As I said before, I never liked wine. I never liked the smell and the taste and the instant recollection of dread. In most cases, I could force down a sip or two, just to make myself social, but at the moment I stood before Samuel Fitzwilliam in that small, sweaty café in Chateau Thierry, I had never once taken so much wine as to make myself drunk. Never once experienced even the slightest sensation of inebriation. Nor had I ever known the desire to feel anything other than perfect, reassuring sobriety.
And yet I thought—as I listened to Samuel Fitzwilliam speak, as I heard him say We’re a bad old lot, deserving of extinction, as I examined the familiar, exciting outline of his eyes and the faint yellow reflection of the chrysanthemums against his jaw—I thought, Maybe I would like to try a little sherry.
I lifted the bottle, which was about two-thirds full, and poured a reckless splash into Samuel’s empty glass. The vessel looked much larger, now that it stood on its own, outside of his giant hand, and the old-fashioned facets splintered the glow from the guttering candle in the center of the table. I sniffed the rim once: no black dread, no throttling panic. Just a vague, sweet excitement that made me feel capable of anything. Any possible folly.
I swallowed quickly, before I lost my nerve, and as I returned the glass to the tablecloth, I said, “Just how much money does she have? Simon’s wife.”
“Lydia? Quite a lot. I expect her father’s worth a hundred thousand or so, at least.”
“A hundred thousand? Is that all?”
“I call it a decent fortune. But perhaps you feel cheapened?”
“Cheapened? Not at all. Just struck, I suppose, by the irony.”
“The irony? Of a hundred thousand pounds?”
To my left, four steaming plates of cassoulet had been brought to the table where Mary and the nurses were sitting, including one set before my own empty seat. I smelt the earthy flavor, the beans and herbs and the meager, mealy sausages, past the sweet haze of the sherry that still fumed about the passages of my throat. I was hungry now, hungry as a lioness, and wanted to eat. But not yet.
Not before I leaned forward and said something utterly out of character, straight into those disturbing hazel eyes.
“Yes, irony. You see, Major Fitzwilliam, my father’s a millionaire.”
Chapter 18
Maitland Plantation, Florida, July 1922
I’m trying to write a letter to my sister, Sophie, but I can’t seem to make any sense. I’ll etch out a sentence, or a few restless words, and I’ll read them over again and there’s no meaning there. Or maybe it’s too much to explain. Too strange and far-fetched, too hysterical. Or maybe it—all of it, the whole story, the tale of my existence here at Maitland—maybe it’s just crazy. I’m crazy. That knock on my head alongside the midnight ocean, it scrambled my brains.
I only have three aspirin left in the bottle. I’m hoarding them carefully, so they don’t run out too soon, leaving me with nothing to soften my state of misery. I can be terribly disciplined, when I must. Have been taking only one each day for the past week. At night, always. I can get through the day without an aspirin if I must, but I can’t face the black night in this state. Agitated and nauseous, sick and confused and sleepless. Sweating through my nightgown. No, at least this way I can look forward to my nightly dose of relief. I can count down the hours and the minutes until the peace descends, brief and precious, and my brain unravels like a spool of tight-wound thread released from its spring. That, of course, is the moment when I should pick up a pen and write a note to my sister, but I can’t. I don’t have the will. I just want to lie in my white-clad bed and watch the drift of the curtains in the moonlight. The slow, silver silence of the room around me.
And then I awaken. Agitated and sick. And I think, Something’s wrong. Something is certainly wrong. I need to do something. I need to let Sophie know. I need to tell Miss Bertram that I’m running out of aspirin.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, even though I do understand that more aspirin won’t help. Because the aspirin isn’t really aspirin, don’t you know.
But I have to do something. The moon is waning again, and soon it will disappear altogether for a few pregnant black nights. And this is terribly important, this moonlessness, though I can’t quite remember why. Life and death.
I finish the letter to Sophie. I address the envelope in a handwriting not my own, to the house on East Thirty-Second Street that I scarcely now remember. But whom shall I trust to post it? Miss Bertram, of course. Miss Bertram will mail this letter for me. In the morning I will place this envelope on my breakfast tray and Miss Bertram will carry it downstairs to be stamped and mailed.
The letter has taken all day. My hand is tired, you understand, and I’m interrupted constantly. Miss Bertram and the maid who comes to clean the room at ten thirty every morning, Evelyn and the doctors. I had to hide the drafts under the mattress whenever a knock sounded on the door. Pages and pages. I’m burning them all now, in the flame of the kerosene lamp on the chest of drawers, while my legs tremble under the strain of my weight. The black scratches disappear into the maw of the fire, and the paper curls and fries and crumbles into ash. The reek scorches the lining of my nose. I turn to the vase instead, the nearby vase of fresh orange blossom, and my God, for an instant it’s like I’m all better, it’s like the nightmare has dissolved, it’s like I’m twenty-one years old and newly married, and a damp London spring blooms around me.
And then a brilliant agony sweeps up the nerves of my arm, and I realize my fingers are burning.
I stumble back and drop the burning papers onto the floor, atop the fine pale rug, and the rug smokes and the air turns acrid. I seize the vase and toss the water and the flowers onto the pile of fire. Well, that’s what I mean to do. But my arms are weak, you see, and my muscles don’t obey my commands as precisely as they used to, and as I sweep the vase sideways and jerk the water free, the delicate crystal bowl strikes the corner of the chest of drawers.
All of which occurs in the space of an instant or two, and yet as I experience this series of small disasters, the pulse of time slows to an almost unsurvivable tempo, like the thud of your heartbeat in the moments after sexual intercourse. I watch my own actions as if I’ve flown straight out of my body: the spasm of my fingers, the fall of the paper, the burst of flame, the fatal trajectory of my arm. The extraordinary shattering of the vase, like the burst of an explosive artillery shell upon contact with the earth. The clutch of my hand, trying to retrieve the fragments from the air—to reverse this terrible destruction—and the way one inevitable shard slices straight across my right palm.