Girl Abroad

JAMIE PARKS HIS JAGUAR BESIDE A BENTLEY AND A BEAT-UP Volkswagen coupe on the gravel car park in front of the manor house. It’s astounding, this place. Four stories of ornate original architecture surrounded by green lawns. A pond on the east side is ringed by willow trees dipping their limbs in the still water.

“Are you serious?” I mutter the exclamation to myself, though Lee hears me and chuckles.

“Shoulders back, chin high. Act like you belong.”

“People actually live like this,” I say in continued astonishment. I’ve seen these places in movies, but they’re so much more elaborate and impressive in person.

“It’s all right,” Jamie says dismissively.

A young woman in a blue pantsuit approaches with a blinding white smile to hand us each a registry of items available for sale. She escorts us around the west side of the main house, through a river stone–paved garden, until we reach a brick courtyard where tables are set out to display silver serving sets, jewelry, books, paintings, and the various collected possessions of one of Britain’s once-great families.

It’s sort of depressing.

Like picking over a corpse.

Jamie is unfazed. Immediately he’s on the scent of a cute brunette admiring the vases and candleholders. In seconds, he has her twisting her hair around her finger and leaning on one hip. Incredible.

As he’s been doing most of the morning, Lee has his head bowed over his phone.

“George?” I ask while we peruse a table of carved jade candleholders.

Lee nods absently.

“Did he shave that horrid mustache?”

“What? Oh, no, luv, this is a new one.”

“A new what?”

“A new George.”

“What happened to Mustache George?”

“Too clingy.” Lee picks a couture silk kimono-style robe sheathed in plastic off a clothing rack. Then he sees the price tag and throws it down like it tried to bite him. “New George is more chill. A go-with-the-flow kind of bloke.”

I shake my head. “I swear, everyone in England is named George.”

We drift over to another table. Most of the stuff arrives at a weird intersection of seventeenth-century English country and eighties Miami drug dealer. Then I spot a hardbound encyclopedia of the trees of France and decide, well, no sense letting material go to waste. I have my research project to think about, and this estate could provide ample inspiration.

I browse the stacks of leather-bound first editions and obscure volumes about the most random of topics. From the history of English carpentry to great ships of the empire. Modern fashion to mapmaking. I find a leaf pressed between the pages of an account of an early expedition to Greenland. Minutes later, my arms are full, and another attendant of the sale offers to set my shopping aside for me while I continue browsing.

“I won’t be mad if you want to slip a few rubies in your pockets.” Lee sidles up to me in front of several paintings propped up against the brick-faced wall of the servants’ entrance to the kitchen.

“Is that the good crystal I hear clinking around in your pant legs?” I tease.

“Did you see those porcelain goose things?” He makes a gagging noise. “A thousand pounds. What on earth possessed these people?”

Most of the paintings are what I’d imagine as fancy British interior design: Hunting horseback behind a pack of dogs. Landscapes. Still life and gardens. But then a small portrait in an ornate frame catches my eye. It’s of a young dark-haired woman looking off her shoulder. Her eyes are a deep chocolate brown. A simple gray dress covers her slight frame and drapes over the side of the antique chair she’s perched on.

Lee whistles softly. “They’re tossing the ancestors out with the old linens. This is dreadful.”

My gaze remains glued to the painting. The girl is around my age, maybe a year or two older. She appears preoccupied. Not lost in thought but as if listening to a conversation just out of frame. That look you get when people are talking about you like you aren’t in the room. She’s trapped in this pose, though she doesn’t know why. Doesn’t know how she found herself here or what else her life might have been, might still be, if she had the nerve to decide otherwise.

It’s mesmerizing.

“Hello?” Lee snaps his fingers inches from my face. “Babe, you in there?”

I gesture at the painting. “She’s sort of captivating, right?”

Staring at her, he makes a face like he’s stepped in something. “It’s a sad white girl.”

“I don’t know. I like her.”

He shrugs. “Whatever. I don’t kink-shame.”

The registry says little about the painting itself. Oil on canvas. Not even a date. By the hair and dress, I’d guess World War II era, but I can’t be sure. It’s perfect for further research, however.

“Hi there,” I say, approaching the woman in the blue pantsuit. She looks up from her clipboard. “May I be of assistance?”

“I hope so. I have questions about one of the paintings.”This content provided by N(o)velDrama].[Org.

“Oh, lovely. Let’s see if I can answer them.”

She introduces herself as Sophie and offers that pearly-white smile again. She’s gorgeous, I realize. Her brown hair is arranged in an elegant chignon, and she has warm hazel eyes and cheekbones I’d kill for.

“Do you work for the Tulleys?” I ask as we fall into step with each other. “Or are you just organizing the sale for them?”

“I work for the duke’s eldest son. Benjamin,” Sophie clarifies, as if I should know this information. “I’m his executive assistant.” She laughs dryly. “My duties range from attending to business matters to running his entire household.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“Sometimes,” she relents.

I lead her back to the painting of the dark-haired girl. “This one. Can you tell me anything more about it other than what’s on the registry?”

Sophie studies the painting, pursing her lips. Then she flips through the pages on her clipboard, stopping to read.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing in here about it. A lot of these pieces belonged to Lawrence Tulley, the duke’s grandfather, who wasn’t diligent about cataloguing his collection. If you’re hoping this has any value of significance, I’m afraid it doesn’t. The valuable pieces are either being retained by the family or sold to museums.”

“No, it’s not the value I’m interested in. It’s the history.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Sophie says before walking off to speak to one of the sale attendants.

I turn back to the painting and check the price. One hundred pounds.

Fuck it. I’m splurging. Dad’s going to have some questions when he gets the credit card bill, but my total haul isn’t so extravagant. Besides, this is an academic pursuit. He’ll understand.

For the drive to Jamie’s estate, the mystery woman rides on the seat next to me. I begin to wonder how, presumably, a Tulley family member gets put out with the old bedsheets and ill-advised fad wardrobe. What relegates a person to a yard sale folding table? At some point, she meant enough to someone to have her portrait painted. When did that change, and why? What betrayal or tragedy befalls a family already so entangled in scandal and strife to prompt the wholesale disposal of this woman?

“You better keep that thing in your room.” Peering over his shoulder from the front seat, Lee scowls at the painting. “I don’t like its eyes.”

“Uh-oh, mate. She’s heard you,” Jamie warns, glancing at me in the rearview mirror as he drives. “Better keep your door locked while you’re sleeping, Abbs.”

“It’s a painting, not a cursed doll,” I grumble at them. “Unless I wake up tomorrow with gray hair, I’m sure it’s harmless.”

Lee faces the front. “That’s what it wants you to think.”

We approach a set of iron gates, then proceed through a tunnel of trees that opens to a long gravel driveway that rounds a fountain in front of a palatial Elizabethan manor. Tall windows reflect acres of manicured lawns as Jamie pulls up to the front door.

“Stop it,” I blurt out, staring through the passenger window.

“We have stopped,” he says, puzzling over me.

“You just, like, live here? Like it’s a perfectly normal thing to do.”

He smiles, at least a little charmed by my astonishment. “No, I live two doors down from your bedroom. My family lives here. Occasionally.”

“Occasionally,” I repeat as we get out of the car.

“There’s the flat in London and summer home on the continent,” he says with a British upper-crust poshness that has Lee rolling his eyes. “This here is nearly a relic. Kent Manor has been in the family since the Napoleonic Wars. The story goes our ancestor had some quarrel with the patriarch of the previous occupants. During the wars, the man lost three heirs to the fighting, a brother to sickness, and the aging patriarch himself was robbed and stabbed to death in London.”

I look at Lee. “And you’re worried about a painting?”

“In the end,” Jamie continues, somewhat smug, “Kent offered to keep the man’s widow comfortable until her death in exchange for assuming the responsibilities of the manor.”

“How generous,” I say, grinning.

He smirks. “Wasn’t it.” With his expensive sunglasses reflecting the sunlight, he leans against the side of his Jaguar. “We do get the occasional special guest. Elton John stayed here once.”

He says it with such gravitas that I’m compelled to burst his bubble just for fun. “I met Elton once. My dad opened for him a few times during the Asian leg of his tour back in the day. He was huge in Korea.”

Lee huffs. “Am I really the only gay man in England who doesn’t know Elton John?”

At home that evening, I take my haul up to my room. The painting goes atop the dresser, and I sit back on my bed watching it watch me. Lee wasn’t entirely wrong about her eyes. They’re intelligent and perceptive. She knows you’re there, wondering who she is, asking questions she won’t answer. Who is she, and how did she end up an anonymous figure inside a frame, forgotten and discarded?

The grim thought sends an odd shiver running up my spine. I think that’s what my dad feared most of all, what propelled him through his career: a persuasive phobia of obscurity. And it’s what made him give it all up too. Fear of never knowing his daughter, of her not recognizing him. Memory controls us more than we realize.

“Souvenir?”

I jerk at the sound of his voice.

Jack leans against my doorframe in a pair of plaid pants. His hair’s wet, and beads of water still cling to his bare chest. He smells like man soap. The scent fills my room in an instant—thick and humid—like I’m standing with him in the shower. A thought that runs rampant through my brain until he nods at the painting like snapping his fingers in my face to see if anyone’s home.

“Who’s the lass?”

“Yeah, uh, I don’t know.” I recover myself, hoping he doesn’t pick up that every time he wanders half-naked into my field of view, I lose track of time and space. “We stopped at an estate sale. I picked it up more out of curiosity.”

Jack bobs and weaves his head as he enters, examining the painting from different angles. “The eyes. I swear they’re following me.”

“Lee doesn’t like her.” I grin. “He thinks she’s going to crawl out of there and end up standing over his bed with a butcher knife.”

Jack shudders. “Thanks for the nightmares.”

“I’m supposed to come up with a research project for one of my classes. Solve a mystery of sorts. I figure this qualifies.”

He approaches the painting again. “She’s a stunner, that one.”

How absolutely typical that Hot Jack would have a crush on a painting I bring home. Eliza will love this.

“I want to find out who she is, but I’m not sure where to start.”

With a shrug, he taps the corner of the painting. “Start with the artist.”

I go to take a closer look. The signature is so subtle I hadn’t noticed it before.

“What does that say?” I ask, squinting at the right-hand corner. “Dyce?”

“Looks like.”

“What are the chances of locating one World War II–era painter named Dyce in the whole of England?”

“Guess you’re about to find out.” He steps back, still studying my new treasure. “Bizarre, isn’t it? To put a portrait out on the front lawn and not say anything about who they are?”

“Part of her charm.” Excitement begins building inside me, that same nerdy glee I feel every time I’m about to delve into a period of unknown history. “What could possibly have gotten her blackballed by a family like the Tulleys? Was she a misfit? A rebel? I don’t know. And there’s something about her expression. It’s like she’d just swallowed a smirk, you know? She was up to something.”

I glance at Jack to realize he’s no longer contemplating the painting but transfixed on me.

“What?” I say self-consciously.

“Really turns you on, does it? This history stuff.”

Oh boy. Somebody this good-looking isn’t allowed to say the words turned on in my vicinity.

“It’s kind of my passion,” I confess.

He chuckles. “My ego would be massive if chicks were talking about me with that kind of passion.”

For my own sanity, I turn the subject on him. “Aren’t you passionate about something?”

“Rugby” is the instant reply.

I snort.

“—and sex.”

My snort turns into a startled cough.

“Big fan of that,” he adds with a faint smile.

I gulp. Is he flirting?

I busy myself by adjusting my side braid, which is coming undone after a long day out. Then I look up and swallow harder, because when my gaze was averted, he sort of snuck up on me and crept close enough that I can feel the heat from his skin on my cheek.

Like the girl in the painting, he has magnetic eyes too. Gaze-into-them-and-fall-in-his-arms eyes. Trip-over-my-own-two-feet eyes. I wonder what he’s seeing in me, staring so intently.

“How about you, Abbs?” His voice has gone a bit raspy, almost mocking.

“How about me what?”

“What are your thoughts on sex?”

My breath catches.

Is he seriously standing here all nonchalant, asking me for my sex thoughts in clear defiance of house rules one through infinity?

“Um.” I bite my lip and don’t miss the way his gaze focuses on that. “Sex is…fun.”

His mouth curves. “Can’t disagree with that.” Jack tips his head, pensive. “You popped your UK cherry yet?”

Oh my God. Did he really just say that?

“No. Why, are you offering?”

Oh my God. Did I really just say that?

My heart is beating triple time, the air so thick I can barely draw a breath. My lungs are burning.

“I think”—Jack watches me for a moment; then he visibly swallows and finishes—“I’d better head downstairs and prep dinner.”

The scent of him lingers in my room well after he’s gone. Taunting me.