Free I'll See You in Paris by Michelle Gable

voice, her head filled with images of the Parisian streets at midnight, its gaslamps hanging in arcades, dancing the people home.

 
    Ten
    THE BANBURY INN
    BANBURY, OXFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND
    OCTOBER 2001
    Â 
    To understand the future Duchess of Marlborough, one must first understand her past.
    Gladys’s mother was Florence Baldwin Deacon, a renowned femme fatale from a celebrated New England family. She wasn’t particularly intelligent but had the compensating attributes of extraordinary beauty and unmatched sophistication. Gladys’s father was bright-minded but cold and austere. He met his death at age fifty-seven, after contracting pneumonia in a mental hospital.
    Florence Baldwin’s father, Gladys’s grandfather, was Rear Admiral Charles Baldwin, a man wealthy beyond description. He was so celebrated that five hundred marines escorted the coffin at his funeral. William Waldorf Astor was a pallbearer.
    The duchess’s other grandfather was a real scrapper, coming up in American society through various bootstrap enterprises, including a whale boating business. Alas, his greatest accomplishment was marrying Sarahann Parker, a descendant of the breathtakingly wealthy Boston Parkers, a family that produced an unending line of adulterers and adultered-upon, all of them gorgeous and sad.
    No Baldwin or Parker was ever happy, despite the money and gilt and their salacious sexual appetites. Gladys’s mother chased the ever-elusive joy for a while until she landed bang in the center of a worldwide scandal. One lover, one baby, and one international incident that changed the course of their lives, especially the life of her eldest, the beautiful, tempestuous Gladys.
    â€”J. Casper Augustine Seton,
    The Missing Duchess: A Biography
    Annie crept through the hotel room door, backpack socked against her chest, book hidden safely in the bottom.
    â€œWhere have you been?” Laurel asked from the corner. She sat in a chintz chair, a stack of papers in her lap. “I was almost starting to get worried.”
    â€œOh,” Annie said, heart thumping like she’d just come home from a field kegger or sneaking out to meet a much older boyfriend. “I didn’t realize you were waiting. Or that you’d be back already. You haven’t been around, so…”
    â€œMmm.” Laurel bobbed her head in agreement, or in acceptance, as she thumbed through the papers in her lap, sticky notes jutting out from all sides. “I apologize. I’m sure you’ve been bored. This isn’t exactly the trip I envisioned, either.”
    â€œDeal not going well?”
    â€œThat’s one way to put it. They’re playing hardball. Who ‘they’ are, the buyers, or the owners of the adjacent parcels, or the lawyers, I can’t decide. Everyone was desperate to get this done a month ago and suddenly nothing’s right.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Annie said, and lowered onto the bed. “What a gigantic pain in the ass.”
    â€œIt’s how these things go, I suppose. I’ve spent more than a few years as a corporate attorney and though my expertise isn’t exactly in U.K.-based land transactions, I’m not falling for any of their tricks.”
    â€œYou get ’em, Mom.”
    Laurel straightened the stack of papers and tossed them onto the desk beside her.
    â€œSo what have you been doing all day?”
    â€œNot much,” Annie said. “Wandering around Banbury. Having tea. The usual.”
    â€œSpecifics, girl. I want specifics. Where’d you go? What’d you see?”
    â€œBanbury Cross. A few English gardens. Some bakeries. Endless limestone.”
    Annie yanked a rubber band off her wrist and pulled back her thick, wavy, jumbled mess of a hairdo. Though the sky was clear when she stepped into the pub, it was drizzling by the time she left. On the short walk home, the dampness exploded her hair to three times its usual