“Stop!” He held up his hand. “Don’t say it, please. Don’t say some damned prim little thing about prudence and discretion.”
I pressed my lips together.
He turned away and stared at the canvas wall.
“I have been wrestling with this all day, Miss—what is your first name?”
“Virginia.”
He closed his eyes and said Virginia. Like a prayer, like the answer to an ancient mystery. The sound of voices intensified on the other side of the canvas. Someone was getting dressed down, a few yards away. Captain Fitzwilliam sucked on the cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly, in a wide, thin stream. “I suppose you think I’m a bounder.”
“No.”
“Ah, but you hesitated.”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t know you at all.”
“May I write to you, at least? Convince you of my innocent intentions.”
“What are your intentions?”
“To be friends, Virginia. There’s nothing wrong with friendship, is there?”
“I’ve often heard it’s impossible for men and women to be friends.”
“Then let’s prove them wrong, shall we?” He stubbed out the cigarette and turned to me, and he was smiling. A little wildly, I thought, like somebody drunk. “You see, I find I can’t quite bear to cut you off so soon, like the limb of a precious new seedling. If friendship is all we’re given on this earth, why, I’ll be the most steadfast, honorable friend you ever knew. We can discuss poetry and history and botany. Whatever you damned well like. The latest sensational novel. Anything but the state of the war. God knows we’ve got enough of that without talking about it.”
“I’m sure you have enough friends already.”
“Yes. Well. I have had friends. The trouble is, they keep dying. It’s a damned nuisance, but there it is. One’s obliged to hunt further afield these days, when one’s old school chums no longer exist. And now you’ve dropped like a ripe pear before me. A friend. A fascinating, unexpected friend, rich with all kinds of interesting mysteries I look forward to discovering.”
He held out his hand. I took it. What else could I do? We shook briskly. His other hand came up to seal our palms together.
“Very good, Virginia. You can call me Simon, at least when nobody’s looking.”
“I’m not sure—”
He leaned forward. “Be sure. Trust me. And if you need anything, anything at all, you’ve only to ask. Your welfare shall remain uppermost in my heart.”
His face was so close, his smile so certain and mesmerizing, I couldn’t move. I thought, I must look away, I must get away, but instead I just stood there, trapped, while his hand actually lifted mine and turned it over, palm up, and I gazed stupidly at his face. His head bent briefly as he kissed my palm, and I stared at the part of his hair, the speckled gold and silver, and thought how dry his lips felt, yet his breath was damp.
“You see? Harmless and devoted. Your loyal English hound. I shall write when we settle in our new quarters—”
“Captain Fitzwilliam—”
“Simon. And you’ll write back, won’t you? And if you should happen by the CCS to pick up patients, or if I should happen by your chateau, on my way to the village—”
“Captain—”
“Simon. You’ll find a few moments to chat, won’t you? A little human contact in this damned squalid show—”
“Simon.”
Those bright, drunk eyes blinked once, the way you wake from a dream. His gaze fell to the photograph on his desk. He squeezed my hand a final time and released me.
“Yes,” I said. “I will.”
Captain Fitzwilliam reached into his breast pocket, removed another cigarette from the case—the last one—and smiled softly as he struck the match. His hand seemed to be shaking, or maybe it was only the building around us, rattling in fear. I remember wondering why on earth he should be so nervous as I was.
“Thank God,” he said.
When I returned to the chateau that evening, cold and thrilled, nerves vibrating to a strange new pitch, Hazel came to find me in my room. To warn me, she said. She had noticed the way I looked at the British doctor, and the way he looked at me.
Warn me about what? I asked.
She leaned forward and took my hands. She spoke in a whisper, the way you tell someone a terrible secret. I can still picture the sympathetic slant to her eyebrows.
Because he was married, she said. Corporal Pritchard told her last night. He had a wife and a baby son, back home in England.
July 28, 1919
Dearest V,
You will pardon my crude language, but there’s really no other way to express oneself in these conditions: Florida is bloody hot. (There, I’ve said it.) Indeed, if God should be so good as to send you back to me one day, and we should be so fortunate as to make a little family of our own, I should carry us all back to cooler climes for the course of the summer months, on my own back if necessary. The Adirondack Mountains, I hear, are suitable as a seasonal retreat; or else the primeval woodlands of Maine or of Washington State. Anywhere but England.
I am in Miami at the moment, meeting with my bankers, who are not particularly pleased to see me. The company overdraft, it seems, has formed a most hideous scar on their balance sheets for some time. All my powers of persuasion are now put to the task of extracting a few coins of additional capital from their sticky paws, for the purpose of getting our business back into productive order. I am nothing if not persuasive, however—even you must allow me that virtue, having happily succumbed to my charm more than once, to my great and (I hope) everlasting fortune.
I wonder if you will like Miami at all, my dear. It is frightfully busy, chock-full of speculators and hedonists. A chap called Fisher is dredging up the bay nearby, at his own unimaginable expense, in order to create a beachside paradise out of the mangrove peninsula protecting us from the open ocean. Of course we could live wherever you like. But I rather prefer the territory further north at Cocoa, which is less frenetic. Last week, I engaged in a spot of tramping about the beaches there, and I wonder if a pretty villa by the sea might not be just the thing for us both. We could listen to the waves roll in beneath the moonlight and be perfectly content.
Yours faithfully,
S.F.
Chapter 7
Miami, Florida, June 1922
The president of the First National Bank of Miami apologizes for our modest surroundings. They’re constructing a brand-new building on the corner of Forsyth, he tells me, and these quarters are only temporary. Slapdash.
A pair of electric fans whir furiously overhead. I lift my voice to reply that I don’t mind a bit.
He pulls back one of the armchairs before his massive desk. “The wait’ll be worth it, though. Steel frame, ten stories high. The finest building in downtown Miami, if not the entire Southeast. Drink? Iced tea?”