Valeria Vose by Alice Bingham Gorman

Author:Alice Bingham Gorman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-six

Driving in England proved to be too difficult for Mallie. She had volunteered to be the first to take the wheel out of Gatwick Airport and had promptly blown out a tire, edging too close to a curb on a roundabout. Their rented black Humber Hawk sat wounded on the side of the road while they waited for the rental company to send someone to change the tire.

The accident was not surprising, given Mallie’s sleepless night on the airplane. Still, she felt a pang of inadequacy for her inability to drive properly on the left side of the road. Jenny was her usual understanding, forgiving self, reassuring Mallie that she could easily have done the same thing. It would take time to acclimate to the English way.

Jenny’s sister Elizabeth Carlisle lived in an eighteenth-century brick manor house, surrounded by flower gardens and a sweep of lawn down to the distant shoreline. On first glance, there was a peace about the place that Mallie imagined existed only in old monasteries or convents.

When the massive wooden front doors opened, a small herd of corgis, long, low-to-the-ground, fox-like dogs with no tails and erect ears, and two Jack Russell terriers, short and wiry, bolted out of the house, encircling the newcomers with ardent sniffings and noisy greetings.

“I do hope you like doggies,” Elizabeth said with the slight British accent she had cultivated from living in England for so many years.

Mallie recognized the tall, silver-haired, tweedy figure in the doorway, although Elizabeth looked much older than she had remembered and nothing like Jenny. The sisters had grown up in Louisville, Kentucky, and Elizabeth had married Lord Ian Carlisle, the eldest son of their father’s distant cousin, the Earl of Carlisle. Ian had come to Louisville for Elizabeth’s debut party in 1950, and that was that. A match made in heaven, Jenny said—unlike her ill-fated match with Webster. The British tabloids reported the wedding as “English Royalty Marries American Whiskey Heiress.” The headline had been accurate, though somewhat tacky, according to Jenny. She and Elizabeth were certainly “whiskey heiresses,” thanks to their grandfather’s Kentucky bourbon distillery, and Ian was due to inherit his father’s title as a large English landowner although neither carried a large cash reserve. The girls’ inheritance from their family’s whiskey business, a fact that Jenny had tried to keep more or less under wraps in Memphis, had made both of them independently wealthy women from the age of twenty-one.

“I love dogs!” Mallie said, dropping her bag and reaching to scratch behind the ears of the closest corgi.

Jenny rushed up the stone stairway and threw her arms around Elizabeth. Mallie was instantly envious of the closeness of the sisters. She loved her two sisters but rarely had the opportunity to spend time with them. She had not seen Anne or her younger sister Kye in months. Neither Anne nor her husband was fond of Larry, particularly after Mallie called Anne to tell her about what was going on in her marriage

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