Главная страница | Современная зарубежная литература | The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance

The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance
Beatriz Williams


Lose yourself in a sweeping love story this summer - perfect for fans of Dinah Jeffries and Santa MontefioreNorthern France, 1917Virginia Fortescue has thrown convention and her respected upbringing to the wind to drive ambulances for the American Red Cross across northern France. Grinding through the mud and the trenches to bring injured and dying men back from the front, the last thing she expects to find is a handsome English doctor who won’t let her go – in spite of a wife waiting for him at home in Cornwall.Florida, 1922In the humid heat of Florida, Virginia Fitzwilliam must tackle the estate of her late estranged husband. After the plantation house burned to the ground with Simon Fitzwilliam inside, the shipping business he built from scratch has foundered and the mangroves have started to take back the land. The more Virginia learns about Simon and the secrets of his life, the more she fears that the dangers surrounding Simon now threaten her as well…






















Copyright (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)







Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in the UK by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Beatriz Williams

Cover design by Charlotte Abrams-Simpson © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover photographs © Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images (figure); Amy Weiss/Trevillon Images (veranda); Yolande de Kort/Trevillon Images (distant house); Shutterstock.com (http://www.Shutterstock.com) (palm trees and aged paper texture)

Beatriz Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008132675

Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008132682

Version: 2017-05-31




Dedication (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


To the land of Florida—its dreamers, its builders, its mavericks, and its scoundrels. (Sometimes all four at once.)


Table of Contents

Cover (#u3a7413a1-bae2-54c2-87f3-5b821aa9ea31)

Title Page (#u01634f9f-066d-5480-a85d-a724fb7e1b27)

Copyright (#u691dc65c-3f4b-561a-9cbc-7abacf2967d8)

Dedication (#ue5cda70f-3fa2-55f2-be0e-119db47a213e)

Prologue (#u901ab412-4826-5887-8a72-96b5892490d9)

Chapter 1 (#ue1adb0ad-9825-5262-b6fe-230c9ffaaa52)

Chapter 2 (#u0c0bd811-81b7-54b7-90b4-6ecce0cf2c3b)

Chapter 3 (#u6ae969aa-0117-500d-afa3-a9a3b6b24b22)

Chapter 4 (#ua85682d1-410d-5fde-b1a8-f0218d03808b)

Chapter 5 (#u615abce1-ed2f-5021-8cef-1ffca0a3ef05)



Chapter 6 (#ub749e66f-bd0a-57cb-8713-b6d8e81d865c)



Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)



Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)



Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)



Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)



By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


May 16, 1919

My dear wife,

Let me tell you about this pen.

Handsome object, made of black enamel, repeating fleur-de-lis motif in gold leaf. Casing somewhat scratched owing to years of hard use (rather like its owner). Knows you well enough, I expect, to write this letter without instruction. Anyway, I wish it would. I have been holding the damned thing for an hour at least. Turning it about between my fingers. Getting up and walking around the room. Sitting and staring and resolving.

The truth is, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say—I don’t know what to write to make you believe in me again. I stand accused and convicted of a despicable crime, and you never allowed me a word in my own defense. If I could, I’d whisper in your ear the entire truth, but I suspect you wouldn’t believe me, would you? God knows, as a practical matter, you shouldn’t believe me. Anyway, I can’t tell you the truth, at least not yet, so that’s that.

Instead of relying on your faith, then, I shall have to attempt the next best thing, the hardest thing. I am going to prove my—I was going to say innocence, but that’s not quite true enough, is it? I am not an innocent man, and I’ve never pretended to be, at least with you—the one person with whom I never pretended. But I can insist I’m innocent of this one crime at least—that I married you for yourself alone—and since I’m afraid, in the wake of my parents’ deaths, the house must now be sold for taxes and the estate broken up, I shall take up the last inheritance remaining to me and make something of myself at last: something, I hope, you will one day recognize as the man you thought you had married.

I shall write my next letter from the mosquito-bitten town of Cocoa, Florida, at the head of a once-grand shipping empire, which I intend to resurrect for your sake. And then—well, what? You will decide, my own dear phantom, my irreplaceable and inalienable wife, my own Virginia. If you’ll remember—if you’re honest in remembering me—I have always allowed you to choose for yourself.

In the meantime, may God watch over you.

Yours always,

S.F.




CHAPTER 1 (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 1922

Someone has cleared the ruins away, but you can still see that a house burned to the ground here, not long ago. The earth is black and charred, and the air smells faintly of soot.

In the center of what must once have been a courtyard, a modest stone fountain has toppled from its pedestal. Already the weeds have begun to sprout from the base, encouraged by the hot, damp sunshine and the fertile soil. Everything grows in Florida. Grows and grows, unchecked by any puny human efforts to control nature’s destiny. I sink to the edge of the pedestal and call to my daughter, who’s poking a stick through the long, sharp grasses that grow along the perimeter of the paving stones. She looks up in surprise, as if she’s forgotten I exist, and runs to me on her stubby bare legs. On her mouth is the same startling smile that used to light her father’s face, and there are moments—such as this one—when the resemblance strikes me so forcefully, I can’t breathe.

“Mama! Mama! There mouse!”

“A mouse? In the grass? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Mama! Mouse! He run away.”

“Of course he did, darling, if you poked him with your stick.”

Without another word she burrows her hot, wriggling body into my chest, and I’m not one to waste such an opportunity. Not me. Not now. I clasp Evelyn between my arms and bury my face in her sweet-smelling hair, and I breathe her in, great lungfuls of Evelyn, as if I could actually do that, if I inhaled with enough strength and will. Breathe my daughter’s spirit into mine.

I haven’t told her that her father died here four months ago, on this very patch of ground, or even that he built this house and lived in it while we—Evelyn and I—inhabited our comfortable brownstone on East Thirty-Second Street in New York City, together with Grandpapa and Aunt Sophie. For one thing, I don’t want to frighten her with the idea that a person could burn to death at two o’clock in the morning in his own house, just like that. For another, she’s not that curious about him, not yet. She’s not yet three years old, after all, and she doesn’t know any other little girls. Doesn’t know that most of them have both mothers and fathers, living at home together, sometimes with brothers and sisters, too. One day, of course, she’ll want to know more. She’ll ask me questions, and I’ll have to think of plausible answers.

And there is another reason, a final reason. The reason I’m here in Florida to begin with, examining this blackened ground with my jaded eyes. I suppose I’ll tell Evelyn about that, too, when the time comes, but for now I’m holding this reason inside my own head and nowhere else. I’ve learned, over the years, to keep my private thoughts strictly to myself.

Behind us, Mr. Burnside clears his throat in that slight, unnecessary way that lawyers have. I imagine they think it conveys discretion. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” he says.

“Yes, Mr. Burnside?”

“Have you seen enough? I hate to hurry you, but we do have a whole mess of appointments this morning.”

Mr. Burnside, you understand, likes to keep to a tight schedule, especially in the face of this shimmering June sun, which forces all business around here to conclude by lunchtime. After which Mr. Burnside will spend the rest of his day inside a high-ceilinged, north-facing room, sipping a cool, strong drink while an electric fan rotates above him. If he can spare the energy, he might turn over a paper or two on his desk.

On the other hand, he’s an extremely competent man of affairs, as I’ve had plenty of occasion to discover in the past two months, and the sound of his voice—practical, confident, somewhat impatient—is enough to stiffen my resolve. To blow away the dust of regret, or nostalgia, or grief, or whatever it is that’s stinging my eyes, that’s clogging my chest as I hold Simon’s daughter in my arms and try to imagine that Simon is dead. Dead. What a word. An impossible word, as unlike Simon as clay is to fire. I kiss the top of Evelyn’s head, detach her from my arms, and rise to my feet. The early sun catches my back. Not far away, the ocean beats against the yellow sand, and the sound makes me want to take off my shoes and socks and wander, aimless, into the surf.

Instead, I say: “Are you certain the remains belonged to my husband?”

“Yes, ma’am. His brother identified the body.”

“Samuel.”

“That’s the man. Big fella.”

“And this was Simon’s house, of course. There’s no mistake about that?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. No mistake about that. Had the pleasure of visiting here many times myself. Lovely place. Like one of those Italian villas. There were lemon trees in this courtyard, real pretty. A real shame, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Terrible, terrible shame that you never saw how lovely it was.”

I gaze at him coldly, and he coughs and turns away, as if to survey the empty, overgrown plot around us. The breeze touches the ends of his pale jacket. His straw hat glows in the sun. He inserts his fingers into his sweating collar and says, “Have you thought about what you’ll do with the place? You can get a good price for the land, if you don’t mind my saying so. Folks are paying top dollar these days for a plot of good Florida land, let alone one as nice and big as this, looking out on the ocean.”

Across the road, at the edge of the yellow beach, an especially large wave rises to the sky, gathering strength and power, until it can’t bear the strain any longer and dives for shore in a long, elegant undulation, from north to south. An instant later, the boom reaches us, like the firing of a seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell—a sound I know all too well. My nerves flinch obediently.

But I’m an old hand at disguising the flinch of my nerves. Instead of jumping at the sound of a crashing wave, I brush an imaginary patch of dirt from my dress and reach for Evelyn’s sticky hand.

“I think we should visit the docks next, don’t you think? So we don’t run late on our schedule.”

Mr. Burnside frowns, causing his bottlebrush mustache to twitch under his nose.

“Of course,” he says. “It’s your property, after all.”

IN ADDITION TO A THOUSAND or so acres of mature citrus, a shipping company, the ruined house on Cocoa Beach, and a hotel in town (in which he kept a private apartment for his own use), Simon has also left me a beautiful sky-blue Twin Six Packard roadster, which Mr. Burnside now drives at thirty exuberant miles an hour toward the long, narrow bridge across the Indian River, where the little boomtown of Cocoa perches on the shore and makes itself a living.

On another day, I would have liked to drive myself. This is, after all, my car. But the estate is still in probate, and anyway Mr. Burnside knows the way, while Florida’s still a mystery to me. Why, I don’t even know the name for this thick, rampant vegetation that spreads around us, creeping along the edges of the road, but as the Packard plows along the raised bed, top down and windows lowered, I think—for the first time in years—of the hedgerows of Cornwall. The way they block everything else from view, everything ahead of you and everything to the side, so that you never know what’s coming around the next curve. Those shrubs might be hiding anything.

“How much farther?” I call out above the roar of the engine and the heavy, warm draft blowing past our ears.

“Bridge is up ahead!”

“What are these shrubs and trees growing alongside?”

“That? Mangrove.”

“Pardon me?”

“MANGROVE, Mrs. Fitzwilliam! That’s MANGROVE! Grows EVERYWHERE around here, where the ground’s LOW and SWAMPY, and it’s mostly LOW and SWAMPY in these PARTS!”

Mangrove. Of course. One of those things you hear about—a mangrove swamp, how exotic—but never actually see. And here it is, spreading everywhere, tangled and salty and very much at home.

“Darned STUFF!” Mr. Burnside continues. “Breeds MOS-QUITOES! I’m sure you’ve noticed all the MOSQUITOES!”

“Yes!”

He turns his head closer. “They used to call this Mosquito County, until someone got smart and saw it was keeping the settlers away. Changed the name to Brevard. Now they’ve got big plans to drain these swamps, at least on the mainland side, some of the bigger islands.”

“What a shame!”

“Shame? About TIME, I say! You haven’t seen ’em SWARM yet! Here’s the bridge, now.”

The mangrove falls away, replaced by the tranquil navy blue of the Indian River and the bustling shore on the other side. Across the waterway stretches the wooden bridge, straight as an arrow, except for the drawbridge and its wheelhouse. We crossed it this morning, rattling the boards from their morning slumber, much to Evelyn’s delight. I nudge her now. “Look, darling! It’s the bridge!”

She scrambles up into my lap and puts her hands on the doorframe. “Bridge! Bridge!”

“She’s a PRETTY THING!” shouts Mr. Burnside.

“Thank you.”

“Looks like her FATHER, if you don’t MIND my SAYING so!”

I stroke Evelyn’s hair. “Tell me, Mr. Burnside. When was the bridge built? It looks rather new.”

Mr. Burnside flexes his fingers around the steering wheel and leans forward, as if to concentrate his attention on the progress of the Packard down the narrow roadway. He’s driving more slowly now, as we cross from solid ground to fragile human construction, and the noise of the engine subsides, replaced by the rattle of wood.

“Oh, not that new, I guess. They finished it just about the time we got into the war—1917, it was. Seems like ages, though I guess that’s only five years, by the calendar.”

“Yes.”

He spares a sideways glance. “You must have gone over there, isn’t that right? The war, I mean. Over to France.”

Evelyn’s trying to stand on my lap, to get a better view over the edge of the car. With difficulty, not wanting to spoil her fun entirely, I brace my hands around her flapping upper arms. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, just curious, I guess. What it was like. Pretty awful, I bet. I figured you must have met Mr. Fitzwilliam there, you know. Since he was fighting.”

“He wasn’t fighting,” I say. “He was in the medical corps.”

“Oh, that’s right. Used to be a doctor, I think he said.”

“Yes. He was a surgeon in the British Army.”

“Yep, that’s right. That was good luck for him, I guess. Do your bit without getting killed.”

“I suppose so.”

The Packard rattles on, toward the middle of the bridge. The sun’s higher now, and without the shade of the mangroves, the interior of the car has grown intolerably hot, even in the draft. The perspiration trickles down the hollow of my spine, dampening my dress against the back of the seat.

Mr. Burnside, however, is persistent. “You must’ve been a nurse, then. Red Cross?”

“Yes.” And then, reluctantly: “I wasn’t really a nurse. I drove ambulances.”

“Did you! Well, I’ll be. Can’t say I would have guessed. You’re such an elegant thing. And that’s man’s work. Real man’s work, driving those tin cans through the guns and the slop.”

“There were a great many women driving, actually. So the men could go fight.”

“Were there, now? I guess that’s war for you. Where’d you learn to drive? In the service?”

“No. My father taught me.”

“Well, well. And so you met Mr. Fitzwilliam in France, somewhere?”

We’re approaching the drawbridge, and the stop signal appears. The Packard slows and slows. I point through the windshield. “Look, Evelyn. The bridge is going to go up so the boats can sail through.”

Evelyn, squealing, throws herself toward the glass, fingers outstretched for the topmost edge, and I catch her by the chest just in time.

“You’ve got your hands full with that one,” observes Mr. Burnside.

“She’s a good girl, really. Just impulsive when she’s excited. As most children are, at this age.”

My voice is crisp, but he doesn’t seem to notice. His hand reaches for the gear lever. “She doesn’t get that from her daddy, that’s for sure. Never saw a man with a more even temper than Mr. Fitzwilliam. Nothing troubled him. Cool as January. I always figured it was the war, see. You survive something like that, and … Oh, look at that. It’s one of his ships. Your ships, I mean.”

I turn my head to the cluster of vessels awaiting the lifting of the drawbridge. “Which one?”

“The steamer, there at the end. Loaded up with fruit, I’ll bet, and headed for Europe. Though I’d have to check the schedule in the office to be sure.”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean you, ma’am. There’s no need for you to trouble yourself with the business side of things.”

The wooden deck draws slowly upward before us, foot by foot, and Evelyn gasps for joy. Claps her palms together, leans trustfully into my hands. The creaking of the gear reaches a breaking point, above the rumble of the Packard’s idling engine, and the ships begin to bob forward.

“But that’s why I’m here, Mr. Burnside. To learn about Simon’s business. Since it now belongs to me.”

“Now, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Why bother yourself like that? That’s what we’re here for, to keep your affairs running all nice and smooth, so you don’t need to dirty yourself. The dirt of commerce, I mean. Just you live in comfort and raise your daughter and maybe find yourself another husband. A nice, ladylike thing like you. It’s hard work, you know, running a business like this.”

“I’m not afraid of hard work.”

“Well, now. Have you ever run a business before, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean—”

“Then I think you’d best just leave everything to us, ma’am. Those of us who know the business, inside out.” He leans back contentedly against the seat and crosses his arms over his broad, damp chest. “Trust me.”

Well! At the sound of those words—Trust me—I’m nearly overcome by an urge to laugh. High and hysterical, a little mad, the kind of laugh that will make this kind, round-bellied lawyer shake his head and think, Women.

Trust me. My goodness. Trust me, indeed. I’ve heard that one before.

But I don’t laugh. Poor fellow. Why disturb his satisfaction? Instead, I watch the progress of the ships through the gap in the bridge, paying particular attention to the nimble white steamship at the end, which—I now see—bears the name of its company in black block letters near the stern.

PHANTOM SHIPPING LINES

AS IT HAPPENS, SIMON’S DOCK is empty of ships, except for a small boat that Mr. Burnside informs me is a tender. “The others are out to sea,” he says, chewing on the end of a long and unlit cigar, “which is a good thing, mind you. Good for profits. Our aim is always to turn the ships around as smart as we can.”

We’re standing at the end of the Phantom Shipping dock, and the Indian River swirls around the pilings at our feet while a hazy white sun cooks us inside our clothes. Evelyn, restless, swings from my hand to look for fish in the oily water. Thirty yards away, a tugboat steams slowly upstream, trailing gray smoke from its single stack. The air is almost too hot to breathe.

“What about the warehouse?” I ask.

“Warehouse?”

I turn and nod to the rectangular wooden building at the base of the dock. Like the ship at the drawbridge, the building identifies its ownership in confident, no-nonsense black letters above the massive double door: PHANTOM SHIPPING LINES. The paint is fresh, on both the signboard and the white walls of the warehouse itself. There are no windows. I understand this keeps the fruit fresh and cool in its crates, waiting for a ship to transport it across the ocean. Citrus, mostly, but some avocado as well. There’s a growing taste for more exotic fare in the London drawing rooms, apparently, after so many years of restriction and rationing and self-denial. A growing taste for adventure.

“Oh, there won’t be anything to see in there,” says Mr. Burnside. “The ship’s already loaded and left, and we’re not due to receive any goods this morning.”

“I’d like to have a look, all the same.”

He nudges aside his sleeve to check his watch. “Well, I can’t object to that. But it is nearly lunchtime, and we’ve still got the offices to visit, haven’t we? And your poor daughter looks like she might stand in need of a rest and a cool drink, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, you do seem pleased to offer up your opinion on a variety of matters, Mr. Burnside.” I strike off down the dock, holding Evelyn’s hand. “Even without being asked for it.”

“That’s what I’m paid to do, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Give you my opinion. Your husband, in his will, made very clear that—”

I turn so quickly, Mr. Burnside nearly stumbles into my chest. He’s an inch shorter than I am, and his eyes are forced to turn up to meet mine. I can tell he doesn’t necessarily welcome the mismatch.

“Let me make very clear, Mr. Burnside, that my late husband’s wishes are really no longer the point. My wishes are your business now, and if you find that task impossible, I’m afraid I’ll simply have to find myself a new lawyer.”

He steps backward. Snatches the cigar from the corner of his mouth. Widens his eyes to regard the cast of my expression, which—after two and a half years of motherhood—is formed of iron.

“Of course, ma’am.” He inclines his head. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. I presume the warehouse is locked?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you have the key?”

“I do.”

“Then let’s proceed, shall we?”

I swing Evelyn onto my hip and cut through the sweating atmosphere in long, masculine strides to the white double doors at the base of the dock.

As it turns out, Mr. Burnside is correct. The warehouse doors swing open to reveal nothing at all: no cargo, at any rate. No waiting crates of citrus and avocado. Along the walls, ropes and tools hang at neat intervals, and the air—unexpectedly cool—smells of the usual dockside perfume, hemp and tar and salt and warm wood.

And something else.

I tilt my chin and sniff carefully. There it is again, sweet and spicy and tonic.

“Is something the matter, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” asks Mr. Burnside, lighting his cigar.

“Nothing at all.”

“What smell, Mama?”

Evelyn’s wrinkling her tiny nose. Her face has grown pink from the heat, and I consider the possibility that Mr. Burnside’s correct about this, as well: she needs a rest and a cool drink.

“Smell, darling? What do you smell?”

“It’s my cigar, I expect,” Mr. Burnside says quickly.

“No, it’s not that. I smelled it, too.”

“Just the fruit, then.”

“Possibly.” I try the air again, but the flavor has disappeared in the overpowering fog of the lawyer’s cigar. “Though it didn’t smell like fruit to me. If anything, it smelled like brandy.”

Mr. Burnside turns for the door and laughs. “Ha-ha. Brandy? Your nose is playing tricks on you, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Though I guess, if some of last night’s shipment had gone off in the heat … happens sometimes … sitting in the sun like that …”

I wave away a delicate blue plume of smoke and cast a final gaze along the clean, well-organized walls of my late husband’s warehouse, and as I do I’m reminded, against my will, of the neat canvas walls of a casualty clearing station in northern France, everything in its place, equipment and instruments and creature comforts, while the rain drummed outside. Of a pair of hazel eyes, turned toward me in supplication.

“Perhaps,” I say.

Evelyn’s squirming weight pulls at my arms. I allow my daughter to slide to the scrubbed wooden floor. I take her hand, and together we follow Mr. Burnside through the doorway, into the suffocating Florida noon.

WE’RE LATE FOR OUR VISIT to the offices of the Phantom Shipping Lines, on the second floor of a large, businesslike brick building set across from the Phantom Hotel, which now belongs to me, according to the terms of Simon’s will. My husband, you see, articulated his last wishes in clear, simple terms: in the event of his death, everything—every single article he possessed—should pass to his wife, Virginia Fitzwilliam of New York City.

A dressmaker and a coffee shop occupy the storefronts on the ground floor, and the stairs for the upper floors lie behind a plain wooden door around the corner. Mr. Burnside reaches for the knob and unlocks it with a small Yale key from the chain in his jacket pocket.

The stairs are wide and bare, and Mr. Burnside tells me to watch my step as I climb, holding Evelyn by the hand. The wood creaks softly beneath our feet. Simon climbed these steps, I think. Simon’s feet caused the same soft creak.

“If you’ll allow me,” Mr. Burnside says, stepping around my body as we reach the top of the staircase and a square, high-ceilinged foyer made white by the glare of the sun through the window at the opposite end. He strides for a door halfway down the wall on the right side, the one facing the river, and unlocks that, too. The top half is made of frosted glass and also bears the name PHANTOM SHIPPING LINES in the same uniform black letters.

“After you,” says Mr. Burnside, stepping back, and Evelyn and I walk through the doorway into a beautiful, spacious room, lined on the east and south walls by large sash windows, shaded from the ferocity of the Florida sun by a series of green-and-white striped awnings. Above our heads, four electric fans rotate quickly. The walls are white, the furniture simple: a pair of desks, a sofa, armchairs, table, cabinets. Everything necessary, I suppose, to run a small, legitimate shipping company, sending fresh, nutritious Florida citrus and avocados to the kitchens and dining rooms of Great Britain.

The room is occupied, of course. After all, business goes on, though the owner of Phantom Shipping Lines has died shockingly in a house fire four months earlier, leaving his company and all the rest of his worldly goods to a wife who, I suspect, most people here in Cocoa never knew existed. A young woman in a navy suit sits erect before a curving black typing machine, the clattering of which has abruptly ceased, and a middle-aged man looks up from the desk on the other side of the room and gazes at us from beneath the green shade covering his brow.

More. There’s another man, stepping just now from a doorway along the north wall, closing the portal behind him and turning to face me. But he’s not the man that—at some hidden depth of consciousness, unknown to logic—I suppose I’m expecting to find before me. Whole and alive.

No. This man is burly and straight-shouldered, grim-faced and dark-haired, bearing a jaw and a pair of hazel eyes so resembling those of my husband, my heart jolts in my chest and my legs turn to sand, and I squeeze Evelyn’s tiny hand in order to remain upright.

Samuel Fitzwilliam.




CHAPTER 2 (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


France, February 1917

HUNKA TIN

… But when the night is black,

And there’s blessés to take back,

And they hardly give you time to take a smoke;

It’s mighty good to feel,

When you’re sitting at the wheel,

She’ll be running when the bigger cars are broke.

Yes, Tin, Tin, Tin!

You exasperating puzzle, Hunka Tin!

I’ve abused you and I’ve flayed you

But by Henry Ford who made you,

You are better than a Packard, Hunka Tin!

—from the American Field Service Bulletin, 1917

(IN THE SPIRIT OF KIPLING’S “GUNGA DIN”)

I met my husband in the least romantic setting possible: a casualty clearing station in northern France in the middle of February. A cold drizzle fell and the air stank of human rot. I suppose this constituted a warning from Providence, though Providence needn’t have bothered. I had always known better than to fall in love. I had always known love was something you would later regret.

The CCS occupied the barn of an ancient farm, and by the time I reached it, late in the afternoon, the sky was dark and the ambulance wheels had choked with thawed mud. For weeks the winter had frozen the saturated ground; today, on the first day of a new offensive, the roads had turned to sludge. That was the war for you.

I brought the motor to a grinding halt in what had once been a stable yard and yanked back the brake. No other vehicles inhabited the swamp around me, and for a moment I thought I’d got the directions wrong. It was all just a hunch, after all: Hazel bursting back from the village, rushing down the empty ward, calling out that there was a battle on! A new attack into some salient or another, and if we wanted patients we should take the ambulance down to the nearest CCS, they’d be lousy with casualties! We were all rolling bandages at the time, there was nothing else to do. No patients to care for. Everyone turned to me. And what could I say? Take the ambulance, Hazel had said: the ambulance just brought down from Paris, our precious Hunka Tin, a bastard born of much wheedling and carrying-on with the American Red Cross Ambulance Service. A tattered, battered Model T that, in our entire sisterhood of accomplished Manhattan ladies, only I could drive.

Take the ambulance, Virginia, do! It’s not as if you have anything better to do.

She was right, of course. The rain was crackling on the great windows overlooking the courtyard. An infinite roll of lint lay in my lap like a death sentence. What else could I have said? Yes. I dumped that damned lint back into the basket and said yes.

A reckless act. Impetuous, my father would have said, shaking his head, and an hour later I’d regretted it passionately, but now that I’d arrived at my destination, the regret was gone. I rubbed my sleeve against the windshield fog—my breath kept clouding the glass—and spied the grim, erratic movements of a stretcher party lurching through the field beyond, half-obscured by mist. Above my head, a delicate whine pierced the air, high and gliding, ending in a percussive crump that rattled my bones. I reached for the door handle and forced myself out.

Four hours ago, as I left the hospital, Hazel suggested I borrow her rubber boots—The mud’s just awful, Virginia—but I hadn’t listened. I had my leather shoes, and from there I’d wrapped army-style puttees around my trousers, all the way to the knee, like a pair of gaiters, and I thought that was enough. Smart and efficient. That was all the soldiers wore, wasn’t it? In those days, newly freed from my father’s house, I thought I didn’t have to follow anyone’s advice if I didn’t want to. I thought I was free. From the moment of departure, from the instant the gray-sided ocean liner cast off into the Hudson River, I had soaked up the knowledge of my independence. I had reveled in reliance on my own common sense.

And that was all very well, except that the mud of northern France didn’t give a damn for my independence and my common sense. The mud didn’t give a damn for anything. I stuck my left leg out of the cab of the ambulance and into the wet French earth, and the muck swallowed up my neat leather shoe right past the ankle. You can’t imagine the greedy, sucking noises it made as I staggered across that stable yard, foot by foot, while the drizzle struck my helmet in metallic pings and the shells screamed and popped at some worryingly unknown distance. The front-line trenches were supposed to be miles away, but you couldn’t tell that to your ears, or to your heart that crashed every time those screaming whistles pierced the air in twos and threes, inhuman and relentless, followed by those acoustic crumps that meant someone had just gotten hell. Shellfire had a way of sounding as if it was going to drop directly on the crown of your head, every time.

I was making for the stretcher party, not the barn. I don’t know why. I think I just wanted to help, right that second, after so many weeks and months of preparation. Like the rest of us American volunteers, I was simply dying for a real live patient. Two men carried the wounded soldier, who was covered by a blanket and nothing else, and my God, how I wondered that he hadn’t fallen off the canvas altogether as the stretcher-bearers staggered through the mud, drunken and exhausted. The rain dripped from their helmets. “Need a hand?” I called out, and their heads jerked hopefully upward at the sound of my voice.

“Jesus,” the first one swore, “who the devil are you?”

“I’m from the American Red Cross,” I said. “I was sent out to bring patients to a hospital nearby. They said you were overloaded.”

“You’re a driver?”

Of the two, the second man looked the worst, whey-faced and vertiginous, as if the next step might kill him. I leapt across a puddle and reached for the handles of the stretcher. “Yes,” I said. “What have we got?”

The man was too tired—or else too astonished—to dispute the stretcher with me. He fell away, rubbing his blistered palms against his trousers, and I took the load in my own hands. It was lighter than I expected, a strange living weight, like a child instead of a man. The wounded soldier’s face was pale and wet; I couldn’t tell where he was hit, beneath the blanket.

“Right leg,” said the second man. “Sent back straightaway for amputation.”

“Can they amputate here?”

“Got no choice, have they?”

The soldier moved his head and groaned. Still wore his helmet, slipped to one side, covering his ear and part of his jaw while his face and young brow remained exposed to the drizzle. His pack lay next to him on the stretcher, shielded by the gray blanket.

“Almost there,” I told him, and his startled eyelids swooped open and his eyes met mine, very briefly, before a patch of mud sent me wallowing for balance.

“Blimey,” he said, blinking, “am I dead already?”

“You ain’t dead, mate,” the second man said. “It’s the American Red Cross, innit.”

“Blimey.” The soldier closed his eyes. “God bless America.”

Ahead of us a door swung open on the face of the barn, and a man’s shoulders appeared in silhouette against the electric light within. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “I told the last party we haven’t got room!”

“Well, they ain’t told us back up the line, sir,” the first man said.

“We can’t bloody well take him!”

“He needs the leg off, sir, on the double.”

The other man pounded his fist against the side of the doorway. He took a step toward us, into the soggy remains of the daylight. Stopped, frowned. He wore a dilapidated khaki tunic, officer’s stripes. The rain struck his bare head. “Who the devil’s this?”

“The American Red Cross, sir,” said the first man.

“How in the hell did she get here?”

I nodded toward the Model T. “I drove, sir.”

“You drove that? From where?”

“From Marieux, sir. We’ve set up a private hospital there, only we weren’t getting any patients, so I went back to Paris and found a Model T from the American Ambulance—” The stretcher handle slipped in my wet right hand.

“Never mind.” The doctor stepped forward and yanked the stretcher handles from my fingers. “Carry on, for God’s sake. Get the poor sod out of the rain. Now!”

He had the kind of manner you couldn’t refuse, the kind of resolve you couldn’t just turn. I think I admired him right then, whether or not I realized it. I couldn’t help it. After all, I was used to a strong masculine will. His authority seemed natural and just, derived from the consent of those governed. I scampered like a damned puppy at his heels. Followed him into the barn, refusing to be shunted. “We’ve got plenty of beds at the hospital,” I said. “I can take three stretchers or six sitting in the ambulance.”

“I don’t know this hospital of yours.”

“We’re fully staffed, sir. Eight nurses, two doctors. Both experienced surgeons. You said you’re full.”

“All Americans, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

We ducked through the doorway of the barn, into a shower of electric light that stung my eyes. Around us stretched a ward of perhaps fifty beds, all of them occupied; a number of cots seemed to have been put up along the walls, staffed by a thin swarm of orderlies and a few nursing sisters in gray dresses and white pinafores. The smell of disinfectant saturated the damp air, swirling with the primeval odors of blood and earth. And not just any earth: this was the mud of France, battlefield mud, in which living things had died and decayed, and even now—years later—the stench still rots in the cavities of my nose like the memory of death. There is not enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse that smell.

The doctor didn’t pause. I don’t think he even heard me, any more than he would have heard an actual puppy scampering at his heels. He called out commands to a series of orderlies—Prepare the theater, Pass the word for Captain Winston—and only when he handed off the stretcher to the men assisting in the operating theater did he turn and fix his full attention upon me, like the next item on a long list of daily tasks, to be checked off and disposed of.

But the funny thing was—the really momentous thing, when I look back on the entire episode, trying to pinpoint this or that instant that might have constituted a turning point, a point of flexion at which my life might have taken an entirely different course—the funny thing was that his expression then changed. Transformed, like a man engaged in an obsessive quest, who had just parted a final pair of jungle branches and made the discovery for which he’d longed all his life.

His face, as I later learned, had that natural capability for transformation.

Where I had expected sternness, and frowns, and orders crossly delivered, I received something else. A smile, quite gentle. A movement of eyebrows that suggested understanding, and a little wonder. A bit of crinkling around a pair of eyes that had to be called hazel, though they tended, in certain light, toward green; surely that signified admiration?

My face turned warm.

“Miss—?”

“Fortescue.”

“Miss Fortescue. You’re the only evacuation ambulance to get through the roads today, did you know that? Either from the dressing station or the railway depot. How the devil did you do it?”

“I—I just drove, sir. Pushed her out when she got stuck.”

He drove a hand through his hair, which was sparkling with gray and cropped short, so that the bones of his face thrust out with additional clout. I thought he looked as if he came from the countryside, from some sort of vast outdoors; there was something a little rough-hewn about his cheeks and jaw, blunt, like a gamekeeper or else a poacher, although his creased skin was pale and sunless. His fingers, by contrast, contained all the delicate, tensile strength of a surgeon. I thought he must be exotically old, thirty-five at least. “Well, well. I’ll be damned,” he said. “You’re a heroine.”

“Not at all, sir. Just doing my best.”

“As are we all, Miss Fortescue, but you’re the only driver who actually made it through. That’s heroism.”

My cheeks burned. Of course. My chest, too, I think, while everything else went a little cold. At that point in my life—aged only twenty, sheltered for most of those years by a few square miles of tough Manhattan Island and a grim, reclusive father—I’d never received a compliment like that. Certainly not from a grown man, a man of mating age. I didn’t even know that kind of man, other than that he existed, a separate and untamed species, kept in another cage from mine on the opposite end of the zoo. And that was well enough with me. I had no interest in mating. Having survived such a childhood, I thought myself practical and resourceful—and I was, by God!—but not tender. Not susceptible to blandishment, and not susceptible to that particular kind of charm, the kind of charm you’re warned about in all the magazines: hazel eyes and a huntsman’s bones and an angel’s smile.

But now, at this instant, it turned out that I wasn’t immune at all. I was only innocent. Like a child who had never been exposed to measles, I thought I couldn’t catch them. That I was somehow stronger than all those weak, febrile children who had gotten sick.

I didn’t know how to answer him. I mumbled something. I forget what.

His smile, if possible, grew warmer. Incandescent, if I had to choose a word for it, which I did only at a much later hour, when I had the time and the composure to think rationally about him. He said, looking fearlessly into my eyes, “All right, then, Miss Fortescue. Heroine of the hour. If you want patients so badly.”

“Yes, we do,” I said, but he had already turned and barked out something to someone, and down we went along the rows of cots, selecting patients for transport. He gave me six, along with their paperwork, and asked me again for the name of the hospital.

“It’s a château, really,” I said. “Near Marieux. It belongs to the de Créouville family. Mrs. DeForest arranged to lease it—”

“Who the devil’s Mrs. DeForest?”

“Our chapter president.”

“Your chapter president,” he said, mock wearily, shaking his head. He was filling out the transfer papers with a beaten enamel fountain pen, using a medical dictionary as a desk. A small, sharp widow’s peak marked the exact center of his forehead. “What would we do without ladies’ committees?”

“A great deal less, I think.”

He looked up and handed me the papers. “You’re right, of course. God bless them all. I don’t suppose you have an orderly with you?”

“No.”

“Nurse?”

“There’s just me.”

“Just you. Of course.” He turned and called out to the nearest man, who straightened away from a bandage and looked afraid. “Miss Fortescue … is that right?”

“Yes. Fortescue.”

“Miss Fortescue from the American Red Cross has driven an ambulance all the way here from Marieux without an orderly, hell for leather, through mud and shellfire, in order to relieve us of some of our patients. Is Pritchard on duty?”

“No, sir. He’s on rest.”

“Fetch him up on the double and tell him we’ve got to escort six wounded men to the Château de Créouville, in Marieux.” Then, to me: “You’ll bring us back in the morning, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

Back to the orderly. “And find Miss Fortescue a cup of coffee and a sandwich, while you’re passing the mess. She looks like death. Perfectly charming death, but death nonetheless. We shall have no further harm come to her, do you hear me? She is absolutely essential.”

“Yes, sir.”

I tucked the papers under my arm. “If I may say so, sir, you should get some rest. You look like death yourself.”

“It’s Captain Fitzwilliam, Miss Fortescue. As well I should. But I’m afraid I shall have to make do with a ride in an American ambulance instead. You’ll be ready to shove off in twenty minutes?”

“Of course.”

That was all. A final smile, and he turned away and headed off into the maze of rubber curtains that partitioned the far end of the barn, while I stood there, dripping and bewildered, scintillating, waiting for my coffee and sandwich, for Corporal Pritchard. For my six wounded British soldiers.

For Captain Fitzwilliam, in his greatcoat and gum boots, who wanted to inspect us personally.




CHAPTER 3 (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


Cocoa, Florida, June 1922

On second thought, maybe I’m not exactly surprised to see Simon’s brother emerging from an office in the headquarters of Simon’s shipping company. It’s been three years, after all, and even England and Germany are allies now. But certainly I’m shocked, with all the usual physical symptoms of shock, which I do my best to disguise. (You might say I’ve had a lot of practice at that.)

Does he notice? I can’t really say. Like me, he’s the kind of person who disguises his untoward emotions behind a set of frigid, automatic manners. He just holds out his hand and says, “Virginia. It’s good to see you again.”

“Yes.” I recover my balance and release Evelyn’s small fingers to take his palm. The contrast startles me. I had forgotten how large Samuel’s hands are. How large, my God, is the rest of him. “How are you?”

“Well enough.” His gaze falls upon Evelyn, who’s crept behind my right leg and now looks out from the shelter of my skirt.

“I didn’t know you and Simon were partners here.”

“We weren’t.”

“Then, if you’ll pardon my asking—”

He looks back up. “Your husband never actually allowed me a share in the business, Virginia. Despite the close nature of our relationship.”

“To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised he took you on at all. Given the close nature of your relationship.” I put the same ironic emphasis on those words as my brother-in-law did. Why not? We share a certain understanding, after all.

“Well, I guess he’d run out of other men to trust. Anyway, he got his money’s worth out of me.”

“Did he? I haven’t had the chance to examine the books yet. I’m sure I’ll find everything in order, won’t I?”

Mr. Burnside steps up on my other side. “Mr. Fitzwilliam was kind enough to stay on with the company, after his brother’s death.”

“I’m grateful.”

“The least I could do,” says Samuel. “And I was happily able to set Mr. Burnside straight about your existence, and where you might be found, and in the meantime—well. Here we are.”

“Here we are.”

Mr. Burnside says, “In your absence, ma’am, and acting for the estate, I appointed Mr. Fitzwilliam temporary director of Phantom Shipping and its affiliate concerns. There was really nobody else. The citrus plantation, as you know, has been in the family for some time.”

“Our grandfather’s American wife,” says Samuel.

“Yes. I remember Simon once told me something about it. A wedding present from her father to the happy couple, wasn’t that right?”

“Something like that. Although really more in the nature of a bribe, the rich old devil. I believe he hoped the glorious sunshine of Maitland Plantation would tempt the two of them near, but they preferred the pile of soggy family stones in Cornwall, God knows why, and poor old Maitland’s been mostly left to the incompetence of estate managers ever since. Well, until Simon came along, after the war.”

“And now you. You’re in charge of everything.”

Samuel shrugs. “So it seems.”

Mr. Burnside breaks in. “Of course, if you don’t think Mr. Fitzwilliam’s the right man for the job, I’m happy to look about for a replacement.”

You know, there’s something about Mr. Burnside’s tone that brings out the streak of perversity in me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’ve been such a very good girl the past few years, a model of respectability, absorbed in my child and my home, never once mentioning the thing that plagues me. Smiling serenely, while the world buckles and shifts around us, while women bob their hair and run out to smoke cigarettes and to vote, while fortunes are made by the illegal importation of liquor, while broad new highways are laid in their hundreds and I am not.

Or perhaps I’m just wondering—and surely you noticed it, too—why Mr. Burnside so artfully changed the subject when I mentioned those company accounts.

“Well, then. Maybe you should look around for a replacement, Mr. Burnside, just to be prepared. I think Samuel understands that he’s here on trial. I’ll be in a better position to make these decisions once I’m fully intimate with the details of the business.”

My exceptional height gives me a small advantage in making this pronouncement. Even as large as Samuel is—and I judge he’s a good four inches over six feet—I don’t have to turn up all that far to meet his gaze, and I can see that I’ve startled him. You know the look. His eyebrows shoot to the roof; his lips part.

But that’s nothing compared with Mr. Burnside, who gasps and mutters by my side, flapping his mouth and his eyelids, while Samuel and I lock eyes like a pair of rival giants.

“Come now, Mrs. Fitzwilliam!”

“She’s right, however,” says Samuel, not looking away. “It’s her business now, isn’t it? Once the estate clears probate.”

“But she’s just—”

“A woman?” Samuel breaks our little encounter at last and turns to the lawyer. “Mr. Burnside, I’m surprised a man your age doesn’t know better by now than to put those words together. Just a woman. Women rule the earth, don’t you know? A man doesn’t do a single thing that isn’t somehow inspired by a woman’s will. Sometimes all it takes is her mere existence. Anyway, you haven’t seen this particular woman drive a rattletrap Model T through the mud of a French battlefield, swearing like a sailor.”

“You’re wrong about that,” I say. “I never swore.”

“Didn’t you? Well, I suppose I never saw you in action, either. I only have it secondhand. Now, then. Would you like to see the rest of the offices, Virginia? All the accounts are in order and ready for your inspection.”

I glance at the clock on the wall, and the two other occupants of the room—the typist and the accountant—turn sharply back to their work. The steady undertone clatter of typewriter keys picks up again. The sound of business. Good, solid, American business, rushing on to meet the brash new age before us.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to defer that pleasure until later this afternoon, Mr. Fitzwilliam. My daughter needs her nap.”

WHEN I FIRST MADE ACQUAINTANCE with the name of Mr. Cornelius Burnside, I was sitting at the desk of my suite in the Pickwick Arms Hotel on the Boston Post Road in Greenwich, Connecticut, sifting my way through a thick collection of mail that had been forwarded from the house in New York City. It was the middle of May and I was exhausted, having sat through yet another court hearing in the days before Father’s trial, and at first I didn’t quite understand the neat, typewritten words before me. (Typewritten, quite possibly, by that silent young lady in the navy blue suit in the office of the Phantom Shipping Company.)

I still have the letter, packed in a separate valise, the one that contains all my important papers, though I hardly need to see it. I must know every word by now. It’s short, after all, and I have read it many times.

Dear Mrs. Fitzwilliam,

You will forgive my intrusion on your notice at such a busy time, but I have reason to believe that you may be the surviving relic of Mr. Simon Fitzwilliam, late of the city of Cocoa, Florida, who I regret to inform you passed away in a fire at his home in Cocoa Beach, in the early hours of February 19 of this year.

I must beg you to confirm your receipt of this letter, and your identity as the former Miss Virginia Fortescue of New York, married to Mr. Simon Fitzwilliam of Penderleath, England [Cornwall, I thought automatically] in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea on the 31st of March, 1919, at your earliest convenience, so that we may proceed with the proper settlement of Mr. Fitzwilliam’s estate.

Yours respectfully,

Mr. Cornelius S. Burnside, Jr., Esq.

On the first reading, I didn’t understand at all. Something about the sight of my husband’s name—Mr. Simon Fitzwilliam—all typewritten and impersonal, as if I were reading about him in a newspaper, simply froze my thoughts in place. My eyes skimmed over the rest of the words without absorbing a single one.

Only upon a second reading did I realize that something had happened to Simon, and only after the third did I perceive that Simon was dead. That he had burned to death in a house in Florida, a terrible accident, and left to me—Virginia Fitzwilliam, his legal wife—the entirety of his estate. His estate, whatever that was.

Because while houses burned down regularly, and people died all the time, I had never imagined that Simon could meet his end like that. You could not extinguish my husband in mere flame. It simply wasn’t possible.

And while I had never tried to forget Simon—how could I, when his daughter gazed up at me every morning, an incarnate reminder of our brief life together?—I had, over the course of the previous three years, sequestered his image into its own tidy corner of my head, rigid and unchanged, a two-dimensional portrait covered by a sheet against the dust. I had refused to allow any memories out of that corner, because those might bring him back to life, and where would I be if Simon became human to me again?

But the shock of seeing his name, understanding the bare facts of his death, had a catastrophic effect on that mental frame I had erected around Simon, confining him in two dimensions. Simon: dead. I couldn’t comprehend it. It simply didn’t make sense. I stared and stared at that letter, and I put it away in the desk, and then I woke up at midnight and pulled it out and read it again while my sister, Sophie, slept in her nearby bed.

A week passed before I found the composure to answer that letter, and when I did, my reply was just as slim and factual as the original, though I wrote it in pen on Pickwick Arms notepaper. I simply confirmed my identity as Simon’s widow, indicated that I would not be at liberty to attend Mr. Burnside in person for some weeks, but that I would be happy to answer any inquiries by letter in the meantime.

At the time, however, I made no mention of Evelyn. For one thing, I doubted Mr. Burnside—or Samuel Fitzwilliam, for that matter—would have any idea of her existence.

I’M CARRYING EVELYN IN MY arms this minute, as we cross the street to the Phantom Hotel and Simon’s private apartment on the fifth floor, overlooking the docks. I haven’t seen it yet. We spent a few brief moments in the hotel lobby this morning, Evelyn and I, depositing our luggage and waiting for Mr. Burnside to appear. I’m afraid I didn’t notice any details, other than a clean-lined, simple décor and the impression of light and mirrors.

Samuel offers to carry Evelyn, but I decline politely, even though my arms ache under her weight. Instead, he puts his hand on my elbow and makes sure there’s no traffic as we start across the pitted street. It’s the first time he’s touched me since we shook hands in the office, and his fingers are unexpectedly light against the sharp point of my humerus. As we reach the safety of the paved sidewalk, the hand drops away.

This time the hotel staff recognizes me, and the manager hurries over the instant I pass through the doorway and hoist Evelyn—already half-asleep—further up my hip. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam!” he cries in dismay. He turns and snaps his fingers to the lobby boy, who hurries to press the call button on the elevator at the other end of the room. By the time we reach the apartment and I’ve tucked Evelyn into her bed, a tray’s arrived, bearing sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade. Samuel, who stands by the window looking at the river, offers to pour me a glass.

The humble question brings me up short in the middle of an enormous silk rug.

“Yes, thank you.”

He strikes out across the floor while I settle myself on the edge of a sleek leather armchair. The drawing room yawns around us, vast and spare, containing only a few necessary pieces of clean-edged furniture and no sentiment whatsoever. Even the curtains are pale and plain, a uniform gray-green that merges immaculately with the paint on the high, long walls. I can just glimpse the river over the edge of the nearest windowsill, and the dark mass of the mangrove on the opposite shore—the barrier that separates us from the Atlantic. A convenient, protected harbor. No wonder Cocoa’s a boomtown.

Samuel hands me a damp glass of lemonade. Our fingertips brush, and he doesn’t move away.

“I didn’t realize Simon’s taste was so modern,” I say.

“I didn’t either, when I first arrived. I suppose neither of us had the opportunity to know him particularly well.”

“I knew him well enough.”

“In hospitals and hotels. But you never set up a home together, did you?”

The question is rhetorical. Samuel knows the solution to this hypothesis as well as I do. Wasn’t he the very man who drove me away from Cornwall, in an ancient Daimler whose cracked leather seats released a particular smell that still hangs in my nostrils? Still: “That’s true,” I say, and I settle in my chair, back still rigid, away from his looming figure.

Samuel tilts his head and returns to his station by the window. “I am sorry about all this. It must have been the devil of a shock.”

“Yes, it was. I still can’t imagine him dead.”

“Neither can I. Of all of us, he was the one most alive.”

“But you saw him dead. You identified the body.”

“Only by the ring.” Samuel taps his finger on the window frame, and the action reminds me so much of Simon, I turn away to drink my lemonade. “The body itself was burned beyond recognition. Poor chap.”

“Poor chap? You can still say that, after everything?”

“Yes, I can. He was my brother, after all.”

I think of Sophie, and the invisible thread that connects my heart to hers, even when an ocean opens between us. How my sister could commit no possible evil—even if she were capable of evil, and Sophie is as pure as a child—that would snap that thread.

“I suppose so.”

“And we had a row, you know, not too long before he died. The last time we met, a god-awful almighty row. I think you should know that, before you hear it from someone else. It’s been a weight on my mind ever since. And he stormed back to Maitland, to the plantation, and that was the last I saw of him. Until I went to identify his body. What there was of it.”

My lips are numb from the ice. I set the glass on the round marble table next to the armchair, and as the two connect in a soft clink, something else occurs to me. “What ring?”

“Ring?”

“How you identified him. He had a ring, you said.”

Samuel turns. “Yes. It was your wedding ring. The one you gave back. He kept it on him. I’m not sure how, in a pocket or something. The fire got to it. But I could still make out the inscription. Your initials, and his.” He reaches into his pocket. “Here it is, if you want a look.”

I stare at his grim expression. At his outstretched hand. The sunlight catches a glint from somewhere within that dense landscape of palm and mangrove, and I think, It can’t be my ring; it’s too small. But of course it is. Dull and bent, no longer a ring but a piece of burnt scrap. It might be anyone’s old ring, but Samuel says it’s mine, Samuel says it’s the ring that Simon placed on my finger three years ago amid a litany of Christian vows, and unlike my late husband, and for all his faults, Samuel is a straightforward man who speaks only truth.

I realize I have stopped moving, stopped breathing, and before this paralysis becomes permanent I spring from the armchair and make for the opposite end of the room, where a broad, high window looks not eastward toward Europe but north, in the direction of New York City. I place my hands on the windowsill and breathe in large, shallow gasps, staring upriver at the ships coursing the tranquil blue water.

Behind me, Samuel swears and apologizes. I hear footsteps, and the click of wood, and the clink of glass, and a moment later, just as I’ve recovered the ordinary rhythms of respiration, my lemonade glass reappears at my elbow. I snatch it away and Samuel says, Careful!

But it’s too late. I’ve already gulped down the first few ounces, and my throat bursts into flame. The cavities of my head fill with smoke.

“My God! What did you put in it?”

“Gin.”

Another spasm. I set down the glass on the ledge. “Isn’t that against the law?”

“Not to drink. Only to buy.”

“You had to have bought it somewhere.”

Samuel shrugged. “The liquor cabinet was already full when I arrived. What’s a fellow to do but drink?”

I lift the glass again, and this time I sip more carefully, and the gin has its proper effect. Tamed by lemonade, in fact, it’s what you might call tranquilizing. My pulse settles, my nerves simmer down. The chasm between my ribs fills with something or other. The warmth on my shoulder, I realize, belongs to Samuel’s hand. I shrug it off and turn to face him, and that’s my second mistake, greater even than the reckless gulping of Samuel’s particular recipe for refreshment.

Maybe it’s his grim, unhappy expression. Maybe it’s the color of his eyes. His smell, or the gin, or the memory of my wedding night, or God knows. Maybe it’s the effect of a sleepless Pullman sleeper, clackety-clack all the way from New York. My eyes, which have remained dry for the past three years, dry and dignified throughout every last thing, start to liquefy at last. I bend my face to the side, but not soon enough.

“Stupid girl,” he says, “crying for him.”

But his voice isn’t without sympathy, and his chest—broad, covered with characteristic plainness in a white shirt and a light gray jacket, unbuttoned—possesses a strange power of gravity, like the earth itself. I find myself leaning toward him, or rather toppling, like a stone tower whose foundation has just turned to sand. An inch or two away from his collar, I catch myself, startling, but not before his right hand discovers the blade of my shoulder, and this gentle, masculine pressure finishes me. My forehead connects with the side of his neck, at the slope where it meets his clavicle, and my fingers rise to hang from the ridge of his shoulders. He goes on cradling my back with his one palm—the other hand, I believe, remains at his side—and says nothing, not even the traditional Hush, now or There, there. Thank God. I don’t think I could have survived any words. His skin and his collar turn wet, though I’m not really sobbing. Not crying as you ordinarily imagine the act of sorrow. Just a small heave every so often, and the streaming from my eyes, which continues for some time. I don’t know how long. I’ve lost the sense of passing minutes, here in the damp, warm hollow of my brother-in-law’s neck.

I WAKE UNSTEADILY, DISCOMBOBULATED BY the heat and the sunlight slanting through the window glass between a pair of pale, billowy curtains. By the unfamiliarity of the bed in which I lie. A white sheet covers me, and beneath that I’m wearing only a petticoat. A clock chimes from somewhere in the room, but by the time I remember to count the strokes, it’s too late. Several, at any rate. A soft knock sounds on the door, and I realize that’s the sound that roused me in the first place.

I straighten myself. Lift the sheet to my neck, and that’s when I remember Samuel, and our embrace, and going to bed for a nap. The rest is blurry. I glance fearfully to the side, and I’m relieved to discover I’m alone.

“Who is it?” I call.

“It’s me. It’s Clara.” A tiny pause. “Simon’s sister.”

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT SISTERS, ISN’T there? At the sound of Clara’s voice, I find myself struck by a gust of yearning for my Sophie, as fierce and destructive as one of those tropical hurricanes that are said to strike these shores from time to time. Sophie, all grown up now, whom I have left once more to bear the burden of our past on her own slim shoulders while I pursue some chimera of my own making, some delusion of salvation in a foreign land.

Clara. Another surprise. But why not? Of course she would accompany her brother Samuel to Florida, since she didn’t have any other family of her own. Parents dead, and all the marriageable men killed in France. That’s what you did, if you were a good maiden sister: help your brother carry his burden. I should have been expecting her, really.

“Come in,” I say.

The door cracks open. “Someone wants to see you,” says a woman’s sweet voice, and Evelyn races through the crack and bounds onto the bed.

“Mama! Mama! Aunt Clarrie cake!”

“Oh, my! Did Aunt Clara give you cake, sweetheart?”

“I hope you don’t mind. Samuel said you needed rest, and that’s what aunties are for, isn’t it? Giving sweets without permission!”

From the last time—the only time—I saw Clara Fitzwilliam, I retain only a vague recollection that her face was drawn and pale, and her voice was somber. But that was years ago, when her parents lay dying. Now she’s transformed. It must be the absence of grief, or maybe the Florida sun has touched some seam of gold inside her; who knows? Her skin is luminous, her dark hair bobbed and cheerful. She’s wearing a sundress of polka-dotted periwinkle blue, the hem of which flutters around the middle of her dainty calves. Beneath it, her stockings are white and extremely fine. She gazes on my bare shoulders without the slightest shred of embarrassment.

“Of course I don’t mind. How are you, Clara?”

A banal, inadequate question at such a moment, as if we’re the ordinary kind of sisters-in-law, meeting again after a month or two abroad. But if she finds me awkward, she doesn’t take any notice.

“Hot and sunburnt! I’ve spent the day at the beach. I can’t seem to soak it in enough, after all those years in the English rain.”

“But you’ve lived here for years, haven’t you? You and Samuel.”

“Years? Dear me, no. Samuel came over all by himself, the rotter, the year after Simon left England. Leaving me all alone and friendless in soggy old Blighty. I only arrived last winter, after Simon died. Samuel cabled me. Simply ghastly. Have you slept enough? Your daughter’s charming. What a delicious surprise. We had no idea. A real live niece! Like finding a shilling in the pocket of one’s winter coat.” She goes to the window, throws open the curtains to their farthest possible extent, and closes her eyes like a goddess summoning the sun. (Or maybe sending it over the horizon—the quality of the light suggests sunset.) She adds, without opening her eyes, “You look well, by the way. Quite stunning. Far better than I imagined you would, after all you’ve been through.”

Evelyn wriggles out of my arms and slides from the bed to join her aunt.

“Thank you. What time is it? I suppose I should be dressing for dinner.”

“Only seven o’clock. But—”

“Seven o’clock! But Evelyn goes to bed in half an hour!”

Clara turns and smiles. “I’ve already given her tea. That should suffice, shouldn’t it? But you needn’t wear anything particular. I’ll ring down and order us a supper. They do a frightfully nice supper, you know. And the best thing is, you don’t have to pay. Because it’s already yours!”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Of course, I expect you’re used to being rich. But it’s all been rather novel for Samuel and yours truly. I say, I do hope you don’t mind that we’ve been living here like parasites, waiting for you to arrive? Or rather, I’m the parasite. Samuel works like a bee. No, not like a bee. Like a beast! A beast in harness, poor dear. But I’m simply useless. Just lying about in the sun, trying to warm my poor English blood, and then coming home to all this”—she waves her hand—“and drinking all your champagne.”

I can’t help smiling. “You do know you’re not supposed to be drinking champagne in America?”

“It’s awfully bad of me. But I promise, not a penny’s changed hands. So we’re quite in the clear, legally speaking, at least according to Samuel.”

“Yes. Samuel.”

She steps forward to sit on the edge of the bed, and Evelyn, who has been peering out the window behind her, sidles up to grab her knees. Without looking down, Clara covers Evelyn’s tiny fingers with her own, a gesture of unconscious affection that ought to disturb me, I suppose, since I hardly know Clara at all. She’s Simon’s sister, she’s almost a stranger. Instead the touch of hands warms me. I don’t know why. A craving for Sophie, maybe, who is so different and yet so strangely like this newfound Clara—full of energy and enthusiasm and a boundless capacity for love. A never-ending faith in tomorrow’s joys.

“Samuel is such a rock,” she says. “I never knew what a rock he could be, until all this.”

“Do you mean what happened to Simon?”

She caresses Evelyn’s fingers, and her voice turns kind. “You say it so calmly. You’re not grieved at all?”

“I’ve already grieved.”

“Oh, you’re that sort, then.”

“What sort?”

“The practical sort, the kind who puts things behind them and moves on. How I envy you. I think about Simon every day. It consumes me. Wondering what I might have done differently, if I might have changed him somehow. How I might have saved things. If only I’d—” She glances at Evelyn. “Well, never mind. I suppose we’ll speak about it eventually. In the meantime, you must dress, and I’ll put our wee darling here in her bath.”

“Oh, but I should do that.”

“Dearest, it’s no bother. I adore children. And you must rest, you really must.”

“But she’s only two—”

“I promise, I shall keep my most beady of beadiest eyes on her well-being. You’re not to worry about a thing, do you understand? She’s my only niece, after all. I shall worship her idolatrously. My darling only niece.”

I lean back against the pillows. “Yes. Of course. She’s your niece.”

“There we are. Is there anything I can get for you?”

“No, thank you. I believe my trunks are already unpacked.”

“Yes, they are. I saw to it personally. Such fun, to be ordering maids about in your service. I do hope everything’s comfortable. I do so want you to be comfortable, after everything you’ve endured. Now that we’ve found you at last. Our sister.” She reaches forward and squeezes my hand.

I thank her, and she hoists Evelyn onto her hip and carries her out of the room, like any adoring auntie, leaving the smell of roses behind her—a scent I hadn’t noticed until now, in the draft of her leaving.

As she passes through the doorway, she pauses and says over her shoulder, “Oh! I’ve forgot. I’m meant to tell you that Samuel has gone to the docks to supervise some shipment or another. He won’t be back until late, so we’re not to wait up.”

AT THE SOUND OF THE clicking latch, I gather up my knees in my arms. The sheets are soft and fine, and I realize this must have been Simon’s bedroom. Simon’s bed. Something about the size of the room, and the windows overlooking the river, and the white-painted door in the corner that leads, I suspect, to a private bathroom. Simon’s bathroom. Simon slept on these soft sheets and gazed at this ceiling and bathed behind that door. As I concentrate my mind, as I tread my gaze carefully along the pale walls and the draperies, the few pieces of dark, elegant furniture, this intuition grows into a certainty. This is Simon’s room. Simon was here.

Simon is still here.

I suppose you think I’m crazy. Simon’s death is a legal fact, after all. No one disputes the evidence. His own brother identified Simon’s burned body, and I have reason to trust the integrity of Samuel Fitzwilliam.

And there is the ring. Who can argue with the presence of a ring, recovered from a body in a fire? I look down at my right hand, and there sits the battered gold band, fit with some effort around my fourth finger, just above the knuckle. It’s my wedding ring, my genuine twenty-four-karat wedding ring, the worse for wear; I don’t question that fact for an instant.

But the sight of this poor, tormented bauble, curled in the center of Samuel’s palm, struck me not with grief—as Samuel supposed—but with something else. Some kind of psychological crisis, some kind of dissonance of the mind, in which the solid, indisputable object before your eyes clamors against the understanding in your brain, and that understanding is defeated, pulverized, crushed under the physical evidence of your husband’s demise. And how are you supposed to contemplate what remains? You can’t. You fall asleep instead.

But now I’ve awakened. I have awakened in Simon’s bed and spoken to Simon’s sister, and the cool suggestion of Simon’s presence returns to me, as naturally as the sun climbs above the ocean in the morning, as unsettling as the fingers of a wraith pressed against your neck.

The faint sound of running water drifts through the plaster walls—a sound that should probably fill me with anxiety but instead leaves me weightless with gratitude. Aunt Clara, giving my daughter her evening bath, so I can rest at last. Our sister, Clara said. And it was true. All along, as I plodded through my days in New York, waiting for some kind of inevitable denouement, I had this family. I had a brother-in-law, and a sister-in-law, and a husband whose existence I tried to ignore. And I know nearly nothing about them. The history of the past three years is as mysterious to me as the mangroves growing on the opposite shore of the river, the mangroves surrounding Simon’s burned house on Cocoa Beach.

I turn my head to the window, and the hot blue sky of this foreign land. This Florida, where Simon went to seek his fortune after I left him in Cornwall three years ago, and where he has met some kind of end, and now the remains of him drift about me, his presence slips in and out of my vision, and I have got to find a way to grasp him.

Because that’s the real reason I’ve come, isn’t it? Not because of duty, and certainly not because of love. Not even in order give my daughter a sense of her father, or any of those fine, sentimental things.

No. I’m here because I’ve done enough running away, haven’t I? Enough hiding from what terrifies me. I’m twenty-five years old, a wife and a mother and a sister, and I’ve just watched a jury of twelve sensible men convict my father of murdering my mother. I’ve survived the worst possible ordeal, the question that’s haunted me since I was eight years old, the source of all my waking dread. I have courage now. I have resolve. I have discovered the truth about one man.

Now the time has come to discover the truth about the other.

OVER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, I inform Clara that I’m taking Evelyn to Miami for a few days. We’ll drive off in the Packard as soon as the dishes are cleared and the suitcases packed.

“Miami?” she says. Toast suspended in midair.

“Yes. Miami.”

“Whatever for?”

For fun, I tell her.

Clara finishes her toast and her tea, dabs her mouth with a delicate napkin, and informs me that she’s not going to let us run off without her, oh no.

And by the way, if it’s fun I’m after, the place to go is Miami Beach.




CHAPTER 4 (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


France, February 1917

A personal inspection. That’s what Captain Fitzwilliam told me, anyway, once we had started on our way, out of the stable yard and down the turgid road, twenty military minutes later. The drizzle had let up; the chill descended. Corporal Pritchard rode in the back with the wounded men, while Fitzwilliam sat next to me on the Ford’s narrow seat, bracing one hand on the corner of the windshield while the damp crept in through the cracks in the rubber curtains.

“To inspect your hospital personally, of course,” he said, in answer to my question. “I can’t send patients to an auxiliary hospital without a thorough inspection of the premises.”

Was he smiling? I couldn’t take my eyes from the road in order to see his face, even if I’d had the courage to do it. In any case, the winter daylight was already retiring behind the thickening fog. But I thought I heard warmth in his voice. An impish emphasis on the word thorough, which I was then too unworldly to understand.

“I suppose not,” I said.

“You’re a Red Cross outfit, you said?”

“Yes. The Eighth New York chapter, the Overseas Unit.”

“Which the redoubtable Mrs. DeForest organized.”

“Yes. Mrs. DeForest was very eager to assist in the war effort. Directly, I mean.”

“Of course she was. I can just picture her now. I do wonder if she’ll match the image in my head. But what about you, Miss Fortescue? The astonishing Miss Fortescue.”

I switched on the headlamps, not that it made much difference. The road went around a slight downhill curve, ending in a muddy hollow that required my concentration. When we had plunged through and emerged on the other side, a flatter stretch, straight and bordered by lindens at even intervals, he relaxed his grip on the windshield and repeated the question.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean what you’re doing here, plowing your ambulance through shellfire and whatnot, along roads deemed impassable by my doughty British drivers. Are you a nurse?”

“Not a qualified one, no. That is, I’ve had first aid training and the Red Cross coursework, of course, but I’m mostly here as an auxiliary.”

“A dogsbody, you mean.”

“Not at all.”

“But Mrs. DeForest has you doing all this wretched driving.”

“I happen to like driving.” The road was drier here, slightly elevated. I moved the throttle, and Hunka Tin reached forward. Engine screaming, mud flying from the tires. “My father taught me.”

“What’s that?” he said over the noise of the engine.

“My father! He’s—well, he likes to work with machines.”

“What, a mechanic?”

“Not exactly. An inventor, I guess.”

“More and more extraordinary. What has your father invented?”

“Nothing, really. Industrial gadgets.”

“Aha. Lucrative stuff, I suppose? Greasing the wheels of American commerce?”

We jumped hard over a rut. Fitzwilliam crashed into me. Straightened, apologized. I said don’t be silly. He smelled of disinfectant and human skin and exhaustion. His beard stood in need of shaving; I had felt it briefly on my cheek, warm and raspy, and I thought, That’s what it feels like, a man’s unshaven jaw, like the rasp of sandpaper.

You know, it’s a cozy roost, the cab of a Model T. And the ambulance cab was cozier than, say, a Ford roadster or a coupe, because you had that wooden box stuffed up behind you, and you were perched on the narrow seat, while your legs crowded into the narrower dash. Put a fully grown male in the passenger seat—a man like Captain Fitzwilliam, long-legged and loose-shouldered, oh yes, fully grown indeed—and there was just enough room for breath and awkwardness, for human sweat and anxiety.

“I don’t know about lucrative,” I said. “We don’t much speak about money at home.”

Fitzwilliam rubbed his jaw. I imagined the soft scratch of bristles, somewhere beneath the engine’s rattle. A pair of headlamps surfaced in the gloaming, and a moment later a supply truck labored heavily past, plastered with mud, the driver’s shattered face visible for an instant in the glow of Hunka Tin’s blinders. Then another one, following close. Headed for the front.

“I suppose that was an impertinent question,” he said.

“Impertinent?”

“About your father’s inventions. Quite out of order. It’s been rather a frightful two days, I’m afraid. Stretchers arriving every few minutes. Scrambles the gray matter.”

“Of course.”

“And then I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like, speaking to a lady.”

“What about your nurses?”

“Oh, the nurses. Have you met any of them? They’re all ancient and exactly like schoolmarms. The RANS does it on purpose, to prevent fraternizing. Amazingly successful. One forgets they’re women at all. Liberates conversation to a shocking degree. Mind you, they’re terribly good at what they—oh, look out!”

Hunka Tin blew her left front tire.

IF YOU’VE NEVER HAD THE pleasure of inhabiting an old French château, let me assure you: the reality’s less charming than you’d think.

Oh, they have a way of bewitching you from the outside. A black night had fallen utterly by the time we reached the Château de Créouville—not so much as a breath of moonlight behind all that cloud—but the lamps blazed from the windows of the great hall and the bedrooms above, so that you emerged from the surrounding forest to encounter seven cone-topped stone turrets rising dreamlike against the sky, and a lake shimmering with gold. Captain Fitzwilliam straightened in his seat. “By God, is that it? Isn’t there supposed to be a blackout?”

“Mrs. DeForest isn’t one for hiding.”

“Must be damned expensive, however, burning up all those lights.”

“She doesn’t care about expense.”

“Yes, that’s the lovely thing about having blunt, isn’t it? Well, she’s failed one test already. She’s got to observe the blackout. I suppose the Boche reconnaissance haven’t found you yet, but they will. They’ll think you’re the new staff headquarters, and bomb the blazes out of you.” He sat back and folded his arms against the solid khaki bulk of his greatcoat. Our elbows met, and I was surprised by the size and strength of his, by how much more assertive the male elbow could be. How confidential, there inside a humid little enclave, where you couldn’t help tasting his vaporous breath and the flavor of his soap, detecting each movement of his fingers and jaw, while a castle glimmered nearby against a sooty night. He went on, more whispery: “It’s beautiful, however. Good God. Like a fairy story. Is it built on that lake?”

“Yes. The lake forms a kind of moat around it, only much prettier than a real moat.”

“Oh, agreed. Nasty, swampish things, moats. Imagine this in summer, set against a blue sky.”

Well, I already had. I’d imagined the château in full, vigorous, fertile summer, five centuries ago: teeming with knights and stags, each stone pink in a rising dawn. I had imagined people inside. I had imagined love affairs and troubadours. Long ago, I had learned that you could imagine anything you wanted, that the space inside your head belonged only to you. Furnished and decorated and inhabited only by you, so that your insides teemed and seethed while your outward aspect remained serene.

“You’ve got some imagination,” I said. “If you look closely enough, it’s falling apart.”

“Of course it is. Everyone’s skint these days, including and perhaps especially the upper classes. Except your Mrs. DeForest, it seems. Or is it just Americans in general?”

“Not all Americans are rich.”

“No, but the ones who are …”

We were climbing the drive now, a slight incline, and the tires slipped in the mud. I reached down with my left hand and shifted the Ford into low gear. The windows grew before us; the exuberant decoration took shape. The ripples on the lake made you think of enchantments.

Because everything looks better in lamplight, doesn’t it? Tomorrow, in the harshness of the winter morning, Captain Fitzwilliam would see the crumbling of the old stones, the chunks of fallen fretwork, the brown weeds thrusting from the seams. The sordid state of the gravel, the broken paving stones in the courtyard. How Mrs. DeForest had grumbled! But now, at dusk, in the glow of a hundred lamps, everything was new and luminous. You couldn’t speak for the beauty of it.

And we didn’t. We didn’t say another word, either of us, all the way up the drive and over the stone bridge, beneath the rusting portcullis and into the courtyard. Captain Fitzwilliam leaned forward, and the movement brought his leg into contact with mine. He didn’t seem to notice; the spectacle of the château immersed him. One gloved hand reached out to grasp the top edge of the dashboard, and I thought how gamely he had helped me change the flat tire, how he’d knelt in the mud and turned the bolts while I held the rectangular pocket flashlight, turning it off and on at intervals so the battery wouldn’t quit. The cheerful way he’d risen from the half-frozen slop and said, I could just about do with a bottle of brandy, couldn’t you? As if I were a partner of some kind, a person of equal footing, deserving of brandy and respect.

I hadn’t replied. How could I reply to a thing like that?

I brought Hunka Tin to a careful, battered stop just before the main steps and switched off the engine. There was an instant of rare silence, like a prayer. Captain Fitzwilliam turned to me and said, “Miss Fortescue, I—”

The door flew open, and Hazel popped outside in her woolen dressing gown.

“Good grief! We thought you’d been killed!” she said, and then Captain Fitzwilliam unfolded himself onto the gravel, muddy and unshaven, wet and weathered, and she paused. One foot hovering on the next step, one hand covering her mouth. Behind her, the hinges squeaked rustily, and somebody shrilled about the draft.

“Home sweet home,” I muttered, and went around back to release the doors.

MY FATHER BOUGHT OUR FIRST Ford secondhand when I was eleven years old. We had just moved into a narrow, respectable brownstone house on East Thirty-Second Street, after two years of renting a basement apartment somewhere on the West Side—I don’t recall the exact neighborhood, just that it was quiet and slightly downtrodden, the kind of place where you minded your own business and didn’t get to know your neighbors—and Father came home one day and said he had a surprise for us. I still don’t know why he bought it. We hardly ever drove anywhere; we never left Manhattan. I think he just wanted something to tinker with, or maybe to keep my sister busy. She shared his joy in mechanical things. I didn’t; I learned how to drive and how to keep the flivver in working order, but only because I had to. Because Father said so. When Sophie was old enough, I washed my hands and turned the Ford over to her.

But even if you didn’t take joy in engines, you couldn’t help admiring that car. It was blue—before the war, you could buy a Model T in red or green or blue, just about any color except black—and really a marvel of simple utility, easily understood, made of durable modern vanadium steel, lightweight and versatile, so that you could jam the family inside for a Sunday drive or build a wooden truck atop the chassis and call it a delivery van.

Or an ambulance.

And when I went to Paris and knocked on the door (metaphorically speaking) of the American Ambulance Field Service in Neuilly and begged for a vehicle, I didn’t tell them I hadn’t bent over the hood of a Model T in five years. I just bent like I knew what I was doing, and it all made sense again. The neat, economic logic of engine and gearbox. The floor pedals and the gear lever, the spark retard on the left of the steering wheel and the throttle on the right. And I thanked my father for making me learn, even though I hadn’t wanted to, and I thought—as I drove out of Neuilly, truck packed tight with hospital supplies and spare parts—about that first driving lesson. How frustrated I had been, how angry at Father’s unsympathetic sternness. But why do I have to learn? I don’t care a jot for automobiles, I said recklessly, and he said implacably, Because a car can make you free, Virginia, a car can take you anywhere you want to go.

But maybe need was a better word. A car could take you anywhere you needed to go. Like the garage of a medieval château in north-central France—a garage that wasn’t really a garage, just an old stable, lacking electricity, lit by a pair of kerosene lanterns, smelling of grease and wet stone and melancholy. I didn’t want to be here, cleaning the mud from Hunka Tin’s brave, scarred sides, changing her oil and examining her tires, but I needed to be here. And needing was of a higher order than wanting, wasn’t it? A nobler calling.

BY THE TIME I FINISHED, it was nearly midnight, and the lamps in the great hall had darkened at last. The atmosphere lay black and dank on the stones of the courtyard. I strode from the garage to the main house, carrying one of the kerosene lanterns, so absorbed by the question of Hunka Tin’s suspect fuel line—to replace or not to replace?—that I didn’t notice the fiery orange dot zigzagging at the corner of the western wing until the smell of burning tobacco startled my nose.

I lifted the lantern. “Who’s there?”

The orange dot flared and disappeared. “Your humble servant.”

“Captain Fitzwilliam?”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you. Have you been taking care of your ambulance all this time?”

“Yes.” I raised the lantern higher, and at last I found him, resting against the damp stone wall, arms folded, cigarette extinguished. The peak of his cap shadowed his eyes. “How are the patients?”

“Tip-top. Showered in grateful attention from the ladies of the Overseas Delegation of the—which chapter is it?”

“The Eighth New York Chapter.”

“Of the American Red Cross. Yes. They were delighted to see us. I was reminded of Jason and the women of Lemnos. Except that ended rather badly, didn’t it? In any case, commendable zeal. Commendable.”

“Does that mean we’ve passed your inspection?”

“With flying colors.”

I wondered if he had been drinking. I thought I smelled some sort of spirits on his breath, though I wasn’t close enough to be sure, and the pungency of the recent cigarette still disguised any other smell that might have inhabited the air. His voice was steady, his words beautifully precise. I couldn’t fault his diction. Still. There was something, wasn’t there? Some ironic note at play. I stepped once in his direction, so that the light caught the bristling edge of his jaw. “You’re making fun of us, aren’t you?”

“I? No, indeed. Perish the thought. I admire you extremely, the entire enthusiastic lot of you. So fresh and dear and unspoiled. The fires of heroism burning in your eyes.”

I lowered the lantern and turned away. “Good night, Captain.”

“No, don’t go. I apologize.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“I have not been drinking.” Injured air. “I’ve had a glass or two of wine, served over dinner by your redoubtable directrix, but I haven’t been drinking. Not as the term is commonly known.”

“You had dinner with Mrs. DeForest?”

“She insisted.”

Yes, I had lowered the lantern and turned away, but I hadn’t taken a step. The soles of my shoes had stuck to the pavement by some invisible cement. I don’t know why. Yes, I do. Captain Fitzwilliam had that quality; he could hold you fast with a single word, a single instant of sincerity. Don’t go. I apologize. And there you stood, rapt, wanting to know what he really meant. Wanting to know the truth. All that charm, all that marvelously arid English wit—there had to be something behind it, didn’t there? It couldn’t just dangle out there on its own, a signboard without a shop.

A light flickered to life in one of the bedrooms above us. Fitzwilliam went on. “I made my escape, however. As you see.”

“You might have chosen a warmer place for it.”

“Ah, but I wanted a cigarette, you see, after all that. Rather badly. And my mother, who detests cigarettes, always made us smoke outdoors.”

“I see. An old habit.”

“That, and I was hoping to encounter a certain intrepid young ambulance driver, to thank her for her fortitude. And for enduring the cynicism of a jaded old soldier along the way.”

“That wasn’t necessary.”

“Not to you, perhaps. But essential to me.”

The handle of the lantern had become slippery in my bare palm. I had left my gloves in the garage. Essential. That word again. “Well, I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble. I hope you weren’t waiting long.”

“Not too long.” He levered himself from the wall. “I just want to be clear. I wasn’t mocking you, Miss Fortescue. I was mocking myself.”

I started walking toward the door, or rather the rectangle-shaped hole in the darkness where the door should have been. The air was opaque and full of weight. I heard the crunch of his footsteps behind me. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“Yes, it does. It matters terribly. All this, it’s no excuse to lose one’s humanity.”

“You haven’t lost your humanity. I saw you working, back there. You cared for those men; you were—you were passionate.”

“The way a butcher cares for his pieces of meat.”

“That’s not true.”

“It shouldn’t be, but it is. It’s the only way to get along, you see.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Because you haven’t been here long enough. Believe me, once you’ve seen enough chaps minus their limbs or their faces or guts, that’s the worst, entrails hanging from a gaping hole in what once was a nobly intact human abdomen …”

He stopped talking. Stopped walking. I stopped, too, and turned my head, pulse racketing. His eyes were stark and gray, his skin was gray. But that was just the light, the feeble light from the lantern I held at my knee.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“There’s no need.”

“It’s the wine, I suppose. One should never obey one’s impulses after drinking a bottle of wine.”

“You said it was a glass or two.”

“I might have been modest.”

How strange. He wouldn’t look away. I wanted to look away, but it seemed rude, didn’t it, turning my eyes somewhere else when he held my gaze so zealously. As if he had something important to say. In fact, I couldn’t move at all, even if I wanted to. Like a nocturnal animal caught in the light from the kitchen door. My knuckles locked around the lantern, my cheeks frozen in shock.

“You should rest,” I said softly. “You shouldn’t be out like this.”

“I might say the same of you. Shall we go in together?”

“Of course.”

He reached forward and took the lantern from my hand. My fingers gave way without a fight. Shameful, I thought. He lifted his elbow as well, but I ignored that. I ignored all of him, in fact, as we walked silently toward the entrance of the château, through which the great had once streamed, the ancient de Créouvilles in all their glory, shimmering and laughing, and now it was just wounded soldiers, common men, nurses and doctors in bleak clothing. I ignored him because I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do. When he opened the door for me, I stepped through and sped for the staircase.

“Miss Fortescue?”

“Yes?” Breathlessly, without looking down. Hand on the bannister. Under my foot, the stair creaked noisily.

“My room is in the west wing.”

“Yes.”

“So I suppose it’s good night.”

The word night tended upward, like a question to which I was supposed to know the answer.

I said, “Yes. Good night.”

THE KINGSTON ACADEMY GIRLS KNEW I was different from them. Girls always do. I was too afraid to speak to anyone—too afraid I would say something I shouldn’t—so I sat by myself on that first day and didn’t say a word.

There was one girl. Amelia. She was the ringleader, the girl everybody listened to. “Let’s play the husband game,” she said when we were outside in the small courtyard after lunch, and everybody wrote something on a piece of paper and put it inside the crown of Amelia’s hat, and when they drew out the pieces of paper and read the words aloud, they were the names of boys, and the name you drew was the name of the man you were going to marry. Henry, John, Theodore, George. The girls all giggled when they read the names, as if they actually believed in it, and I sat there on a wooden bench next to the brick wall of the courtyard—there was a cherry tree growing feebly nearby, I remember that—and I hoped no one would notice me.

But Amelia did. That was why she was the ringleader; she never missed a thing. She came up to me, and her brown eyes were like keyholes, small and well guarded. “Pick a name, Fortescue,” she said, shaking the hat. “That is your name, isn’t it, Fortescue?”

I now know she only meant the question rhetorically, but at the time I quaked in panic. Because my surname wasn’t Fortescue, was it? I was really Faninal, unique and infamous. I shook my head at Amelia and said No, thank you.

Well, Amelia wouldn’t stand for that, not right there in front of the other girls. You couldn’t allow any petty rebellions. The new girl always had to be put in her place.

“I said, pick a name, Fortescue!” She rattled the hat again, right in my face, and again I refused, and her eyes, which had been keyholes, became tiny slits. “All right. If you’re too scared,” she said, and she picked a piece of paper from the hat and read out the name, and everybody—all the girls—burst into hysterical giggles.

I sometimes wonder if I should have obeyed Amelia. Would everything have taken a different path? Would I have become like the other girls, and my old Faninal life dissolve harmlessly into my past? Would I have entered into the Kingston universe, the ordinary female universe, in which pretty dresses hung like stars and marriage was the gravity that held everything together?

Or would I have remained stranded on my bench, while the other girls went to parties, met boys, discovered dark corners, were kissed and fell, unafraid, into love?

EXCEPT FOR MRS. DEFOREST, WHO HAD a grand suite in the west wing, the nurses slept in a row of narrow bedrooms, like nuns in a convent. Mary’s door was closed and dark, and Hazel’s. We were all so exhausted after so much excitement.

And me. Virginia Fortescue. I climbed into bed at last, trembling and aching, incurably awake, my nerves shot through with some kind of foreign stimulant I could not identify.

She is absolutely essential.

I stared at the gilded ceiling and thought, over and over, I have certainly not fallen in love; that is impossible.




CHAPTER 5 (#ufbc20d83-e682-5f82-9220-59f46d737b2c)


Dixie Highway, Florida, June 1922

We’re rushing down the highway in the blue Packard, Evelyn wedged happily between us, suitcases lashed precariously into the rumble seat, and I’m laughing at some joke of Clara’s, laughing and trying to keep the Packard straight on the road, which is soaked and slick from a morning downpour.

“Miami Beach is just heavenly,” Clara’s saying, “just endless fun. I know all the right people, too. They think I’m a proper aristocrat, and they’ve fallen all over themselves to make my acquaintance. There’s nothing an English accent won’t get you, in American society. I suppose there’s some tremendous meditation there on republicanism and human nature, but I haven’t got the brains for it this morning.”

“Have you been there often? Miami Beach?”

“Oh, back and forth, really. Samuel goes to Miami on business, and I won’t be left by myself in dull old Cocoa, not if you paid me. I’ve done enough of that all my life! Being left behind.”

“What kind of business?”

“Heaven knows. Banks, I suppose. Or estate agents. Everybody’s buying land in Florida these days, you know. Oh, look! There’s the ocean. Isn’t it dazzling? You couldn’t pay me to return to England, either. For one thing, there aren’t any men left, and you’ve got heaps of strapping young fellows here. To be perfectly honest—you don’t mind if I’m perfectly honest, do you?”

“I don’t think I could stop you.”

“Well, as I said, to be perfectly honest, I was rather shocked to discover that you were still married at all. To Simon, I mean. That you hadn’t divorced him and married someone else. Some devastatingly attractive Yankee chap. You can’t have lacked for admirers.”

The Packard’s wheels slip in the mud, and I use this momentary distraction—righting a motorcar on a treacherous road, a nimble skill I still possess, thank God—to think of a suitable reply. When the Packard’s running straight and smooth once more, I squint briefly at the sun and say, “Not really. I didn’t go out. I was too busy with Evelyn.”

“But your sister! Surely your sister must have wanted to go out. Didn’t you chaperone her, or something like that? I think I read she had a suitor.”

“Read where?”

“Why, in the papers, of course! How do you think we discovered where to find you? Your father’s trial occupied all the headlines. I’m afraid I devoured them shamelessly. You were such a mystery to us, after all.” She pauses and turns to me. “I hope you don’t mind? I couldn’t very well not look. I’m not that noble.”

Unlike the sloppy road, the sky is blue and clear, the sun white against the windshield. Not so hot as yesterday, either, though it’s only nine o’clock in the morning. Plenty of time for the heat to build, plenty of time for the tropical air to move in like a well-cooked sponge. For now, though, I’m enjoying the coolness of the breeze on my neck, the tiny goose bumps that raise the hair on my arms. I glance in the rear mirror, almost as if I’m expecting another car behind us, and say, “Then I guess you probably know more than I do. I haven’t looked at a newspaper in five months.”

“Really? Don’t you want to know what people are saying?”

“Not at all.”

“But your father! My goodness! Aren’t you curious to know what becomes of him now?”

I glance down at my daughter, nestled between my right leg and Clara’s left. Her soft head is already drooping against my ribs, her eyelids heavy and inattentive. The honeysuckle smell of her hair drifts upward into my throat. I turn a few inches to make absolutely sure my sister-in-law can hear my words over the engine.

“A court of law has just convicted my father of the crime of capital murder, Clara. So you’ll forgive me if I really don’t give a damn what becomes of him now.”

TWO HUNDRED MILES AND SEVEN hours later, I point the Packard eastward along a narrow causeway, according to Clara’s confident directions. The afternoon sun glitters joyfully on the water around us. To the left, a pair of oval islands slumber in the sunshine, too perfect for nature.

“Isn’t it clever?” Clara says, standing up on the floorboards, clutching the top of the windshield. The draft whips her bobbed hair about her cheekbones. “Carl’s dredging the bay to make beaches and islands. Just wait until you see the hotel.”

“Who’s Carl?”

“Carl Fisher, of course. He’s an absolute genius. He’s the one developing all this.” She makes a sweeping arc of her right hand, taking in everything spreading out before us: the oval islands made of dredged sand, the long strip of palms and mangrove and building plots on the barrier island beyond. “Miami Beach,” Clara says dreamily, and closes her eyes.

“I don’t see any beaches.”

“Those are on the other side, facing the ocean. The hotel’s right over there, along the bay, so you can watch the speedboat regattas right from your window. Or moor your yacht out front!” She laughs.

“If you’ve got a yacht, of course.”

“Even better if it’s someone else’s yacht, though. That way you haven’t got to take care of it, or remember to pay your staff.”

“Crew.”

“Yes, of course. Crew!” She laughs again and sits down, pulling Evelyn onto her lap. “You’re going to love Miami Beach, darling girl. We’ll take you to the casino first thing tomorrow.”

“The casino?”

“Oh, it’s not that kind of casino. At least, not by daylight. It’s a bathing casino. Lovely beach right on the ocean. Swimming pools. It’s heavenly. If I were going to build a mansion, I’d build it right here in Miami Beach. On the ocean side, I think, so I can watch the waves arrive from across the world.”

I don’t know if I agree with her. In the first place, I wouldn’t want to live in a mansion—too much grandeur, too much trouble—and in the second place, the ocean’s such an unreliable neighbor, isn’t it? Noisy, wet, tempestuous. Apt to spit up storms and unwanted visitors on your doorstep, without warning.

But my eyes and my shoulders are drained by the long drive in the sun, and I don’t possess the strength to argue, or really to speak at all. I grip the Packard’s large steering wheel between my hands—the white cotton gloves gone gray with dust—and concentrate what force remains on the slim, straight causeway before me, until our wheels roll onto dry land once more, and Clara points me left, up a wide and unhurried avenue, toward the Flamingo Hotel.

AN ELEPHANT BROWSES THE LAWN outside the hotel entrance.

“Look, there’s Rosie!” Clara exclaims. She hoists Evelyn onto her lap—much hoisting has been done this day—and points one graceful finger toward the beast, while I attempt, between astonished gapes, to keep the Packard in a straight line for the hotel entrance. If I’m not mistaken, a pair of golf bags hangs on a yoke from Rosie’s shoulders. Evelyn squeals and throws herself against Clara’s restraining hands.

“Why on earth do they keep an elephant?” I ask.

“For fun, darling! My goodness. Haven’t you ever heard of fun? There are two of them, actually. Elephants, I mean. Carl and Rosie. They do children’s birthday parties and caddy for the golfers and that sort of thing. Better than being cooped up in a zoo or a circus, I should think.”

Evelyn wants to stop the car and say hello to Rosie. I tell her we’ll meet the elephant later. My daughter’s face is brown from the sun, and she’s full of spirit after being cooped—in the manner of an elephant in a zoo, I suppose—inside the narrow front seat of a Packard roadster all day. Our several stops at fruit stands and service stations seem only to have fueled her excitement. She exclaims at the palms lining the drive, the red-suited bellboys scrambling to meet us, and as I steer the car to the curb at the grand portico entrance, I think, Maybe this trip has been good for her. Maybe Florida is good for her.

Maybe little girls should have a chance to see the world a bit, while they’re still young enough to see it in wonder.

“NOW THEN,” CLARA SAYS, when the last of the room service dinner is cleared away and Evelyn’s bathed and put to bed. “Where shall we go tonight?”

“Go?”

“Yes. Go. Go out, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, because you can’t tell me you’re actually in mourning for my brother, God rest his villainous soul.”

“No, of course not. But—”

She wags a finger. “But nothing! Of course, the winter season’s long over, so there’s not nearly so much going on. But the casino will be open, and I know a dashing little place up the coast—”

“You must be joking. Who’s going to look after Evelyn?”

“Evelyn?” She looks to the connecting door.

“Yes. My daughter. We can’t just go running off like that and leave her alone.”

“But why not? She’s sleeping, isn’t she?” Clara’s delicate face is a picture of puzzlement. Brows all bent, lips all parted.

“She might wake up, and then what?”

“Can’t we just—well, lock the door?”

“If there’s a fire?”

“Oh, for God’s sake. There won’t be a fire. Even if there is, look at all this marvelous water! They’ll have it out in a flash.”

I laugh, a little weary, and sink onto the settee. “Clara. I don’t mean to be rude, but I can see you’re not a mother.”

“Well, if I were, I shouldn’t be so frightfully dull about it as you are. Children need to learn a little independence, don’t they?”

“She’s not yet three years old.”

“Well!” Clara sits, too, in a ripple of accordion-like pleats, atop the armchair before the desk. Or rather she perches, right on the edge, like a bird about to take flight, and I think again how unexpectedly young she looks, though she must be in her late thirties. I can’t remember exactly how old. Her skin is so fresh and unlined, her hair so dark, her brows so crisp. She doesn’t wear any cosmetics, except for a bit of lipstick, now smudged, as if she doesn’t know how to blot. Maybe it’s a cream she uses, or maybe it’s a trait she’s inherited from some fortunate ancestor. Maybe it’s her good spirits. I’ve heard good spirits make all the difference.

“Yes. Well.”

“What a nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to stay in, then. I don’t suppose your scruples will allow us to roam so far as the hotel restaurant?”

“No.”

“The tea garden?”

“Even worse. It’s outside.”

“The lobby?”

“Maybe for a minute or two, to collect messages or leave instructions.”

“My goodness. How reckless. Well, then.” She springs back to her feet and dusts off her hands. Her dress floats around her narrow little figure. “You leave me no choice.”

“You’re not going out alone, are you?”

“I might, if I were here by myself. In fact, I rather believe I would.” She pauses. Bites her lower lip. Gazes upon me with remorseful huge eyes. “Oh, rats! Look at you. I can’t lie. Very well. To be perfectly honest, I’ve already done so, on frequent occasion.”

“Here? In Miami Beach?” I glance out the nearby window at the yacht basin below, where perhaps a dozen golden-lit pleasure craft bob like apples in a barrel. Our suite occupies the seventh floor, at least a hundred and fifty feet from the nearest boat, and still I can hear the trails of mad, giddy laughter, the drunken song rising upward to drift through the crack in the window. “Do you think that’s wise?”

“Of course it’s not wise. Goodness me, no. But you never have any fun if you’re wise. You never get the chance to live, and why did we go through all the trouble of surviving that awful war and everything else, if we don’t mean to live?”

How my throat fills with bitter words. I can taste them at the back of my mouth, flavored with experience. Because the opposite of wisdom is folly. Because when you’re foolish, you get hurt. When you abandon your good common sense for the sake of your impulses, you find yourself in trouble.

But Clara doesn’t wait for me to answer her question. Her face has gone aglow, like the lights strung along the decks of those yachts in the harbor below. As she turns for the door, she continues in her confident, modern voice. “But this time I’m here with you, dearest, and I’d never abandon a sister to an evening of stultifying boredom, just for the sake of my own amusement. No, no. As the saying goes, If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain …”

“What are you doing?”

Clara pauses before the door, tilting her chin in a martyred pose. “I’m off to collect a mountain for you, my darling. Or at least a bottle of champagne, which is just as difficult in this strange Puritanical teetotal nation of yours.”

BEING CLARA, SHE RETURNS BEARING not just champagne but dessert, pushed through the doorway on a mirrored serving trolley by a waiter who’s paid to ignore the distinctive round-bellied bottles dangling from each of Clara’s slender hands. “I couldn’t decide,” she says, setting down each one, “so I had him bring them all.”

I can’t tell her that I hate champagne, the taste and the smell and the zing of bubbles against my nose, which brings such painful memories rushing against my skull, I sometimes hold my breath on those rare occasions when champagne must be endured. Clara’s so triumphant, so full of joy at her successful mission—God only knows where she found these bottles, and what she had to do to obtain them for us—I just keep quiet. Wince at the shhh-pop of the first cork. Take my glass and sip as small as I can: a toothful of bubbling wine.

Clara drains half a pint or so and reaches for the strawberries. “That’s better. Now where were we?”

“We weren’t anywhere.”

“Do have one of these chocolates. The pastry chef makes them himself. One by one. I watched him once. Mesmerizing.”

I took a chocolate.

“And for heaven’s sake, drink your fizz. You’ve no idea what promises I made to obtain it. No, no. Not another miserable little sip. Properly. Like this.” She tipped back her head and finished off the glass and poured herself another.

“I can see you’re an expert.”

“You don’t need to be an expert to enjoy champagne.” She made a little leap and plopped herself on one of the beds. “How I do adore this hotel! We stayed here when we first came to Miami Beach, Samuel and I. That was March, after we’d been to identify poor Simon’s body. I couldn’t stand to stay in that dreary little town, so we came here to recover. Just like you! That’s why I thought of this place, when you said Miami.”

I lower myself to the edge of the other bed. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Yes, it was. I could see it in your face, when we saw the elephant. You were enchanted—as enchanted as darling Evelyn—only you wouldn’t admit it. You daren’t admit your enchantment anymore. Because of Simon, I suppose.” She drinks her champagne and stares at the ceiling. “I say, I rather fancy a fag. You don’t mind, do you?”

I tell her I don’t mind at all, and she leaps up again and rummages through her handbag until her hand emerges in possession of a slim gold case. She knocks out a cigarette and lights it in a series of quick, graceful movements that mesmerize me. When she’s finished, and the cigarette burns from her fingers, she lifts the champagne bottle and wanders dreamily across the room to where I sit on the edge of my bed. “Refill, darling. Now be a good girl and drink it.”

For some impossible reason, I obey her and drink deep, and this time it isn’t so bad. As if those first few sips have numbed the nerves that connect sensation to memory. Anyway, everything’s different now, isn’t it? This is Florida, sun-warmed and hibiscus-scented. The icy champagne just fits, somehow.

Clara watches my face. “That’s better, isn’t it? There’s nothing a bottle of vintage fizz can’t cure, I always say. And you need it more than anyone. You’re in desperate need of a good roaring drunk, Virginia Fitzwilliam.”

“Am I?”

“Oh, yes. Poor thing. I’ll bet you’ve been blaming yourself for the past three years, telling yourself you can’t have any fun, that you don’t deserve any fun because you made such a dreadful, dreadful mistake trusting Simon.”

“It wasn’t a mistake. I thought so in the beginning, after I realized what he really was. But then Evelyn came.”

“Oh, Evelyn. Of course. No, I don’t suppose you can regret her.”

“Never.”

“And you can’t really hate Simon, can you, when he gave you such a daughter. Oh, my darling! What a terrible burden you’ve been carrying, between Simon and your father. All these dreadful men pressing around you.” She wandered back to her own bed and made that same little skipping motion, landing on her back, one white-stockinged leg dangling from the side. “You mustn’t blame yourself, you know. It’s not your fault that men are such beastly bounders.”

“I don’t blame myself.”

“Oh, lies! Yes, you do. And you’re punishing yourself for it. You’re doing penance for allowing yourself to be taken in. Not once, but twice! First your father, and then Simon. Or is it the other way around?”

In a single awkward, unpracticed movement, I lift the glass to my lips and drink all the champagne, all of it, jiggling the stem so that the last drop tracks along the bowl and into my mouth.

Clara turns on her side and examines me. “Ah! I’ve got it right, haven’t I?”

“Not at all.”

“Yes, I have. I’m a terribly keen observer of other people, you understand. We younger siblings always are. I knew right away, as soon as I saw you. My poor Virginia. My poor brave darling.”

I rise from the bed, and this time I’m the one who takes the bottle in my hand. I’m the one who pours the champagne into my glass, almost to the rim. “I’m not brave at all, though. If anything, I’ve been weak. Weak and blind.”

“Because you wanted to be loved. You had no mother, no other family. My God! That man was your father. And Simon was your lover. Of course you wanted to believe in them. I remember the first time I saw you, clinging to Simon like a lovely pale little vine—you’re so tall, and yet you didn’t look tall at all then—and I thought, oh, the poor dear sweet thing. What am I going to tell her? How am I going to warn her?” She reaches forward—I’m standing next to her, because she left the champagne bottle on the small table between our two single beds—and she seizes my empty left hand. “And your father, too. It’s the same thing. You wanted so desperately to believe that he was good, that he wasn’t a murderer. You had no choice but to believe in him. He had all the money, and you had a sister, and then the baby. Where else could you go? You simply had to believe he was innocent. To go on believing. Oh, come here, darling.” She pulls me onto the bed with her and puts her arms around me, and while I’m absolutely not crying a bit—my eyes are dry, my chest still—I find myself helpless to resist her. She has paralyzed me. “You’re safe now, anyway. They can’t lie to you anymore.”

“What a shame. They were both excellent liars.”

“Oh, you don’t need to tell me that! Simon was just—what’s the word? He was congenital. I don’t know about your father, but Simon was simply born that way. A liar. He was an expert, a natural. He knew exactly what to say to you, to make you believe him. He knew exactly what you wanted to hear.”

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Of course, it made him terribly charming. All the local girls used to go mad for him, whenever he came down from school at the end of term. You can only imagine what a clever seducer he was. He was no more than fifteen, I think, when he got started. Yes, fifteen at the oldest. I remember because I happened upon him with a girl one afternoon, the summer I turned ten. There was a pretty little secret garden on the grounds, you see, just perfect for that sort of thing, all walled and sunken and loads of benches and sweet-smelling roses. I used to play there all the time. I thought it was a fairy garden. Don’t laugh! Oh, the stories I used to make up, the darling little fairies of my youth. Anyway, that’s where I saw them together, although I was so young at the time, I had only the vaguest idea what was going on. Just that it seemed rather beastly, like a pair of naked white rabbits.”

We’re lying on our sides, spoon-fashion, because the bed is so narrow. Clara’s arms are secure around my chest, her breath sweet in my hair. I’ve drunk the champagne too quickly. The opposite wall floats before me. A pair of watercolor landscapes, framed in white, bob and merge along the sea-green wallpaper. I picture a ten-year-old Clara wandering across a wet Cornwall lawn. Turning the corner of a brick wall and finding Simon stretched on a bench or a blanket, atop some faceless, budding, writhing girl. In my imagination, she has blond hair and smells of peaches.

“How awful for you,” I whisper. “And for her. Poor girl.”

“She was lovely. An utter innocent, of course, just like you. I think he preferred them that way: virgins, or else someone’s naïve young wife. The purer the better. And she wasn’t a village girl, either, this one. She was a proper middle-class sort of girl, an attorney’s daughter, the kind of girl who’s supposed to preserve her virginity at all costs until marriage. Particularly in those days, you know, before the war. The poor darling! I don’t know how he convinced her. The usual way, I suppose. He didn’t give a damn for your feelings; that was his strength. You can do anything if you don’t care how other people feel.”

“I don’t understand that. How he could seem so sympathetic, if he didn’t really care.”

“Because he knew what you were feeling. Don’t you see? He knew, but he didn’t care. He was a tremendous actor. He acted his way through life, manipulating us all like puppets. Everyone else was taken in by him, but I knew. I knew how rotten he was inside. I could just smell it, the rottenness. I’ve always sensed things like that, as if I could just sort of see someone’s spirit, like the color in a rainbow.”

“A color?”

“Yes! Everybody has a color. Oh, not visible, I mean, not exactly. I can’t explain it. Like a sort of halo, I suppose, or rather the impression of a halo. The color I think of, the color that floods me when I see you. I feel myself rather purple, for example, veering between a kind of lurid violet and a lavender, depending on my surroundings.”

I make an awkward laugh. “Really? And what color am I?”

“Oh, darling! You’re blue. Dear, true, pure, melancholy blue! And I adore you for it. My sweet new sister.”

I want to know what kind of color she saw in Simon, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to ask. I gaze at the wall instead, breathing quietly, thinking Blue. A dark blue or a light blue? Or, as with Clara, does my particular shade depend on my surroundings?

She speaks up suddenly. “That’s why he made such a good surgeon, you know. Simon. He wasn’t troubled by what he saw. He could operate on you as if you were an automobile engine. Quite without mercy, but of course it worked. I suppose you might say that human civilization needs people like that—people to do our dirty work, to do all the horrible necessary things we can’t bring ourselves to do. It’s just you don’t want to fall in love with them.”

I sit up. The pins in my hair have loosened, and a few locks drop free. I brace my hands on the edge of the mattress, concentrating my attention on the wall, until the merged watercolors separate once more into two distinct forms. Then I reach for the champagne glass on the nightstand.

Behind me, Clara lifts herself to a sitting position and slips her arms around my waist. Her head rests gently on my back. She’s forgotten about her cigarette. I watch the dying wisps of smoke drift from the white ceramic ashtray next to the champagne bottle. It’s shaped like a shell—the ashtray, of course, not the champagne bottle—and the delicate flutes make a perfect hollow for the cigarette’s round shape. How clever.

I lift the cigarette, rimmed in smudges of Clara’s lipstick, and stub it out. “Still. I can’t regret it.”

“Of course not. You have Evelyn.”

“She is worth everything to me. She’s worth anything.”

Clara reaches past me for the cigarette case. “And your sister? What was her name?”

“Sophie. Her name is Sophie.”

“She’s all right, too?”

“Yes. She’s engaged to be married. A nice, well-bred fellow. Harmless and simple, from a stately old family. He hasn’t got much money, but then he doesn’t need to, does he? I think they’ll be happy together.”

Clara lights the cigarette and leans back against the pillow, watching my profile. “And you? What about you, dearest?”

“What about me?”

“Have you thought of marrying again?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You might as well make a fresh start, mightn’t you? Simon’s dead. The trial’s over, and your father’s got what he deserved. Your sister’s got someone to watch over her. You have your daughter and all your lovely, lovely money. Why not find yourself a handsome, trustworthy lad to share it all with?”

“Because I can’t!”

She leans forward. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of all men now? I assure you, you’ve only been frightfully unlucky. Most of them are quite decent. Anyway, you’d better marry quickly, or you’ll attract all the rotten ones. The ones after your dosh.”

“I’m not afraid of that. I don’t have any intention of forming any—any—”

“Attachments?”

“Is that what you call them?”

“My poor love. Look at you, all frightened and trembling. And you are so blue, you know. You’re not the sort that can take up with one chap and another, flitting about like a bee sipping nectar, and yet you need love. You need love desperately.” She snatches a quick bite from her cigarette. “No. We’ve got to find you a husband. What about Samuel?”

I spring to my feet. “Samuel?”

“He’s handsome enough, isn’t he? And he’s a dear, loyal boy who won’t run about on you. You’re already terribly fond of him.”

“I hardly know him.”

She shakes the cigarette at me. “Now, don’t be coy. I know all about your embrace yesterday.”

“It wasn’t an embrace. Not that kind of embrace.”

“Perhaps on your side it wasn’t. But Samuel! He told me, you know. In his gruff little way. In fact, I suspect you quite overcame him. I shouldn’t wonder if he’s been in love with you all this time. Just like him, to form a passion for an impossible object. It’s illegal, you know, back home. To marry your brother’s widow.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. The Church thinks it’s a kind of incest, apparently. Ghastly archaic old men. Anyway, it all makes tremendous sense. He’s just enough like Simon to attract you, but not enough to put you in danger for your life. In fact, the opposite. Samuel will protect you from anything. Protect you with his own heart’s blood, I daresay, or whatever manner of nonsense you like. He’s a warrior, you know. That’s what they do.”

I walk to the mirror that hangs above the desk. The image appalls me. I suppose I’m not the sort of woman who looks enchanting in dishabille. My hair straggles gracelessly from its pins; my face is wan, protected from sunburn today by the brim of a sensible hat. My bones stick out everywhere. Over my shoulder, Clara’s dark head bobs and wavers. “I am not going to marry Samuel,” I tell the reflection in the mirror, in slow, forceful words. “I’m not going to marry anyone again.”

“Really?”

I turn to face her. “Really.”

She reaches out to crush the cigarette into the crustacean ashtray. “I have agitated you terribly.”

“I’m not agitated. I’m simply not going to marry again. I can’t. I will take a thousand lovers before I marry again. But not that. Not marriage.”

“Why? Because you’re afraid they all are only in it for the dosh? Because Samuel—”

“Actually, there isn’t any dosh. Not much, anyway.”

“I mean when your father’s dead, of course—”

“No. After he was arrested, he transferred everything, all he had, the patents and the money and the house, to Sophie and me, first thing. But I couldn’t keep my share.”

Clara’s still rolling the end of the cigarette in the ashtray. She stops now, holding the stub against the porcelain, eyebrows high and sweetly arched. “You gave it all away?”

“Not quite all. But I couldn’t take Father’s money, any more than I needed. I’ve put almost all of it, including the patent rights, into trust for Evelyn.”

Clara drops the cigarette at last. Rubs her thumb and forefinger together, as if to brush away the ash. “That’s awfully noble.”

I turn back to the mirror. “Not really. It isn’t as if money has ever given me what I really wanted. You might say it’s the opposite.”

“Oh, my darling.”

The bedsprings squeak, the rug rustles. Clara lays her small head against my back and wraps her arms around my waist.

“You poor thing,” she whispers against the thin fabric of my dress.

“I’m not poor. I’m rich. I have Evelyn, I have my sister.”

“What about Simon’s estate? Are you going to give that away, too?”

“I haven’t decided yet. Yes, probably. I guess I’ll likely sell it all and put the money in Evelyn’s trust. Once I’ve found out …”

“Found out what?”

“I don’t know. Once I’ve seen everything. Everything Simon left behind.”

“That may take a little time. He left behind a great many things.”

My hollow eyes regard me. A bit accusingly, maybe, as if I’m blaming myself for my current state. My current gloom. I should eat more, I think. I should eat more and drink more and go outside without my hat and generally enjoy myself. Why not? I should learn something about this world that Simon inhabited, until I discover what I’m looking for. Whatever that is. A sign or a clue or an elegant solution to the puzzle of Simon’s death. Until I discover whether or not I’m really free.

A foot or so to the left of the mirror, a window frames the western landscape, catching the glare of the dying sun. If I shade my eyes, I can see the smudge of buildings on the opposite shore of the bay. The striving blocks of Miami, where Simon occasionally made visits, to transact business with his bankers.

I say softly, “I’ve got nothing but time.”




CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_1b0f687b-c7d3-5498-8048-16f33d8859e8)


France, February 1917

During the night before I left for France, I slept in Sophie’s room, in her bed, the way we used to do when she was small. After Mama died.

Slept. I don’t think we actually slept. We talked until our throats hurt, we laughed into our pillows, and Sophie cried a little. Sophie’s the sentimental one; she tears up at everything, Fourth of July parades and baskets of puppies. Maybe I’ve spoiled her; maybe I’ve been too protective. I held her while she wept, and the old flannel of her nightgown scratched my neck, and the honeysuckle smell of her hair filled my head, raising all kinds of memories. My chest ached. She asked me why I had to go, and I didn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her that I was going to explode, I was going to go mad, I was a pot of salted water coming on to boil under the pressure of an eternal cast-iron lid, and someone was going to get scalded.

Instead, I stroked her honeysuckle hair and said, Because there’s a war on, Baby. There’s a terrible war going on overseas, and I have to help.

She said, I’m going to miss you so much, what am I going to do without you here, and I kept on stroking that hair, blinking my bee-stung eyes, and when I could speak I said, You’ll be fine, you’ll be safe, Father will take good care of you.

I said it over and over, until I believed it myself. Until it almost felt true.

But I couldn’t numb the anguish beneath my sternum. I couldn’t cure the absence of my sister, or the fear that sometimes roused me in those sooty moments before dawn, when the terrible new day smoldered at the horizon, streaked with unknown danger.

AS IT DID NOW, THE morning after I first met Captain Fitzwilliam. I lay on my back and stared at the crumbling ceiling, while my nerves stung and my temples burst. While the tension hurt the muscles of my jaw. Like I hadn’t slept at all, and maybe I hadn’t.

I rolled over and opened the drawer in the bedside table, where I kept a clumsily embroidered sachet that Sophie had given me for my birthday when she was ten. Before I left New York, I had removed the exhausted lavender and slipped inside a small cake of soap, the honeysuckle soap with which I always bathed her, until she was old enough to bathe herself. I held the sachet to my nose and thought, If I can still smell her, she must be all right, she must be safe. Father must be taking good care of her.

The light grew. Time to rise. Time for breakfast, time to wash and to dress and to drive out into the bitter February morning. The bitter February mud. I absorbed a last breath of honeysuckle and threw off the covers.

Mrs. DeForest was one of those women who believed in a sturdy, early breakfast, stocked with protein and vitamins. She worshipped vitamins, the entire alphabet of them. She’d brought her own hens from Long Island, and not one bird had dared to expire along the way. When I stepped downstairs into the refectory at six o’clock, she sat already at the head of the long wooden table, looking clean and practical. At her left sat Corporal Pritchard, shoveling food silently into his mouth, and at her right sat Captain Fitzwilliam, wearing his tunic (but not his belt) and drinking coffee. I saw that his hair was lighter than I had supposed. It was almost golden—or maybe that was only the effect of the vast electric chandelier overhead—and spiked all over in stiff, reflective gray. I was shocked at the familiarity of his face, how I already recognized each angle of bone and each line embedded around his eyes and mouth. How I could say to myself, His skin looks better this morning, less wan, full of color, plumper. He must have slept well, after all.

Mrs. DeForest was speaking. She nodded to me but she didn’t pause. She never paused. “It’s the result of so much planning, you know. No detail too small when it comes to people’s health. I’m a firm believer in clean sheets and fresh, abundant food. We’ve brought our own supplies, and there’s more on the way from our chapter back home. We have an awfully enthusiastic chapter. Nothing is too good for our patients, Captain Fitzwilliam.”

“Indeed.” The captain looked at me. His eyes crinkled some sort of message. I went to the sideboard and lifted a plate. A mirror hung before me, at such an angle that I could watch the two of them, at right angles, his left knuckles nearly brushing her right knuckles.

“Our main ward is the old great hall. That was my idea. You can’t understate the healthful benefits of the circulation of air, and the ceilings in that hall are no less than twenty-five feet high, served by no fewer than twenty fully operational windows. I saw to the refurbishment myself.”

“But doesn’t it get cold? So many windows? The men do hate a draft, Mrs. DeForest.”

Mrs. DeForest set down her fork and steepled her fingers over her plate. She ate eggs and fruit for breakfast—always fresh, no toast—after an hour of morning calisthenics. She had gone to college, you know, and was all up-to-date. She was the first woman I knew who cut her hair short, though pretty soon we were all doing it, bobbing our hair. But she was the first. She said that short hair saved her an hour a day, at least. Her husband was older, and they had never had children. Maybe that accounted for her skin, which was so untroubled and resilient, as she leaned forward over the de Créouville porcelain, that you could have bounced a tennis ball from her cheek, if you wanted to. (Not that I wanted to! It’s only an illustration.) Her fingers were equally young and strong, linked together now at the middle joints, though she must have been forty-one, by my own calculation. “As for warmth,” she said, “you’ll notice two rather spacious hearths, one on each end of the hall, which provide a great deal of heat. Nice, dry heat, Captain, in this awful damp.”

“An inestimable virtue at this time of year.”

My dish was full. I went to my usual chair, to the left of Corporal Pritchard, two seats down. Four nurses sat at the other end of the table, hunched over their plates, eating swiftly, each movement straining with suppressed excitement. The other nurses, I supposed, were on duty in the ward. Mrs. DeForest had worked out a careful system of shifts, based on scientific principles of human efficiency.

“I understand your patients are housed in a barn, Captain?” she said.

Corporal Pritchard set down his fork, lifted his head, and answered for his captain. “Indeed they are, ma’am. A regular French barnyard. Smells like the devil.”

Mrs. DeForest turned to me. “Is this true, Miss Fortescue?”

“I think the corporal—that is, the building was a barn. Before the war. But it’s perfectly clean now, just like a regular kind of hospital. Everything sanitary, as far as I could see.”

Corporal Pritchard shook his head, very mournful. He was a thin, hollow-cheeked man with an oversized nose and a gaze of perpetual hunger, and mournfulness just about hung on his face as if he’d given birth to it, millimeter by millimeter, through his nostrils. I thought he was around thirty years old, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe the war made boys look older, and he was really eighteen. “It’s the summer that’s the trouble, miss. Them pigs running about. But we don’t like to complain.”

At the word pigs, I pressed my coffee cup to my lips and glanced at Captain Fitzwilliam, who concentrated on his toast. The clock ticked, the air yawned. The soft thump of busy feet approached and receded. Mrs. DeForest looked at me, at Captain Fitzwilliam. At Corporal Pritchard.

“Pigs, Corporal?”

“Just in summer.”

“Hmm.” The fingertips tapped. The brow furrowed. The gaze returned to Captain Fitzwilliam, but not the head itself. She had a way of doing that, looking at you sideways. “A barn,” she said.

The captain spoke cheerfully. “You see, Mrs. DeForest, the Royal Army Medical Corps established this particular clearing station in the early days, when we were dashing about digging trenches, and nobody had the least idea we’d still be churning over the same ground two years later. There wasn’t time to build any of your fine modern compounds of huts and wards, according to all those marvelous diagrams prepared beforehand by our diligent staff. Luckily—well, for the men, at least—it’s only temporary accommodation. Until they’re well enough to go back up the line, you know, or else bad enough to continue on to the base hospitals, or even Blighty itself. Well, the really fortunate blokes, anyway, too ripped up to be any use to Haig.”

Mrs. DeForest smacked the table with the flat of her palm. “There. Do you see, Miss Fortescue? This is why we came to France. This makes it all worthwhile. Barns! Barns, if you will!”

I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t why I came to France, not really. That the barn wasn’t all that bad, and the British Army seemed, after two and a half years of war, to be taking care of its wounded in a pretty resourceful manner, given the circumstances. I thought of Captain Fitzwilliam’s keen face, and the competent way he shot an order in its proper direction, hitting the mark bang on the nose, before turning to me and smiling, smiling, as if he’d been playing at darts. But how could you say that to Mrs. DeForest, the president of the Eighth New York Chapter of the American Red Cross, who never got out of bed except to rescue some lesser creature from an awful fate? How could you admit to a variety of motives, not all of them noble?

Captain Fitzwilliam saved me. “You’re an angel of mercy, Mrs. DeForest, and on behalf of the entire British nation, I thank you for your service. That’s a splendid cut of ham, by the way. Splendid.”

She snatched his plate, darted to the sideboard, and heaped on the slices of pink French ham, one after another. How she came by the ham in the middle of the beleaguered Western Front, I never understood. She was just that kind of person. She could pluck priceless haunches of jambon from thin air. She set the plate back before the captain and resumed her seat.

“So you’ll be sending more? Patients?”

“As many as we possibly can.”

“And you’ll tell your colonel how well we’ve cared for your men, isn’t that right? The many advantages of the château?” She lifted the coffeepot and dangled the spout above his cup. “More coffee?”

He nudged the saucer forward.

“My dear Mrs. DeForest. Advantages it is.”

IN FACT, AS I WALKED down the ward on my way to the entrance, I thought the men were maybe a little too well cared for. The zeal of eight Red Cross nurses had left them cocooned in immaculate white sheets, immobile, a little stunned, like flies in the web of an especially greedy spider. The sisters were serving hot breakfast by the spoonful—whether or not the patient was capable of lifting a spoon—and as each man opened his mouth he seemed to be uttering a silent cry for escape.

“It’s a bleeding palace,” muttered Corporal Pritchard, who walked at my side. If you looked carefully, you could actually see the bulge in his stomach where the breakfast lay. Like a massive, self-satisfied tumor hanging from his ribs.

“A château.”

“Like that what them staff officers got.” At either end of the hall, just as Mrs. DeForest promised, two fires burned up the DeForest fortune at a magisterial rate of combustion. A wind-up gramophone played tinny Mozart between the two central windows.

“Your headquarters, you mean? In a château?”

“Yes, miss. A great big one, they say, but that’s just to be expected, innit? The staff sacrificing their youth and health, day and night, for our sake. It’s only right they should have a nice posh castle to lay their weary heads in.” He stood back politely to allow me through the doorway. I liked the way he spoke, the peculiar accent (youf an’ elf) and the natural sarcasm. Outside, on the gravel drive, Hunka Tin stood waiting. I had spent the hour before breakfast in the makeshift garage—the former stables, actually, except all the horses were long gone—while Mrs. DeForest did her calisthenics, and now the Ford looked as bright as new, almost. Mud washed away and engine tuned. Tires all repaired and axles checked. I hadn’t replaced that fuel line, however. Hoped I wouldn’t regret the omission.

“Blimey,” said the corporal, “you ain’t half got a good mechanic.”

“Actually, I’m the mechanic.”

“You, miss?”

The air was bitter, and the engine would be cold. I went around front, released the choke, and turned the engine. “My father had a Model T for years, and my sister and I kept it running for him. He thought we should be self-reliant. Could you switch the ignition for me?”

When the engine was puttering at an easy, patient pace, the corporal slid from the seat and made room for me. “Your chariot, m’lady,” he said. Courtly bow.

“Where’s your captain?”

“Making his regards, I think.”

“His regards?”

He nodded at the steps. “To herself.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“Now, don’t you think anything of that, miss. It’s only what he does.”

“Think anything of what?”

The corporal nudged the brim of his hat and reached into his pocket. He lit a cheap, brown-wrapped cigarette and walked away, a few polite steps, smoking and staring into the dry fountain in the center of the driveway, where a suite of lichen-crusted cherubs stood frozen in frolic. A dark fog wrapped the trees beyond. I realized he wasn’t going to reply and climbed into my seat. The smell of exhaust. The steady vibration of the engine under my hands and my bottom. The things I knew.

After a minute or two, Captain Fitzwilliam emerged from the château, hat and belt in place, and swung into the seat beside me. He smelled of coffee and soap and just the faintest hint of cigarettes, and his cheeks were pink against the ecru of his shirt collar. “Off we go, then,” he said, striking the dash with his palm, like a signal, and he propped one boot against the frame, leaned back his head, and fell asleep.

SO I DROVE, BECAUSE I could do that well, and it steadied my nerves to do something well. Something practical. The fog persisted, and the damp, bitter wind blew on my temples. Behind me, the wooden truck rattled and groaned on its metal chassis. The engine ground faithfully, smelling of burnt oil and gasoline. The road was even more churned and muddy than yesterday, but this time I knew the way, and the morning light was still young and hopeful. I kept to the middle of the road, where the mud wasn’t so bad, though I had to give way to other vehicles: supply trucks and artillery wagons and even, as we drew closer, other ambulances. All crusted with mire. They were headed to the railway station at Albert, for the sanitary trains to the coast, where the base hospitals lay in a chain along the sea, from Étaples to Boulogne.

Beyond them, England. The source of all these vehicles. The quarry from which all this manhood was mined, was cut and honed and shipped here in its millions. To do what? To live and fight and die. To construct and occupy this vast, temporary civilization that existed for a single object.

I caught myself wondering, at that moment, where Captain Fitzwilliam lived, when he wasn’t patching up bodies in a casualty clearing station in northern France. When he wasn’t asleep beside me, heavy and silent, pressing his big left knee across my right. Where he was raised, who were his parents. The ambulance pitched and wallowed. The wet air had soaked through my woolen gloves, and my fingers, clenching the wheel, should have felt the cold. Instead they glowed. She is absolutely essential. I was not falling in love; I was certainly not falling in love. Love was a fiction, written by Nature to disguise her real purpose. This sick, breathless sensation in my belly was only biology. This heat on my nerves. Only the instinct to procreate.

Or something else, maybe. The recognition of imminent danger.

“YOU’RE DAMNED QUIET,” CAPTAIN FITZWILLIAM said an hour later, making me jump. “Are you always so quiet?”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Only resting my eyes. I rarely sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Troubled conscience, perhaps.”

The ambulance lurched through a hollow. Fitzwilliam gripped the doorframe, while a series of thuds vibrated the wood behind us, and Pritchard swore.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” he said.

“Ask what?”

“Why my conscience is troubled.”

“Isn’t that your own business? I don’t even know you.”

“Miss Fortescue,” he said gravely, “this is a time of war, not a drawing room in peacetime.”

“I don’t understand. What difference does that make? People are people.”

“I mean that we’ve shared a most intimate space for several hours now. Can’t we dispense with the niceties and be friends?”

I said nothing.

“Look. I’ll start. My conscience, since you’re curious—”

“I’m not curious.”

“Yes, you are. You’re desperately curious. You like me, Miss Fortescue; admit it.”

“I do not—”

“My conscience, Miss Fortescue, coincidentally enough, is troubled because of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Because a young lady of tremendous youth and merit, to say nothing of beauty, has traveled such a great distance to cover herself in mud and motor oil and to make conversation with an old bounder like me, and most especially to put herself under the command of a Mrs. DeForest—”

“Mrs. DeForest is an admirable woman.”

“Oh, most admirable. No doubt at all. But she’s rather a tyrant, isn’t she?”

I was still too rattled by the word beauty. “Of course not,” I lied.

“And I ask myself why. Why you should do such a thing, and why I should be so fortunate as to deserve you.”

“Deserve me!”

“Deserve, I should say, your entrance into my particular butcher shop at a quarter past five on an otherwise ordinary February afternoon. Ordinary in the sense of this mad, atrocious war, I mean.”

Another vehicle approached us along the narrow road, a large truck painted in dull olive green, covered in canvas. I pointed Hunka Tin carefully to the right-hand side, and the truck thundered past, engine screaming, mire flying from the wheels.

“I don’t understand why you say these things. How you can be so flippant.”

He placed one hand on his woolen heart. “You wound me.”

“Nonsense.”

“I protest. In the first place, I’m not being flippant. I’m quite sincere. In the second place, you’ll find there are two ways to cope with the madness in this godforsaken Hades. The first is to pretend that it’s all a great—if rather unsporting—outdoor game. A match of cricket prolonged by inclement weather and unlucky batsmen.”

“And the second?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Another truck came by, identical to the first. A supply convoy, probably, returning from the lines. I rubbed my thumbs against the wheel. My back ached, my jaw ached. Every muscle strung tight.

“In any case,” Captain Fitzwilliam went on, when the clamor died away, “we have roamed far from the question at hand. What exactly are you running away from, Miss Fortescue? I find I should very much like to know.”

“Nothing at all.”

“Tyrant parents? Failed love affair? Creditors at your heels?”

“None of those things.”

“Nothing left behind? No heartache, no loved ones pining?”

I gripped the wheel and leaned forward. Stared through the windshield. The bleak, brown, lurching winter landscape. I remember I was considering how long to remain silent before starting another topic, and what kind of topic I could safely introduce. Weather or war news or staff incompetence. Something even more impersonal, like the quality of wartime coffee, and whether you could call it coffee at all. Then—

“I have a sister.”

“What’s that?”

“A sister!”

“Older or younger?”

“Younger.”

“Are you close?”

“Very much.”

“Well, then. Why the devil should you leave her behind, if you love her?”

“Because I—”

Well. I stopped right there, right there on the edge, right in the split second before I tumbled off. Shocked that I had crept so close without realizing. Or shocked, really, that I had allowed this man to lead me there. Why? Because he was handsome and weary and crammed with easy manners, because he was solid and smoke-scented by my side, because I was breathing the fog of his breath and he was breathing mine, and his big left knee connected with my slender right one. Because he was a doctor, after all, and how could you not trust a doctor with your miseries? That was why doctors existed.

“Because I wanted to help,” I said instead.

He shifted in his seat, and his knee left mine.

“Well,” he said, tilting his head back again, crossing his arms across his ribs, “if you change your mind, I should be glad to serve as your confidant.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t think I could. I felt sick, perspiring, the way you do when you stand by yourself on the brink of some vertiginous cliff, and the whole world undulates around you, and you’re overcome by the tantalizing power of suicide. The death that lies within your immediate grasp. A single, easy step.

When the silence ripened, and the road flattened, and I felt I could risk a sidelong glance, I saw that Captain Fitzwilliam’s eyes were closed once more.

But I knew he was not asleep.

WHEN WE WALLOWED INTO THE stable-yard entrance at half past ten, the scene had changed from the day before. Two ambulances occupied the corner nearest the barn, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if they were loading patients or unloading them. I pulled the brake and the car lurched and stopped. “We’re here!” I shouted, banging a fist on the wood behind me, and I didn’t wait for Captain Fitzwilliam to stir, I didn’t wait for Corporal Pritchard to wake up and crawl from his stretcher. I jumped out of my seat and into the soft earth, and I floundered around back to toss open the door.

Pritchard was sitting on the floor, dazed and sleepy. He lifted his head and swore. “That was quick.”

I stuck out my hand and lifted him free. The other ambulances, I now saw, were loading men. They were headed for the railway station, for the sanitary trains to the base hospitals. From the east came the sound of artillery, a steady barrage, round after round firing into the German defenses. This time there was no returning fire, no long whistle and low, shattering explosion, but I stuck my head to the crown of my helmet anyway, as if that would protect me, and staggered through the sucking mud back to the front of the ambulance.

Just as I ducked around the corner, a stretcher party charged from the doorway, awash in wet khaki and as urgent and muscular as a set of racehorses. I stopped just in time and flattened myself against the wall. “Watch it, mate!” the orderly said, the one in front, and for some reason this rebuke brought me back from the nauseous precipice. Reminded me, I suppose, of my own unimportance in this place. My insignificance. I was not absolutely essential; I was intruding. I was in the way. There was no impending collision. No Virginia at the center of some fearful, imagined impact. Just wounded men, who were fighting a war.

The stretcher passed. “Go on, then,” said Fitzwilliam’s voice behind me, and I obeyed him. Crossed the threshold into the barn.

Less crowded now. A few of the cots lay stripped and empty, and the orderlies and nursing sisters moved around like people instead of rabbits. But the architecture was the same, the brown walls, the rows of lumpy beds to the right, the curiously identical white faces stuck above each blanket, the curtains to the left that partitioned the operating theater, the recovery room, the mess and the barracks. The smell of disinfectant, of earth and wet wool and old wood, enclosed me in its familiar cloud. If I cared to listen, I could discern the restless moans, the low chatter of a hundred injured men. Like any hospital, I thought. Captain Fitzwilliam pushed past me and caught the elbow of one of the nurses, speaking earnestly, head a little bowed, so that the electric light caught the tender skin of the back of his neck, and I found that I was wrong. That the threat of annihilation didn’t matter.

But that’s how it happens, when you have no defense, no immunity whatsoever. When you thought you were strong, and you were only untested. I made a movement, preparing to turn away, and at that instant Fitzwilliam lifted his gray-speckled head and looked at me, and his lips parted.

“Miss Fortescue—”

A clatter of boots overtook him, a choir of exhausted male shouts, and our heads snapped to the doorway of the barn, where a new stretcher party had arrived, flinging mud and chill onto the floorboards.

“Damn,” said Captain Fitzwilliam. “You’ll excuse me.”

He strode to the door, and I turned to look for Corporal Pritchard. But Pritchard had gone as well, and I was left standing alone near the entrance to the operating theater, a useless obstruction, a thick American branch tossed into the orderly flow of treatment and evacuation, treatment and evacuation. We were two years late, weren’t we? In the early months of invasion and repulsion, the race to the sea—before so many clearing stations were established, before the base hospitals were built on the northern coast, before all the manuals were written and the procedures put in place—when the trains were stuffed with casualties and the depots lined with stretchers and panic, a hospital like ours might have made a difference.

In this brutal, methodical February of 1917, our zeal was nothing but vanity.

I stood there, feet planted on the old wooden boards of that French barn, and watched Captain Fitzwilliam approach the stretcher and trade a few words with the man in front. Step forward and bend his head to address the wounded soldier inside. Behind them, the door was still open, and the corner of an ambulance flashed in and out of view as the driver and the orderly secured the doors. A nurse hurried past, carrying a tub of soiled and stinking bandages. Fitzwilliam stepped away from the stretcher and issued some direction to the stretcher-bearers, pointing his finger to one of the empty cots, bleached new sheets yellow-white under the electric bulbs, and I thought, It is time to go, Virginia.

Time to go.

I stepped aside for the stretcher party, and the soldier’s pale face jogged by. Every roof beam, the arrangement of every cot was familiar to me, as if I’d known them for years. As if I’d been born and raised here, and maybe I had. Maybe I had lived an entire new life inside the space of the last twenty-four hours, been reborn and struggled and hoped and strived, and now … and now …

What now?

Did I die and return to the old life?

“Miss Fortescue,” said a voice next to my shoulder, “will you come to my office? I’m afraid some paperwork remains to be sorted out.”

AND SO I CAME, WITHOUT even striving for it, to stand inside that canvas-partitioned square that constituted Captain Fitzwilliam’s office, while he made his final notes on the papers that would accompany my new patients to the Château de Créouville. He had offered me coffee, and I had refused it. I didn’t want him to see how my hands shook. I gazed at the pink lobe of his right ear and said, Of course.

“I don’t know how to say this—I’m sure you’ll think me a little mad …”

I leaned forward and gathered up the papers from the desk. He was standing on the other side; he reached out and stopped my hands.

“You don’t need to speak. I’ll speak. I’ll tell you something I’m not supposed to tell you, which is that we’re moving. The unit, I mean. Next week. Long overdue. We’ve got a proper site, modern regulation huts, that sort of thing, just yards away from the railway, about two miles from here. Your Mrs. DeForest ought to be perfectly mollified about that, at any rate.”

“No more barns,” I said throatily.

“Of course we shall continue to send patients your way for rehabilitation; we stand very much in need, as I said before, of a hospital to manage all the ambulatory cases, trench foot and frostbite and that kind of thing, and while it’s not as glamorous as—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t care about that.”

“No, of course not. You wouldn’t. But I’m afraid Mrs. DeForest has loftier dreams.”

“Well, she doesn’t have a choice, does she?”

“No.”

I stared at the desk before us. My hands still rested on either side of the sheaf of documents, held at the wrist by Captain Fitzwilliam’s agile, gentle fingers. A surgeon’s fingers, trained at great expense. His thumbs lay upon the backs of my bare hands, like a pair of anchors. The intimate contact seemed at odds with our businesslike communication, but what did I know? No man had ever held my wrists like this before.

And then his hands sprang back, as if only just realizing what they were doing, and settled behind his back. I gathered up the papers to my chest. From beyond the canvas partition came a metallic crash, an angry shout. I thought, Someone’s going to walk in, right this second. Someone’s going to see us like this, standing here without speaking. The desk between us was one of those collapsible designs, made of thin, light wood: a camp desk, bearing only a kerosene lantern, a couple of medical volumes topped by a messy leather notebook, a tin of pens, and a silver-framed photograph of a woman in a white dress.

I said, without moving, “If that’s all, then—”

“Wait! Damn.” He turned, stepped a few paces to the right, and stopped square. Behind his back, his thumbs dug into his palms.

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t call me that. Don’t call me sir, in that voice.”

The lantern was lit, and the glow fell on the silver frame of the photograph. The metal was tarnished from the damp. From this angle, I couldn’t see the subject very well, but she seemed to be smiling. I leaned forward an inch or two and tilted my head for a better look. The photograph, it seemed, was not taken in a studio. The girl sat on a large boulder, both shoes visible beneath the hem of her frothy white dress, and she carried her hat in her hand. Her hair seemed to be escaping its pins. There was an inscription at the bottom. I couldn’t read it.

“That’s a lovely photograph,” I said.

“Photograph?”

“On your desk.”

He turned back. His face was pale, except for a pair of reddish patches on the outer edges of his cheekbones. You might have thought he would look at the photograph, but he didn’t. He looked at me instead, fixing his gaze so intently on my face, I almost turned away. Instead, I said, in a high voice, “She’s lovely. Is she your sister?”

“Yes. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Of course not.”

He reached inside the breast pocket of his tunic and pulled out a gold cigarette case. There were initials engraved on the outside, in plain Roman lettering. My heart beat in such enormous, galloping strokes, I couldn’t breathe. “It must be difficult, being apart from your family like this,” I said.

“Yes. Well. We do what we must.” He lit the cigarette quickly and shook out the match. “I seem to have lost my train of thought. What were we saying?”

“I don’t recall. Something about the unit moving elsewhere.”

“You seem upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“I hope I haven’t made you ill at ease. I never meant—you see, it’s the strangest thing. Since yesterday, I have been struck—I have wanted—I want most intently—most unaccountably—to see you again, to see how you’re getting on—to be a friend, I suppose.” The cigarette twitched between his fingers. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I—not really, no. I’m afraid I don’t. I think it would be better if—”

“Stop!” He held up his hand. “Don’t say it, please. Don’t say some damned prim little thing about prudence and discretion.”

I pressed my lips together.

He turned away and stared at the canvas wall.

“I have been wrestling with this all day, Miss—what is your first name?”

“Virginia.”

He closed his eyes and said Virginia. Like a prayer, like the answer to an ancient mystery. The sound of voices intensified on the other side of the canvas. Someone was getting dressed down, a few yards away. Captain Fitzwilliam sucked on the cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly, in a wide, thin stream. “I suppose you think I’m a bounder.”

“No.”

“Ah, but you hesitated.”

“I—I don’t know. I don’t know you at all.”

“May I write to you, at least? Convince you of my innocent intentions.”

“What are your intentions?”

“To be friends, Virginia. There’s nothing wrong with friendship, is there?”

“I’ve often heard it’s impossible for men and women to be friends.”

“Then let’s prove them wrong, shall we?” He stubbed out the cigarette and turned to me, and he was smiling. A little wildly, I thought, like somebody drunk. “You see, I find I can’t quite bear to cut you off so soon, like the limb of a precious new seedling. If friendship is all we’re given on this earth, why, I’ll be the most steadfast, honorable friend you ever knew. We can discuss poetry and history and botany. Whatever you damned well like. The latest sensational novel. Anything but the state of the war. God knows we’ve got enough of that without talking about it.”

“I’m sure you have enough friends already.”

“Yes. Well. I have had friends. The trouble is, they keep dying. It’s a damned nuisance, but there it is. One’s obliged to hunt further afield these days, when one’s old school chums no longer exist. And now you’ve dropped like a ripe pear before me. A friend. A fascinating, unexpected friend, rich with all kinds of interesting mysteries I look forward to discovering.”




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