I nod to the door. “My friend will be back soon.”
“Not for an hour at least, I’ll bet,” he says, reaching inside his jacket, “but I think you need your rest. Here’s my card. If you need anything, or hear anything important, anything you think I might need to know, I want you to call that number right away. Do you understand? Collect.”
I accept the card between the tips of my fingers. “I will.”
He puts his hat back on his head—all this time it’s been dangling from the fingers of his left hand, a government-man fedora of dark gray felt, the sinister opposite of the tourist boater this afternoon—and turns to leave. “Oh, and Mrs. Fitzwilliam?”
“Yes?”
“I meant to ask. Have you happened to receive any relevant letters from your husband, over the years? Letters that mentioned business, I mean. Names, places, that kind of thing.”
“Business? Why, no. Nothing as particular as that. Just love notes, really.”
“I see. But if you remember anything, you’ll let me know?”
I flutter the card in the air. “Of course. Good night, Mr. Marshall.”
He stares at me a moment longer, narrowing those eyes in a most unsettling way, as if he’s actually prying inside the contents of my mind. I suppose they train them that way, these revenue men, picking apart truth from prevarication. He’s rather tall, for such a burly fellow, and I can’t help feeling as if he’s about to step forward and snap me in two.
Instead, he says, “I am very sorry about all this, Mrs. Fitzwilliam,” and steps through the doorway as soundlessly as a six-foot cat, nearly brushing the lintel with his fedora.
Chapter 10
Paris, August 1917
At first I thought the man was a ghost. A figment of my imagination, or at least of my unconscious mind. He had flown up from the hole in the center of my soul—the one that hurt so much I had to ignore it—because you couldn’t just go on ignoring the thing that hurt you. You couldn’t go on fleeing the agony in your middle, the discord that plucked through your guts, just because you were afraid to acknowledge the truth.
So now he had come to haunt me.
“Captain Fitzwilliam?” I whispered.
He stepped forward into the light, and I saw that he was solid, not transparent. Whole and real: not a ghost. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t mean to shock you.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Can’t you guess?”
I shook my head, and he smiled confidently.
“Because Mrs. DeForest told me you were in Paris, by yourself—”
“Not by myself.”
“With only that silly nurse for company. Where is she now?”
My mouth was dry, my tongue almost too thick to speak. “She’s with a friend.”
“A friend. Hmm. As I thought. And you, Miss Fortescue? Why aren’t you with a friend?”
“Because I—because—I was unwell.”
He stepped forward. “Unwell!”
“Just for a moment.”
He stopped, and I was already frozen, and so we stood for a moment. Still as forest animals. The wallpaper peeled behind him. The lamp cast a sinister shadow on his face. Above us, the floorboards creaked, while several thousand words floated like dust in the stuffy, sordid air between his lips and mine.
He moved first, shifting his hat from right hand to left. His voice was soft. “Did you receive my letters at all?”
“Yes.”
“What did you think of them?”
“I thought—I thought—”
“Yes?”
“I didn’t read them. I’ve been so busy, you know, with the hospital.”
“I didn’t think you would. But I had to write something, or I would have run mad. You see . . .”
“Yes?”
His pulse beat against the skin of his neck. “There’s something I must tell you. Something I think—I hope—will change your mind about me.”
“Oh.”
“So I thought . . . well, I wanted to see you. To tell you the truth. To see if perhaps we might begin again.”
I stood there, unmoving, thinking a hundred thoughts at once, not one of them expressible in words. His competent hands, operating on maimed and frightful bodies. The lines of his skin. The wool of his tunic. My painful feet. Lieutenant Green, pale under the ruddiness of wine. Footsteps on the pavement, and the uncanny instinct of being watched, and the even uncannier instinct that the danger had now passed, that I was safe. In good hands. I looked up from his collar and saw how earnestly his eyes were fixed on my face.
“Please. Virginia. If I could just explain. If I could just make you understand. Do you know what I mean?”
At the time, I didn’t know what he meant. I could not comprehend why this man’s gaze should be fixed on me, of all women. Now, of course, I understand wholly. I know the nature of his attraction to me. I know the exact length and breadth of his ardor, and why he felt it, and whether or not it could be trusted.
But in that suffocating August foyer in the middle of Paris, sexual love remained a mystery to me, and I sometimes wish I could go back to that moment: when the mystery was still pure, when the possibility of discovery still hovered before me. When I didn’t know everything. When I was still innocent, and understanding lay in the future.
When I could say, in a surge of unfathomable trust that only a virgin could muster: I suppose we could find somewhere to talk.
Somewhere, by necessity, meant my room upstairs. For some reason, this suggestion didn’t seem daring at all; maybe it was his uniform, or my independence. Acts we would have deemed impermissible before the war had now become ordinary. Who needed a chaperone to navigate your private behavior, when you spent your days navigating the churned earth of northern France in an ambulance packed with barbarian soldiers, all on your own? We were sensible adults, he and I. There was no need to fear each other.
Upstairs, I opened the window and asked Captain Fitzwilliam if he wanted a glass of water.
He placed his hat on the table beneath the lamp. “Thank you, yes.”
I poured out two glasses from the pitcher, and as I handed him his drink I wondered if our fingers would touch. They did not. There was just the warmth of his hand, brief and ghostly.
“I’m afraid you can’t stay long,” I said. “Hazel will return any moment.”
“Ah, yes. The irrepressible Hazel.”
I sat in the armchair—a relic of the past century, wobbly at the legs, upholstered in threadbare velvet that might once have been burgundy but had since faded to a warm pink. Simon went to the window and parted the curtain an inch or so. “Is that the Bois de Boulogne?”