“Don’t look now,” Robert leaned down to whisper, “but I don’t think Annette is traumatized by this.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe that’s because small children don’t always know what they’re seeing when they look at something.”
“And you’re sure you do?” he countered.
I shrugged. “I see an ambassador behaving indiscreetly with one of his guests,” I said.
“I see a man who often works far too hard having just a little bit of fun for once in his life,” he said.
“Then we’ll have to just agree to disagree.”
“You look like you could use a bit of fun for a change too, Miss Bell,” he said. “How about a dance?”
“Oh, no,” I started to protest, already picturing the decidedly unfashionable statement we would make: he in his cheap fed suit, me in my Sunday Bloody Sunday dress.
He wouldn’t be deterred, though.
“Come on—” he tugged a little harder “—Edgar won’t mind.”
I was about to protest that, as well—what was it to me whether Edgar minded what I did or not?—but he already had one hand at the base of my spine, taking my hand in his other. And before I could think to say anything else, my feet remembered all sorts of moves they hadn’t been encouraged to use in a long time.
“You can really dance, Miss Bell!” His surprise was evident.
“She really can,” I heard the familiar ironic voice say behind me.
I turned in Robert’s arms to find Ambassador Rawlings standing there. Then he reached over and tapped Robert Miller on the shoulder.
“May I cut in?” he asked.
“Well…” The other man looked reluctant to give me up. “I suppose the etiquette of this sort of thing dictates that I say yes, doesn’t it?”
“It does.”
“Well, I suppose I could always ask her again later.”
Robert started to hand me over.
“Hey,” I said, “don’t I get any say in the matter?”
Ambassador Rawlings placed his hand at the small of my back, where Robert’s hand had been a moment before, and looked down at me.
“No,” he said, “you don’t.”
As we began to move, I tried to ignore how good it felt to have his hand there, how different the feelings were in me than when I’d danced with the other man. Shouldn’t an employee, particularly a governess, feel awkward about dancing with her boss?
Suddenly, I felt so awkward, had talked myself into it really, that I stepped on his toe.
“Ouch!” he couldn’t help saying.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Just try to leave the other intact so I can at least hop around.”
“Sorry,” I said again, wishing myself elsewhere.
“What happened?” he asked with surprising gentleness. “A minute ago, you were practically dancing like Julie Andrews.”
“I must have gotten distracted,” I said.
We danced for a moment in silence and I managed to get my rhythm back.
“There!” he said finally. “You’re doing it again. Wherever did you learn to dance so well?”
I explained how when I was younger, my aunt insisted on lessons.
“She said I was such a klutz, I might learn some grace that way.”
“You certainly are graceful,” he observed.
“Only when I dance,” I said, ruefully looking down at the stain on my dress. “The rest of the time, I’m still me.”
The music stopped so abruptly that we were still moving for a moment afterward, until stopping abruptly ourselves. It was as though we, the ambassador and I, had been an old-fashioned record spinning on a turntable and someone had decided they didn’t like the tune, picking up the needle and dragging it across the vinyl.
We were just disengaging when Bebe Iversdottir came up beside us.
She smiled sweetly at the ambassador, but there was a lot of ice there.
“I did not play so that you could dance with another woman,” she said, still smiling all the while as though she was just teasing, when it was clear to me at least that she wasn’t.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, taking the hand she held out. “I didn’t mean to make you feel neglected.”
Odd, he was holding her hand but he was still looking at me.
“It’s okay,” I said awkwardly, since no one had said anything that should have elicited that response from me. “I should be taking Annette upstairs soon anyway.”
“Yes,” agreed Bebe. “That sounds like an excellent idea.”
I was halfway back to Annette when I heard her say to him, “I’m sure Annette’s governess is adequate, if a bit shoddy in appearance, but wouldn’t your daughter be better off going to boarding school? Myself, I went to a fine place in Switzerland from an early age. If you’d like, I can recommend…”
I didn’t stay to hear any more from her, to hear an answer from him.
“Come on, Annette,” I said. “It’s time both of us went to bed.”
“But I was hoping to meet Miss Bebe personally! I am sure she would like me very much!”
“I’m sure that’s true,” I said, not believing it for a second. What kind of cold woman would suggest sending a little girl to live somewhere that was several hours by plane away from her father? I knew what it was like to be separated, at such a young age, from my father, to feel alone in a world without parents. No matter what else might be right, the wrongness of that had skewed my entire childhood.
“But,” I told Annette, “it looks like your father and…Miss Bebe are dancing again, so perhaps it’s best you meet her another time.”
As I looked back at the happy couple, I tried to tell myself it didn’t bother me at all.
Upstairs, it seemed to take forever to get Annette settled in for the night. She kept coming up with excuses—she needed to brush her teeth a second time, she needed a glass of water, she needed to pee—to delay having me turn out the light. But I saw it for what it was: she wanted to relive what she saw as the grandeur and romance of the evening and I was the only person available with whom to do so.
“Have you ever seen such beautiful people?” she bubbled.
“They were an attractive crowd,” I admitted, pulling the blankets up over her.
“And Miss Bebe was the most attractive of all!” she said.
I tucked the blanket up under her chin, thought about what she’d said.
“I suppose that’s true,” I said.
“I wonder what kind of mother she would make,” Annette asked dreamily.
A positively horrid one, I wanted to say. She’d make the Evil Stepmother look like Snow White.
Out loud, I said, “Who can ever guess what kind of mother a woman would make? Sometimes, people surprise you.”
“Papa really enjoyed dancing with you,” she said out of the blue.
I was caught off guard.
“Do you really think so?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“Oh, yes. You would have seen his face if you had not had your own turned down almost the whole time. He was smiling bigger than I’d ever seen him smile before.”
That made me feel unaccountably happy, a feeling I quickly shoved aside.
“Oh,” I said, “he was probably overcompensating, trying not to let the pain show of me stepping on his feet. I’m sure he was happier dancing with Miss Bebe.”
“It’s hard to say,” she said, taking the matter quite seriously. “He did seem to smile a lot with her, too.”
“Well,” I said, kissing her on the forehead, “if you don’t go to sleep soon, you’ll be too tired to do any smiling yourself tomorrow.”
“Good night, Miss Bell,” she said, at last giving in to a yawn as she rolled over onto her side, tucked her little hands under the pillow. “Even if you are not as glamorous as Miss Bebe, I love you all the same.”
She was so sweet, so dear to me. I hated to think I might not one day be with her,
hated to think of Ambassador Rawlings succumbing to Bebe’s suggestion to send her away.
“I love you, too,” I said softly, turning out the light. “Sweet dreams.”
Safe at last in my own room, I removed my dress and tossed it in the trash basket; those wine stains would never come out. Then I prepared for bed, brushed my teeth, put on my white gown.
But once I was beneath the sheets, sleep wouldn’t come. I kept replaying the events of the evening, a different version than Annette’s, the good and the bad. And if that weren’t enough, the sound of loud music and increasingly boisterous merrymaking from down below would have kept me awake. Perhaps Annette could sleep through anything, including a fire, but I couldn’t. Honestly, didn’t these selfish people downstairs think of anyone but themselves?
I punched my pillow, tossed, turned. After counting enough sheep to fill both Australia and Argentina, I at last slept.
But my sleep was fitful.
First I dreamed that I was back with Buster Keating, but then he was replaced by Ambassador Rawlings. No sooner did I find myself in his arms than I was replaced in my own dream by Bebe Iversdottir, who was no longer wearing her red dress, but rather had on a long white Victorian wedding gown. I stood by Annette in the dream, throwing rice—the one thing that told my relieved unconscious mind that it was a dream, since I’d never throw rice in real life because of what it does to birds and all. I held Annette’s hand as we waved the happy couple off, tears streaming down my face, not of joy, but of sadness.
I woke abruptly to the feel of wet tears streaming down my cheeks and a gentle tapping at my door. That tapping, growing more insistent, was the only sound in the now-quiet house.
“Yes?” I called, wiping at the tears.
The handle turned and then Ambassador Rawlings was in the room.
I saw that the tie of his tux had been undone, the shirt collar opened. His hair was disheveled and a scent of alcohol entered the room with him. I suppose that for the first time since I knew him, I could see that he was a bit drunk.
“As I came up the stairs,” he said, “I thought I heard someone crying.”
“Perhaps it was the madwoman,” I suggested, trying to make a joke of it.
“No—” he shook his head in earnest “—I could have sworn it was coming from in here.”
“Then you were mistaken,” I said, hoping the room was dark enough that he wouldn’t see any remnant tears on my cheeks.
“Oh,” he said, sitting on the edge of my bed as though I were Annette and he were, well, me, “then I am relieved.”
“Relieved, sir?”
“Of course. Do you imagine that I wish you unhappy, Charlotte?”
I figured he must be very drunk to call me Charlotte again.
“No, of course not,” I said. “But I also wouldn’t imagine you give my happiness any thought one way or another.” It didn’t matter that he asked me about it every week; I hadn’t believed his queries about my happiness were sincere.
“Then you must think me a very hard man.”
“Hard?” I echoed him again. “Not at all. I merely think you’re my employer.”
“Meaning?”
“Why should my happiness matter to you in the slightest, so long as I do my job well enough?”
“I see,” he said, and then he just sat there for a moment.
His proximity was making me uncomfortable.
“Is there anything else, sir?” I asked
Now it was his turn to echo me. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Anything else. Now that you know that whatever sound you heard was not me crying, is there anything else?”
“No,” he said, rising slowly and heading for the door, “I suppose not.” Then he turned. “Did you enjoy yourself this evening?”
“I liked seeing Annette so happy,” I answered truthfully. I always liked seeing Annette happy.
“Yes, of course,” he said, “as do I. But did you enjoy dancing…with me?”
I couldn’t lie.
“Yes,” I said quietly.
“Thank you,” he said. “Good night, Miss Bell.”
“Ambassador?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not really going to send Annette away to boarding school, are you?”
“I’m certainly not going to do it tonight,” he said.
“Nor tomorrow?”
“Nor tomorrow, either. Sweet dreams, Miss Bell.”
“Good night, sir.”
No sooner had he closed the door than I heard that eerie laugh, that awful sound I hadn’t heard in a long time. To me, it sounded as though someone was objecting to the closeness we had shared for a moment there.
chapter 9
Normally, if you get disturbed in mid-dream and want to return to it, it’s impossible to do so. No matter how you try to retrieve the wonder, it evades you, your subconscious mocking you as if to say, You want it so badly? Well, ha! I won’t give it to you! But have a screaming nightmare, as I’d had many over the years—the usual one where I’m too late to take an important final exam or the more troubling one in which my own father has a gun and is trying to kill me—and each time you try to raise yourself to consciousness in order to escape the horror, just as soon as you close your eyes again the same awful images come rushing back.
And so it had been the night before after Ambassador Rawlings had left me. No sooner did I close my eyes than the dreadful picture came back of Bebe Iversdottir as his grinning bride.
Abandoning sleep at dawn, I rejected the images. There had been real closeness between him and me the evening before, had there not? I refused to let myself imagine what this might mean, refused to let myself dwell on what my own feelings might be, but a hopeful feeling awoke in me coincident with my rising, even as that hope was at war with a vague uneasiness that my haunted dreams of the night before must surely function as an ill omen.
Feeling more upbeat than I had in a long time, I hummed as I prepared for the day, taking more time than usual with my dress. When I at last went down to breakfast, it was with the optimistic expectation that I would see him there. After the late night he’d had, surely he would be taking it at a slower pace this morning. How would he speak to me? I wondered. Would I be able to see evidence of the affection I’d felt between us?
But when I got to the table, there was only Mrs. Fairly and Annette, dining on pancakes and juice, and Lars Aquavit, finishing a last cup of coffee.
“Where’s Ambassador Rawlings?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“What’s it to you?” Mrs. Fairly asked with unusual tartness.
But then I noticed the bags under her eyes. Despite that she was usually a sound sleeper, and like Annette could sleep through a fire, the noise from downstairs on the previous evening must have kept her awake.
“I was only curious,” I said, “that’s all.”
“Gone already,” Lars Aquavit said, taking another sip of his coffee. “I drove him and Miss Iversdottir to the airport earlier. They wanted to catch a plane to the Westman Islands.”
“The Westman Islands?” I echoed dumbly.
“Yes,” he said. “Miss Iversdottir said she wanted to do some rock-climbing there and the ambassador was only too happy to accompany her.”
How…outdoorsy of her, I thought. I hoped that, with the hangovers they must surely have, they didn’t fall to their deaths. Or at least I hoped one of them wouldn’t.
“Does that not sound romantic and adventurous?” Annette enthused.
I admitted that it did, thinking all the while that no one would ever catch me climbing rocks. I hate heights. Have I mentioned that already?
“They’ll be back this evening?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Fairly spoke the words as though I were being incredibly silly. “They won’t be back for at least a few days.”
“I see,” I said. “Annette, as soon as you finish your breakfast, we really should get down to work. What with all of
the silly fuss and bother here the last few days, there’s been precious little time to get anything serious accomplished.”
“Aren’t you going to eat anything?” Lars Aquavit asked.
“I’m not hungry this morning,” I said.
Despite what I’d said to Annette about the need to get serious, I found myself unable to concentrate once we had her workbooks arranged on the table before us. Honestly, who cared if the letter S was made the way it was supposed to be or if it was a little backward? I could still read what she was trying to write: Bebe Iversdottir Rawlings.
“Why don’t you get out your art things,” I suggested.
“But you don’t usually let me paint until I have finished my lessons,” she objected.
“What,” I said, feeling unaccountably testy, “you’re suddenly a stickler for rules? You’d rather work on your letters than draw a picture of, oh, I don’t know, a cow?”
“I’ll take the cow, please.” She smiled.
“That’s what I thought.”
Once I had her squared away, enough black and white acrylics squeezed onto the palette, plus a dab of pink for the nose, her smock on, I excused myself to make a phone call.
I needed to talk to somebody, so I decided to call Gina.
“What a grand surprise!” she said, answering her work phone.
“Can you talk?” I asked. “You won’t get in trouble with anybody there?”
“Trouble?” My question clearly puzzled her. “Oh, no. I was just retranslating a book by Czeslaw Milosz. In English, you would call it The Captive Mind. You know, it really is amazing, how much more you understand of totalitarianism when you translate this kind of thing repeatedly.”
“I’ll bet,” I said, not really sure what I was agreeing with. “But I thought you worked on ancient texts?”
“Yes, but every now and then we get to play around a bit.”
“Well, it still sounds like pretty serious work. I suppose you must be anxious to get back to it.”
“A bit,” she confessed. “I was just getting to the exciting part.”
I was sure it would be a mistake for me to ask, so I didn’t.
How Nancy Drew Saved My Life Page 15
