“Your family. Simon. I suppose you’ve been to see them already?”
He transferred his attention, which had wandered briefly to Mary and the nurses, back to me, and for an instant I was truly frightened. His eyes, which so uncannily resembled Simon’s, such that the sight of them made me lose my breath, contained a strange intensity of emotion—as if he were one of those spoon benders in the curiosity show, and I were a spoon. No one had ever looked at me like that. Not my father. Not even Simon. No one had ever wanted to bend me before.
“Well?” I said. “Haven’t you seen them? Don’t they know you’re alive? You have no idea what—”
“But I did write, Miss Fortescue. That’s the thing. I did write. They do, in fact, know I’m alive. They have known, from the beginning.”
“From the beginning? You mean since you were captured?”
“Yes. The Red Cross gets the letters out. Didn’t you know?”
“But that’s impossible. They must not have received them.”
“They did receive them.”
“No, they didn’t. Simon said—”
He laughed. “Simon said.”
“What does that mean?”
The glass was empty again. He poured another—the bottle was running low—and asked me if he could light a cigarette, though he didn’t wait for a reply. Just pulled out a packet and a book of matches from his tunic and lit himself up.
I leaned forward. “Well? Are you certain they know you’re alive? Have you been to Cornwall and spoken to them?”
“A better question, I think, is whether you have been to Cornwall. Have you ever seen my family? Spoken to them?”
“Of course not. I’ve had no business with your family. No opportunity to travel, even if I did.”
“Only with Simon?”
“Just Simon.”
“Ah, Simon. My dear brother. And Simon told you that I was dead, didn’t he? That I’d been killed at the beginning of the war.”
“He said—I don’t remember exactly what he said. That you went missing, I think, and were presumed killed.”
“How convenient of me. Terrible blow.”
“Well, it was! He said it was! He’ll be delighted to know you’re alive. In his last letter—”
“Oh, I’m sure he said all kinds of decent things in his last letter. Simon’s superb at saying decent things. Though I expect you’re already aware of that.”
My head was spinning a little, trying to pin down facts that refused to stop shifting around. I placed my palms on the table and stared at my knuckles.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand. You can’t be saying that Simon knew you were a prisoner all this time.”
“Of course he knew.”
“But that’s ridiculous! Why on earth would he say the opposite? Say you were killed? When he had every reason to want you alive! Didn’t you know that? Didn’t you know you have a—you have a child?”
Major Fitzwilliam dropped a long crumb of ash into the chrysanthemum jar. “Ah. Now we’re getting to the truth of the matter. The reason I came to see you, of all people, in this godforsaken little French hole in the mud. The fact is, I didn’t know there was a child, and if I had known, I would have been happy to tell anyone who cared to ask that it wasn’t mine.”
“What? How can you say that?”
“Because it’s the truth.” He tapped his temple. “There are things, Miss Fortescue, about which a man can be pretty certain, and the question of whether or not it’s possible he’s fathered a child on a particular lady is one of them.”
“But then who is the father?”
“An excellent question. I’ll give you a moment or two to ponder it.”
“You’re not saying Simon . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The blood in my cheeks seemed to interfere with the ordinary function of my jaw.
“Got my fiancée with child, as soon as I’d marched off to war? I can’t say for certain, of course,” he drawled. “Since I wasn’t there at the moment of conception.”
“He wouldn’t have. He wasn’t in love with her.”
“You don’t have to be in love, Miss Fortescue. Where do you get these ideas? You only have to want something. If you’re my brother, it’s usually something you shouldn’t have. Your brother’s fiancée, for instance.”
For an instant the image blinked before me. A pretty girl in a white dress, trimmed in lace; wearing, perhaps, a wide-brimmed hat with a pink grosgrain ribbon and an air of moneyed desirability. The heiress, the one whose wealth was meant to save the family estate.
I whispered, “You were actually engaged, then? You and Miss . . .”
“Gibbons. Yes, we were engaged. I rather thought she was in love with me. We hadn’t told my parents, of course, or hers. It wouldn’t have done for her to marry the second son. A waste of perfectly good capital.”
“But you never—”
He squinted at me. Squeezed the glass in his hand.
“Never . . . ?”
“Don’t make me say it.”
“Never went to bed with her? Let’s just say that I know the baby isn’t mine, hmm? The birth of young Samuel Fitzwilliam came as a cracker of a shock, when my family got a telegram through with the news. A rather brusque telegram, if you must know. There I was, rotting away in a German prison camp, kept alive only by my faith in the love of a precious girl—the only girl, I might add, who has ever liked me better than my charming, elegant brother . . .”
He paused grandly to pour himself another glass. I thought, Surely he ought to be drunk by now, even a big man like him. But he wasn’t. He was exquisitely lucid, his movements elastic and precise. The sherry didn’t wobble as it fell happily into the glass. His thick, dark hair remained in place. Only his mood showed any sign of poisoning: maudlin and reckless, like a man on the brink of some self-destructive act.
“It’s not true,” I said softly. “I know Simon. I know what he told me. Why would he lie?”
“To get you into bed, of course. It seems to have worked.”
“He asked me to marry him. It’s a sham, you know, his marriage to—his marriage. It was only because of the baby. They aren’t intimate. He’s divorcing her, with her full support.”
“Is he? I haven’t heard anything about that.”
“Because you’ve been in prison.”
“I hear news, believe me. Heard that he was enjoying himself with an American nurse, for one thing—”
I made a little noise of outrage, but he held up his hand and went on.
“I don’t give a damn, Miss Fortescue. I really don’t. Long since given up counting Simon’s conquests, let alone blaming them for being conquered. My parents, of course, and then the nannies and the governesses. Even Lydia, it seems, though she used to see through him. When we were young, I mean.”
“Or maybe she only sees him clearly now.”
He shrugged. “As you like. Anyway, it’s always come up trumps for good old Simon, which—as I said—doesn’t bother me a bit. But I thought you should know what’s really going on, that’s all. That you’re being led down the garden path, just as I was.”