Читать книгу The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 12

France, February 1917

During the night before I left for France, I slept in Sophie’s room, in her bed, the way we used to do when she was small. After Mama died.

Slept. I don’t think we actually slept. We talked until our throats hurt, we laughed into our pillows, and Sophie cried a little. Sophie’s the sentimental one; she tears up at everything, Fourth of July parades and baskets of puppies. Maybe I’ve spoiled her; maybe I’ve been too protective. I held her while she wept, and the old flannel of her nightgown scratched my neck, and the honeysuckle smell of her hair filled my head, raising all kinds of memories. My chest ached. She asked me why I had to go, and I didn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her that I was going to explode, I was going to go mad, I was a pot of salted water coming on to boil under the pressure of an eternal cast-iron lid, and someone was going to get scalded.

Instead, I stroked her honeysuckle hair and said, Because there’s a war on, Baby. There’s a terrible war going on overseas, and I have to help.

She said, I’m going to miss you so much, what am I going to do without you here, and I kept on stroking that hair, blinking my bee-stung eyes, and when I could speak I said, You’ll be fine, you’ll be safe, Father will take good care of you.

I said it over and over, until I believed it myself. Until it almost felt true.

But I couldn’t numb the anguish beneath my sternum. I couldn’t cure the absence of my sister, or the fear that sometimes roused me in those sooty moments before dawn, when the terrible new day smoldered at the horizon, streaked with unknown danger.

AS IT DID NOW, THE morning after I first met Captain Fitzwilliam. I lay on my back and stared at the crumbling ceiling, while my nerves stung and my temples burst. While the tension hurt the muscles of my jaw. Like I hadn’t slept at all, and maybe I hadn’t.

I rolled over and opened the drawer in the bedside table, where I kept a clumsily embroidered sachet that Sophie had given me for my birthday when she was ten. Before I left New York, I had removed the exhausted lavender and slipped inside a small cake of soap, the honeysuckle soap with which I always bathed her, until she was old enough to bathe herself. I held the sachet to my nose and thought, If I can still smell her, she must be all right, she must be safe. Father must be taking good care of her.

The light grew. Time to rise. Time for breakfast, time to wash and to dress and to drive out into the bitter February morning. The bitter February mud. I absorbed a last breath of honeysuckle and threw off the covers.

Mrs. DeForest was one of those women who believed in a sturdy, early breakfast, stocked with protein and vitamins. She worshipped vitamins, the entire alphabet of them. She’d brought her own hens from Long Island, and not one bird had dared to expire along the way. When I stepped downstairs into the refectory at six o’clock, she sat already at the head of the long wooden table, looking clean and practical. At her left sat Corporal Pritchard, shoveling food silently into his mouth, and at her right sat Captain Fitzwilliam, wearing his tunic (but not his belt) and drinking coffee. I saw that his hair was lighter than I had supposed. It was almost golden—or maybe that was only the effect of the vast electric chandelier overhead—and spiked all over in stiff, reflective gray. I was shocked at the familiarity of his face, how I already recognized each angle of bone and each line embedded around his eyes and mouth. How I could say to myself, His skin looks better this morning, less wan, full of color, plumper. He must have slept well, after all.

Mrs. DeForest was speaking. She nodded to me but she didn’t pause. She never paused. “It’s the result of so much planning, you know. No detail too small when it comes to people’s health. I’m a firm believer in clean sheets and fresh, abundant food. We’ve brought our own supplies, and there’s more on the way from our chapter back home. We have an awfully enthusiastic chapter. Nothing is too good for our patients, Captain Fitzwilliam.”

“Indeed.” The captain looked at me. His eyes crinkled some sort of message. I went to the sideboard and lifted a plate. A mirror hung before me, at such an angle that I could watch the two of them, at right angles, his left knuckles nearly brushing her right knuckles.

“Our main ward is the old great hall. That was my idea. You can’t understate the healthful benefits of the circulation of air, and the ceilings in that hall are no less than twenty-five feet high, served by no fewer than twenty fully operational windows. I saw to the refurbishment myself.”

“But doesn’t it get cold? So many windows? The men do hate a draft, Mrs. DeForest.”

Mrs. DeForest set down her fork and steepled her fingers over her plate. She ate eggs and fruit for breakfast—always fresh, no toast—after an hour of morning calisthenics. She had gone to college, you know, and was all up-to-date. She was the first woman I knew who cut her hair short, though pretty soon we were all doing it, bobbing our hair. But she was the first. She said that short hair saved her an hour a day, at least. Her husband was older, and they had never had children. Maybe that accounted for her skin, which was so untroubled and resilient, as she leaned forward over the de Créouville porcelain, that you could have bounced a tennis ball from her cheek, if you wanted to. (Not that I wanted to! It’s only an illustration.) Her fingers were equally young and strong, linked together now at the middle joints, though she must have been forty-one, by my own calculation. “As for warmth,” she said, “you’ll notice two rather spacious hearths, one on each end of the hall, which provide a great deal of heat. Nice, dry heat, Captain, in this awful damp.”

“An inestimable virtue at this time of year.”

My dish was full. I went to my usual chair, to the left of Corporal Pritchard, two seats down. Four nurses sat at the other end of the table, hunched over their plates, eating swiftly, each movement straining with suppressed excitement. The other nurses, I supposed, were on duty in the ward. Mrs. DeForest had worked out a careful system of shifts, based on scientific principles of human efficiency.

“I understand your patients are housed in a barn, Captain?” she said.

Corporal Pritchard set down his fork, lifted his head, and answered for his captain. “Indeed they are, ma’am. A regular French barnyard. Smells like the devil.”

Mrs. DeForest turned to me. “Is this true, Miss Fortescue?”

“I think the corporal—that is, the building was a barn. Before the war. But it’s perfectly clean now, just like a regular kind of hospital. Everything sanitary, as far as I could see.”

Corporal Pritchard shook his head, very mournful. He was a thin, hollow-cheeked man with an oversized nose and a gaze of perpetual hunger, and mournfulness just about hung on his face as if he’d given birth to it, millimeter by millimeter, through his nostrils. I thought he was around thirty years old, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe the war made boys look older, and he was really eighteen. “It’s the summer that’s the trouble, miss. Them pigs running about. But we don’t like to complain.”

At the word pigs, I pressed my coffee cup to my lips and glanced at Captain Fitzwilliam, who concentrated on his toast. The clock ticked, the air yawned. The soft thump of busy feet approached and receded. Mrs. DeForest looked at me, at Captain Fitzwilliam. At Corporal Pritchard.

“Pigs, Corporal?”

“Just in summer.”

“Hmm.” The fingertips tapped. The brow furrowed. The gaze returned to Captain Fitzwilliam, but not the head itself. She had a way of doing that, looking at you sideways. “A barn,” she said.

The captain spoke cheerfully. “You see, Mrs. DeForest, the Royal Army Medical Corps established this particular clearing station in the early days, when we were dashing about digging trenches, and nobody had the least idea we’d still be churning over the same ground two years later. There wasn’t time to build any of your fine modern compounds of huts and wards, according to all those marvelous diagrams prepared beforehand by our diligent staff. Luckily—well, for the men, at least—it’s only temporary accommodation. Until they’re well enough to go back up the line, you know, or else bad enough to continue on to the base hospitals, or even Blighty itself. Well, the really fortunate blokes, anyway, too ripped up to be any use to Haig.”

Mrs. DeForest smacked the table with the flat of her palm. “There. Do you see, Miss Fortescue? This is why we came to France. This makes it all worthwhile. Barns! Barns, if you will!”

I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t why I came to France, not really. That the barn wasn’t all that bad, and the British Army seemed, after two and a half years of war, to be taking care of its wounded in a pretty resourceful manner, given the circumstances. I thought of Captain Fitzwilliam’s keen face, and the competent way he shot an order in its proper direction, hitting the mark bang on the nose, before turning to me and smiling, smiling, as if he’d been playing at darts. But how could you say that to Mrs. DeForest, the president of the Eighth New York Chapter of the American Red Cross, who never got out of bed except to rescue some lesser creature from an awful fate? How could you admit to a variety of motives, not all of them noble?

Captain Fitzwilliam saved me. “You’re an angel of mercy, Mrs. DeForest, and on behalf of the entire British nation, I thank you for your service. That’s a splendid cut of ham, by the way. Splendid.”

She snatched his plate, darted to the sideboard, and heaped on the slices of pink French ham, one after another. How she came by the ham in the middle of the beleaguered Western Front, I never understood. She was just that kind of person. She could pluck priceless haunches of jambon from thin air. She set the plate back before the captain and resumed her seat.

“So you’ll be sending more? Patients?”

“As many as we possibly can.”

“And you’ll tell your colonel how well we’ve cared for your men, isn’t that right? The many advantages of the château?” She lifted the coffeepot and dangled the spout above his cup. “More coffee?”

He nudged the saucer forward.

“My dear Mrs. DeForest. Advantages it is.”

IN FACT, AS I WALKED down the ward on my way to the entrance, I thought the men were maybe a little too well cared for. The zeal of eight Red Cross nurses had left them cocooned in immaculate white sheets, immobile, a little stunned, like flies in the web of an especially greedy spider. The sisters were serving hot breakfast by the spoonful—whether or not the patient was capable of lifting a spoon—and as each man opened his mouth he seemed to be uttering a silent cry for escape.

“It’s a bleeding palace,” muttered Corporal Pritchard, who walked at my side. If you looked carefully, you could actually see the bulge in his stomach where the breakfast lay. Like a massive, self-satisfied tumor hanging from his ribs.

“A château.”

“Like that what them staff officers got.” At either end of the hall, just as Mrs. DeForest promised, two fires burned up the DeForest fortune at a magisterial rate of combustion. A wind-up gramophone played tinny Mozart between the two central windows.

“Your headquarters, you mean? In a château?”

“Yes, miss. A great big one, they say, but that’s just to be expected, innit? The staff sacrificing their youth and health, day and night, for our sake. It’s only right they should have a nice posh castle to lay their weary heads in.” He stood back politely to allow me through the doorway. I liked the way he spoke, the peculiar accent (youf an’ elf) and the natural sarcasm. Outside, on the gravel drive, Hunka Tin stood waiting. I had spent the hour before breakfast in the makeshift garage—the former stables, actually, except all the horses were long gone—while Mrs. DeForest did her calisthenics, and now the Ford looked as bright as new, almost. Mud washed away and engine tuned. Tires all repaired and axles checked. I hadn’t replaced that fuel line, however. Hoped I wouldn’t regret the omission.

“Blimey,” said the corporal, “you ain’t half got a good mechanic.”

“Actually, I’m the mechanic.”

“You, miss?”

The air was bitter, and the engine would be cold. I went around front, released the choke, and turned the engine. “My father had a Model T for years, and my sister and I kept it running for him. He thought we should be self-reliant. Could you switch the ignition for me?”

When the engine was puttering at an easy, patient pace, the corporal slid from the seat and made room for me. “Your chariot, m’lady,” he said. Courtly bow.

“Where’s your captain?”

“Making his regards, I think.”

“His regards?”

He nodded at the steps. “To herself.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“Now, don’t you think anything of that, miss. It’s only what he does.”

“Think anything of what?”

The corporal nudged the brim of his hat and reached into his pocket. He lit a cheap, brown-wrapped cigarette and walked away, a few polite steps, smoking and staring into the dry fountain in the center of the driveway, where a suite of lichen-crusted cherubs stood frozen in frolic. A dark fog wrapped the trees beyond. I realized he wasn’t going to reply and climbed into my seat. The smell of exhaust. The steady vibration of the engine under my hands and my bottom. The things I knew.

After a minute or two, Captain Fitzwilliam emerged from the château, hat and belt in place, and swung into the seat beside me. He smelled of coffee and soap and just the faintest hint of cigarettes, and his cheeks were pink against the ecru of his shirt collar. “Off we go, then,” he said, striking the dash with his palm, like a signal, and he propped one boot against the frame, leaned back his head, and fell asleep.

SO I DROVE, BECAUSE I could do that well, and it steadied my nerves to do something well. Something practical. The fog persisted, and the damp, bitter wind blew on my temples. Behind me, the wooden truck rattled and groaned on its metal chassis. The engine ground faithfully, smelling of burnt oil and gasoline. The road was even more churned and muddy than yesterday, but this time I knew the way, and the morning light was still young and hopeful. I kept to the middle of the road, where the mud wasn’t so bad, though I had to give way to other vehicles: supply trucks and artillery wagons and even, as we drew closer, other ambulances. All crusted with mire. They were headed to the railway station at Albert, for the sanitary trains to the coast, where the base hospitals lay in a chain along the sea, from Étaples to Boulogne.

Beyond them, England. The source of all these vehicles. The quarry from which all this manhood was mined, was cut and honed and shipped here in its millions. To do what? To live and fight and die. To construct and occupy this vast, temporary civilization that existed for a single object.

I caught myself wondering, at that moment, where Captain Fitzwilliam lived, when he wasn’t patching up bodies in a casualty clearing station in northern France. When he wasn’t asleep beside me, heavy and silent, pressing his big left knee across my right. Where he was raised, who were his parents. The ambulance pitched and wallowed. The wet air had soaked through my woolen gloves, and my fingers, clenching the wheel, should have felt the cold. Instead they glowed. She is absolutely essential. I was not falling in love; I was certainly not falling in love. Love was a fiction, written by Nature to disguise her real purpose. This sick, breathless sensation in my belly was only biology. This heat on my nerves. Only the instinct to procreate.

Or something else, maybe. The recognition of imminent danger.

“YOU’RE DAMNED QUIET,” CAPTAIN FITZWILLIAM said an hour later, making me jump. “Are you always so quiet?”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Only resting my eyes. I rarely sleep.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Troubled conscience, perhaps.”

The ambulance lurched through a hollow. Fitzwilliam gripped the doorframe, while a series of thuds vibrated the wood behind us, and Pritchard swore.

“Aren’t you going to ask?” he said.

“Ask what?”

“Why my conscience is troubled.”

“Isn’t that your own business? I don’t even know you.”

“Miss Fortescue,” he said gravely, “this is a time of war, not a drawing room in peacetime.”

“I don’t understand. What difference does that make? People are people.”

“I mean that we’ve shared a most intimate space for several hours now. Can’t we dispense with the niceties and be friends?”

I said nothing.

“Look. I’ll start. My conscience, since you’re curious—”

“I’m not curious.”

“Yes, you are. You’re desperately curious. You like me, Miss Fortescue; admit it.”

“I do not—”

“My conscience, Miss Fortescue, coincidentally enough, is troubled because of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Because a young lady of tremendous youth and merit, to say nothing of beauty, has traveled such a great distance to cover herself in mud and motor oil and to make conversation with an old bounder like me, and most especially to put herself under the command of a Mrs. DeForest—”

“Mrs. DeForest is an admirable woman.”

“Oh, most admirable. No doubt at all. But she’s rather a tyrant, isn’t she?”

I was still too rattled by the word beauty. “Of course not,” I lied.

“And I ask myself why. Why you should do such a thing, and why I should be so fortunate as to deserve you.”

“Deserve me!”

“Deserve, I should say, your entrance into my particular butcher shop at a quarter past five on an otherwise ordinary February afternoon. Ordinary in the sense of this mad, atrocious war, I mean.”

Another vehicle approached us along the narrow road, a large truck painted in dull olive green, covered in canvas. I pointed Hunka Tin carefully to the right-hand side, and the truck thundered past, engine screaming, mire flying from the wheels.

“I don’t understand why you say these things. How you can be so flippant.”

He placed one hand on his woolen heart. “You wound me.”

“Nonsense.”

“I protest. In the first place, I’m not being flippant. I’m quite sincere. In the second place, you’ll find there are two ways to cope with the madness in this godforsaken Hades. The first is to pretend that it’s all a great—if rather unsporting—outdoor game. A match of cricket prolonged by inclement weather and unlucky batsmen.”

“And the second?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Another truck came by, identical to the first. A supply convoy, probably, returning from the lines. I rubbed my thumbs against the wheel. My back ached, my jaw ached. Every muscle strung tight.

“In any case,” Captain Fitzwilliam went on, when the clamor died away, “we have roamed far from the question at hand. What exactly are you running away from, Miss Fortescue? I find I should very much like to know.”

“Nothing at all.”

“Tyrant parents? Failed love affair? Creditors at your heels?”

“None of those things.”

“Nothing left behind? No heartache, no loved ones pining?”

I gripped the wheel and leaned forward. Stared through the windshield. The bleak, brown, lurching winter landscape. I remember I was considering how long to remain silent before starting another topic, and what kind of topic I could safely introduce. Weather or war news or staff incompetence. Something even more impersonal, like the quality of wartime coffee, and whether you could call it coffee at all. Then—

“I have a sister.”

“What’s that?”

“A sister!”

“Older or younger?”

“Younger.”

“Are you close?”

“Very much.”

“Well, then. Why the devil should you leave her behind, if you love her?”

“Because I—”

Well. I stopped right there, right there on the edge, right in the split second before I tumbled off. Shocked that I had crept so close without realizing. Or shocked, really, that I had allowed this man to lead me there. Why? Because he was handsome and weary and crammed with easy manners, because he was solid and smoke-scented by my side, because I was breathing the fog of his breath and he was breathing mine, and his big left knee connected with my slender right one. Because he was a doctor, after all, and how could you not trust a doctor with your miseries? That was why doctors existed.

“Because I wanted to help,” I said instead.

He shifted in his seat, and his knee left mine.

“Well,” he said, tilting his head back again, crossing his arms across his ribs, “if you change your mind, I should be glad to serve as your confidant.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t think I could. I felt sick, perspiring, the way you do when you stand by yourself on the brink of some vertiginous cliff, and the whole world undulates around you, and you’re overcome by the tantalizing power of suicide. The death that lies within your immediate grasp. A single, easy step.

When the silence ripened, and the road flattened, and I felt I could risk a sidelong glance, I saw that Captain Fitzwilliam’s eyes were closed once more.

But I knew he was not asleep.

WHEN WE WALLOWED INTO THE stable-yard entrance at half past ten, the scene had changed from the day before. Two ambulances occupied the corner nearest the barn, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if they were loading patients or unloading them. I pulled the brake and the car lurched and stopped. “We’re here!” I shouted, banging a fist on the wood behind me, and I didn’t wait for Captain Fitzwilliam to stir, I didn’t wait for Corporal Pritchard to wake up and crawl from his stretcher. I jumped out of my seat and into the soft earth, and I floundered around back to toss open the door.

Pritchard was sitting on the floor, dazed and sleepy. He lifted his head and swore. “That was quick.”

I stuck out my hand and lifted him free. The other ambulances, I now saw, were loading men. They were headed for the railway station, for the sanitary trains to the base hospitals. From the east came the sound of artillery, a steady barrage, round after round firing into the German defenses. This time there was no returning fire, no long whistle and low, shattering explosion, but I stuck my head to the crown of my helmet anyway, as if that would protect me, and staggered through the sucking mud back to the front of the ambulance.

Just as I ducked around the corner, a stretcher party charged from the doorway, awash in wet khaki and as urgent and muscular as a set of racehorses. I stopped just in time and flattened myself against the wall. “Watch it, mate!” the orderly said, the one in front, and for some reason this rebuke brought me back from the nauseous precipice. Reminded me, I suppose, of my own unimportance in this place. My insignificance. I was not absolutely essential; I was intruding. I was in the way. There was no impending collision. No Virginia at the center of some fearful, imagined impact. Just wounded men, who were fighting a war.

The stretcher passed. “Go on, then,” said Fitzwilliam’s voice behind me, and I obeyed him. Crossed the threshold into the barn.

Less crowded now. A few of the cots lay stripped and empty, and the orderlies and nursing sisters moved around like people instead of rabbits. But the architecture was the same, the brown walls, the rows of lumpy beds to the right, the curiously identical white faces stuck above each blanket, the curtains to the left that partitioned the operating theater, the recovery room, the mess and the barracks. The smell of disinfectant, of earth and wet wool and old wood, enclosed me in its familiar cloud. If I cared to listen, I could discern the restless moans, the low chatter of a hundred injured men. Like any hospital, I thought. Captain Fitzwilliam pushed past me and caught the elbow of one of the nurses, speaking earnestly, head a little bowed, so that the electric light caught the tender skin of the back of his neck, and I found that I was wrong. That the threat of annihilation didn’t matter.

But that’s how it happens, when you have no defense, no immunity whatsoever. When you thought you were strong, and you were only untested. I made a movement, preparing to turn away, and at that instant Fitzwilliam lifted his gray-speckled head and looked at me, and his lips parted.

“Miss Fortescue—”

A clatter of boots overtook him, a choir of exhausted male shouts, and our heads snapped to the doorway of the barn, where a new stretcher party had arrived, flinging mud and chill onto the floorboards.

“Damn,” said Captain Fitzwilliam. “You’ll excuse me.”

He strode to the door, and I turned to look for Corporal Pritchard. But Pritchard had gone as well, and I was left standing alone near the entrance to the operating theater, a useless obstruction, a thick American branch tossed into the orderly flow of treatment and evacuation, treatment and evacuation. We were two years late, weren’t we? In the early months of invasion and repulsion, the race to the sea—before so many clearing stations were established, before the base hospitals were built on the northern coast, before all the manuals were written and the procedures put in place—when the trains were stuffed with casualties and the depots lined with stretchers and panic, a hospital like ours might have made a difference.

In this brutal, methodical February of 1917, our zeal was nothing but vanity.

I stood there, feet planted on the old wooden boards of that French barn, and watched Captain Fitzwilliam approach the stretcher and trade a few words with the man in front. Step forward and bend his head to address the wounded soldier inside. Behind them, the door was still open, and the corner of an ambulance flashed in and out of view as the driver and the orderly secured the doors. A nurse hurried past, carrying a tub of soiled and stinking bandages. Fitzwilliam stepped away from the stretcher and issued some direction to the stretcher-bearers, pointing his finger to one of the empty cots, bleached new sheets yellow-white under the electric bulbs, and I thought, It is time to go, Virginia.

Time to go.

I stepped aside for the stretcher party, and the soldier’s pale face jogged by. Every roof beam, the arrangement of every cot was familiar to me, as if I’d known them for years. As if I’d been born and raised here, and maybe I had. Maybe I had lived an entire new life inside the space of the last twenty-four hours, been reborn and struggled and hoped and strived, and now … and now …

What now?

Did I die and return to the old life?

“Miss Fortescue,” said a voice next to my shoulder, “will you come to my office? I’m afraid some paperwork remains to be sorted out.”

AND SO I CAME, WITHOUT even striving for it, to stand inside that canvas-partitioned square that constituted Captain Fitzwilliam’s office, while he made his final notes on the papers that would accompany my new patients to the Château de Créouville. He had offered me coffee, and I had refused it. I didn’t want him to see how my hands shook. I gazed at the pink lobe of his right ear and said, Of course.

“I don’t know how to say this—I’m sure you’ll think me a little mad …”

I leaned forward and gathered up the papers from the desk. He was standing on the other side; he reached out and stopped my hands.

“You don’t need to speak. I’ll speak. I’ll tell you something I’m not supposed to tell you, which is that we’re moving. The unit, I mean. Next week. Long overdue. We’ve got a proper site, modern regulation huts, that sort of thing, just yards away from the railway, about two miles from here. Your Mrs. DeForest ought to be perfectly mollified about that, at any rate.”

“No more barns,” I said throatily.

“Of course we shall continue to send patients your way for rehabilitation; we stand very much in need, as I said before, of a hospital to manage all the ambulatory cases, trench foot and frostbite and that kind of thing, and while it’s not as glamorous as—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t care about that.”

“No, of course not. You wouldn’t. But I’m afraid Mrs. DeForest has loftier dreams.”

“Well, she doesn’t have a choice, does she?”

“No.”

I stared at the desk before us. My hands still rested on either side of the sheaf of documents, held at the wrist by Captain Fitzwilliam’s agile, gentle fingers. A surgeon’s fingers, trained at great expense. His thumbs lay upon the backs of my bare hands, like a pair of anchors. The intimate contact seemed at odds with our businesslike communication, but what did I know? No man had ever held my wrists like this before.

And then his hands sprang back, as if only just realizing what they were doing, and settled behind his back. I gathered up the papers to my chest. From beyond the canvas partition came a metallic crash, an angry shout. I thought, Someone’s going to walk in, right this second. Someone’s going to see us like this, standing here without speaking. The desk between us was one of those collapsible designs, made of thin, light wood: a camp desk, bearing only a kerosene lantern, a couple of medical volumes topped by a messy leather notebook, a tin of pens, and a silver-framed photograph of a woman in a white dress.

I said, without moving, “If that’s all, then—”

“Wait! Damn.” He turned, stepped a few paces to the right, and stopped square. Behind his back, his thumbs dug into his palms.

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t call me that. Don’t call me sir, in that voice.”

The lantern was lit, and the glow fell on the silver frame of the photograph. The metal was tarnished from the damp. From this angle, I couldn’t see the subject very well, but she seemed to be smiling. I leaned forward an inch or two and tilted my head for a better look. The photograph, it seemed, was not taken in a studio. The girl sat on a large boulder, both shoes visible beneath the hem of her frothy white dress, and she carried her hat in her hand. Her hair seemed to be escaping its pins. There was an inscription at the bottom. I couldn’t read it.

“That’s a lovely photograph,” I said.

“Photograph?”

“On your desk.”

He turned back. His face was pale, except for a pair of reddish patches on the outer edges of his cheekbones. You might have thought he would look at the photograph, but he didn’t. He looked at me instead, fixing his gaze so intently on my face, I almost turned away. Instead, I said, in a high voice, “She’s lovely. Is she your sister?”

“Yes. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Of course not.”

He reached inside the breast pocket of his tunic and pulled out a gold cigarette case. There were initials engraved on the outside, in plain Roman lettering. My heart beat in such enormous, galloping strokes, I couldn’t breathe. “It must be difficult, being apart from your family like this,” I said.

“Yes. Well. We do what we must.” He lit the cigarette quickly and shook out the match. “I seem to have lost my train of thought. What were we saying?”

“I don’t recall. Something about the unit moving elsewhere.”

“You seem upset.”

“I’m not upset.”

“I hope I haven’t made you ill at ease. I never meant—you see, it’s the strangest thing. Since yesterday, I have been struck—I have wanted—I want most intently—most unaccountably—to see you again, to see how you’re getting on—to be a friend, I suppose.” The cigarette twitched between his fingers. “Do you see what I mean?”

“I—not really, no. I’m afraid I don’t. I think it would be better if—”

“Stop!” He held up his hand. “Don’t say it, please. Don’t say some damned prim little thing about prudence and discretion.”

I pressed my lips together.

He turned away and stared at the canvas wall.

“I have been wrestling with this all day, Miss—what is your first name?”

“Virginia.”

He closed his eyes and said Virginia. Like a prayer, like the answer to an ancient mystery. The sound of voices intensified on the other side of the canvas. Someone was getting dressed down, a few yards away. Captain Fitzwilliam sucked on the cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly, in a wide, thin stream. “I suppose you think I’m a bounder.”

“No.”

“Ah, but you hesitated.”

“I—I don’t know. I don’t know you at all.”

“May I write to you, at least? Convince you of my innocent intentions.”

“What are your intentions?”

“To be friends, Virginia. There’s nothing wrong with friendship, is there?”

“I’ve often heard it’s impossible for men and women to be friends.”

“Then let’s prove them wrong, shall we?” He stubbed out the cigarette and turned to me, and he was smiling. A little wildly, I thought, like somebody drunk. “You see, I find I can’t quite bear to cut you off so soon, like the limb of a precious new seedling. If friendship is all we’re given on this earth, why, I’ll be the most steadfast, honorable friend you ever knew. We can discuss poetry and history and botany. Whatever you damned well like. The latest sensational novel. Anything but the state of the war. God knows we’ve got enough of that without talking about it.”

“I’m sure you have enough friends already.”

“Yes. Well. I have had friends. The trouble is, they keep dying. It’s a damned nuisance, but there it is. One’s obliged to hunt further afield these days, when one’s old school chums no longer exist. And now you’ve dropped like a ripe pear before me. A friend. A fascinating, unexpected friend, rich with all kinds of interesting mysteries I look forward to discovering.”