passed away decades ago. There was no one left in her family but Gen. Despite Gen’s dubious upbringing in Paris, despite her mother’s scandalous life, despite Gen not having stepped foot in London since she was an infant, Philomena had decided almost immediately that she would be groomed to be the next Lady Grantham. They would bury all hints of Gen’s disreputable origins behind a hinted-at mysterious upbringing on the Continent and leave it at that.

  It was about as far from her old life as Gen could possibly imagine. In short, it was ideal. She was perfectly happy to burn away Geneviève Valadon in the crucible and emerge as Genevieve, Lady Grantham, older, harder, wiser, and impenetrable.

  She would learn it all, every lord and lady in London. She’d learn the dukes and earls and the financial situations of each and every one of them. She’d learn the Byzantine rules of polite society, and then she’d help Philomena teach them to a bunch of unpolished American girls. Then, just like her great-aunt, her great-grandmother, and her great-great-grandmother, she’d make sure the right girl with a fortune was introduced to the right cash-strapped nobleman. It was commerce dressed up as romance, and hadn’t she grown up knowing all about how that world worked? The manners here were just more polished.

  “We’ve been invited to the Miltons’ ball in two weeks. I think we’ll debut you there.”

  “Two weeks? That soon?”

  “Trust me, child, all of London already knows you’re here. If we wait any longer to bring you out, they’ll decide there’s something wrong with you. So somehow, we’ll have to make you ready to assume the role by then.”

  Two weeks to fully bury her old self and craft a new one. She couldn’t wait to get started. Gen inhaled deeply. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Philomena gave her a brief nod of approval, which seemed about as close as she ever came to affection.

  “Genevieve,” she said, when Gen had assumed she’d turned her attention back to the invitations.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  Genevieve gave her a nod of approval of her own, attempting to mirror Philomena’s chilly demeanor, her polite distance, her self-possession. “So am I.”

  “Then let’s begin.”

  Chapter Seven

  London, 1897

  “Oh, I’m so glad Lord Wrexham invited us to the reception. I was afraid there were going to be no more social events before I left for home. And here’s this elegant reception, on my last night in London! It’s like my very own Christmas present.”

  Hazel, demurely lovely in a frothy white gown under a red velvet cape, leaned forward in the carriage to gaze at the facade of the National Gallery, all lit up in the foggy darkness in honor of the reception. Their carriage was creeping along in a long line slowly making their way to the front steps to discharge their passengers.

  “It
was very kind of him to invite us.” Gen’s voice sounded flat and far away to her own ears. She’d been moving through life as if wrapped in cotton for weeks—since Archie’s unexpected explosion back into her life. His reemergence had stirred up a host of memories and emotions she’d thought she’d successfully buried years ago, and it wasn’t pleasant.

  “Especially as he was forced into it by his children, poor man. They were adorable, though, weren’t they?” Hazel said, a touch wistfully.

  “Charming.” In truth, Gen couldn’t think about Archie’s children without a pang of some indescribable emotion. Envy? Regret? Longing? The idea of motherhood for her had been consigned to the waste bin years ago, along with everything else she’d left behind in Paris. But that little boy with Archie’s eyes… Something primal beat hard in her breast when she’d looked down into his face. Or at Charlotte, hanging from Archie’s neck as she stared in wonder at Gen.

  Bah! Enough. Hadn’t he come to London to find a mother for his children? He’d no doubt find one soon enough, and when he did, she’d be nothing like Genevieve Grantham.

  “Did I tell you, my friend Missy Whitaker, back home in Cincinnati—she’s the one who married that banking chap?—she’s just had their first baby. A boy.”

  “How lovely for them.”

  “And here I am, not even engaged yet.”

  “To be fair, Hazel, you’ve chosen a different path than Missy, or you wouldn’t have spent the last two years in London with me.”

  Hazel sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Missy has invited me to their New Year’s Eve party. Everybody I know from home will be there. She said even Theo is coming home from Chicago at last.”

  “Theo?”

  Even in the gloom of the carriage, Gen could make out a telltale blush. “You remember. Her older brother? But then he went off to college in Chicago. And I came here. I haven’t seen him in an age. Won’t he be surprised to see how I’ve grown up?”