Stephanie Barron Read online

  It was inevitable, Jo thought, from the moment she’d taken Gray’s call in the middle of shopping; or perhaps it had been inevitable from the day they’d had coffee alone together, and she’d found him finishing her thoughts before she’d spoken them. As his mouth searched hers in the London suite, she could see the next few hours unroll like a predictable pageant: the intensity of lovemaking (his breathing was already faster as his hand slid over her shoulder), the dining table wheeled into the disheveled room by the discreet and wooden waiters; the champagne, the bathrobes, the steaming tub for two. It would be shocking and exhilarating and more dangerous than anything she’d ever done. And then she would awake the next morning and know that she had destroyed something important—not Gray’s marriage, that was his own problem—but something harder to describe. Her self-possession?

  What happened to business owners who slept with their clients? What was more important—Bellamy Design, or Gray Westlake?

  His fingers tugged at the elastic gripping her hair, loosened her neat ponytail, sent brown strands cascading over her shoulders. For an instant, his eyes studied her, and Jo felt a surge flow upward from her heart: half fear, half desire. Then her lips quirked suddenly in a smile. She couldn’t help it.

  “Do you always seduce your hired help, Gray?”

  “What?”

  “Is it noblesse oblige?” she mused. “Something rooted in your earliest ancestors—boinking the serving girl on the back staircase?”

  “Jo, don’t,” he said quietly. “You’ve never been hired help. You’re my true north.”

  But she had begun to question herself, and there were too many interesting answers for a mindless plunge into passion. “Gray,” she said briskly, “I’d like some time to think.”

  “Shit.”

  He let her go, his face a mix of puzzlement and frustration. Very few women, Jo imagined, were immune to the sort of triple-barreled assault Gray Westlake could bring: All that charm. All that power. All that money. She knew she was foolish. She’d probably lose Gray as a client anyway—so why not lose her heart?

  Her cell phone vibrated again.

  She reached for it, hair sliding into her eyes. Her blouse had come undone and her shoes were scattered. She discovered she was impatient with it all.

  “Miss Bellamy?” said a cautious British voice in her ear. “Peter Llewellyn here. I’ve finished with your notebook.”

  She glanced at Gray; he was raking his fingers through his dark hair, that look of pain in his eyes again.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said.

  29 March 1941

  Sissinghurst

  WE WALKED IN THE GARDEN AFTER DINNER, QUITE late, the Priest’s House lowering behind us, no flicker of fire or golden lamp escaping its heavy blackout shades. Vita still talks of bombing runs. She has no idea why I’ve ceased to fear the Germans.

  “Do you see him?” she whispered. She was wrapped up in her sables, her nose emerging from the sumptuous collar like a ship’s prow. “He” was a member of the Home Guard, posted nightly in the height of her tower. A spotter. A lookout for the sudden flower of parachutes over the hop fields; for Nazi troop planes vomiting men. How perfect, I thought, as I squinted up at Mr. Home Guard, the band on his arm, the inverted pie-plate of his hat. How perfect that Vita’s tower should have its sentry posted once more. The tower and Orlando have been waiting for the enemy all these long years since Elizabeth; waiting for conquest, and night watches, and the Defence of the Realm.

  There was no one posted in Sussex that night last November. No one but the dog to sound the alarm when the white silk flowered overhead.

  Vita wanted to smoke; I could see the fingers of her right hand twitching where they grasped her left elbow. But she was no fool. Not for worlds would she allow the glowing fag to summon the Luftwaffe.

  “There were incendiary bombs in the neighbouring field,” she whispered. “Machine gun bullets down by Hadji’s lake. Long Barn was hit, did you know that? All those children—”

  They have sent the children out of London to havens like Long Barn. The place I loved her first, and best. Bombed, like all the best houses—Tavistock Square, Mecklenburgh.

  Here is a partial list of the things Vita needs for survival: Boots. Breeches. Jerseys. Shirts. Stockings. Sables.

  How like her to put the boots and breeches well before the furs. If the Germans land, she is under orders to load everything into her Buick and get out of Kent. But these are Harold’s orders, who is still marooned in London. What else should she take? A Thermos, of course. Hot water bottles. Cigarettes and lighters and matches. Harold’s books. Her manuscript of Grand Canyon. Her bedroom slippers and a wooden statue of a saint she calls Barbara.

  And then there is her bare bodkin, the poison Harold found somewhere. She will kill herself if Mr. Home Guard fails her, and the Germans reach Sissinghurst unannounced.

  I am struck, as she talks, by the efficiency of her plans: Orlando at bay. She recruits for the Women’s Land Army. She stockpiles straw to make beds for refugees. She agrees to serve as Ambulance Driver for the surrounding countryside, in the aforementioned Buick, which will naturally preclude loading it with sables and turning west. She will never leave Sissinghurst, which makes her resort to the bare bodkin all the more likely. Her lists—the act of making them—are all the salvation she needs.

  Whereas I abandoned my life, my clamorous, inchoate mind, without the slightest useful provision. The river, my poison. Stones in my pockets instead of a torch. My furs on my back. I fled the way a child runs from home, expecting to be retrieved and scolded at any moment.

  Only Vita never scolds.

  She coddles me like a schoolgirl. Murmurs incantations as we stand in the inky garden. She is talking, I realise, of what she cannot save: this place, the future. Those things she cannot list. This watch-tower under the clouded night, the garden she dreamt from the ruins. She will never abandon Sissinghurst, even at the point of the sword. Her survival depends, in the end, on the Germans giving up.

  “I wish you could see the tips of the daffodils poking through the soil,” she murmured. “I bought scads of them at auction last fall. Also a magnolia, quite a lovely thing, but very slow growing. Hadji says I’m foolish. The whole place could be a ruin in weeks. But I must plant, don’t you see? I must continue to believe that things will grow. Spring comes, regardless of the Luftwaffe. Or whether I live or die.”

  “The earth takes in our bones—and gives back the magnolia.”

  We picked our way through the beds near the Priest’s House, where she and Harold take their meals. Roses, of course, everywhere—a nightmarish landscape in this season and the dark. Stiff, brutal canes like barbed wire. Leafless. I thought of trenches. The dead. Earth torn by shrapnel. Thorns. Crucifixions—

  “No light,” I said, my words thick. Panic in my throat. The man falling through darkness.

  “Hadji painted all our torches blue last autumn, when we cared about the blackout. So now I dispense with light altogether. Like a cat. And I’ve walked this path from dinner to bed countless times in the dark. Look!”

  She seized my wrist and held me there. I lifted my gaze from the trenches and the sick barbs of stillborn roses, and saw it.

  The great ghostly barn owl, drifting overhead. White as a wraith, silent as Nemesis.

  “Isn’t he gorgeous,” Vita whispered.

  The Home Guard had missed this pair of wings. We kept the visitation to ourselves. And absurdly, I felt my heart lift. Sweeping through the air—Life! Life! Life!—impervious to despair. Its pale shade a taunt to the Luftwaffe.

  “It glows,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it just!”

  I glanced around. “You should have white flowers here. Nothing else. They’d rise in the dark like fairy lamps, lighting your way to bed.”

  “Lilium regale,” she said. “Hadji loves them. Only not here—I thought perhaps in the Lion’s Pond. Vass drained it.”

  “The Lion’s Pond get
s no sun.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That’s what Hadji said! Have you been writing to my husband?”

  Harold and I, in mutual sympathy? No. He is a man, after all, and their instinct is mastery—

  “White clematis. White lavender, white agapanthus, white double-primroses. White anemones…”

  Lists, again. How they comfort her.

  I wanted to tell her she would never do it, with this constant maddening threat of war. She could not buy plants or the petrol to fetch them or the labour to thrust them into the earth, but the idea of all this whiteness was vital to her—a cleansing impulse, a need for clarity. Light in the darkness. How obvious it seems, how clumsy, how necessary.

  “Is Vass still here?”

  She shook her head. “Called up and gone the next day. But I have a boy—a good, sensible, Knole-bred boy, sent over for the duration. You met him yesterday.”

  The tall, silent one standing with his cap in his hands at the Staplehurst station. “Jock?”

  “My faithful terrier. He worries about me, did you know?”

  “He’ll be off to war one day, too.”

  “Not if I can prevent it.” Her voice was tight with suppressed anger. Fear for her own boys. Ben flying low over batteries, skirting the radar. The horrible deaths we witnessed in the last war. Trenches. Barbed wire. The trenches are flooded and our feet are rotting. How the water calls to me with babbling Death—

  “His hands are too fine,” Vita said. “There’s suffering in them.”

  In all our hands.

  We did not speak until we reached the South Cottage.

  PETER LLEWELLYN STOOD WAITING OUTSIDE THE auction-house entrance. The change in his expression when Jo pulled up in the borrowed Bentley—there were mini Connaught flags flying from the headlamps, as though she were a Head of State—was comical to behold.

  “Shall we take tea?” he asked once the chauffeur had evicted her to the paving and resumed his privileged post behind the wheel.

  “Sure. I could use a little caffeine. I’m not used to wine in the middle of the day.”

  “That’s rather reassuring, in the circumstances. That you aren’t a habitual drinker, I mean. Walk or taxi?”

  She’d expected Sotheby’s café again. “Let’s walk.”

  They set off down New Bond Street, Jo conscious of a sudden shyness. It had been an unsettling day. And there was all of London around her—this extraordinary city—the strangeness of the man beside her, kind as he was; the unexpectedness of Gray, waiting for her in an empty hotel suite.

  “Do you like macaroons?” Llewellyn asked unexpectedly.

  “Very much.”

  “Smashing. We’ll have lots, shall we?”

  She smiled, then noticed how he ducked his head as though from a physical blow; Americans, she recalled, were accused of smiling too much. She would have to curb her impulse in the future.

  “You mentioned you were done with my notebook,” she ventured.

  “I did.” He walked swiftly, with his blond head slightly bowed; a slim figure, unconsciously graceful. He might almost have been striding along alone—except that she was aware of him almost imperceptibly shepherding her through the crowd. “Miss Bellamy, would you describe yourself as a person of integrity?”

  “Does my tea depend on it?”

  He grimaced. “I’m feeling rather as though I’ve gone out on a limb. I don’t suppose you understand me.”

  “You want to know if I’m honest.” She tried to think objectively. “I have a great deal of integrity about my work—getting it right, for myself and the people who hire me. I would like to think I treat the people I love with honesty. But…” She hesitated, aware of conflict in her soul, Gray hovering over her. “I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. All the time.”

  “Which is in itself the most honest thing you could say. Thank you.”

  They dashed through traffic in Piccadilly and then into the Burlington Arcade. He was leading her to a place called Ladurée, a bright shining birdcage of a room filled with pastel-colored French pastries, melt-in-the-mouth macaroons for which Paris was famous.

  “Opened recently,” Llewellyn murmured. “We’re not too sure about it. Londoners, I mean. Suspicious of anything too French. I got over that, myself, years ago.”

  They chose a plateful of exotic flavors from the rows of coat-button–size confections and sat down at a tiny table, their knees almost touching, to wait for a pot of tea. When it came, Jo closed her eyes and allowed the bergamot fragrance of Earl Grey to drift to her nostrils. “I should bring some of this home to my grandmother. She loves British tea.”

  “Masterpiece Theatre fan?”

  “Military nurse. She was stationed here for years during the war. Never got over it.”

  “Ah!” His expression, which had been curiously concentrated when he looked at Jo, suddenly relaxed. “That’s all right, then. I suppose she gave you this?”

  He had drawn the notebook out of his coat pocket and held it before her like a flag.

  “Nana? How could she? I found it at Sissinghurst!”

  “So you said.” Llewellyn lifted the teapot carefully and refilled his cup. “Only, you see, it doesn’t work. I wish it did, because you’ve said you’re honest and I like you, Miss Bellamy. I’d hoped we could deal frankly with one another.”

  Jo felt her face suffuse with heat. Carefully, she set down her half-finished macaroon and wiped her fingers on her napkin. “I don’t lie, Mr. Llewellyn. What about the notebook doesn’t work?”

  “It doesn’t square with the evidence, I’m afraid. The historic record of Woolf’s life.” He took a sip of tea. “Whoever wrote this went to a great deal of trouble—the notebook itself is authentically of the period, the ink is probably prewar, although we’d have to verify that chemically; the language is similar to the sort of stuff Woolf wrote to be just plausible—”

  “Then why—”

  “Indeed, certain phrases and passages might almost have been lifted straight from her work—and probably were,” he added hurriedly. “Then there’s the references to Lady Nicolson and her family, their shared past, Woolf’s novel Orlando, which is dedicated to Vita—and so on and so forth.”

  “So what’s—”

  “It’s clearly a forgery, I’m afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “You honestly don’t know? You never noticed?”

  Jo frowned.

  “Open to the first page, Miss Bellamy, and read out the date.”

  She did as she was told.

  “Twenty-nine March 1941,” she read, “Sissinghurst. What’s so wrong about that?”

  Llewellyn leaned across the table. His gray eyes were studying her with something like pity. He had not touched his macaroons.

  “Do you know when Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse?”

  Jo shook her head.

  “The day before your notebook starts—March twenty-eight, 1941.”

  30 March 1941

  Sissinghurst

  SHE WOKE ME THIS MORNING WITH SUCH AN EXPRESSION of worry that at first I thought I had offended her, from staying abed so late into the morning. I had been drowning in sleep for hours—down, down, into the depths of this feather bed, its curtains pulled close, like a Tudor princess sacrificed to policy—never in recent memory have I slept so sound. The voices in my head banished sleep, a constant argument overheard on the Tube, a BBC broadcast perpetually in the background, an intimate whisper of invective and abuse. I could not write for their clamour in my ears—

  “He has written to me,” she said. “There—you may see the letter. It’s quite dreadful, darling.”

  I knew the hand. I did not have to take it to see who it was—why my Vita was agitated so dreadfully. L. is a terrible scold. With the best intentions in the world—the preservation of genius—he will drive one to the edge of insanity, and observe as one falls over. Waiting with his net. Waiting with his snare.

  I am never so much L.’s own, as
when I am mad.

  It is the kind of mastery he craves; all our friends, cooing with sympathy: You have preserved for the world her genius what would she have done without you we should never have known Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse! And I, dutiful child, nod swiftly and say to them all: I have been so very happy with L. So good to me, always.

  “I won’t read it,” I said, thrusting back the covers. I fancied I saw him folded up quietly in a corner of the room, thin knees tucked in, watching me. He was smiling; there was intent behind his eyes, some devilment. “I shall simply pack my things and go. You won’t betray me?”

  “Darling, you don’t understand.” Vita sank down onto the bed, the letter slack in her fingers. “He has told everyone you’re dead. That you killed yourself. He intends to send the information to The Times. Apparently they’re dragging for your body, back at Rodmell…”

  My body.

  The chuckling brown water, inviting me. Seducing me. Dragging at my thighs. And but for the bird singing Vita! I might have plunged in.

  “What did you write,” she said, “in that letter you left him?”

  “Merely that I could not go on. That I felt I was going mad again. That he would be better without me—able to work. That no one had been kinder.”

  Vita snorted. “He took it as Farewell—when you simply meant farewell. How you’ve made him wretched, darling. Should you like me to telephone from the village?”

  · · ·

  “SO YOU SEE,” PETER LLEWELLYN WAS SAYING APOLOGETICALLY “it’s quite impossible. She was drowned the day before the journal begins.”

  “All right,” Jo admitted, “I never focused on the dates. I didn’t buy a biography of Woolf in a bookstore and check when she killed herself. It never occurred to me. My interest in this is secondary—”

  “What is your interest, Miss Bellamy?”

  It was a way of asking the question he’d been avoiding, Jo realized: Are you a crook, Miss Bellamy? Are you attempting a massive literary fraud and hoping to use me as your dupe?