“Better that than bored, or disinterested,” he said. “Who’d wish to come all this way only to hear ‘What do you want?’”
Anisette giggled, then fell into a more serious mood. Again her teeth sank into her lower lip. She twice started to speak and then abruptly checked herself. She seemed always like a kettle about to boil. “Tell me, Angus. What do you want?”
For a moment he thought it was an accusation, like the jig was up. He made a show of mopping his forehead with the back of his hand. “In this weather, an iced gin would be a nice place to start, don’t you agree?”
She slapped him playfully on the shoulder in a very un-jig-is-up sort of way. “Now you’re the one being silly. I’m serious. When you think about life and everything it could be, what do you want?”
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
“But you must have!” Anisette’s voice was charged, even annoyed. “You must think about the kind of life you want. Do you always want to live in Scotland? What sort of work will you do—or is it crass to suggest that the son of an earl must work? Or is it crass to suggest that you won’t?” Anisette’s cheeks were flushed pink. The color extended down her neck, blazing against the gauzy cream fabric like a sunburn. “Will you be a bachelor adventurer your whole life, or will you live in a big house full of dogs and children and—”
“Hullo!” he said. “I see that you’ve given this a great deal of thought.”
“Everyone does,” she said. “Except for you, it seems.”
He had batted away her question as if it were a trifle, but of course he’d thought about it. Francis was full of wanting. All his life he had chased and desired and sought, and getting only made him want more. Playing that hand for higher and higher stakes had spurred him on in Dublin, but since his escape he had been forced to reshuffle the deck. First and foremost, he wanted Michael to be cured, and he wanted not to have been responsible for the accident—the incident—the event that had damaged him. More than that, he wanted for none of it to have ever happened in the first place. But he knew that without the explosion that had nearly killed Michael there wouldn’t have been a strongbox, and without the strongbox, there would be no FC Plan, and without the FC Plan… well, he wouldn’t be strolling through the park with Anisette, Michael trailing behind dressed like a dapper young dandy.
Francis forced a laugh. “You ask like it’s an uncomplicated question.”
“It is.” She spoke to him as if he were a child, as if English were not his native tongue. “What… do… you… want?”
He could not tell if she was innocent or incredibly forward—if she was a maiden for whom subtext was a foreign language or a bawd who couldn’t waste her time with fumbling boys. He’d known madams in Dublin brothels who were less forward in their way of speaking. He thought to parry the question again but something thick caught in his throat. He looked again into those eyes. The truth. She wanted the truth. Had he spoken so much as a single true syllable to her since they had met on the Britannic?
“Anisette,” he said, “there’s so much I want that I can’t even find a way to answer the question.”
The wall that he had so carefully constructed between Francis and Angus was wobbling. What he had said was true of him—of Francis Dempsey—but whether it was true also of Angus MacFarquhar, he did not know. He had been Angus only for a short time and hadn’t expended much effort plumbing the hopes, fears, and desires of the dashing young Scotsman. Angus had come into being as a necessary convenience, a part of the FC Plan, and he was meant to be only temporary, to last as long as the crossing. Francis had never thought about what came after the FC Plan, but now he didn’t want there to be an after. He wanted the FC Plan to become permanent: the money and the ease of movement, Anisette and her belief in the future.
“But what about you?” he said. “What do you want?”
She made a show of considering the question, but she must have had an answer scripted and ready to perform. “Well,” she said, “I want a lot of things, too. I’d like to get out of this city. Not just for visits to other places, or for the summer. I mean out for good.”
“You don’t like New York?”
“It’s not so much the city itself. It’s the people in it—present company excepted.”
“Thank goodness for that,” he said.
“I want the people I care about to stay close, and to be safe.” She thought about her brother. Robert had always been kind to her, but he had gone far away. She wanted him to come home, though she knew there was something about her father that made that impossible, and maybe something about Robert, too. But that was one item on the list: to see her brother again. She would have also liked for there to be a safe place for the people she had met in Europe, because there was so much danger around them. Couldn’t one of the more pleasant countries just refuse to take part in any fighting so that everyone who wasn’t interested in war could go there?
“I sometimes think about a house on a hill,” she continued, “with a broad lawn that goes all the way down to the ocean. The house would be big and airy and full of people and laughter, and there would be children galore and three or four dogs lazing on the porch. And there would be music—lots of music.”
“Well, of course,” he said. “You have a gift there.”
“Félicité is the one with the gift. You should hear her on the piano—except that she never lets anyone hear her play. If there’s one person at home, she won’t even set foot in the conservatory. God forbid she should bring a little joy into someone’s life.”
“I don’t think she likes me—not even a little.”
“Don’t let it bother you. She doesn’t like me either.”
THEY WALKED THE length of the mall, the dappled sunlight playing across the faces of flaneurs, lunch-breakers, time-killers, lollards, and mothers seeking relief from crowded apartments. Children raced from one bench to the next squealing in delight, crying “Cheater!” and racing again. An old woman, pigeon-chested and expensively coiffed, walked a Pomeranian on a thin red leash.
“Oh, how adorable!” Anisette said.
“Yes, and the dog is lovely, too,” Francis-as-Angus said.
At the end of the mall, face to face with the busts of the world’s great writers, Francis bought a round of shaved ice soaked in flavored syrup: lemon, maple, vanilla. Michael accepted his with a pantomimed tip of the cap, and Anisette took hers with a flourish of her hand—For me? You shouldn’t have—and a sweeping debutante’s curtsy. Michael applauded as best he could without losing his grip on the paper cone.