The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  “Yes?” She half-expected to be booted off the boat already.

  The piece of paper he handed her was just a single sheet, folded and sealed. “This is for you.”

  “Thank you.” Tess fished in her purse and found a coin for the steward. “For your troubles.”

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Mary Kate craned to see over Tess’s shoulder. “Your young man?”

  “No.” Tess didn’t need to open it to know who it was from. Or what it would be about. “My sister.”

  “Oh,” said Mary Kate, losing interest. “That’s nice.”

  Overhead, the great horn sounded and the ship lurched forward. Tess grabbed at the side of the bunk to keep herself from staggering as the great boat began to move. Her stomach heaved in time with the motion.

  “Yes,” gasped Tess. “Isn’t it? Pardon me—I believe that’s my basin.”

  Ginny would just have to wait.

  Chapter 7

  Sarah

  Devon, England

  May 2013

  John Langford glanced warily in my direction and asked if I was feeling carsick.

  “Not at all,” I said, which was true. It wasn’t the car that was making me sick; it was the quantity of Beefeater gin I’d drunk earlier that afternoon, behind the bar of the Camelot Hotel. My head seemed to be stuck on sideways, and my stomach had lost its connection to the planet’s gravitational field. The motorway, undulating like a gray ribbon around the green Devon hills, had no end in sight. “I just had this idea that England was a lot smaller. We’ve been driving for hours.”

  “We can stop for coffee if you want.”

  For an instant, coffee sounded perfect. Until it didn’t.

  “No, thanks. I can stick it out. We are almost there, right?”

  John checked his watch. “About half an hour, I guess. I rang ahead to the housekeeper. She’ll have something ready for us when we get there.”

  “A housekeeper. Must be nice.”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking. She’s been with us since before I was born. She must be eighty years old at least. So be kind.”

  “What do you mean, ‘kind’? I’m always kind.”

  “You’ll see what I mean when we get there.” He reached for the climate-control knob and turned it to the left. “Here. That should help. You can roll down the window if you like.”

  “I told you, I’m not carsick.”

  “Sarah. When I said ‘carsick’? I meant ‘hungover.’”

  “You know, that’s the thing about you Brits. You never say what you really mean.”

  “We call it being polite. I know you Americans struggle with the concept.”

  “We’re just honest, that’s all. Frank. Call a spade a spade.”

  “All right. I’ll start again.” He cleared his throat. “Why, Sarah. You’re not hungover, are you?”

  “Hungover? Why, yes, John. Yes, I am hungover. I drank my own body weight in gin four hours ago, on an empty stomach, and you’re just lucky I’m not barfing all over this gorgeous Range Rover leather.”

  “‘Barfing’?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know the Cockney rhyming slang for ‘vomit.’”

  “Wallace and Gromit,” he said helpfully. “If you give me a few seconds’ warning, I can pull over.”

  “Thank you, John. I will do that.” I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the headrest. John and Sarah, I thought. At least we were John and Sarah now. That was a start, wasn’t it? “You don’t actually live in Langford Hall with only one housekeeper, do you?” I asked.

  “Actually, the family moved out of the hall years ago, when my grandfather died. Taxes. We deeded the building to the National Trust and soon realized that a house isn’t really a home when you’ve got busloads of tourists traipsing through the drawing room at all hours. So my grandmother decamped for the Dower House.”

  “Your grandfather. That would be Robert’s son, right? The politician?”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Do you remember him?”

  “No. He married a bit late, because of the war, and then the cancer got him in the sixties.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  John shrugged. “One of those things. I wasn’t around to miss him. Now, of course . . .”

  “Now . . . what?”

  He checked the mirror. His knuckles were large and white as they gripped the steering wheel. “Nothing.”

  I glanced at the side of his face, which had turned heavy again—mouth clenched, brow stern. The landscape blurred past his head, green and hilly, a patchwork of farms and woods. We were headed to the Langford family seat, in a village called Ashprington somewhere near the coast, although I suspected the journey had less to do with John’s generous desire to help out an unknown historian than his emphatic desire to escape the paparazzi. In the morning papers—if not today’s Evening Standard—there would appear grainy, guilty photographs of the two of us, sharing intimate drinks in a grubby basement bar in Shepherd’s Bush in the middle of the day. John Langford and a Mystery Brunette. We’d ducked into my room to escape the flashbulbs and the lenses, and John had cast an appalled gaze about the peeling walls and suggested—chivalrously, probably, and also a little recklessly thanks to the gin and the adrenaline—that we might as well head down to Devon to start our research.

  Our research? I’d asked, sort of doubtful.

  He’d looked me in the eye and asked if I had a better plan, perhaps?

  Well, I didn’t have a better plan, and as I returned my stare out the window to the left, and the distant, occasional glitter of the English Channel between the southern hills, I figured that John Langford probably didn’t have one, either. When your wife was caught by a Daily Mail photographer leaving the One Hyde Park residence of a Russian oligarch at four in the morning, and it just so happened that oligarch was a close crony of the Russian president, and you found yourself resigning your Parliament seat as fast as you could say “Profumo” amid a fusillade of flashbulbs and shouted questions that continued, without relief, for nearly a fortnight . . . well, you really weren’t looking past surviving the next hour or two. You just existed. You saw the excuse to flee the capital for a few days with a destitute American stalker—possibly unhinged, possibly fraudulent—and you took it.

  What did you have to lose, after all?

  “How old is the house?” I asked. “Langford Hall, I mean.”

  “I’m surprised you have to ask. Shouldn’t you know all this already?”

  “Just trying to change the subject. Since you obviously don’t want to talk about anything personal.”

  John cleared his throat. “The house, as you probably well know, was completed in 1799, by my great-great-great-great-grandfather James Langford.”

  “The admiral, right?”

  “Yes. Came from a line of prosperous shipbuilders, joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman when he was twelve or thirteen. Made post captain by the time he was twenty-two. He was a damned fine sailor and a decent battle tactician, but he had one excellent quality that set him above the rest.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Luck,” John said. “In 1786, our man was out charting the Pacific and stumbled on the Manila galleon, which had lost its escort in a storm. Of course he snapped it right up. One of the greatest prizes ever. I believe it was carrying something in the neighborhood of a million in specie, besides another million or so in cocoa and spices and that sort of thing. That’s Spanish dollars, of course,” he added, after a second’s thought. “In pounds sterling, the total was closer to half a million. In any case, he had a proper three-eighths share, because his orders came directly from the Admiralty, so his fortune was made. All hail the noble custom of prize money. To his credit, he didn’t resign his commission straightaway.”

  “Just married an earl’s daughter and bought an estate near the sea.”

  He cast me a sidelong look. “Aha. I knew you’d done your research. Well, here we Langfords are, anyway
. Gentlemen and politicians, thanks to Admiral Langford’s cheeky luck in the Pacific. Just think how it all might have turned out if the wind had come from the wrong quarter that day.”

  “Chaos theory. The beating of a butterfly’s wings—”

  “And I wouldn’t be here today.” He said it almost wistfully.

  I wrapped my hands around my knees. John Langford drove a Range Rover, yes, but it was ten years old at least, and the leather seats were worn to a comfortable softness. The interior smelled strongly of dogs and wet wool, almost (but not quite) overcoming the scent that belonged to John himself—his soap or his shaving cream, maybe, sweet and clean. I knew it was John because I’d smelled it earlier, when I was leaning across the bar in Shepherd’s Bush, pouring him a gin and tonic. A faint scent, of course. He wasn’t the kind of guy who wore cologne. You only smelled it when you were close enough. When he let you.

  “What about Robert, though?” I said. “He wasn’t a statesman.”

  “Not in the least. He was a right charming rascal, though. The family rebel. Not that I blame him. He had the original British lion for a father, an Eminent Victorian with the whiskers to prove it. Sir Peregrine Langford. There was another son, you know. Robert’s older brother. He drowned when Robert was quite young, eight or nine. Some kind of boating accident. The way I heard it, James was trying to save Robert, who had gotten into trouble—that was Robert’s specialty, apparently, getting into trouble—and ended up drowning himself instead, poor chap.”

  “Oh my God. Are you serious? That wasn’t in any of the stuff I read.”

  “The family kept it quiet. We’re exceptionally good at that sort of thing. Well, we used to be, at any rate. I think the official line was that he died of pneumonia or something. The truth was, they pulled him out of the water and he died a day or two later. Apparently James was a brilliant fellow, the perfect golden-haired Edwardian Adonis. Head boy, wrote poetry in Latin and captained the cricket, that sort of thing. His mother died a year later, probably of grief, and his father never really forgave Robert for any of it.”

  “What a bastard.”

  “Not much in the way of grief counseling back then.” John nodded to a passing road sign. “Nearly there. Next junction.”

  “Look, the sun’s coming out!”

  “It always does, around here,” he said, changing lanes. “That’s how I know I’m almost home.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t help noticing the way the late afternoon sunshine touched John’s hair as we made our way up the gravel drive toward the Dower House. This was partly because he walked a half-step ahead of me, eating up the ground with his long legs, and partly because the flash of pure gold did something strange to my breath. In the next instant, he turned his head and slowed his stride, like he’d only just remembered my existence.

  “Sorry.” He took my duffel bag from my hand. “Didn’t realize how eager I was to be home.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s beautiful.”

  “Ah. You might want to hold your opinion until you see it up close.”

  I squinted at the rectangle of elegant Georgian bricks ahead, which glinted a brilliant red-brown in the same languorous sunshine that gilded John’s hair, and saw only the kind of settled, symmetrical beauty that screamed—or rather, sang softly—English country house, circa 1800. Three stories tucked under a hipped, dormered roof. Sash windows, twelve panes each, evenly spaced on either side of the front door. A row of boxwoods, in need of a trimming. Gravel drive, in need of a raking. Behind us, a garage that had once been a stable, containing the Range Rover in a space that had once been a box stall. Could it get any more perfect, really? Maybe in an hour or so, when the sun began to set. But not much.

  Naturally, the door was unlocked. John reached past me, turned the knob, and pushed it open, releasing a heavenly smell of dust and old wood and beeswax. “Mrs. Finch!” he called out. “I’m home!”

  There was a huge, damp silence, the kind of quiet you only encounter inside an old house where nobody lives. I stepped over the threshold into a square foyer, paved in checkerboard marble, chipped at the corners. A small stone fireplace lay empty in the corner. Twelve feet above our heads, the acanthus plasterwork ran riot around the perimeter of the ceiling, but the decoration was otherwise spare. Just a couple of stately Victorian portraits frowning down in obvious disapproval. Or else indigestion.

  “Sorry,” said John. “She’s a little deaf. Just go straight through and turn left past the staircase. She’s probably in the kitchen. With luck, she’ll have the kettle on.”

  I marched obediently through the doorway into the hall, where a handsome, curved staircase wound up to the second floor and a pair of doors stood closed on either side, leading probably to the drawing room and dining room, or maybe the library, if I knew my Georgian floor plans. At the end of the staircase, I turned left down another hall, narrower, and found myself standing on the brink of an enormous kitchen, last renovated around the middle of the previous century.

  “Mrs. Finch!” John shouted again. “We’re here!”

  “Johnnie?” came a floral English voice, echoing strangely in the room before me, as if belonging to a ghost.

  I took another step, turned left again, and tripped over something that turned out to be one of a pair of stainless steel dog bowls, sitting before a cupboard adorned in peeling paint the color of green apples. Ahead of me, a gargantuan yellow Aga dominated the wall, flanked by more cupboards. I turned back toward a large wooden island and, beyond it, a round table inside a nook of French windows, overlooking the gardens. By the table stood a gray-haired lady in a dress of pale blue, covered by a pinafore apron. She squinted at me and reached for the broom that rested against the wall to her right.

  “You!” she snapped, lifting the broom. “Out of my kitchen!”

  “But—”

  She whacked me around the kneecaps. “Go on! The likes of you!” Whack. “Didn’t I say you wasn’t welcome here?” Whack. “Go on! Out! Powdering your pretty nose on my nice clean pastry board.” Whack. “Breaking my poor boy’s heart—”

  She raised the broom to whack me again. John grabbed the handle just in time. Though I wasn’t looking at him, I had the idea that his chest was shaking with laughter.

  “Mrs. Finch! You must stop!”

  “I’ll stop when I want! What are you thinking, you muddle-headed boy, bringing that tart back in my kitchen—”

  “Mrs. Finch! For God’s sake! It’s not Callie!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Not Callie!” he boomed.

  She squinted at me from behind a pair of thick, old-fashioned spectacles. “You’re not Callie.”

  “Who’s Callie?”

  “My ex-wife,” John said dryly, putting the broom away in a cupboard.

  “Oh,” I said. “Calliope. Callie. I get it.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Mrs. Finch said, though she didn’t sound that contrite. In fact, she sounded a little proud of herself. The demented force of her onslaught had driven me back against the Aga, and the housekeeper now stepped back and reviewed my defeated figure with an air of satisfaction. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d only fallen back out of a sense of chivalry. She stood about an inch over five feet, and probably weighed less than the broom. Her silver hair frizzled out of what she’d intended, no doubt, to be a very strict, very neat bun at the back of her head. John, returning to her side, loomed over her like a tree. She tilted her head back to meet his gaze and demanded, “If she’s not Callie, then who is she?”

  “She’s a friend,” he said.

  She clasped her hands. “Ooh, Johnnie! A girlfriend!”

  “No! A friend. A historian. She’s come to look at some papers.”

  Mrs. Finch looked back at me in utter bewilderment. Her pale eyes were so large behind the glasses, she might have been a Disney princess. A very old Disney princess. Behind me, a kettle whistled. She made no sign of having heard it.

  �
�Um, Mrs. Finch?” I stepped aside. “The kettle?”

  “The what, dear?”

  John cupped his hands around his mouth. “The kettle!”

  “Yes! I’m making tea. She does drink tea, doesn’t she?”

  I turned around, lifted the kettle from the hot plate, and closed the lid. “When I have to,” I said.

  * * *

  “So I know I promised to be kind and everything,” I said, heaping sugar into my tea from a dainty porcelain sugar bowl, “but isn’t she a little—well—”

  “Deaf? Blind? All those things.” He sighed. “I just can’t let her go. For one thing, I’d have to find somebody else. For another thing, we’ve always had Finches at Langford House. We have an old saying—Are you all right?”

  I ran for the sink and spat out the tea. “Salt!” I gasped.

  “Salt?”

  “In the sugar bowl.”

  He dipped his fingertip in the bowl and tasted it. “Christ.”

  “It’s okay. Just kind of took me by surprise.” I straightened away from the sink—a great big bathtub of a farmhouse basin—and walked back to the round table, where we sat with the tea things between us.

  “You don’t have to finish it,” John said.

  “I wasn’t going to, believe me. Just pour it out and try again.”

  “No, let me.” He rose from his chair and took my cup to the sink. Turned on the tap and rinsed it out. I watched his back curiously as he performed these chores, trying to reconcile this domesticated figure with the eloquent, passionate John Langford I’d seen on one of those YouTube videos, holding forth with tremendous authority during Prime Minister’s Questions about the failings of the NHS emergency services during the winter flu season. Now he was disgraced, defeated, and yet he didn’t look like either of those things. He looked tired. Resigned, maybe. But still upright. His shoulders still straight. He turned back to me and frowned. “I’m not sure where we’re going to find any sugar, however.”

  “That’s okay. I can do without. The cake’s sweet enough.”

  He flashed a smile that hit me right in the stomach. “You’re a good sport, Sarah.”