“Walter likes to entertain.”
“And you don’t?”
She opens the liquor cabinet. “What would you like? We’ve got just about everything, I think.”
“Brandy will do.”
She finds the brandy and the snifter, and though she pours with extreme care, the bottle still clinks against the edge of the glass, betraying the slight shake in her hands. She sets down the bottle and lifts the glass between her palms to warm the brandy.
“An expert, I see.”
“My father used to drink brandy. Well, I suppose he still does. When I wanted to ask for a favor, I started him off with a glass of his favorite.”
“An excellent strategy. Did it work?”
Violet hands him the glass and watches as he takes a sip. “Occasionally. Please sit. I don’t want your surgeon to come after me, shaking his fist.”
“You first, Mrs. Grant.”
Violet lowers herself into one end of the sofa. Lionel takes a chair, exhaling just a fraction as the weight draws off his left knee. He extends the leg in a rigid line across the rug before him, nearly touching Violet’s crossed ankles.
Violet curls her fingers together in her lap. The lamplight is kind to Lionel, softening his face, so that the pronounced jut of his soldier’s cheekbones mellows into something more elegant. He reclines his large body, staring somewhere to Violet’s left, quite at home in Walter’s favorite chair. The brandy revolves drunkenly in his palm.
Violet is terrible at small talk. She waits for Lionel to speak first.
He lifts the glass and sips. “What sort of favors?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“From your father. What sort of favors did you ask?”
“My freedom, mostly. To go to college, to go to Oxford afterward. To study chemistry instead of English or history.”
“Nothing wrong with English or history.”
“There’s nothing wrong with chemistry, either, unless you’re a seventeen-year-old girl just out of school whose sole purpose in life is to marry well and make brilliant conversation at dinner parties.”
“But you weren’t that girl.”
“No, not at all.”
He smiles and leans forward. His eyes smile at her, too, reflecting the color of the brandy in his glass. “Good. You’re better this way. Anyway, if you had done the conventional thing, you wouldn’t be here now.”
Violet springs to her feet and goes to the window. “And wouldn’t that be a shame.”
“I’d be devastated.”
Sexual attraction. Violet knows what it is; she knows she’s feeling it now, that she’s felt it from the moment he prowled into the middle of her dark laboratory room ten days ago. Why not? Lionel Richardson is a strapping, healthy specimen of a man, an animal in its prime, manifestly ready to mate. She would be made of stone if the chemistry of her body did not respond to the proximity of his.
But what should she do about it?
Outside the window, night has fallen like a cloak over the streets of Berlin, but Berlin hasn’t noticed. Violet can’t hear the revelry, but she knows it’s there: people laughing and drinking and smoking, in the cafés along Unter den Linden and in the grand apartments around the Tiergarten. In one of those apartments, her husband is laughing and drinking and smoking, talking with his friends, politicians and generals and minor German royalty, professional American divorcées like the Comtesse de Saint-Honoré. Committing adultery in his heart, and perhaps in actual deed. Probably not even perhaps. Parties are Walter’s favorite hunting ground, after all: the prey is well-groomed, is relaxed and daring with drink. Possibly, at this very instant, Walter is with another woman.
“Have I offended you, Mrs. Grant?”
She turns to face him. “Of course not. I know it was only one of your jokes. Have you finished your brandy? You must be desperate to get back to your party.”
He hasn’t finished his brandy; he’s hardly touched it. He’s only toying with it, back and forth between his hands. “I'm not, in fact. I think you’re much more interesting than another damned party.”
“I’m not, actually.”
“You are. You’re fascinating. Do you know what I love most about you?”
“I can’t imagine. We hardly know each other.”
He taps the wide bowl of the snifter with one finger. “Among other things, that I could pull out a sheet of paper and a pencil and sit here and talk all night with you about bloody atoms, and it would be the most interesting and illuminating conversation I’ve had in years.”
Violet laughs drily. “Then why did you leave the institute in the first place, all those years ago, and join the Army? Of all things.”
“Ah.” He leans back in the chair and watches her with a speculative expression. “Funnily enough.”
“Was it something to do with Walter?”
In a swift and unexpected movement, Lionel lifts the brandy to his lips and swallows it all. Violet watches in astonishment as his throat works, as his white-tipped fingers grip the bowl.