The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  “See?” said Mr. Langford. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “A regular medical man, you are,” retorted Tess. “Would you like to sell me some snake oil?”

  “No,” said Mr. Langford equably. “Just another sip of tea. A small sip.” He watched as Tess complied.

  He made the world’s least likely governess, thought Tess irritably. “Happy?”

  “Quite. One likes to see one’s remedies succeed. Perhaps I’ll patent it. Langford’s Ginger Toddy.” Dropping the patter, he said, with a rough sort of sympathy, “You’re not accustomed to people looking after you, are you?”

  Tess folded her arms across her chest, well enough now to feel the wind. It bit through her thin suit jacket. “What makes you say that?”

  “I had a dog when I was young. A whippet. I . . . reclaimed him from some boys who had been training him to race. Starving him, really.” He regarded Tess thoughtfully. “He showed the same charming lack of gratitude when I first tried to feed him. He’d been trained to mistrust good intentions.”

  Tess wasn’t sure she liked being compared to a dog. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms to try to stave off the chills. “Forgive me for forgetting to tug my forelock. I’ll just grovel a bit now, shall I? Do you need me to k-k-ow-tow, or will a simple th-thank you do?”

  Mr. Langford’s lips pressed together. “You’re freezing. Don’t you have a coat?”

  “Downstairs. I hadn’t exactly p-planned to come out for a constitutional.”

  Ignoring her sarcasm, Mr. Langford shrugged out of his coat and settled it over her shoulders like a cape. Tess could feel the warmth from his body sinking into her very bones.

  Instinctively, she put her hands up to the collar, feeling wool that had obviously never seen the inside of one of Mr. Gimbel’s bargain bins. “I can’t take this.”

  “Calm yourself. It’s not a gift, only a loan. I can’t have you dying of hypothermia on my watch. I’ll lose my membership in the Royal Order of Knights Errant and be forced to confess myself a hopeless cad. Consider it your contribution to my moral rehabilitation.”

  “Well, if you put it like that . . .” Maybe it was the cold, or the weakness of being sick, but Tess felt the fight draining out of her. Was it so hard to allow someone to be kind? Gruffly, she said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re doing me a service, if you knew it.” Mr. Langford looked out over the waves, his profile like something carved on the prow of a ship. “I hate the sea.”

  Tess looked at him in surprise, the wool of the coat collar tickling her chin. “You don’t seem to be suffering.”

  “My brother drowned in a sea like this.” The stark words rang like iron on metal. Mr. Langford breathed in deeply through his nose. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  “I’m just that easy to confide in,” said Tess. It wasn’t entirely untrue. People tended to tell her things. Maybe because they saw in her what they wanted to see. “It must be my warm and sympathetic manner.”

  Mr. Langford snorted, momentarily diverted. “Ha. Shall we say that you have a certain astringent charm?” A wave crested around them, and Mr. Langford’s lips went white.

  “Do you need to sit down?” said Tess, her hand automatically going to his elbow to steady him.

  “Do I look so feeble as that?” His eyes met hers, and there was a force that leapt between them, like the snap of the current. Mr. Langford broke his gaze first. “The waves—I’ve been sailing since. Get back on the horse, they say. In calm weather, when the sun is shining, I can pretend it doesn’t matter, that I’m not chilled to my bones. But when the fog comes up and the sea gets rough . . .”

  “How old were you?” Tess asked softly.

  “Eight. And my father . . . My father . . .”

  His fingers strayed unconsciously to his breast pocket. Tess could hear the crinkle of . . . something. Paper. A telegram.

  “He must want you home,” Tess ventured.

  Her father had been like that after their mother died, not wanting to let either of his daughters out of his sight. Keeping them close, like a miser with only two coins. Not out of love, so much, but fear. All they had was each other, he’d told them, again and again. Each other, a gaudily painted wagon, and a store of bad ideas.

  Mr. Langford gave a short, harsh laugh, and looked at her as though he’d just remembered her presence. “Hardly.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Oh, but I do.” There it was again, the unconscious move toward the pocket and whatever it contained. “The pater sent me a telegram telling me not to sail. It doesn’t come much clearer than that. Don’t look like that. I would feel the same way in his place. It was my fault that Jamie died.”

  Tess clutched his coat tighter around her. “How?”

  “I’d pestered him to take me out with him. And then—I was the one who fell in. Jamie drowned trying to save me.”

  Tess tried to catch his eye. “You didn’t mean it to happen. You weren’t trying to hurt him.”

  “Does it matter? The result was the same. If I could go back—” The anguish in his voice cut to the bone. He shook his head, like a man coming awake. “Why am I telling you this?”

  “Because I’m here?” She didn’t tease herself that it was anything else. She might have been that whippet he’d been talking about: an object of charity. His coat hung on her shoulders, heavy and warm. Without giving herself time to think better of it, Tess blurted out, “I killed my mother. Not intentionally. I came down with scarlet fever and she took it from me. My father—he never reproached me with it. But I always knew that if he could trade us—well, I wasn’t the one he’d keep.”

  Her throat burned with the words. No matter how many times she’d thought it, she’d never said it aloud, not to anyone. Not even to Ginny. But she owed Robert Langford, and this was the only coin she had with which to pay him.

  Tess cleared her throat. “It’s not easy, is it? Being the one who survived.”

  Mr. Langford lifted his teacup, his eyes never leaving hers. “Here’s to the survivors. Unwanted though we may be.” He paused, struck by a sudden thought. “Didn’t you tell me you were going home to your mother?”

  Damn and blast. That was what she got for letting down her guard. A cup of ginger tea and a warm coat and she’d nearly blown the game.

  “Is there any more tea in that cup?” Tess demanded. As Mr. Langford handed it to her, she hastily cobbled together a lie. “I’m headed home to my stepmother. I wasn’t—I wasn’t really welcome in my father’s new family. I was sent to America to live with an aunt in Kansas when I was five. It was easier for everyone that way.”

  That was the thing with lies: she could almost imagine it were true. She could picture the cottage she’d supposedly left, like something out of a picture book, all thatch and hanging kettles, and a woman with an apron tied over a cotton dress, holding a ladle.

  “Then what brings you back?”

  “It was time.” Over his shoulder, she could see Ginny, waiting in the lee of one of the lifeboats. Ginny made a barely perceptible move of her chin. Tess knew what that meant. Get a move on. Time’s wasting. Quickly, Tess said, “My father’s dead. It was time to go back to the beginning again and start over.”

  “Can you?” Mr. Langford looked at her, his eyes as dark as the sea. “Or is that just a fairy tale we tell ourselves?”

  “You don’t know if you don’t try, do you?” Ginny’s foot was tapping impatiently against the deck, but Tess couldn’t resist adding, “You’re going back, aren’t you?”

  Something passed across Mr. Langford’s face. When he spoke, his voice was a deliberate drawl, the flippant aristocrat at play, holding her at a distance. “Blighty needs all her sons these days, they say. Whatever my father may think.”

  “At least you still have a father.” So much for confidences. Tess shrugged out of Mr. Langford’s coat, thrusting it back to him with more speed than grace. “Thank you for the coat and the tea. I feel almo
st human again.”

  “Only almost?” There was real concern in his voice. And something like an apology.

  Tess bit her lip. No explaining how she’d spent her life watching through windows, wondering what it must be, to be like everyone else. “If I don’t, it’s not your doing,” she said. It was past time to go, but she stopped all the same, asking gruffly, “Will you be all right?”

  Surprise and gratification chased across his face before the usual urbane mask descended. His hand covered hers for a brief moment. “Survivors, remember?”

  And then he tipped his hat to her and was gone, with a speed that was almost like flight.

  “Well,” said Ginny.

  Tess turned to find her sister standing behind her, arms folded across her chest. No matter how many times she saw her, Tess still couldn’t quite get used to Ginny’s latest incarnation, her fair hair dyed black and ruthlessly scraped back. It changed the entire nature of her face; it made her feel like a stranger. A very disapproving stranger.

  Ginny looked darkly at the door through which Mr. Langford had departed. “Is that why you couldn’t be bothered to meet me last night? Too busy sparking with the Mr. La Di Dah over there?”

  “I wasn’t sparking—with anyone. I was sick.” Which you would know if you’d bothered to check, thought Tess mutinously, and then felt guilty for it. How many times had Ginny sat through the night with her childhood megrims? Hadn’t been her father, certainly. It had been Ginny, always Ginny, with a cold cloth and a bottle of patent medicine.

  Ginny was unconvinced. “What was all that, then?”

  “Common kindness,” said Tess tersely.

  Ginny snorted. “Come on, now, Tennie,” she said, and the use of her childhood nickname made Tess feel about five years old again, with a dirty apron and mismatched braids. “Don’t you know better than that? There’s nothing common about kindness.”

  Tess could hear Mr. Langford’s voice in her ear. He’d been trained to mistrust good intentions. Was that what had happened to her? Had she become too hard, snapping in self-defense where there was no threat to be had? He hadn’t had to be nice to her. He’d done it to no purpose.

  “Maybe they’re just bred to it, then, people like him.” Tess fished out a phrase from a half-forgotten book. “Noblesse oblige.”

  “If you want to believe that, I’ve a bridge I can sell you. I just don’t want to see you hurt, Tennie, not like that.” Ginny clasped Tess’s cold hands in her own, squeezing them tight. “His kind, they use up girls like us and toss ’em aside. You know that. Just because he has a handsome face—don’t let yourself fall for it.”

  Tess shook her head. “He wasn’t trying to romance me.”

  Ginny dropped her hands. “No, he’s got Caroline Hochstetter for that.” The words hit Tess like a blow. Just as Ginny had intended. Tough love for her own good. “But when has that ever stopped a man from having a bit on the side? Wham, bam, and a few coins if you’re lucky.”

  Her words hung like coal dust in the air, acid, corrosive.

  “Ginny—” Tess began, and broke off, not knowing what to say. She knew there were things Ginny had never told her, things she’d done to keep them afloat. To keep Tess safe and fed. But Ginny’s closed face forbade sympathy. Instead, Tess said simply, “Don’t worry, Ginny. I’ll be careful. I promise. I was sick and he helped me. That was all.”

  Ginny put her face close to Tess’s, frowning. “We can’t trust anyone but each other. You know that.”

  “I know that.” Mr. Langford’s ginger tea burned at the back of her throat. Kindness. So much for kindness. Tess could feel the sickness rising again, and swallowed hard.

  Ginny gripped her by the shoulders, looking at her with concern. “You all right, Tennie?”

  “It’s just”—what had Mr. Langford called it?—“mal de mer. I guess I’m not much of a sailor.”

  “Well, you’d better hope it subsides,” said her sister, letting go and stepping back, all business again. “You have work to do tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow night,” echoed Tess. “Tomorrow night?”

  “Were you planning to wait until we disembark? This isn’t a game, Tess. This is our future we’re talking about.”

  No, it wasn’t. It was Tess’s past, and she couldn’t seem to get clear of it. “All right,” said Tess wearily. Without Mr. Langford’s coat, she felt cold and exposed. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You could at least pretend to be pleased.” Ginny looked at her with pursed lips. “The manuscript is in the safe in the Hochstetter suite. Hochstetter had the safe put in specially—didn’t trust the safe in the purser’s office. Which should tell you something about just what this thing is worth.”

  Tess was supposed to be impressed, she knew, but she couldn’t quite muster the energy. So she just nodded.

  Ginny’s lips tightened. “The Hochstetters will be at the captain’s table at dinner. They’ll both be there starting at six. The staff have their meal at six thirty. You have until seven thirty. Eight if you’re lucky.”

  “That’s not enough time to make a copy!”

  “Then steal it and copy it at your leisure.”

  “In my cabin, which I share with three other people?”

  “Do I have to do all the thinking around here? Just do it, Tess. Get it done somehow. And get it done tomorrow night.” Ginny glanced over her shoulder, as if looking for eavesdroppers. “You don’t know the people we’re dealing with.”

  There was something in her voice that set all Tess’s alarm bells ringing. “What people, Ginny?” It was a music manuscript, for heaven’s sake. Admittedly, collectors could be cutthroat, but it hardly seemed something to engender such alarm. “What are you talking about?”

  Ginny just shook her head. “Never you mind. Just do it. Tomorrow night.”

  Chapter 10

  Sarah

  Devon, England

  May 2013

  Judging by the state of the sun—falling, still falling, toward a reluctant May horizon—we had an hour or two to start work before night arrived. Or maybe John Langford planned to keep himself busy through the night, in order to stay his demons. He certainly walked like a man bent on business. I gamboled across the tender green turf like a puppy, trying to keep up with those long, determined strides, until he started and briefly turned his head.

  “You should let me know when I’m walking too fast,” he said reprovingly.

  “You should notice when you’re walking too fast,” I said, “or else you’re going to have to turn in your English Gentleman certification card.”

  “I apologize. I was counting on your shrill American voice to keep me in check.”

  He hadn’t stopped, but he’d shortened his stride, and as I caught up and glanced at the side of his face, I saw he was grinning.

  “That’s why there were so many war babies, you know,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Back in the Second World War. Cultural conditioning. The English girls expected the American GIs to act like gentlemen, basically, and the GIs expected the English girls to slap them when they’d crossed the line. They were pretty much doomed to disappoint each other. Ergo, babies.”

  John made a thoughtful grunt.

  “I take it you’re not impressed with my historical insight?” I said.

  “Not at all. I just think ‘disappoint’ is an interesting choice of terms, in the context of sex.”

  At the word “sex,” delivered in John’s masterful Oxbridge drawl, I stumbled, recovered for an instant, and then skidded spectacularly into the grass.

  “Are you quite all right?” he asked, helping me back up.

  I spat out a mouthful of turf and said I was just fine, thanks. “How far away is this folly of yours, anyway?”

  “Not my folly. Robert’s folly. It’s just around the edge of those trees, up ahead. You’ll see it in a moment. I say, are you sure you’re not hurt? You seem to be limping.”

  “Totally okay.
A few grass stains on my pants, no biggie.”

  John’s cheeks turned pink. He looked away swiftly and cleared his throat. “Trousers, Sarah. When in England, always say trousers.”

  “Because?”

  “Just trust me. Ah, here we are. Down that little slope. You see?”

  I came to a stop and followed the direction of John’s arm. “You mean there? On the island?”

  “That’s the one.”

  I didn’t reply. I might have forgotten how to speak. Around the trees, down that gentle slope of spring green, nestled a small, tranquil lake; in the middle of the lake swam an island; in the middle of the island, surrounded by willows weeping and a couple of apple trees uncurling their new green leaves, sat an octagonal building like something the Romans might have left behind, made of crumbling red brick and pale stone. A swath of massive, purpling wisteria climbed up one side and over the crest of the dome, disappearing down the back. From behind us, the sun turned the stone a luminous rose-gold.

  “Rather pretty in the dying light, isn’t it?” John said, in the kind of vaguely ironic voice that probably disguised a deeper meaning, which I was too awestruck to deconstruct. “Although I expect all that lovely wisteria’s done for the roof.”

  “I think it’s beautiful.”

  “Of course it’s beautiful,” he said. “But what matters is what lies inside the thing. Wouldn’t you say?”

  He resumed his brisk pace, and I scrambled after. Though the air was turning cool, I hardly noticed; my blood was warm from exercise and anticipation. An elegant stone bridge came into view, linking the island to the shore, and as we approached it, I asked John when it was built.

  “The folly? Oh, it’s original,” he said. “The old admiral had it built as an astronomical observatory—stars being essential to navigation back then—and also to keep watch on the Channel shipping. None of his descendants shared his obsession, however, so eventually they sold off the telescope and closed up the roof.”

  We reached the bridge, and I laid my hand on the round-topped pillar at its base. “But this is more recent, isn’t it?”