“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 MOSQUITOES! 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.