“What is that about?” Anna wondered.
“Mrs. Roebling had the honor of crossing the bridge first, since she did all the work after her husband was injured,” Jack told her. “Apparently with a rooster in her lap for good luck.”
Good luck. Anna had never taken comfort in such ideas, but she wished, just now, that she could. If there was any good luck to be had in the world, Sophie and Cap should have it all.
“Where has your mind gone?” Jack’s voice, low and a little gruff, set something off in her, a prickling that raced down her back to spread out and out. She pressed his hand and leaned against his arm, as if she meant to push him off the sidewalk. Jack Mezzanotte, as solid as a wall.
“I’m just where I want to be,” Anna said. “Except for one odd thing. I’ve walked this way home too many times to count, but tonight it seems to have stretched to double the normal distance.”
“You’re impatient.” He pulled her closer. “And that puts me in a good mood.”
He kissed her, full-mouthed, intent, his hands framing her face. When he lifted his head he said, “You make the most intriguing sounds. Little squeaks and a soft clicking at the back of your throat. As if you were drinking me in.”
“That’s a backhanded compliment,” Anna said, laughing. “If it’s a compliment at all.”
She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her. He spread his hands to span the full width of her back. “Take me to your bed, Savard, and I’ll come up with compliments to make you blush for days.”
They ran the rest of the way, breathless, laughing.
? ? ?
INSTEAD OF USING the front door they circled around to the passageway that led to the carriage house, passing the small stable and the garden sheds, the chicken coop closed up tight, an icehouse. The air smelled of newly cut grass and hay, ripening compost and flowering lilac bushes, taller even than Jack, that divided the working parts of the garden from the rest.
Anna went ahead, gesturing for him to wait where he was.
He wandered through the garden, lit by the moon and the reflected glow of the streetlamps. It surprised him still, this quiet island behind brick walls. There were fruit and specimen trees and flower beds that even his father could not have found fault with, a rose arbor overhung with vines weighed down with buds, the neat rows where vegetables had been planted.
The pergola reminded him of home, where the family ate out of doors in the warm months at a long table under a grape arbor. Someone familiar with the way things were done in Italy and southern France had designed this place, for privacy and comfort. Jack sat down on a wide chaise longue upholstered in dark velvet and piled with cushions. Shadows moved with the breeze, every leaf and shoot, blossom and vine dancing.
Jack thought, It seems I am turning into a poet.
Now he realized that Anna wasn’t going to take him to her bed after all, but she would come to him here. They would lie down together in a bower of blossoming lilac and wait for the fireworks to arch across the sky. And he would have her here. It had been too long, and he wasn’t willing to wait even one more hour.
Things hadn’t gone as planned today, but it occurred to him that a doctor was the right wife for him; she really would understand when work kept him out late or took him away unexpectedly. He knew more than a few detectives with unhappy wives and sour views on marriage, something that had kept him from thinking too much about the institution for himself. Until Anna.
And now she came around the corner carrying an old-fashioned hurricane lamp, as round and bright as a sun in the new dark. It covered her in light and lifted her face out of the night, and Jack heard himself catch his breath. She had changed into a loose white gown of some fine fabric and let her hair out of its pleats and tucks so that the breeze sent it twisting and twirling around her like a dark lacy shawl.
The words that came to mind were ones he could not say. To tell Anna Savard that she looked like an angel would embarrass them both with such triteness. To say she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life would diminish the truth of it. And so he got up and went to her. He took the lamp from her and put it on the table. The pergola came to life, the crockery vase filled with white lilac and deep red Rose de Rescht he had sent from the greenhouse, the blue leather binding of a book that had been left out, the jumble of cushions, yellows and greens and pinks, that lined the chaise longue with its velvet upholstery worn thin and silky as a woman’s skin.
She was looking over her shoulder into the dark garden, as if she did not trust herself to look at him. He caught her wrist, threaded his fingers through hers, long and strong and tough with constant scrubbing and still gentle enough to remind him that she was female, and fragile in ways she would never admit to him or herself.