There was more where that came from, and when she was done reading, Jane did not immediately look up. She knew that the reviewer had pricked his vanity—and precisely where it would hurt the most—but Wells was determined not to let on. He took a sip of his whiskey, smacked his lips, and asked, “Who wrote it?”
Jane flipped back to the previous page and said, “Someone named Rebecca West.”
“Never heard of her. Have you?”
“No, but I suspect it’s a nom de plume, anyway. It’s the name of the heroine in Ibsen’s play, Rosmersholm.”
Wells mulled it over. “At least she writes well.” That joke about the ladies’ ardent exclamations in his books . . .
“I think that’s enough for one night,” Jane said, tactfully closing the Freewoman without excising the review.
“I’m going to read for a bit,” Wells said, setting the papers aside and picking up a copy of the latest book by Henry James, a collection of his late short fictions, sent to him by the author himself. “This one ought to make me sleepy.”
“Your friend Henry can be relied on for that,” Jane said, trailing a hand lightly across his shoulder as she went upstairs to her bedroom. They had kept separate sleeping quarters almost since the day they were married. “Just don’t fall asleep in your chair again.”
Wells removed his bookmark—that telegram from the War Office asking him to stop by at his discretion for a private conference—opened the book again, but had more trouble than usual focusing on the words. Good God, why couldn’t James ever just say something in plain English? Why did everything have to be so belabored, so drawn out? But it really wasn’t James. That wasn’t what was bothering him. It was that damned Rebecca West, whoever she really was, and her pointed pen. He was both annoyed and intrigued by her nerve. He felt like a bear who’d been stung by a bee.
He picked up the Freewoman and read the entire review, and by the time he was done, he had resolved to invite her to his house and see if she was willing to stand in front of him and stick by what she had written. Yes, he would invite her to lunch at Easton Glebe and see what this young woman—and she had to be young or he would have heard of her already—was made of.
CHAPTER THREE
Cicily Fairfield boarded the train at Liverpool Street Station, and found a seat in a compartment occupied only by an elderly woman and her lap dog. Although Bishop’s Stortford was the closest station on the regular schedule, she had advised the conductor that, per the instructions Wells had sent her, she would need to be dropped off at a private halt a mile or so on, reserved for visitors to the estate of Lady Frances Warwick.
She had fretted for hours over what to wear, attended by her two older sisters and her mother, who had at first refused to believe that she had been summoned to meet the great man at all. They had studied his invitation as if decoding Sanskrit. But her mother, who had often wondered what would become of her willful daughter—until the year before, she’d aspired to become an actress—was openly encouraged by this sign. Perhaps the girl, whose essays and reviews had begun to appear quite regularly in small presses and publications, had real talent after all. But it was of paramount importance, her mother insisted, that she make the right first impression, and so she was wearing a dark green woolen suit and matching hat, with a starchy white blouse fastened high at the throat by a cameo broach Mrs. Fairfield’s mother had once worn to Ascot. Cicily’s dark brown hair, thick and lustrous, was tamed as best it could be, but there was nothing to diminish the flashing brilliance of her big dark brown eyes.
In her purse, she carried a copy of the Freewoman in which she had written the blistering review of Marriage. She’d been so proud of it at the time—the boldness of attacking a popular novel by an acknowledged master of the craft, a book unanimously praised elsewhere—but now she was mortified at her hubris, and the invective of the prose. It had never dawned on her that she might one day have to beard the lion in his den. Although the invitation had been mildly worded, simply suggesting that as the author of the book in question Wells would be interested in a candid exchange of views, she wondered if, when it came to it, he might not thunder down at her like Zeus from Olympus. As a very pretty young woman, she had learned from experience that men’s vanity could be so easily pricked.
The lap dog on the seat opposite studied her with an unwavering gaze. Could it tell how nervous she was? And when the train made a special stop at the estate station, even the dog’s owner looked up with undisguised curiosity as Cicily stood.
“Do you know Lady Warwick?” she asked.
“No. But I know H. G. Wells, who leases the rectory on her property.”
This left the woman even more slack-jawed, as Cicily stepped onto the platform and looked around. No one else had disembarked, and no one else was waiting there except for a slight, middle-aged man with a wispy brown mustache, the sort who might have been mistaken for a second-tier solicitor. He was wearing a long brown overcoat, a bowler hat, and muddied walking boots.
“Miss Rebecca West, I presume?” he said, coming forward with a bright smile and an outstretched hand.
“Cicily Fairfield, actually.”
“Ah, at last. I’d had to address the telegram to your pseudonym at the magazine office. Nice to know the true identity of my closest reader.”
“And one of your greatest admirers,” she said, “really. I’m so sorry about the tone of that review. I don’t know what got into me that day. I was—”
But he stopped her with another smile and an upraised palm.
“No need to defend yourself, or the review. I’m a big boy. I’ve weathered worse.”
She had sworn to herself that she wouldn’t burble, that she wouldn’t recant her views, that she wouldn’t melt in the glare of Wells’s celebrity, and here she’d done all three in a matter of seconds. She had to get a hold of herself, especially as he was hardly a formidable figure—he was not much taller than she was, twice her age, and if it weren’t for his kind eyes, which took her in with evident delight and interest, he might have been someone she passed on the street without a second glance.
“Do you mind if we walk to the house?” he suggested. “It’s not far.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “My legs are cramped from the train.”
Why had she said that about her legs? It was inappropriate, particularly on first meeting someone. A gentleman yet. Sometimes she wondered if she was really the firebrand she liked to imagine herself—and that her mother worried that she had become—or just another conventional young woman brought up to be a proper lady. Was she the dutiful Cicily Fairfield . . . or the radical, yet devious, heroine Rebecca West, whose name she had appropriated?
On the way to the house, a stately redbrick Georgian positioned at the top of a hill—before what was no doubt a very green lawn in spring and summer, but sere now—Wells told her a little bit about the countryside, the reason he’d taken the house there. “I have a place in London, of course, but here there are so few intrusions on my time and my writing, and no clanging trolleys or crowds to contend with.” And then there was his landlady, the grand benefactress who had “so generously” given him a long lease on the old rectory.