by Nora Roberts
Wyley. Good Christ.
For the first time since the nightmare had begun, he felt for the weight in his pocket. He felt the lump of what he’d stolen from the man currently staring up at the sky with blank blue eyes.
“You won’t need it,” Felix said between chattering teeth, “but I swear before God if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have stolen from you in the last moments of your life. Seems like robbing a grave.”
His long-lapsed religious training had him folding his hands in prayer. “If I end up dying here today, I’ll apologize in person if we end up on the same side of the gate. And if I live I take a vow to try to reform. No point in saying I’ll do it, but I’ll give doing an honest day’s work a try.”
He passed out again, and woke to the sound of an engine. Dazed, numb, he managed to lift his head. Through his wavering vision, he saw a boat, and through the roaring in his ears, heard the shouts and voices of men.
He tried to call out, but managed only a hacking cough. “I’m alive.” His voice was only a croak, whisked away by the breeze. “I’m still alive.”
He didn’t feel the hands pull him onto the fishing trawler called Dan O’Connell. Was delirious with chills and pain when he was wrapped in a blanket, when hot tea was poured down his throat. He would remember nothing about his actual rescue, nor learn the names of the men whose arms had hauled him to safety. Nothing came clear to him until he woke, nearly twenty-four hours after the torpedo had struck the liner, in a narrow bed in a small room with sunlight streaming through a window.
He would never forget the first sight that greeted him when his vision cleared.
She was young and pretty, with eyes of misty blue and a scatter of gold freckles over her small nose and round cheeks. Her hair was fair and piled on top of her head in some sort of knot that seemed to be slipping. Her mouth bowed up when she glanced over at him, and she rose quickly from the chair where she’d been darning socks.
“There you are. I wonder if you’ll stay with us this time around.”
He heard Ireland in her voice, felt the strong hand lift his head. And he smelled a drift of lavender.
“What . . .” The old, croaking sound of his voice appalled him. His throat felt scorched, his head stuffed with rags of dirty cotton.
“Just take this first. It’s medicine the doctor left for you. You’ve pneumonia, he says, and a fair gash on your head that’s been stitched. Seems you tore something in your shoulder as well. But you’ve come through the worst, sir, and you rest easy for we’ll see you through.”
“What . . . happened? The ship . . .”
The pretty mouth went flat and hard. “The bloody Germans. ’Twas a U-boat torpedoed you. And they’ll writhe in hell for it, for the people they murdered. The babies they slaughtered.”
Though a tear trickled down her cheek, she managed to slide the medicine into him competently. “You have to rest. Your life’s a miracle, for there are more than a thousand dead.”
“A . . .” He managed to grip her wrist as the horror stabbed through him. “A thousand?”
“More than. You’re in Queenstown now, and as well as you can be.” She tilted her head. “An American, are you?”
Close enough, he decided, as he hadn’t seen the shores of his native England in more than twelve years. “Yes. I need—”
“Tea,” she interrupted. “And broth.” She moved to the door to shout: “Ma! He’s waked and seems to want to stay that way.” She glanced back. “I’ll be back with something warm in a minute.”
“Please. Who are you?”
“Me?” She smiled again, wonderfully sunny. “I’d be Meg. Meg O’Reiley, and you’re in the home of my parents, Pat and Mary O’Reiley, where you’re welcome until you’re mended. And your name, sir?”
“Greenfield. Felix Greenfield.”
“God bless you, Mr. Greenfield.”
“Wait . . . there was a woman, and a little boy. Cunningham.”
Pity moved over her face. “They’re listing names. I’ll check on them for you when I’m able. Now you rest, and we’ll get you some tea.”
When she went out, he turned his face toward the window, toward the sun. And saw, sitting on the table under it, the money that had been in his pocket, the garnet earbobs. And the bright silver glint of the little statue.
Felix laughed until he cried.
HE LEARNED THE O’Reileys made their living from the sea. Pat and his two sons had been part of the rescue effort. He met them all, and her younger sister as well. For the first day he was unable to keep any of them straight in his mind. But for Meg herself.
He clung to her company as he’d clung to the plank, to keep from sliding into the dark again.
“Tell me what you know,” he begged her.
“It’ll be hard for you to hear it. It’s hard to speak it.” She moved to his window, looked out at the village where she’d lived all of her eighteen years. Survivors such as Felix were being tended to in hotel rooms, in the homes of neighbors. And the dead, God rest them, were laid in temporary morgues. Some would be buried, some would be sent home. Others would forever be in the grave of the sea.
“When I heard of it,” she began, “I almost didn’t believe it. How could such a thing be? There were trawlers out, and they went directly to try to rescue survivors. More boats set out from here. Most were too late to do more than bring back the dead. Oh sweet God, I saw myself some of the people as they made land. Women and babies, men barely able to walk and half naked. Some cried, and others just stared. Like you do when you’re lost. They say the liner went down in less than twenty minutes. Can that be?”
“I don’t know,” Felix murmured, and shut his eyes.
She glanced back at him and hoped he was strong enough for the rest. “More have died since coming here. Exposure and injuries too grievous to heal. Some spent hours in the water. The lists change so quick. I can’t think what terror of heart families are living with, waiting to know. Or what grief those who know their loved ones are lost in this horrible way are feeling. You said there was no one waiting for word of you.”
“No. No one.”
She went to him. She’d tended his hurts, suffered with him during the horrors of his delirium. It had been only three days since he’d been brought into her care, but for both of them, it was a lifetime.
“There’s no shame in staying here,” she said quietly. “No shame in not going to the funeral today. You’re far from well yet.”
“I need to go.” He looked down at his borrowed clothes. In them he felt scrawny and fragile. And alive.
THE QUIET WAS almost unearthly. Every shop and store in Queenstown was closed for the day. No children raced along the streets, no neighbors stopped to chat or gossip. Over the silence came the hollow sound of church bells from St. Colman’s on the hill, and the mournful notes of the funeral dirge.
Felix knew if he lived another hundred years he’d never forget the sounds of that grieving music, the soft and steady beat of drums. He watched the sun strike the brass of the instruments, and remembered how that same sun had struck the brass of the propellers as the stern of the Lusitania had reared up in her final plunge into the sea.
He was alive, he thought again. Instead of relief and gratitude, he felt only guilt and despair.
He kept his head down as he trudged along behind the priests, the mourners, the dead, through the reverently silent streets. It took more than an hour to reach the graveyard, and left him light-headed. By the time he saw the three mass graves beneath tall elms where choirboys stood with incense burners, he was forced to lean heavily on Meg.
Tears stung the backs of his eyes as he looked at the tiny coffins that held dead children.
He listened to the quiet weeping, to the words of both the Catholic and the Church of Ireland services. None of it reached him. He could still hear, thought he would forever hear, the way people had called to God as they’d drowned. But God hadn’t listened, and had let them die horribly.
Then he lifted hi
s head and, across those obscene holes, saw the face of the woman and young boy from the ship.
The tears came now, fell down his cheeks like rain as he lurched through the crowd. He reached her as the first notes of “Abide with Me” lifted into the air. Then he fell to his knees in front of her wheelchair.
“I feared you were dead.” She reached up, touched his face with one hand. The other peeked out of a cast. “I never got your name, so couldn’t check the lists.”
“You’re alive.” Her face had been cut, he could see that now, and her color was too bright, as if she were feverish. Her leg had been cast as well as her arm. “And the boy.”
The child slept in the arms of another woman. Like an angel, Felix thought again. Peaceful and unmarked.
The fist of despair that gripped him loosened. One prayer, at least one prayer, had been answered.
“He never let go.” She began to weep then, soundlessly. “He’s such a good boy. He never let go. I broke my arm in the fall. If you hadn’t given me your life jacket, we would have drowned. My husband . . .” Her voice frayed as she looked over at the graves. “They never found him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He would have thanked you.” She reached up to touch a hand to her boy’s leg. “He loved his son, very much.” She took a deep breath. “In his stead, I thank you, for my son’s life and my own. Please tell me your name.”
“Felix Greenfield, ma’am.”
“Mr. Greenfield.” She leaned over, brushed a kiss on Felix’s cheek. “I’ll never forget you. Nor will my son.”
When they wheeled her chair away, she kept her shoulders straight with a quiet dignity that brought a wash of shame over Felix’s face.
“You’re a hero,” Meg told him.
Shaking his head, he moved as quickly as he could away from the crowds, away from the graves. “No. She is. I’m nothing.”
“How can you say that? I heard what she said. You saved her life, and the little boy’s.” Concerned, she hurried up to him, took his arm to steady him.
He’d have shaken her off if he’d had the strength. Instead, he simply sat in the high, wild grass of the graveyard and buried his face in his hands.
“Ah, there now.” Pity for him had her sitting beside him, taking him into her arms. “There now, Felix.”
He could think of nothing but the strength in the young widow’s face, in the innocence of her son’s. “She was hurt, so she asked me to take the boy. To save the boy.”
“You saved them both.”
“I don’t know why I did it. I was only thinking about saving myself. I’m a thief. Those things you took out of my pocket? I stole them. I was stealing them when the ship was hit. All I could think about when it was happening was getting out alive.”
Meg shifted beside him, folded her hands. “Did you give her your life jacket?”
“It wasn’t mine. I found it. I don’t know why I gave it to her. She was trapped between deck chairs, holding on to the boy. Holding on to her sanity in the middle of all that hell.”
“You could’ve turned away from her, saved yourself.”
He mopped at his eyes. “I wanted to.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I’ll never know why.” He only knew that seeing them alive had changed something inside him. “But the point is, I’m a second-rate thief who was on that ship because I was running from the cops. I stole a man’s things minutes before he died. A thousand people are dead. I saw some of them die. I’m alive. What kind of world is it that saves a thief and takes children?”
“Who can answer? But there’s a child who’s alive today because you were there. Would you have been, do you think, just where you were, when you were, if you hadn’t been stealing?”
He let out a derisive sound. “The likes of me wouldn’t have been anywhere near the first-class deck unless I’d been stealing.”
“There you are.” She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dried his tears as she would a child’s. “Stealing’s wrong. It’s a sin and there’s no question about it. But if you’d been minding your own, that woman and her son would be dead. If a sin saves innocent lives, I’m thinking it’s not so great a sin. And I have to say, you didn’t steal so very much if all you had for it were a pair of earbobs, a little statue and some American dollars.”
For some reason that made him smile. “Well, I was just getting started.”
The smile she sent him was lovely and sure. “Yes, I’d say you’re just getting started.”
Two
Helsinki, 2002
SHE wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d studied the picture of her on the back of her book, and on the program for the lecture—would it never end?—but there was a difference in flesh and blood.
She was smaller than he’d imagined, for one thing. Nearly delicate in her quiet gray suit that should, in his opinion, be a good inch shorter at the hem. From what he could see of her legs, they weren’t half bad.
In person she didn’t look nearly as competent and intimidating a woman as she did on the dust jacket. Though the little wire glasses she wore onstage added a sort of trendy intellectual tone.
She had a good voice. Maybe too good, he thought, as it was damn near putting him to sleep. Still, that was primarily the fault of the subject matter. He was interested in Greek myths—in one particular Greek myth. But Christ Jesus, it was tedious to have to sit through an hour’s lecture on the entire breed of them.
He straightened in his chair and did his best to concentrate. Not on the words so much. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about Artemis turning some poor slob into a stag because he’d seen her naked. That only proved that women, goddesses or not, were peculiar creatures.
To his mind, Dr. Tia Marsh was damn peculiar. The woman came from money. Great gobs and hordes of money, yet instead of sitting back and enjoying it, she spent her time steeped in long-dead Greek gods. Writing about them, lecturing about them. Interminably.
She had generations of breeding behind her. Blood as blue as the Kerry lakes. But here she was, giving her endless talk in Finland, days after she’d given what he assumed was the same song and dance in Sweden, in Norway. Hyping her book all over Europe and Scandinavia.
Certainly it wasn’t for the money, he mused. Maybe she just liked to hear the sound of her own voice. Countless did.
She was, according to his information, twenty-nine, single, the only child of the New York Marshes and, most important, the great-great-granddaughter of Henry W. Wyley.
Wyley Antiques was, as it had been for nearly a hundred years, one of the most prestigious antique and auction houses in New York.
It was no coincidence that Wyley’s offshoot had developed such a keen interest in the Greek gods. It was his assignment to find out, by whatever means worked best, what she knew about the Three Fates.
If she’d been, well, softer, he supposed, he might have tried and enjoyed a seduction angle. It was fascinating what people would tell each other when sex was tangled into the mix. She was attractive enough, in a scholarly sort of way, but he wasn’t entirely sure what button to push, romantically speaking, with the intellectual type.
Frowning a bit, he turned the book over on his lap and gave the photo another look. In it she had her sunny blond hair tucked back in some sort of bun. She was smiling, rather dutifully, he thought now. As if someone had said, “Say cheese!” It wasn’t a smile that reached the eyes—very sober and serious blue eyes that suited the somewhat sober and serious curve of her lips.
Her face tapered down to a bit of a point. He might have called it elfin but for that primly styled hair and the somber stare.
He thought she looked like a woman in need of a good laugh . . . or a good lay. Both his mother and his sister would have belted him for that opinion. But a man’s thoughts were his own business.
Best, he decided, to approach the prim Dr. Marsh on very civilized, very businesslike terms.
When the applause, a great deal more enthusias
tic than he’d expected, broke out, he nearly cheered himself. But even as he started to rise, hands shot up.
Annoyed, he checked his watch, then settled himself for the question-and-answer session. As she was working with an interpreter, he decided the session might take the rest of his life.
He noted she took the glasses off for this portion, blinked like an owl in sunlight, and seemed to take a very long breath. The way a diver might, he mused, before plunging off a high board into a dark pool.
When inspiration struck, he lifted his hand. It was always best, he thought, to knock politely on a door to see if it opened before you just kicked it in.
When she gestured to him, he got to his feet and sent her one of his best smiles. “Dr. Marsh, I’d like to thank you first for a fascinating talk.”
“Oh.”
She blinked, and he saw she’d been surprised by the Irish in his voice. Good, something else to use. Yanks, for reasons that eluded him, were so often charmed silly by an accent.
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“I’ve always been interested in the Fates, and I wonder, in your opinion, if their power held individually or only because of their union.”
“The Moerae, or the Fates, were a triad,” she began, “each with a specific task. Clotho, who spins the thread of life, Lachesis, who measures it, and Atropus, who cuts that thread and ends it. None could function alone. A thread might be spun, but endlessly and without purpose or its natural course. Or without the spinning, there’s nothing to measure, nothing to cut. Three parts,” she added, sliding her fingers into an interlocking steeple. “One purpose.” And closed them into a joined fist. “Alone they would be nothing but ordinary if interesting women. Together, the most powerful and honored of gods.”
Exactly so, he thought as he resumed his seat. Exactly.
SHE WAS SO tired. When the Q-and-A session was finished, Tia wondered how she didn’t simply stumble her way to the signing area. Despite the precautions of melatonin, diet, aromatherapy and cautious exercise, her internal time clock was running ragged.
