When Lionel returns some untold time later to settle into the straw, her mind startles awake. He curves his body like a protective shell around her. He’s still wearing his trousers, but his chest is bare.
“I can’t blame you,” he says.
“Blame me for what?”
“It’s a dirty business, isn’t it. What I do. I lie, I seduce, I break faith. I change masks without a blink. Sometimes I kill.”
“Not wantonly, surely. Only when you need to.”
“And then there’s you, like the new-fallen snow.”
She works herself deeper into the shelter of him. Her legs ache from pedaling, her back aches from bending over the handlebars. She has been caressed and pummeled and made gloriously alive. She thinks for an instant of Walter and his more exotic demands, of her faithful acquiescence and her pride—oh, God, her ridiculous pride—in her own large-mindedness. As if obedience to the unspeakable were proof of worth. “That’s not true. I was no innocent.”
“In the essentials, you were. You are. There’s no pretense in you. The way you’re lying in my arms now, lying here willingly with your head between my jaws. You astound me.”
Violet takes his hand and holds it against her belly. She loves the sound of his voice, the cigarette-scented breath of him. The words themselves no longer matter.
Lionel tucks her hair over her ear. “You are so beautiful. Your skin and hair, all sunburned and lovely. Your marvelous mind, your practical fingers. You make me believe in things again. You make me think it’s possible.”
“What’s possible?”
“Everything.” He kisses her hair. “Anything.”
? ? ?
LIONEL WAKES HER at dawn, bristling with energy. “You’re not human,” Violet says, rolling her face into the straw.
“Come along.” He gives her bottom an encouraging swat. “We’ve got to cross the border today. I’d give anything for a newspaper this morning.”
“I’d give anything for a bath.”
“You can bathe in our hotel in Zurich tonight. I’ll wash you myself. Up you get, or I’ll be forced to take extreme measures.”
Violet yanks him into the straw. He yanks her up again, and in a few minutes they’re on their way, while the breeze pulls the stalks from her hair.
? ? ?
AT LUNCHTIME they arrive in the outskirts of the town of Blumberg. Lionel stops to consult a map, the bicycle balanced between his long flannel legs.
Violet brushes back her damp hair. She left her hat behind in the train compartment, and the sun is hot against her unguarded skin. “Where are we?” she asks, for perhaps the dozenth time that morning, though this time she knows the answer. Here, the streets are alive with the hum of commerce, the rattle of urgent travel. The gathering momentum of a steam engine chuffs over the rooftops. Violet cannot breathe.
“It’s the main border crossing.” Lionel looks up. “This way.”
Violet seizes her handlebars and follows him about the streets, between carts and chattering pedestrians and the odd automobile, too exhausted to think. He pulls up before a small hotel and dismounts the bicycle. “Here we are.”
“Here?” She looks up doubtfully at the ancient building, which looks as if it’s been welcoming weary travelers since the days of the Grand Tour. A columned portico sags to leftward, dreaming of more elegant days, above a double entrance shut tight to the hot afternoon air. A cluster of agitated tourists huddles in the slanted shade.
“My dear Mrs. Brown.” He helps her from her bicycle and kisses her hand, right atop the ring. “Do remember we’re on our honeymoon.”
In the absence of a doorman, Lionel ushers her through the entrance with her valise in his hand. The lobby is cramped and dark and blissfully cool. Two figures rise from the worn red velvet settee in the corner, flanked by a pair of valises.
“I might have known,” Violet says with a sigh.
? ? ?
“I SUPPOSE you know more than I do about all this,” Violet says to Henry. They are sitting at a small table in the dining room, sipping weak lemonade, while Jane and Lionel confer quietly next to them. Lionel’s shoulder brushes her with reassuring nearness, and yet she feels quite apart from the two of them, a different world entirely.
Henry stares at the stained and pitted wood before him. “Not much.”
“Does she usually drag you about on her . . .” Violet squints for a word. “Her missions?”
His dark head lifts, and his eyes examine her with an expression that seems far wiser than his years. All of him seems older and wiser than he did just months ago, in May. His shoulders seem wider, his jaw sturdier. As if his flesh is finally filling out the gaps in his long skeleton. “She’s a force of nature, you know,” he says. “She lands on her feet, every time. You can trust her.”
Violet glances at Jane’s animated face and back again. She smiles. “We’re a great deal alike, aren’t we, Henry?”
He manages a smile of his own and reaches out boldly to squeeze her hand. “I’d like to think so.”
Lionel turns to her and speaks in a low voice. “Does that make sense, Violet?”