The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  Chapter 12

  Tess

  At Sea

  Monday, May 3, 1915

  “Pardon me,” said Tess, as she dodged past a nanny and her charges on the Shelter Deck, just outside the upper level of the first-class dining room.

  The children of the saloon passengers were being gently separated from their hoops and tops, extracted from their games, shuffled off to dinner and bed so their parents could come out to play. And by play, Tess meant dine and drink and play at cards and make a hash of amateur theatricals. It was, to recall a phrase from her childhood, none of her no-nevermind. It wasn’t any of Tess’s business what the swells did, just so long as it kept them from their cabins, visibly occupied elsewhere.

  Really, thought Tess, it was terribly kind of the architect of the Lusitania to have included a rotunda over the first-class dining room. Not only did the balcony make an excellent vantage point, but the ornamental pillars provided cover, a place to keep an eye on the comings and goings. One coming in particular: Caroline Hochstetter. Once Mrs. Hochstetter was safely seated, Tess could hightail it to the Hochstetter cabin.

  And then? Oh, nothing much. Just crack a safe, extract the contents, and get away before anyone saw her. Simple stuff.

  It’s the last time, Tess reminded herself, heading for a likely pillar.

  There was one problem. Her pillar was already occupied, and by the look of him, the incumbent had been standing there for some time.

  “Why doesn’t it surprise me to see you here?” Mr. Langford lifted a silver flask in greeting. Tess caught a brief glimpse of a crest incised on one side before he tilted it back, drinking deeply.

  “Because you just can’t stay away from me?” Tess quipped, trying to decide what to do. He’d notice if she found another pillar. On the other hand, chatting with an acquaintance gave her an excuse for being up here.

  On the whole, Tess rationalized to herself, Mr. Langford might be more of a blessing than a curse. Albeit a rather grumpy one.

  “You seem to have recovered,” said Mr. Langford. He did not sound particularly enthused. He waved the flask. “From your . . .”

  “Mal de mer?” provided Tess with a grin, but Mr. Langford failed to smile back. Silly to feel hurt. It wasn’t as if they were anything more than chance acquaintances. She nodded at his watch chain. “Do you have the time?”

  “‘I have wasted time and now time doth waste me.’” Mr. Langford took another swig from the silver flask before hoisting his watch from his waistcoat pocket. “It’s half five.”

  Later than she had thought. “Ta,” said Tess, as she had heard the English porters do. And then, “Are you all right? You look a little—”

  “Beset? Besieged? Bewildered?”

  “I asked if you were all right, not if you’d swallowed a dictionary,” retorted Tess, but the ashen cast of Mr. Langford’s elegant features took the bite out of her words. Moved by genuine concern, she took a step closer. “Is something wrong? Is it . . . your brother?”

  “Jamie?” Mr. Langford raised a brow. He did it very nicely, one graceful arch, with no unsightly eye scrunching. He slouched back against the pillar. “It ought to be Jamie, oughtn’t it? But no. Nothing that noble. Nothing that simple.”

  “I’m good at complicated,” offered Tess. Mr. Langford gave her a look. Tess shrugged. “What? Call it payment for the use of your coat. It’s a onetime offer.”

  “If you must know,” Mr. Langford said testily, “I’ve been in love with the same woman for the better part of a decade, and she hasn’t the slightest idea I’m alive.”

  Tess pressed her eyes shut. That was what she got for asking. “Oh, I’d say she knows you’re alive, all right. If we’re talking about the same woman.”

  “Oh, yes—as a dancing partner, maybe,” said Mr. Langford bitterly. “As someone to play duets with while her bloody husband talks business. But that’s all. I’m just a pair of legs and fingers.”

  “Legs and fingers?” Tess choked on a laugh and tried to turn it into a wheeze. “Sorry. Sorry. I shouldn’t mock. Love’s hell, right?”

  Not that she’d know. The closest she’d come to romantic love was of the “if you don’t move that hand, I’ll shoot your fingers off” variety. She’d fancied herself in love once, sixteen and naïve, but her family had moved through town too quickly for her to do anything stupider than a bit of canoodling behind a cowshed. For which she was grateful. Really, she was.

  Mr. Langford scowled at her. “Go right ahead, mock, mock, mock. You want something to mock? Your so-called accent. Where in Devon did you say you were from again? And did you emigrate via the moon?”

  “I only went for the green cheese.” Mr. Langford was not amused. But, then, this wasn’t about her accent, was it? Tess let out a deep breath. “Fine. You caught me. I was faking the accent. Happy now?”

  “Oh, blissfully,” said Mr. Langford bitingly. “Why pretend?”

  “Look, I was a kid when I came here. But I always knew it wasn’t for keeps.” Sometimes, the best lies weren’t lies at all. “I thought—I thought people on the other side of the Pond might take me more seriously if I sounded like I belonged. Do you know what it is not to belong anywhere anymore?”

  Mr. Langford’s eyes burned through her. His clipped British accent very apparent, he said, “Do you need to ask me that?”

  Her cheeks were too hot and her hands were too cold; Tess felt as though she had a fever, half-chills, half-flame, and all because of the strange, electric feeling of his eyes on her, seeing her, seeing through her. They had nothing in common; they were from worlds apart. So why did she feel like she was staring into the other half of her own soul?

  “Oh, give me that,” said Tess, and grabbed the flask from him before he had time to protest, tipping off the cap with an expert flick and emptying it gratefully over her mouth. It went down strong but smooth, the burn a welcome distraction. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, deliberately crude. “Lordy, that’s good. You may have dubious taste in women, but you sure do know your whisky.”

  “Where,” said Mr. Langford, ignoring the insult, “did you learn to drink like that?”

  “Finishing school,” said Tess, and took another swig, more for show than anything else. She didn’t like getting drunk; she didn’t like the loosening of her limbs, the dimming of her wits.

  Mr. Langford gave her an incredulous look. “I’d like to see that school.”

  “I bet you would. My . . .” She’d almost said “father.” Tess hid her confusion with a cough. “My aunt’s husband made his own ’shine. Until the law caught up with him, that was.” Ten dollars’ worth of lovely copper coils reduced to rubbish. “You grow up being dosed with that, you can drink anything. But we’re not meant to be talking about me. We’re meant to be talking about you. Here you go, Romeo. Drink up.”

  “‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound,’” said Mr. Langford darkly. He tipped back the flask and then looked owlishly at Tess over the silver cap. “You want to know what bothers me?”

  “I expect I’m going to hear it,” said Tess. She snagged the flask. “Shoot.”

  “I’ve loved her for years. Years.”

  Tess rolled her eyes at the elaborately painted ceiling. “Yes, you had mentioned that.”

  Mr. Langford glared at her. “Do you want to hear this or not? I’ve loved her ever since I met her at a ball just weeks after I arrived in the States. She wasn’t meant to be there—she wasn’t out yet—but her mother brought her all the same. And I found her casting up her accounts in the rosebushes.”

  “Last of the great romantics, you,” muttered Tess, but for all she wanted to make fun, there was something about the story that hit her hard where it hurt. Because it was romantic, more romantic than all those fools who mooned over their perfect loves. You saw a woman at her most vulnerable and still wanted her? That was something different, indeed. “So what happened?”

  “She married,” said Mr. Langford bleakly. “A man a
dozen years her senior. More. And I didn’t have the sense or the will to stop it. I was traveling the country, satisfying my wanderlust. She was only sixteen when I met her. It never occurred to me—but it ought. I ought to have known. I ought to have at least sent her a bloody letter. But she was in school still! There was all the time in the world.”

  “You weren’t the one who married,” Tess pointed out.

  “No, but . . .” Mr. Langford shook his head helplessly. He looked directly at Tess. “Do you know what I did today? I finally told her the truth. I told her that I’ve been in love with her since that night at the Talmadges’ hideous party. I stripped myself to the bone.”

  “And?” Tess prompted, feeling a strange lump in her stomach.

  Mr. Langford drew himself up to his full height. “She told me that she loves her bloody husband.”

  “Oh,” said Tess, feeling both relieved and intensely sorry at the same time. Neither of which made the least bit of sense.

  “Oh,” agreed Mr. Langford. “She kissed me. She kissed me.”

  “I can see where that might give you ideas,” hedged Tess, trying to suppress the urge to slap Caroline Hochstetter right across her pampered face.

  “It did,” said Mr. Langford shortly. “But I was wrong. It wasn’t about me at all, it seems. I might have been anyone. I was just the teaser stallion. Warming her up for her proper mate.”

  “Ouch,” said Tess, as mildly as she could. “No wonder you look like you want to kick out the rails of your pen. Should I give you some hot mash and tuck you up for the night?”

  Mr. Langford scowled at her. “Why do I talk to you?”

  “Because you can’t talk to anyone else.” And she was nobody, not even a whippet. Tess made up her mind. “You gave me some good advice yesterday. So I’m going to return the favor. Here. You might want to take a bit more of this,” she added, shoving the flask back in his general direction.

  “That’s your advice? To drink? Forgive my skepticism, but I’ve already tried that. It doesn’t work.”

  Fine words from a man who’d snatched up that flask faster than a frog on a June bug. “Now who’s having trouble accepting a kindness? The drink isn’t the advice. It’s just a temporary panacea. Think of it more as . . . the anesthesia before the amputation.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of this,” muttered Mr. Langford into the mouth of the flask. “Which part of me are you planning to sever?”

  “The part of you that’s wasted ten damn fool years on a woman who doesn’t want you.” Tess muscled up to him. He was considerably taller than she was; she had to crick back her neck to look him in the eye. Not like the elegant and willowy Caroline Hochstetter, who had only to tilt her head gently. Hmph. Tess enunciated slowly and clearly. “Any woman who uses you to get to another man isn’t worth your time. She’s not the one for you.”

  “Or she just hasn’t realized it yet.” The words seemed to come from deep in his chest, a raw, whisky-infused rumble that Tess felt as much as heard.

  “Yet?” Tess poked him in the chest. Hard. “Didn’t you say it’s been ten years? How much longer are you planning to give her?”

  “And you should, if you please, refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews . . . That’s from a poem, you know. Marvell. ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ Had we but world enough, and time . . .” Mr. Langford regarded Tess with heavy-lidded eyes. “He was trying to persuade her to forget her virtue, of course.”

  He was trying to shock her, she knew, to get back at her for her unwanted advice. But she was no debutante to quail at the mention of what went on between a man and a woman.

  Tess folded her arms across her chest. “Is that what you want from Mrs. Hochstetter? To get her into bed?”

  “Damn your eyes,” said Mr. Langford, but he said it without heat. He raised his eyes to the heavens. Or, rather, to the idealized imitation of the heavens painted in rococo splendor above their heads, mute gods and goddesses, shepherds whose pan pipes remained forever silent. “God, what did I do to deserve you? Have you been assigned as my own particular conscience? Or merely a goad? Yes, if you must know. And no . . . I want her, yes; who wouldn’t?”

  Who indeed? But Tess didn’t say it aloud. She wasn’t a woman here. She was a semi-detached conscience. Or perhaps a goad. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “But?” she prompted.

  “I only want her body if it comes with the rest of her. Her heart, her soul, her conscious will.” Mr. Langford laughed without humor. “That’s a nice bit of ego, isn’t it? Wanting to possess someone entirely, inside and out. But that’s what it is: that’s what I want, not a quick tumble in the sheets, but a love for the ages, the sort minstrels sing about centuries on. Troy lost, Camelot fallen, diplomacy upended, and kingdoms ruined.”

  “You talk like that and I’m confiscating your hooch,” said Tess tartly. “No one is worth telling the world to go to hell. That’s not love; that’s arson.”

  “Love is to burn.” He added, with deliberate provocation, “You might know that if you’d ever been in love.”

  Tess’s teeth clamped so hard that her jaw hurt. “Did it never occur to you, perhaps, that you’ve loved her for so long that loving her has become a sort of habit for you?”

  Mr. Langford looked at her with the appalled disgust usually reserved for the sort of people who picked their teeth in public. “What in the devil is that supposed to mean?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound. “You want to talk about minstrels singing? Half the time, those knights were off on quests for things they didn’t even want. Grails, wild boar, women, it didn’t much matter, did it? The point was the chase.” Like her father, always questing after something. “That’s not to say Mrs. Hochstetter isn’t a fine woman. She is. But have you thought about what you’d do with her if you got her? I mean, besides making kingdoms topple.”

  Mr. Langford’s lips were pressed in a thin, white line. He stared at her with burning eyes, but made no response.

  Couldn’t argue with her, could he? Tess met him stare for stare. “Never mind, I’m sure you’d play lovely duets together. That would take up—what?—two or three hours in a day?”

  Mr. Langford forced the words between his lips. “You know nothing about it.”

  “Don’t I?” Tess shot back, and for a moment she wasn’t sure if she was talking about him or about herself. “It’s easy to love someone you can’t have. There’s no risk in it.”

  “Oh, isn’t there?” Mr. Langford’s jacket buttons scraped against hers, Savile Row against Woolworth.

  Tess refused to back down. She blew out her chest like a pigeon. “What risk? That she’ll divorce her husband and you might actually have to risk making your life around another person? Caring about another person? Trusting another person?” The words tore up from deep inside her, raw and painful. Tess bit down deeply on her lip, so hard she could taste blood. “Never mind. You asked my advice, and I’m giving it. Here it is. Forget her.”

  Something naked and vulnerable passed across his face. “How in the bloody hell am I meant to do that?”

  Tess could practically taste the whisky on his breath. His fine-featured face was inches from hers, scored with torment. She didn’t think; she just acted.

  “You can start with this.” Grasping his lapels, Tess pulled his face down to hers.

  She’d meant to kiss and run. Just a brief smack on the lips, for effect’s sake. But this wasn’t a boy behind a cowshed. This was a man: a man with a fair amount of whisky in him, a man who’d already been kissed and left. His hands closed around her arms; his mouth slanted across hers, hot and hard, holding her to the promise of her kiss. Never mind that it had been meant as a false promise, she was caught now, caught fast, dizzy with the smell of whisky, tobacco, and expensive shaving soap. Dizzy with the smell of him.

  Colors flared behind her closed eyes, like a Turner painting, all orange and red, purple and gold; she was drowning in it, drowning in color and light, and the only way
to stay afloat was to pour it all back out on the canvas, kissing him back as good as she got, clinging to his shoulders with both hands, his buttons leaving dents in her chest, his hands burning through her back.

  It was the dinner bell that brought them both to their senses, tolling loudly enough to make Tess’s ears ring. Or maybe it was the kiss making her ears ring.

  She stumbled back, feeling the painted wood of the railing hard against the small of her back.

  “Steady on now,” said Mr. Langford unsteadily, taking a half-step forward.

  Tess held out a hand to ward him off. If he touched her again—well, it wouldn’t be a good idea, that was all.

  “Don’t fret yourself,” she said tartly, or as tartly as she could, with all her breath constricted somewhere below her corset. “I’m not flinging myself over the balcony. But don’t you go getting any ideas now! That was just—just a thank-you for yesterday. Now we’re quits.”

  Mr. Langford blinked at her. “You call that quits?”

  It was gratifying, dangerously so, that he sounded as bemused as she felt. Now who was the teaser mare? Tess thought savagely. And she’d walked right into it herself. No point blaming Mr. Langford. This was all on her head. Not that she’d ever tell him so.

  Below, Caroline Hochstetter, serene in pearls, entered the dining room on her husband’s arm, Margery Schuyler close on their heels, her awkward gait serving only to emphasize Caroline Hochstetter’s elegance, an elegance that went deeper than clothes and jewels, imbued in her bones, her carriage, the tilt of her head. She would never be caught slamming down ’shine, or flaunt her bosom to distract a mark. Tess tasted bile at the back of her throat, bile and whisky.

  “Two women kissing you,” Tess said mockingly. “Don’t let it go to your head.”