I looked at him for a long time. Even tired and ragged as he was, even after everything that had happened, it was a pleasure to contemplate Alex. He had removed his jacket, and I watched the curve of his back as it flickered in the firelight, the line of his shoulders, and once again I knew what I had first understood that day in 1914: I was horribly, irrevocably in love with him. This time, the thought did not bring the same pain.
I stood from my chair and, without regard to anyone who might come into the room, I sat in his lap. I hooked my legs over his long, strong ones and put my arms around his neck, leaning my shoulder in to him and letting my cheek drop against his collar.
His hand touched my back, but I felt his body tense beneath me. “Jo,” he said, “do not tease me.”
I raised my head and spoke into his ear, holding him tighter and turning my body to press more snugly against his. “Fine,” I said. “I won’t. Just tell me whether Hans Faber had any girlfriends.”
He sighed in surrender. “No, you idiot,” he replied, pulling pins from my tangled hair. “He lived like a monk.”
“I know you,” I said. “That sounds difficult.”
“It was easy.”
I paused at that as my heart skipped a beat. Then I gave him a succession of soft kisses along his jaw. “I think we should go and make proper use of our room,” I told him, the taste of his skin on my lips. “That is, if you remember what to do?”
He turned my face to his and kissed me, slowly and thoroughly, until my blood was singing. I knew all of Alex’s kisses, and this one was full of very serious intent.
We went upstairs. It turned out that neither of us had forgotten a thing. And for all the hours afterward, as the storm blew in from the sea, we pretended we were the only two people in the world.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
We set out for Wych Elm House the next morning, over roads strewn with branches and ruts puddled with rain. The sky was sleek gray, the wind nasty and chill, and even in Alex’s modern motorcar we could not get entirely warm, the winter cold creeping into our hands and feet.
We were silent during the drive. It was one of those long-married stretches of quiet during which there was no need for us to speak. Alex kept his gaze on the road, watching for the next obstacle through the gloom. I sat with the map unfolded and unread in my lap, my hair tucked under my cloche cap, my gloved hands idle as I watched the landscape out the window.
I was happy—of course I was happy—but I couldn’t help the dread that settled on me the longer we drove. It was like the feeling I’d had at the engagement party when I’d noticed that all of the family was gone from the room. As we followed the winding road bringing us closer and closer to Wych Elm House, I couldn’t shake the instinct that something was terribly awry. Alex seemed to feel the same way, and as we traveled, his expression grew more grim and he pressed the accelerator, pushing the car to go faster.
We arrived in Anningley around time for luncheon, but neither of us wanted to stop and eat. “Let’s press on,” I said.
“I’d like to make one stop,” Alex replied.
He drove us to the little cottage that belonged to Petra Jennings. Anningley was strangely quiet, and we saw only a handful of people, as if everyone had decided to stay inside out of the cold. The effect was eerie, and only added to my alarm. Perhaps Alex had additional questions for Petra Jennings. Whatever his aim, I hoped he would do it quickly so we could continue up the road.
But he did not get to perform his plan at all. When we approached Miss Jennings’s cottage, we found it shut and dark, the curtains drawn over the windows. Alex got out of the car and I watched him knock at the door, then make a quick circuit of the building, looking through the cracks between the curtains.
“She’s gone,” he said to me when he got back into the motorcar, bringing a breath of icy air with him. “The place is packed up. The clothes are gone from the kitchen, the iron and board, everything. It looks like she plans to be away for a while.”
I stared at the dark cottage, my dread increasing. What had made Petra Jennings pack up over the course of a single night and leave her home? Where had she gone? Had something frightened her? Had she even left by her own choice? I glanced up her quiet street and saw a curtain twitch in one of the neighbors’ windows.
“Please, Alex,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He only nodded and started the motorcar again.
The road to Wych Elm House had lost the last of its autumn luster and turned from the final red-brown tints of fall to the defeated gray, drained of color, that signaled the waning half of November. The storm had blown through here, too, stripping the trees of their last leaves and exposing branches stark to the bleached sky. As I watched the landscape, my heart started a slow acceleration in my chest, a mix of horrid anticipation and fear. I half expected to see Frances Forsyth appear from a swirl of leaves, her massive dog following at her heels. These were her woods.
“You told me that first night,” Alex said, reading my mind, “that you’ve seen the dog.”