“Well,” she said. “Good night, then.”
Francis closed the door and returned to bed. “Equo ne credite, Teucri!” he said aloud, into the darkness. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” The words felt clumsy in his mouth. He hadn’t used his Latin in ages. If Michael were awake—if he weren’t stone-deaf, Francis reminded himself—he would have no trouble with that one. Aeneid. Book Two. Give me something harder than that, he would say. I’m not a complete eejit, you know. It was a game they had grown up playing, the only game their father had ever played with them. He would toss out lines—Homer and Virgil were a regular part of the rotation—and the boys would compete to be the first to identify the source and render an on-the-spot translation. That they considered it a game, rather than an endless final examination, said a lot about life in the cottage in Ballyrath. A schoolmaster father, his three sons, and no feckin’ idea how to talk to one another like normal folk.
And now: another knock at the door, louder than the first. Had the young Miss Bingham screwed up her courage and returned for another round of compliments? Yes, he was very kind, but he was also exhausted and desperate for a night’s sleep. Francis hauled himself out of bed and readied his smile, his Quite, quite. Only it wasn’t Anisette. He opened the door to Marion Walter leaning against the jamb. She did not speak, but he was sure that he could hear the purr in her throat. She looked at him in a vague and unfocused way, then over his shoulder at the dark room behind him, and then she was inside and the door was shut. She leaned against the wall and drew him toward her, plucking loose the drawstring on his pajamas. She tasted of gin and tobacco, and the scent of her neck was sharp: dried flowers wrapped in leather. He had a fleeting thought of nights on the cheap along the Grand Canal in Dublin, but this was no dark alley. This was first class. She pulled him closer, and as he bunched the watery silk of her gown around her hips, she bit him hard on the shoulder. The rest was sudden, frenzied, and audible from the corridor.
ANISETTE SNUGGED THE duvet under her chin. What would Maman say if she knew? To go to his room? To knock on his door? To have him answer half dressed—which meant half undressed? After everything that had happened in New York, Maman would kill her, plain and simple. But what a gentleman he had been! And hadn’t Maman been telling her for months that the purpose of the trip was to meet a better class of people? The best thing to do, Maman had said, was to let the dust settle and then return in triumph.
And hadn’t tonight been a triumph? She had worried that the Walters—such awful people—might ruin everything with their bickering but they hadn’t been anything more than a distraction: the drunken fat man stuffed full of roast beef and loud opinions and his fairy-tale witch of a wife. Mrs. Walter was the wicked queen in Snow White—the same pale skin, black hair, and nasty laugh—with just a dash of Anisette’s older sister, Félicité, thrown into the mix. That woman had tried to draw Angus into her web all night—yes, she was a spider, too; that’s just what she was—but he was too good for her, too quick on his feet, and maybe (fingers crossed!) a little too interested in Anisette to get tangled up in that woman’s web.
But now New York was waiting for them and it was the same old New York they had left. Except that they had made the acquaintance of Angus MacFarquhar, and he was the most charming man Anisette had ever met. If that witchy Mrs. Walter was the evil queen, then surely Angus was the prince and Anisette herself was Snow White (she could hear Father’s voice: Foolish girl!). Maman had already promised to invite Sir Angus to dinner and who knew where it would go from there? She did hope that Félicité would be in Newport or Greenwich or anywhere that wasn’t New York, and while she was making wishes she added another that Father would be on his best behavior.
Father on his best behavior—that was the silliest thought she’d had all night. Hadn’t Father made a joke of their entire holiday? The storm before the Sturm. He’d called them a two-woman economic-aid package for the jewelers and dressmakers of Europe and said it would be their last chance to use their French—that soon the whole continent would be speaking German. Anisette hadn’t found this funny in New York and now, months later, she considered it cruel. Despite some sunny days, the mood in Europe was mostly one of gloom and doom. It was already infecting her fledgling memories of their travels. She wanted golden recollections of the Piazza San Marco and the Uffizi and the Louvre. In the months and years to come, she wanted to take solace in Botticelli’s Venus, the sunrise over Santa Maria della Salute, the verdant angles of Versailles, and the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower. It was her dream vision of Europe, shadow boxes built from books and paintings and her hothouse imagination before she’d even left New York. All she’d needed was the actual stuff of experience to fill out the spaces she had already cleared for each perfect, crystalline moment of her Grand Tour.
The reality of Europe wrecked it for her. Yes, she saw Rome and Venice and Florence and Paris and plenty more and they were beautiful—so much like she had imagined them. But the delicate case she had made for each porcelain memory had been smashed to bits by sights too big and ungainly to fit neatly into any frame. In Munich, soldiers walked the train platforms with their machine guns and their dogs, eager to bark and to bite. Vienna was buffed to a gleaming carapace of red and black, like painted lips over savage teeth. And all of France seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the punch to land. Just on the other side of the French border, gangs of workers were digging in the fields. When she asked a man on the train what they were planting, he gave a sad, tired laugh and said, “Cannons.”
Lying in the dark, with the ocean moving beneath her, she thought of all the lovely people she had met and she wondered when the net would fall upon them. They would all be caught up in whatever came next. But here at least was Angus, and for a little while he would be in New York, not in Europe, and he would be safe.
THE FARM