Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  The doctor stood at last and told me that he was finished, and I should dress the wound. “Not too tight; you nurses are always dressing a wound too tight. I will have to come back with the transfusion equipment. It may take an hour or two. Can you stay awake with him?”

  Yes, I could.

  “Then we will put him in his bed.” He signaled for one of the crew, who were hovering anxiously nearby, and somehow made himself clear with gestures and a few scant words of German. Two of the men hoisted Stefan up—he was out cold by now, his dark head turned to one side—and the doctor yelled at them to be careful. He turned to me. “Don’t leave his side for a second. You know what to look for, I think? Signs of shock?”

  “Yes. I will watch him like a child, I promise.”

  2.

  He did look like a child, lying there on his clean white bed, when I had tucked the sheets around his bare chest, and his face was so pale and peaceful I checked his pulse and his breathing every minute or so to make certain he hadn’t died. I turned off the electric light overhead and kept only the small lamp burning next to his bed, just enough to see him by. His skin was smooth, only a few faint lines about the eyes, and his hair was quite dark, curling wetly around his ears and forehead. He was about my brother’s age, I thought, twenty-three or -four. His lashes were long and dark, lying against his cheek, and I wondered what color his eyes were. Stefan Silverman’s eyes. When I touched his shoulder, his lids fluttered.

  “Shh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

  He opened those eyes just long enough for me to decide that they were probably brown, but a very light brown, like a salt caramel. He tried to focus and I thought he failed, because his lids dropped again and his head turned an inch or two to the side, away from me.

  But then he said, almost without moving his lips: “Stay, Mademoiselle.”

  I smoothed the sheets against his chest, an excuse to touch him. He smelled of gin and antiseptic. I thought, It’s like waiting forever for the film to start, and then it does.

  “As long as you need me,” I told him.

  3.

  At half past eight o’clock in the morning, Stefan’s mistress arrived.

  Or so I assumed. I could hear a woman on the other side of the cabin door, shrill and furious like a mistress. She was remonstrating with someone in French (of course), and her opponent was speaking back to her in German. Stefan opened his eyes and stared, frowning, at the ceiling.

  “I think you have a visitor,” I said.

  He sighed. “Can you give us a minute or two, Mademoiselle?”

  “You shouldn’t see anyone. You have lost so much blood. You need to rest.”

  “Yes, but I’m feeling better now.”

  I wanted to remind him that he was feeling better only because he had a pint of Annabelle de Créouville coursing through his veins. I rose to my feet—a little carefully, because a pint of blood meant a great deal more to me than it did to him—and went to the door.

  The woman stopped shrilling when she saw me. She was dressed in a long and shimmering evening gown, and her hair was a little disordered. There was a diamond clip holding back a handful of once-sleek curls at her temple, and a circle of matching diamonds around her neck. Her lipstick was long gone. Her eyes flicked up and down, taking me in, exposing the line of smudged kohl on her upper lid. “And who are you?” she asked, in haughty French, though I could tell from her accent that she was English.

  “His nurse.”

  “I must see him.”

  I stood back from the door. “Five minutes,” I said, in my sternest ward sister voice, “and if you upset him even the smallest amount, if I hear so much as a single word through this door, I will open your veins and bathe in your blood.”

  I must have looked as if I meant it, for she ducked through the door like a frightened rabbit, and when six minutes had passed without a single sound, I knocked briefly on the door and opened it.

  Stefan lay quite still on the bed. His eyes were closed, and the woman’s hand rested in his palm. She was curled in the armchair—my armchair, I thought fiercely—and she didn’t look up when I entered. “He is so pale,” she said, and her voice was rough. “I have never seen him like this. He is always so vital.”

  “As I said, he has lost a great deal of blood.”

  “May I sit with him a little longer?”

  She said it humbly, the haughtiness dissolved, and when she tilted her head in my direction and accepted my gaze, I saw a track of gray kohl running down from the corner of her eye to the curve of her cheekbone. She had dark blond hair the color of honey, and it gleamed dully in the lamplight. Her gown was cut into a V so low, I could count the ribs below her breasts. I looked at Stefan’s hand holding hers, and I said, “Yes, a little longer,” and went back out the door and down the narrow corridor to the stern of the ship, which was pointed toward the exposed turrets of the Fort Royal on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, where the Man in the Iron Mask had spent a decade of his life in a special isolated cell, though no one ever knew who he was or why he was there. Whether he had a family who mourned him.

  4.

  I had sent a note for Charles with the departing doctor, in the small hours of the morning, and I expected my brother any moment to arrive on the yacht, to assure himself of Stefan’s survival and to bring me home.

  But lunchtime came and went, the disheveled blonde departed, and though someone brought me a tray of food, and a bowl of hot broth for Stefan, Charles never appeared.

  Stefan slept. At six o’clock, a boat hailed the deck and the doctor’s head popped over the side, followed by his bag. The day had been warm, and the air was still hot and laden with moisture. “How is our patient this evening?” he asked.

  “Much better.” I turned and led him down the hallway to Stefan’s commodious stateroom. “He’s slept most of the day and had a little broth.” I didn’t mention the woman.

  “Excellent, excellent. Sleep is the best thing for him. Pulse? Temperature?”

  “All normal. The pulse is slow, but not alarmingly so.”

  “To be expected. He is an active man. Well, well,” he said, ducking through the door, “how is our intrepid hero, eh?”

  Stefan was awake, propped up on his pillows. He shot the doctor the kind of look that parents send each other when children are present, and listening too closely. The doctor glanced at me, cleared his throat, and set his bag on the end of the bed.

  “Now, then,” he said, “let us take a look at this little scratch of yours.”

  On the way back to the boat, the doctor gave me a list of instructions: sleep, food, signs of trouble. “He is quite strong, however, and I should not be surprised if he is up and about in a matter of days. I shall send over a pair of crutches. You will see that he does not overexert himself, please.”

  “I don’t understand. I had no expectation of staying longer than a day.”

  The doctor stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “What’s this?”

  “I gave you a message, to give to my brother. Wasn’t there a reply? Isn’t he coming for me?”

  He pushed his spectacles up his nose and blinked slowly. The sun was beginning to touch the cliffs to the west, and the orange light surrounded his hair. The deck around us was neat and shining, bleached to the color of bone, smelling of tar and sunshine. “Coming for you? Of course not. You are to care for the patient. Who else is to do it?”

  “But I’ll be missed,” I said helplessly. “My father— You must know who I am. I can’t just disappear.”

  The doctor turned and resumed his journey across the deck to the ladder, where his tender lay bobbing in the Isolde’s lee. “My dear girl, this is nothing that young Créouville cannot explain. He is a clever fellow. No doubt he has already put about a suitable story.”

  “But I don’t understand. What’s going on? What sort of trouble is this?”
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  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said virtuously.

  “Yes, you do. What sort of trouble gets a man shot in the night like that, everything a big secret, and what . . . what does my brother have to do with any of it? And why the devil are you smiling that way, like a cat?”

  “Because I am astonished, Mademoiselle, and not a little filled with admiration, that you have undertaken this little adventure with no knowledge whatever of its meaning.”

  We had reached the ladder. I grabbed him by the arm and turned him around. “Then perhaps you might begin by explaining it to me.”

  He shook his head and patted my cheek. His eyes were kind, and the smile had disappeared. “I cannot, of course. But when the patient is a little more recovered, it’s my professional opinion that you have every right to ask him yourself.”

  5.

  The next day, Stefan roared for his crutches, an excellent sign, but I wouldn’t let him have them. I made him eat two eggs for breakfast and a little more beef broth, and he grumbled and ate. I told him that if he were very good and rested quietly, I would let him try out the crutches tomorrow. He glared with his salt caramel eyes and directed me to go to the Isolde’s library and bring him some books. He wrote down their titles on a piece of paper.

  The weather was hot again today, the sun like a blister in the fierce blue sky, and every porthole was open to the cooling breeze off the water. I passed along the silent corridor to the grand staircase, a sleek modern fusion of chrome and white marble, filled with seething Mediterranean light, and the library was exactly where Stefan said it should be: the other side of the main salon.

  It was locked, but Stefan had given me the key. I opened the door expecting the usual half-stocked library of the yachting class: the shelves occupied by a few token volumes and a great many valuable objets of a maritime theme, the furniture arranged for style instead of a comfortable hours-long submersion between a pair of cloth covers.

  But the Isolde’s library wasn’t like the rest of the ship. There was nothing sleek about it, nothing constructed out of shiny material. The walnut shelves wrapped around the walls, stuffed with books, newer ones and older ones, held in place by slim wooden rails in case of stormy seas. A sofa and a pair of armchairs dozed near the portholes, and a small walnut desk sat on the other side, next to a cabinet that briefly interrupted the flow of shelving. I thought, Now, here is a room I might like to live in.

  I looked down at the paper in my hand. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers; Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Dumas père, Le vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard.

  When I returned to Stefan’s cabin a half hour later, he was sitting up against the pillows and staring at the porthole opposite, which was open to the breeze. The rooftops of the fort shifted in and out of the frame, nearly white in the sunshine. It was too hot for blankets, and he lay in his pajamas on the bed I had made expertly underneath him that morning, tight as a drum. “Here are your books,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a bear in a cage.”

  “You are certainly acting like a bear.”

  He looked up from the books. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve had worse patients. It’s good that you’re a bear. Better a bear than a sick little worm.”

  “Poor Mademoiselle de Créouville. I understand your brother has ordered you to stay with me and nurse me back to health.”

  “Not in so many words.” I paused. “Not in any words at all, really. He sent over a few clothes and a toothbrush yesterday, with the doctor, but there was no note of any kind. I still haven’t the faintest idea who you are, or what I’m doing here.”

  He frowned. “Do you need one?”

  I folded my arms and sank into the armchair next to the bed. His pajamas were fine silky cotton and striped in blue, and one lapel was still folded endearingly on the inside, as if belonging to a little boy who had dressed himself too hastily. The blueness brought out the bright caramel of his eyes and, by some elusive trick, made his chest seem even sturdier than before. His color had returned, pink and new; his hair was brushed; his thick jaw was smooth and smelled of shaving soap. You would hardly have known he was hurt, except for the bulky dressing that distended one blue-striped pajama leg. “What do you think?” I said.

  He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. “You are a nurse. You see before you an injured man. You have a cabin, a change of clothes, a dozen men to serve you. What more is necessary for an obedient young lady who knows it is impertinent to ask questions?”

  I opened my mouth to say something indignant, and then I saw the expression on his face as he lit the cigarette between his lips with a sharp-edged gold lighter and tossed the lighter back on the nightstand. The end of the cigarette flared orange. I said, “You do realize you’re at my mercy, don’t you?”

  “I have known that for some time, yes. Since you first walked into that miserable boathouse in your white dress and stained it with my blood.”

  “Oh, you’re flirting again. Anyway, I returned the favor, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. We are now bound at the most elemental level, aren’t we? I believe the ancients would say we have taken a sacred oath, and are bound together for eternity.” He reached for the ashtray and placed it on the bed, next to his leg, and his eyes danced.

  “If that’s your strategy for conquering my virtue, you’ll have to try much harder.”

  Stefan’s face turned more serious. He placed his hand with the cigarette on the topmost book, the Goethe, nearly covering it, and said, “What I mean by all that, of course, is thank you, Mademoiselle. Because there are really no proper words to describe my gratitude.”

  I leaned forward and turned the lapel of his pajamas right side out. “Since we are now bound together for eternity,” I said, “you may call me Annabelle.”

  6.

  Of course, my full name was much longer.

  I was christened Annabelle Marie-Elisabeth, Princesse de Créouville, a title bought for me by my mother, who married Prince Edouard de Créouville with her share of the colossal fortune left to her and her sister by their father, a New England industrialist. Textiles, I believe. I never met the man who was my grandfather. My father was impoverished, as European nobility generally was, and generously happy to make the necessary bargain.

  At least my mother was beautiful. Not beautiful like a film star—on a woman with less money, her beauty would be labeled handsome—but striking enough to set her apart from most of the debutantes that year. So she married her prince, she gave birth to Charles nine months later and me another four years after that, and then, ooh la la, caught her husband in bed with Peggy Guggenheim and asked for a divorce. (But everybody’s doing it, my father protested, and my mother said, Adultery or Peggy Guggenheim? and my father replied, Both.) So that was the end of that, though in order to secure my father’s cooperation in the divorce (he was Catholic and so was the marriage) my mother had to leave behind what remained of her fortune. C’est la vie. We moved back to America and lived in a modest house in Brookline, Massachusetts, summering with relatives in Cape Cod, until Mummy’s appendix burst and it was back to France and Saint Cecilia’s on the storm-dashed Brittany coast.

  “But that is medieval,” said Stefan, to whom I was relating this story a week later, on a pair of deck chairs overlooking a fascinating sunset. He was still in pajamas, smoking a cigarette and drinking a dry martini; I wore a lavender sundress and sipped lemonade.

  “My father’s Paris apartment was hardly the place for an eleven-year-old girl,” I pointed out.

  “True. And I suppose I have no right to complain, having reaped the benefit of your convent education. But I hate to think of my Annabelle being imprisoned in such a bitter climate, when she is so clearly meant for sunshine and freedom. And then to have lost such a mother at s
uch an age, and your father so clearly unworthy of this gift with which he was entrusted. It enrages me. Are you sure you won’t have a drink?”

  “I have a drink.”

  “I mean a real one, Annabelle. A grown-up drink.”

  “I don’t drink when I’m on duty.”

  “Are you still on duty, then?” He crushed the spent cigarette into an ashtray and plucked the olive out of his martini. He handed it to me.

  I popped the gin-soaked olive into my mouth. “Yes, very much.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. I had hoped, by now, you were staying of your own accord. Do you not enjoy these long hours on the deck of my beautiful ship, when you read to me in your charming voice, and then I return the favor by teaching you German and telling you stories until the sun sets?”

  “Of course I do. But until you’re wearing a dinner jacket instead of pajamas, and your crutches have been put away, you’re still my patient. And then you won’t need me anymore, so I’ll go back home.”

  He finished the martini and reached for another cigarette. “Ah, Annabelle. You crush me. But you know already I have no need of a nurse. Dr. Duchamps told me so yesterday, when he removed the stitches.” He tapped his leg with his cigarette. “I am nearly healed.”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  “Perhaps he is a romantic fellow and wants you to stay right here with me, tending to my many needs.”