He leaned over to look down at me. “I don’t want to be made. Can I state that more plainly? I would much rather stay here with you. If you would.” He flopped down on his back, putting his hands behind his head and looking up at the sky. “A big if, I know.” He rolled onto his side to face me. “Just think about it. We still have a few weeks. Don’t say anything now.”
I looked at the sky, at the clouds gathering in the west as if to send the sun off in style. My wish to believe in him, to say yes, surprised me and scared me into silence. Because, what would that mean? Never to see my own world again, my friends, my mother. To permanently be a second-class citizen as a woman, and to die of something ridiculous, like childbirth; the hormonal injection lasted only about as long as the mission. So why was I even tempted?
“It’s cold in Canada,” he went on. “You don’t like to be cold. I was thinking, what about Italy?”
I pictured hills to the horizon with lines of cypresses marching up and down them. Venice, before it was lost beneath the sea, was said to have been impossibly beautiful. We could live simply, a garden and a little house. With prudence, our money could last; life was cheaper there. I could learn Italian, work as a midwife. We could grow tomatoes.
I said, “They have a big malaria problem.”
Liam reminded me we’d been vaccinated against that, along with everything else anyone could think of.
“We don’t know how much protection we actually have; the strains might be different.”
“If you were so afraid of infectious disease, you would never have come to 1815.”
He had me there.
“I don’t know,” I said, surprising myself again. “How do people know?”
“They never do, Rachel dear. They take a leap.”
“Like you did, when you got engaged?” I could not help asking. Stealing someone’s fiancé seemed, at the very least, bad luck, a violation of female solidarity. As an image of Sabina, tall and blond and exquisite, rose before me, it struck me that there also was the mystery of how one person could imagine himself in love with two such different women.
He was silent for a long time. “It seemed a sign that I had arrived. The making of me.” Another pause. “I think she suspected.”
“Suspected what?”
“Sabina’s very intuitive.”
“What did she suspect?”
“I’d proposed, years before, when I’d just sold my Brummell book. It seemed like I was finally someone that could dare to ask—but she didn’t say yes or no. She said, let’s wait. I was handy to have around, you see. And then, just before we left, so suddenly for her to suggest—She sensed, I think, what first I hardly did myself. And it displeased her.”
“If you don’t stop being mysterious, I will kill you with my bare hands. Sensed what?”
“About you. How I felt.”
“We were strangers. What could you feel?”
He looked at me. “You seemed especially American: obtuse and overconfident. You talked a lot, and had a weird laugh.”
“That’s fair,” I said, stung. “You’re not the first to—”
“When you dislike someone, and yet you’re attracted, your mind does strange things. Every good feature becomes another strike against them.”
“So I had some good features?”
“That dry way you looked at the rest of us, like you didn’t give a damn what the Old British thought. I loved that. So small, so forceful, with a kind of generous outrage. And then, your mad hair, your epic shape. Your nose.” He reached over and touched the tip of my nose. “I was besotted; you never noticed? That’s good. It would have scared you.”
“I don’t scare easily.”
“We’re all afraid of something.”
I fell silent, looking at the sky. “So you were taken with an idea of me.”
“That day you bought Tom—that was when I knew my idea of you was right.”
I turned on my side to look at him. “You were so angry with me that day—” I began, and paused, staring at his arm. He’d taken his coat off, and there was an ominously familiar brown bug crawling down his white sleeve, one I knew too well from Mongolia. “That looks like . . . Is it possible you got lice at the Swan?”
“Anything’s possible,” he said, strangely calm, as we looked down at the blanket we were lying on and leaped up from it at the same moment, brushing off our clothes, as if that would help.
AFTER WE LEFT THE SWAN, FINDING SPARE BUT CLEAN-LOOKING rooms to let by the week above a milliner’s shop in the middle of Leatherhead, it would be fair to say we became obsessed with hygiene. We sent every piece of clothing and linen out to a laundress except those on us, which we burned when the others came back. We took baths daily in a tiny copper tub placed close to the hearth, drawing a screen around to fight drafts and heating water in a kettle on the fire. Hauling water from the pump in the courtyard was a full-body workout for whoever wasn’t bathing, since we’d let the servants go. Liam shaved his head—excessive, since he’d not gotten head lice, yet understandable.
Despite all this, disaster struck.
About a week and a half after Box Hill, Liam complained of a headache and refused to eat. Our usual activities at that time consisted of sex, conversation, meals in our favorite public house, walks around Leatherhead, taking baths, and rereading “The Watsons”; on the following day he had energy for none of them and was ferociously thirsty. Lying with my head on his chest, I felt him radiating heat like a furnace.
Five days after the onset of fever, he was presenting with the characteristic rash, the flushed skin, the bleary eyes. I’d been to an apothecary by then and gotten some willow, the raw ingredient of aspirin; and Peruvian bark, the raw ingredient of quinine. Both reduce fever, though they didn’t seem to help, or maybe he would have been worse without them.
The course of typhus is a few weeks, followed by a slow and wearisome convalescence. Nothing was unusual, except having no drugs to address the actual ailment, and the complicated mix of feelings I had for the patient.
Depression, lethargy, and weakness are also normal, as I knew from my experiences in Mongolia. I’d never seen quite so theatrical a presentation, though. Depression is usually boring, a reduction of feeling. Unless you’re Liam.
“I’m shit,” he muttered between sips of Peruvian bark tea, hand shaking so much I had to help hold the cup. “Shit on two legs. Henry Austen looked at me and knew that I wasn’t a gentleman.”
“He challenged you! Only gentlemen duel. So that was like the seal of gentlemanly approval, right? Wasn’t that why you wanted to stay and fight him?”
His breath came fast and shallow. “Can I have some more—Thanks. So thirsty.”
“Don’t gulp it, you’ll throw up again. Take your time. We’ve got nothing but time.”
“I should never have—I should never—”
“Should never have what?” I wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to look on the bright side: only one of us had typhus, and it wasn’t the medical professional.
“Should never have, any of it. Shitting higher than my arse. I will pay. They told me I would.”
“It’s not your fault you got sick. It happens.”
“Body lice! It’s disgusting. I’m disgusting. I stink. Of cabbage. You know that’s what they told me, my hallmates, at Crofton? I thought they were just being cruel, but when I went home for the Christmas break, I walked into my house and, oh my god—”