“That was about the time you went on your last patrol, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, “and it astounded me, later, to see what she’d manufactured for herself out of that thin raw material. Her war memoirs were a shocking fabrication; I hope you don’t plan on reading them. They brought her fame, of course, and I don’t suppose it does me any actual harm. And she lost her brother, you know, less than a year after my own supposed death. Blown to pieces by a German shell, apparently. A terrible blow for her; they were quite close. So it would be churlish of me to hold grudges.”
“You never loved her?”
“Darling, by the time I left for the front, Flora Hamilton was beginning to represent all I most disliked about my world. And to compare the… the fleeting feelings I had for her with those I bear for you…”
“But you wrote the poem for her.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “The poem.”
“Your everlasting fame comes from a… a love sonnet to another woman,” I said, hiding my expression behind the soup spoon.
He spoke slowly. “It’s generally supposed that I was referring to England. To the love of king and country as redemption for war’s evil.”
“… And her beauty
Glowing through the rain, like minnows flashing silver
From some shaded summer pool; or else the moon,
Radiant behind a veil of streaming cloud…”
I quoted, into my soup. “Excuse me, but no man is that patriotic.”
“You’ve memorized it?”
“I told you, I wrote an essay on it in high school.” I looked up at him and smiled, a little ruefully. “I had to compare you to Wilfred Owen.”
“How did I come out, in your estimation?”
“I think I stumped for Owen,” I admitted. “I thought ‘Overseas’ sentimental, especially laid next to those froth-filled lungs of Owen’s. But you were writing during the first part of the war, before the Somme, and he wrote at the end. That was the point of the essay, you see…” My voice dwindled. “But I liked yours the most. I thought it was the most hopeful, the most redeeming, especially that bit at the end about defeating eternity. Poor Owen’s just miserable. There’s no compromise, nothing to soften the blow. Nothing to hope for.”
“Well,” Julian said meditatively, “the war itself was bleak and horrible. Either you saw a higher purpose in it, or you didn’t.”
“Did you?”
He considered. “I suppose so. Partly because I was doing my duty, not just to my country but to the men I commanded. And partly because I was a silly young ass, after all, just out of university, thinking myself jolly splendid in my uniform. It suited that rather barbaric streak to my nature. Going from the quite rigid civilization of my earlier life, its petty proprieties, its various hypocrisies, to going without washing for a week at a time. Up all night, running raids and repairing wire and that sort of thing.”
“Weren’t you scared? Horrified?”
“Well, yes. Of course. Shell fire particularly; most nerve-racking, that. Incessant bloody noise. And the beastly snipers taking potshots at all hours. But you see, I was one of those lucky chaps that could stand it, more or less.”
“I’m not sure I buy that. I don’t see how it couldn’t affect you.”
He ran one finger along the stem of his glass. “Look, I didn’t say it didn’t affect me. But I don’t brood about it. I don’t know why; perhaps because I never fought a major action, only damned little raids and patrols. Perhaps because I’d been stalking deer and shooting birds all my life; I hadn’t any illusions about what happens when one fires a gun and hits something. Or perhaps because it was all overshadowed by what came after. Really, Kate, what do you want me to say? That I’m wounded inside and I need you to heal me?” He said it lightly, teasingly, but I caught a faint note of warning in his voice.
I leaned forward, unimpressed. “So why did you write the poetry, if you didn’t need to get things off your chest?”
“Kate, everybody wrote poetry. My formal education, you understand, consisted largely of memorizing endless sections of verse, epic and otherwise. I could jolly well recite you every bloody word Milton ever wrote. Virgil, in Latin. The entirety of Henry V. ‘Once more unto the breach’ and all that. So it was more or less inevitable that my fellow officers and I, finding ourselves in the middle of an historic European war, well-larded with long stretches of interminable boredom, were moved to cram our service notebooks with all sorts of derivative rubbish.” He paused to drain his champagne, an uncharacteristically gluttonous act, and fiddled the empty glass between his finger and thumb. “I suppose, in my case, I wrote to keep my intellect from surrendering completely to the sordidness around me.”
“To the distant sweetheart.”
“Yes. True enough, but those words suit you far better than her. I think of you when I remember them.”
“Now you do, maybe, but not in 1916.” I finished my soup and replaced the spoon on the saucer. “So if Florence wasn’t the one, who was?”
“The one?”
“The one you slept with, during the war.”
“Look,” he said roughly, “didn’t we agree to keep this a blank slate? I won’t ask you any pointed questions about your lovers, and you won’t ask me about mine.”
“I’m sorry.”
An expression of shock struck his face. “Oh, hell, darling. I didn’t mean that. Tonight of all nights. Come here. Don’t be shy; we’re alone.” His long arms reached out to lift me bodily into his lap. “I should be shot, sweetheart,” he said. “That was vulgar of me, vulgar and boorish and ill-bred. Forgive me. Oh, darling, don’t be hurt. Don’t. If you knew how I revere you…”
“This is what I meant, before,” I said bitterly. “Deep down, you want the kind of girl you used to know. Aristocrats, with perfect manners and deportment and virtue…”
“Restless, shallow girls, mere useless tinsel, without a hint of genuine originality, and without an ounce of real virtue, real nobility: your nobility, Kate.”
“Nobility!” I turned my head, feeling his shirt-point press into my cheek. “I’m from Wisconsin, Julian. My dad’s in insurance. I don’t have so much as a drop of blue blood.”
“I don’t mean your blood, sweetheart,” he said. “God knows that means nothing to me anymore. I mean your soul. Your heart.”
“How can you know that?”
I felt a light pressure on the top of my head: his kiss. “I just do.”
“Tell me something,” I said, after a moment, when his body had poured enough comfort into me, “if you don’t mind my asking. If it’s not a violation of the blank-slate agreement. Why only one? When you could have had anyone?”
“You overestimate my powers of seduction, Kate.”
I snorted. “Julian. Your powers of seduction could light up the entire borough of Manhattan whenever the grid craps out again. Believe me, I know.”
“You’re a trifle biased, sweetheart.”
“Well, that’s kind of a circular argument. I’m biased because of your powers of seduction, after all. But you’re avoiding the question. Not that you have to answer it.”
“I’ll answer it,” he said, wrapping his fingers around mine. “In the first place, it wasn’t quite so straightforward a matter back then, for a callow young chap just out of school. Willing females not so easy to come by, you see; at least of the amateur variety. Have you read anything about my father?”
“Lord Chesterton? Not much. He was in politics, I know. One of those Eminent Victorian types.”
Julian smiled. “Yes. Rather into politics. He and my mother had a love match, you know, which was not altogether unheard of at the time, but not quite the usual thing.”
“Oh, I’m so glad for you.”
“Yes, when you look at some of the other families, we were really quite happy. And instead of taking me to a brothel for my fourteenth birthday—as did the fathers of several of my friends, to my certain knowledge—mine sat me do
wn for a long talk and obtained my promise that I shouldn’t set out to seduce any woman unless I’d made her my wife. Because, upon meeting my mother one day, in the midst of a providential June downpour, he found himself wishing he’d done the same.”
“Oh.” I swallowed. “That’s about the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Which is why,” Julian went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, as if it were all part of some speech he’d planned, which I began to realize it was, “I’ve asked you to join me here tonight, Kate.” He slipped out from beneath me, placing me on the chair, and went down on his knee before me.
At once, his words receded in my ears, as if they were coming from the end of a long narrow tunnel. Don’t faint, I told myself sternly.
He gathered my fingers between his own and spoke slowly, deliberately, in that lush persuasive voice of his. “It’s why I’m asking you, my beloved, to do me the very great honor of accepting this humble hand as your own; to take this grateful man as your husband. Will you marry me, Kate?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, because the sight of this beautiful man, this heart-shattering Julian, kneeling at my feet, proposing to me in this sweet ridiculous way, like no man had done to any woman in about a century, caused quarts of adrenaline to shoot through my veins with staggering effect. I didn’t know what to say, or do. I found myself slipping off the chair, onto my knees next to him. “Oh, Julian, you don’t have to do this. Stand up. Don’t kneel at me. I should be kneeling.”
“Only say yes, Kate. Say yes, and I’ll stand. Say yes.”
“All right. Yes. Yes! But you don’t need to do this. You don’t…”
I couldn’t say any more, because he’d risen, pulling me up with him, and lifted me from the ground for a champagne-drenched kiss.
“Thank you,” he said at last, setting me down on the floor. “You’ve made me the happiest of men.”
HE DROVE ME BACK HOME in the Range Rover later that night, loopy and confused still, and led me upstairs to a bedroom overflowing with roses and candles.
I gaped about, stupefied. “When did you do this?”
He drew his arms around me from behind. “The innkeeper’s a friend of mine.”
“Obviously you figured I was a sure thing.”
“I had my hopes. You hadn’t shown too much resistance to the idea before.”
“Well, I was afraid you might ask eventually, but…” I turned in his arms. “You really don’t need to do this, Julian. I told you, I’m already a ruined woman.”
“You are nothing of the kind, and every moment I’ve spent in your arms these past two nights, I’ve been aching to put this right. Kate, you must understand, I would never, never have brought you here, lured you here, if I hadn’t the most honorable of intentions.” He smiled. “I promised my father, didn’t I? And as long as you’re willing, as long as you’ll have me, I simply can’t wait any longer to have at least the promise of marriage between us, when we lie together.”
“I see. You want me to make an honest man of you?”
“If you’ll have me,” he repeated seriously. “I know it seems soon to you, darling. And I realize there’s a great deal to consider. Who I am, and all that comes with it…”
“That’s the least of my worries, in fact.”
He frowned. “What are your worries, then?”
“That you’re rushing into marriage before you know me well enough. That this mad infatuation of yours…”
“Mad infatuation.” He pulled me into his chest and spoke with quiet assurance into my hair. “Kate, really. You know better. I’ve known, from the very beginning, that we simply fit together. Don’t you feel it? As though something between us is in perfect tune somehow. Beyond this mad infatuation, Kate, this… this passion, this desire to carry you off to bed, make you cry out again with that lovely feral howl of yours…”
“Julian, good grief…”
“Don’t you feel it too? I’m not putting it eloquently, perhaps, but surely you know what I mean? That we simply understand one another? And that we therefore, in plain straightforward logic, belong with each other, and no one else?”
“I feel it.”
“Thank God. I should hate to think I’ve been hallucinating it all this time. Here, I have something for you.” He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a box.
“Oh no. When did you have time to go ring shopping?”
“There’s a marvelous jeweler on Lyme Street, in the middle of the village. As good as any in Manhattan.”
“Just my luck.”
“So I called ahead, described what I wanted, had them put a few pieces out for me.” He opened the box. “If you don’t like it, of course, we’ll go back tomorrow. I tried to find something in your taste. Something simple and elegant.”
I’d been filled with foreboding, half-expecting some ten-carat monstrosity, but it was only a slender band of diamonds in a platinum setting, the three square center stones slightly larger than the rest. “Oh,” I breathed, without thinking, “it’s perfect!”
“Thank God. You’ve no idea…” He took the ring out of the box and eased it onto my trembling finger and folded his hand around it. “I knew you wouldn’t want something flashy, but at least the stones are without flaw…”
“Stop. I don’t care. It’s perfect.” I put up my hand to caress his cheek, and the diamonds on my finger caught the light with an unfamiliar glint. “You darling man, you could have bought the whole store for me…”
“I wanted to.”
“… and instead you brought back what I would want. And it’s perfect, and I love it. And I’ll marry you, Julian. Of course I will. With only one condition,” I added, when his lips were a breath away from mine.
He stopped and made an inarticulate noise. “I should have known,” he groaned. “It was all going so well.”
“Just this,” I said. “Six months. We wait six months before setting a date.”
“Six months? Before setting a date?”
“Because it is all too soon, and you know it. I need six months to sort my own life out, career and everything, so I won’t just lose myself in being your wife. Julian Laurence’s wife, I mean, which is different from being your wife, from being Kate Ashford.” The name emerged so naturally, so beautifully, it was almost as though I’d heard it before.
He examined me for a few seconds, concentrating, the candlelight shifting across his face from all angles. “Fair enough, then. I see your point.”
“And I need six months to be sure you really want me. If you still feel this way by Christmastime, we’ll start making plans. And if not,” I continued, “and I’ll be able to tell, Julian Ashford, so don’t be noble and pretend you’re still in love with me, then we walk away from it.”
“And in the meantime, you’ll wear the ring? We’ll be properly engaged?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“If I like.” He brought his hands up behind my head. “Beautiful Kate, beloved Kate. Look at you, so fine and loyal. That sweet trust of yours; I shan’t ever betray it, I swear. I shall protect you, fight for you, with every last breath in my body.”
“Julian, it’s two thousand and eight. Good luck on that.”
“Look, darling, I’m in the middle of a speech, here. I’d appreciate your breathless attention.”
I curled my arms around his waist. “I’m sorry. Please go ahead. I love your speeches. It’s like being in the middle of a Trollope novel.”
His thumbs brushed my cheekbones. “Minx. You’re mocking me. And yet I mean all of it, you know. Unredeemed old-fashioned bloke that I am.”
“I know you do.”
“I would fight for you, Kate. I’d kill for you. Die for you, if I had to. Six months.” He shook his head. “As if six more months could alter me.” His face came close to mine, until our foreheads were almost touching, and he spoke to me in the fiercest whisper. “Every possible vow, darling, I’ve made you in my heart. I’m already your husband—didn’t you know that?”
“If it makes you feel better, while you’re busy debauching me night after night…”
“It does,” he said, and then there were no more words, at least coherent ones; I felt only his lips, his hands, his golden body slanting over mine in the candlelight: union and ecstasy and, at last, the warm tangle of a deeply contented sleep.
IN THE MORNING, WHEN I WOKE, he had already left for Manhattan, but a large silk-lined box sat on the nightstand beside me. Inside lay a king’s ransom of jewelry: ropes of diamonds, bracelets, earrings, rings, glittering in all colors; and a note, written in elegant black ink on an ecru card: Humor me.
Amiens
The dream reared up suddenly, in the midst of a deep velvet sleep. The same as ever, except it had taken on even greater intensity now; it filled me with something beyond panic. An end-of-the-world feeling, an Armageddon. The man couldn’t hear me, couldn’t understand me. He smiled at me, confused, and as I spoke more loudly, more urgently, he backed away, still smiling, into a blackness so absolute it seemed to swallow him. “Stop!” I screamed at him. “Stop! Come back! Don’t leave me!”
Overseas Page 24
