Chapter 7 Lord Edward
When we get to the train station in East Hampton, the sidewalk is empty except for a single person shivering in the cold.
Even though it’s winter, and we’re in the bloody Northeastern United States, she’s not wearing a coat, only a bulky gray sweater over a pair of black leggings.
Sneakers instead of boots. I’d guess she was coming from someplace warm—Australia, maybe, Florida—but she’s so pale it’s hard to imagine her basking in the sunlight.
It’s dark enough that if it weren’t for the streetlights, we might not have seen her at all.
The girl is tiny, and as far as I can tell, she’s not wearing a stitch of makeup.
The driver gets out and takes her bag—an oversize duffel slung over her shoulder—and puts it in the trunk.
She doesn’t so much walk as shuffle toward the car, her gait tight and compact.
The driver opens the door, and she climbs into the SUV beside me.
Close up, I can see faint lines peeking out from the corners of her eyes, one arch like a parenthesis on the left side of her mouth.
Her skin is slightly loose over the bones of her face.
I guess that she’s older than I am, but still young, not yet thirty.
“Thanks,” she says, her teeth chattering slightly, though she tries to control them. I’m not sure if she’s talking to the driver or to me.
She takes earbuds from her ears and tucks them into her pocket, fastens her seat belt, then holds out a hand for me to shake.
“Amelia Blue Harris,” she offers, giving up any anonymity she might have retained in seven syllables.
Her accent is American, with a slight West Coast drawl.
I recognize her name; she’s the late musician Scott Harris’s daughter.
Amelia Blue Harris has hazel eyes and dark brown hair pulled into a messy bun on top of her head.
When she smiles I see a crooked gap between her front teeth.
I shake her hand but don’t offer her my name.
Normally, I don’t have to. Her fingers are so cold that I find myself wanting to blow on them to warm her skin; the urge is so surprising that I drop her hand abruptly.
“Thanks again.” She slouches in her seat, curled over herself like a teenager.
“I’m sure you think I’m an idiot for getting off at the wrong station.
” Her teeth no longer chattering, she bites her lower lip.
For a second, I think she’s about to cry.
Again, I’m struck by the instinct to reach out, rub her arm, to comfort her somehow.
“Not at all,” I lie.
“They said it would take at least a half hour for another car to get here, and I was freezing. Did you come from someplace warm? Probably not, judging by your outfit. Or maybe you’re just smarter than I am.
Anyway, I’m probably not supposed to ask, right?
I used to live on the East Coast, you’d think I’d know how to dress. ”
Dear god, she’s bloody chatty. Mentally I calculate how long this drive together will be. I wedge the ankle of my left leg beneath the driver’s seat just in front of me.
“Where are you from?” she continues. “I mean, your accent kind of gave you away, you must be British—”
She stops abruptly, and I know she’s recognized me.
Anne pretends she cares about discretion, but what she really longs for is control. She’ll leak the story—her wayward little brother in rehab—the next time she needs the press to turn a blind eye to one of Dad’s unseemly acts.
Lord Eddie in a World of Hurt, the tabloids will shout.
In the corner of the page will be some version of the headline they’ve been writing for years now—Lady Mary Living the High Life—alongside a picture of my mother at a cocktail party in Los Angeles or Majorca or Madrid.
They never stopped calling her Lady Mary, even after Grandfather died and they ought to have called her the Duchess of Exeter.
Of course, now she shouldn’t be addressed with any honorific at all, having lost it in the divorce.
I was only two when they split, far too young to understand what my mother was willing to give up to be free from the family.
Everything except the money, Anne would be quick to remind me. Mum received a handsome settlement in exchange for absenting herself from our lives.
“London,” I answer Amelia Blue finally, though now that she’s recognized me, she certainly already knows that.
“I grew up in London.” The third oldest private residence in London, in fact.
When the family’s not in town, they give tours to the public, pocketing the funds to put toward the property’s upkeep, though of course the money’s not nearly sufficient.
Amelia Blue’s small hand disappears into her enormous handbag and digs around until it emerges clutching a pink pack of gum.
She offers me a piece, but I shake my head.
Anne and I weren’t allowed to chew gum as children.
For years I sought it out like other kids sneak cigarettes and alcohol.
Gum was so gauche, so American. (Cigarettes and alcohol, Anne and I were given freely.)
I press the heel of my hand into my left thigh.
We drive past one mansion after another. In summer, these houses would be hidden behind elaborate landscaping, but this time of year, one can see through bare hedges up long, winding driveways.
“It’s hard to imagine owning a home like this and only using it for a few weeks out of the year,” Amelia says, the artificially sweet scent of her breath filling the back seat of the car.
I wonder if she realizes that in addition to the property in London, my family owns homes in Windsor, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands, each larger than the mansions we’re currently passing, and none lived in year-round.
Technically, the family owns my apartment in Tribeca, too, though perhaps they’ve already sold it and the possibility of my return is a ruse Anne’s using to keep me in line.
“No one who can afford it would be here this time of year,” I point out. In the winter, they vacation in Switzerland or Aspen, the Caribbean or the South Pacific. Anne, her husband, and my nephews recently returned to London from Zermatt.
“Except for us,” Amelia Blue points out.
I pretend to sleep for the rest of the drive—through the village of Sag Harbor, across the bridge to North Haven, onto the ferry that will take us to Shelter Island.
Would Amelia Blue be surprised to learn that a bloke from London knows his way around, or has she heard about the time I spent here last summer?
The ferry sways in Long Island Sound, the current so choppy that it’s hard to imagine that whoever named this particular body of water wasn’t being ironic.
Anne said that I wouldn’t be able to run away from the recovery center like I did from Eton, from Choate, from Columbia.
Where would I go, trapped on a small island surrounded by frigid water?
She made my destination sound less like shelter than prison.
I find myself thinking, Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban.
Fiction, Anne would say disdainfully, a children’s story.
The ferry rubs against plastic bumpers on either side as it pulls into port, groaning as though this is the last place on earth it wants to be.
Okay then, I imagine myself parrying, the real criminal Frank Morris escaped from the real Alcatraz.
Anne would point out that Frank Morris was a good deal more able-bodied than I am. Then she’d add, Did you just call yourself a criminal? pleased to have caught me in an accidental admission of guilt.
As though there’s any denying what I’ve done.