He visits his son next. Sam always sleeps on his stomach, crosswise, the sheets and blankets long kicked from the bed. Simon straightens him out and tucks the bedclothes back around him. Smooths his hair and says he loves him. The boy’s been asking about England lately, out of the blue. Remembers the old house in Cornwall, the gardens where he used to play. Sometimes Simon wonders if they should go back and visit, whether Sam maybe deserves to choose whether he will be a Cornishman or an American. The other day, over breakfast, Clara mentioned that Penderleath has gone up for sale again—Clara and Portia now jointly own the hotel and the shipping business, he figures it’s their right, while he and Virginia and the children spend much of their time at Maitland, tending to the orchards and the rebuilding of the house—and Virginia turned to him, eyebrow raised, meaning What do you think? Should we buy it, she meant. Should we do all those things you dreamed of, once, when you brought me to your home all those years ago.
He shrugged and went back to his newspaper, but his pulse beat hard, his mind teemed with possibility. Last night, as they settled into bed, she asked him again, this time outright, and he said, You decide, it’s your money, and she kissed him and said no, it’s our money, we’ll decide together. And it seemed to him, in that instant, that his heart might actually burst, that there was no containing so much love in so small and human an organ.
On the other hand, Florida suits him. He loves the unending warmth and the rampant way things grow under its sunshine and its abundant rain. Loves the way he can make love to his wife in the secret garden he planted for her, the way the sea beats against the sand outside his door in Cocoa Beach. How he rebuilt his marriage here, brick by brick; how he taught Virginia how to swim in the surf, and do you know, that was when she returned to him at last: swimming together at midnight under a full, bright moon. She came out of the sea, long-limbed and silvery, covered in nothing but salt water and moonshine, laughing for the first time in ages, collapsing in his outstretched arms. She looked up at him, and he looked at her, and it was time. Time to be man and wife again. Time to lie down together and remember what it meant to be happy.
A few months later she was carrying a child.
He realizes he has fallen into a reverie, standing there in Sam’s bedroom staring at the glittering ocean outside the window, and he shakes his head and turns for the door. As he does so, he catches sight of something, a bit of movement through the glass, and he recalls the instant of waking, a quarter of an hour ago. What made him wake.
He steps to the window and looks out. Nothing. The moon—an old, waning crescent—has disappeared from view, but the sun is just starting to illuminate the horizon. To give shape to the waves and the stretch of unmarred beach.
No. Not unmarred. As he stands there, eyes adjusting to the darkness, he can just pick out a line of footprints, a double line, along the plateau washed smooth by the tide during the night. He can’t tell which way they’re pointing—Sammy’s room is along the side of the house—or where they came from. How long they’ve been there.
But he does know that his brother, Samuel, disappeared that night at Maitland, after shooting Lydia through the heart, and nobody’s seen him since.
He leaves the room and hurries down the hall to the staircase. In the cupboard near the door, on the highest shelf, he keeps his old service pistol in a locked box. He unlocks it now, a matter of seconds, and looks out the window. He has no patience for danger, no tolerance whatsoever for any kind of menace to this peace, this fragile joy, this precious family he has finally found after so many years of loneliness. If he has to kill someone, he will bloody well kill someone.
Movement. The corner of the porch.
He leaves the window and creeps to the door. Lifts the latch on the pistol. Heart thuds in his ear. Skin prickles.
A soft knock sounds on the door. A soft shout.
His name?
“Who’s there?” he calls. Back against the wall.
Through the night, through the sturdy walls of his rebuilt villa on the Atlantic shore, comes a single word.
Marshall.
So he sighs and lowers the pistol and opens the door a crack, though he doesn’t replace the safety latch on his pistol until he sees the large, brown head of Agent Marshall bristling in the dawn.
“What the devil,” he says.
“Sorry to turn up so early in the day, old boy,” Marshall says.
“Think nothing of it.”
Marshall ignores his dry tone. Sticks his boot in the doorway. “I need your help. Can we come in?”
“Simon! What’s the matter?”
Simon turns swiftly to find his wife standing in the middle of the stairs, awkward with child beneath an enormous dressing gown. Her right hand grips a long, slim object that appears to be Sam’s favorite baseball bat.
He turns back to Marshall and says, “We?”
Marshall pushes the door open, and now Simon can see that he’s holding not a pistol of his own but someone’s hand: a person who now comes into view from the shadows of the porch. A pale, sharp-faced woman in shapeless clothes, her weary blue eyes tipped up at the corners. Her bobbed red hair shining in the dawn. Bruise along one side of her face. Small, young girl-child blinking sleepily from the folds of her skirt.
Simon stares, open-mouthed. Nearly drops the pistol. Behind him, Virginia gasps, and not even this sound of shock from his pregnant wife can detach his gaze from Marshall’s remarkable companions.
Marshall frowns, looks back at the woman, and clears his throat.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got somewhere to hide them?” he asks.
Author’s Note
Somewhere in the middle of writing this book—in fact, just as I was about to send Virginia off to her husband’s plantation to recuperate from a blow to the head—I discovered that Maitland Plantation actually existed. My in-laws had recently sold their house and were sorting through all the vast accumulation of books, photographs, and family heirlooms, and I waltzed into the kitchen just as my mother-in-law was organizing her parents’ letters. I picked one up at random. It was postmarked from Winter Park, Florida, in 1932. Carola Dommerich (faithful readers of my books will recognize that last name) had just arrived at someplace called Maitland and wrote to tell her then-fiancé about the journey.
“What’s Maitland?” I asked my mother-in-law.