The Colonel

by Beau North

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  The Colonel

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  Copyright © 2019 by Beau North

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  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any format whatsoever.

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  ISBN: 978-0-578-52569-3

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Also by Beau North

  Prologue

  I. Only Son Of The Ladiesman

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  II. I Love You But I’m Lost

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  III. You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  IV. We Are Fine

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Timeline - Richard

  Timeline - Ben

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Beau North

  Longbourn’s Songbird

  The Many Lives of Fitzwilliam Darcy

  Modern Love

  Then Comes Winter

  The Darcy Monologues

  Dangerous To Know: Jane Austen’s Rakes and Gentlemen Rogues

  Rational Creatures

  How Anything Can Grow From This

  To all the boys that broke my heart

  “She will love deeply, she will suffer terribly, she will have glorious moments to compensate.”

  ― L.M. Montgomery, “Emily of the New Moon”

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  “Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves

  from the loved one and, trembling, endured:

  as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself

  to be more than itself as it shoots?”

  ― Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies”

  Prologue

  This isn’t a love story, but the end of one. The story of two ships forever passing in the night. This is the story of my father and the woman he spent most of his adult life loving, a woman who was never really his.

  You can never know a person, no matter how much you think you might. I never presumed to know Richard Fitzwilliam. My father loved me, and that was always enough. He taught me how to play baseball and how to write a check, how to open doors and say “please” and “thank you.”

  When I was seven years old, I fell on the ice in Central Park and broke my ankle. My father picked me up and carried me the eight blocks to St. Luke’s. Later, when my mother demanded to know why he didn’t just get a taxi, my father would shrug and say he was faster than the Manhattan traffic. That was the man he was.

  He was a man who sacrificed pieces of himself for his country twice over, earning not one but two battlefield promotions for his quick thinking and reckless bravery. Colonel Fitzwilliam was a man who didn’t just dance with Death but wined, dined, and outright romanced it.

  In his youth, a bon vivant and connoisseur of bad habits, he loved extravagantly―and often unwisely. But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

  I've told stories before. War stories, political stories, all the news that’s fit to print. This is my first time trying to tell a love story.

  But like I said, this isn’t a love story.

  But almost.

  Part I

  Only Son Of The Ladiesman

  1

  BEN

  April 4, 2002

  Times Offices

  New York City

  Ben checked his desk one more time, making sure he hadn’t forgotten anything personal. The framed photos of Fiona he threw in the trash without ceremony. He supposed he should feel bad that she’d taken the BBC job, but all he really felt was relief. Goodbye, Ben. Goodbye, Fiona. Don’t forget to write. Their relationship had been unbearably strained since…well, since September. He’d been on the ground that day, that perfect blue-sky day in September when his world tilted at an irrevocable angle. He’d seen things that he suspected would haunt him for life. His job now left a sour taste in his mouth. The drinking helped at first, but he lost the fire somewhere along the way, the fire he felt when presented with a new story. He tried, he could say that much, but he would wake up sometimes hearing the bang of bodies hitting the ground. He never could have imagined that sound if he lived a thousand years. To fall from such a height, he thought the impact would be muffled, or wet. It wasn’t. It was the sound of bones being driven into the earth. That bang would haunt him until his dying day.

  In some ways, the days that followed were worse. The days that he’d come home coated in a layer of ash that used to be people, the ones who couldn’t get out and the ones who came too late. All those months later, he was still wiping away the layers of dust that would settle in his apartment, over and over, remembering who it was. He was carrying them with him all the time, and they weighed him down. He needed to get away from New York, away from the dust and the ash, away from the nights when he’d wake up hearing that sound. Bang.

  “Why do you even have this job?” Fiona had shouted the day she broke the news that she was leaving him, leaving everything. “It’s not like you need the bloody money!”

  The thought hadn’t even occurred to him, that he could just quit. Fiona’s question began to tug at his mind day in and day out. Why don’t I quit? And so he did. He walked in to work on a Monday after Fiona left for the last time, went straight to his editor, and handed in his notice. He spent the rest of the day handing off projects to other staff writers and cleaning out his desk. I really must dash, but thanks ever so much for the nightmares. As the elevator doors shut behind him, Ben’s shoulders lifted, his back straightened. He’d even say he felt a little randy, which happened less often than he liked now that he was staring down the barrel of fifty. He was free.

  As soon as he exited the Times Building, he took a deep breath, the ever-present city smell of car exhaust, food, and urine making him instantly regret doing so. He thought of the clean air in Annapolis and considered that maybe it was finally time to go home. The modestly sized Midtown apartment he shared with Fiona was all boxed up and neatly labeled. Her boxes would be shipped to London. His would go in storage until he found a new place. He’d planned to stay at a hotel for a few nights and then maybe the townhouse in Gramercy Park where his mother and aunt still lived. But when a person needed a change, a big change, he figured they might as well go whole hog.

  He looked down at the box he’d packed at his desk—clippings, awards, a photo from the last of Clinton’s White House Correspondents’ Dinners—over twenty years of his career in one little package. What the hell. He tossed the box into a nearby trash bin and hailed a cab. He had one change of clothes and a toothbrush in his messenger bag. H
e had a wallet full of credit cards and a sudden, irrepressible need to get out of the city.

  “Grand Central, please.”

  The driver nodded and pulled into the afternoon traffic. Ben watched the city go on about its business outside his window. He loved New York. He’d been born there, grown up there. It was home—one of his homes—but it made him feel tired too. Too much growth, too much change. Ben needed for everything to stop, or slow down long enough, for him to get his bearings, but the city was relentless in its progress. The future was happening all around him all the time, but it was the past that beckoned him now.

  He made small talk with the driver, learned that he was originally from Trinidad, where Ben had spent some time as a foreign correspondent in the eighties. Ben remembered his brief time there fondly, watching the schoolboys play cricket on the Queen’s Park green while eating doubles—channa sandwiches with hot pepper and mango—the soft, pillowy bara bread still hot from the fryer. It would singe his fingertips as he pulled back the wrapping, and the spicy channa would make his eyes water. In those moments he felt more alive and in the world than ever. It was a good memory.

  Part of him knew he should be feeling panic. No more Fiona, no more apartment, no more job. But he did have a house, and money, and a brain in his head. It felt natural, right somehow, to go home. He was a time traveler, caught in a slip stream that pulled him back, back, back into the past, for better or for worse.

  Three hours later, he was seated on the Northeast Regional in a first-class car with a Dashiell Hammett paperback and a vodka on ice, watching the passing scenery as it slipped into night. The clatter and sway of the train lulled him, and he closed his eyes, dreaming of Trinidad and the brown-skinned kids dressed in white, swinging their cricket bats in the evening dusk, their laughter ringing across the green, buffeted up and carried away on the warm, ocean wind.

  Ben took a cab from the train station, but, rather than go all the way to the house, he asked to be dropped off at the end of the long, winding street. He needed to stretch his legs and fill his lungs with fresh air. He needed time to prepare himself to face the past. In no hurry, he ambled the quiet street. He took in the damp chill and the briny, muddy smell of the Severn River to the east, letting it sink into his blood and his bones. Crickets sang in the night, an eerie chorus to him after the years of New York noise. He was glad to see that he remembered the way back. The town was different, but it was also the same, and when he approached the house, he found it unchanged.

  Ben checked the screen on his Nokia. Just after nine. New York felt like a million miles away. He stood across the street for some time, just looking at the house, remembering summers there with his parents and aunt. Sometimes his cousins Maggie and Tom would come stay for a week and his father would sail them across the Chesapeake Bay. He wondered when those visits had stopped. 1970? Before that? He wondered how Maggie and Tom were now, and what had become of his father’s boat. Ben thought no one was ever as cool as his old man on those days when he was at the helm, his lanky arms bare and deeply tanned, cigarette perpetually dangling from his lip.

  The brass plate mounted to the exterior brick declared the house to be on the historic registry, embossed with a seal and the words “Fitzwilliam House.”

  The house looked back at him. Hello, Benny boy. You took your sweet fucking time, didn’t you?

  Calling it a house wasn’t entirely right. The main structure was a stalwart colonial construction, as tall and imposing as its owners had always been. Over the two hundred years since it had been built, other smaller buildings had cropped up on the property. Around the turn of the century, some clever Fitzwilliam had connected all the buildings with brick enclosures, so it couldn’t really be called a house. It was more like a maze. A compound.

  He took out his keys, glad that he hadn’t tossed those into an Eighth Avenue trash bin. The lock stuck a little, but, after a few tries, he managed to push the door open, stumbling headfirst into the past. The dusty smell of disuse couldn’t mask the other smells: the lingering ghost of cigar and cigarette smoke, the smell of thousands of applications of linseed oil that had been applied to the home’s natural woodwork over the course of generations.

  Ben scrambled to the light switch, banging his shin painfully against a table set up in the entryway. The lights snapped on. He took a moment to be grateful he still paid to keep the electricity connected.

  He fell back against the door, letting out the breath he’d been holding. Not a thing had changed. It was a little like stepping into a museum. The same marine-colored walls, the same mellow wood floor. He knew, under the spectral shapes of drop cloths in the next room, he would find the same fine-crafted Federal furniture, and that nowhere in this house would he find a television set. His father always relied on the radio for the news or Yankees games, claiming the television caused headaches due to his impaired vision.

  The house was cold, and it wasn’t just the temperature. He couldn’t explain how but he thought it felt...neglected. Lonesome, even.

  He walked through all the rooms, a careful expedition of his past. He left the furniture covered. There would be time enough for that later. His father’s office was the only room he avoided entirely, wanting to save that room for the light of day. He found his old room easy enough, but as soon as he flipped the light switch, there was a bright sizzle and a telltale pop of the bulb going out. Before it went out, he could still see the posters he’d hung the last summer he’d stayed with his father. One was the poster for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the other was Cybill Shepherd from The Last Picture Show. He remembered being a kid of seventeen and looking up at that poster, eyes fastened to Cybill’s full bottom lip, feeling his body flush as he did what teenage boys do.

  Ben laughed and shook his head as he made his way down the hall. Again, he felt the same twinkle of randy excitement he’d felt that afternoon. By Jove, there’s still life in the old boy yet. He and Fiona hadn’t had sex in months. He suspected she had someone else for that. The thought didn’t bother him as much as he thought it should…maybe because, at some point, they’d stopped thinking of it as making love and started calling it having sex. He suddenly missed that feeling: those first stirrings of attraction, of lust, the insatiable days when lust melted swiftly into infatuation and infatuation to love. There was a word for that feeling, he remembered. Limerence. Even the syllables felt attractive.

  The light in his father’s room still worked fine. Ben felt a pang in his chest, a heartfelt longing for one day—one hour, even—with the man who’d occupied these rooms. He leaned against the doorframe and sighed. “Oh, Pop.”

  A thin layer of dust lay over everything, though not as bad as it could have been. He had a caretaker who arranged for light cleaning every other week so the place didn’t go to seed. A group of framed photos stood sentry on the nightstand, the room’s only personal touch. The last time he’d been here, that nightstand had been cluttered with the detritus of the sick: bottles of medicines, get well cards, and scrawled reminders of doctors’ appointments. Ben had brought a portable CD player so his father could listen to his audiobooks. He’d bought those too, if he recalled. Compact discs of books by Elmore Leonard and Raymond Chandler, Patrick O’Brien and Tom Clancy, Dumas and Dickens and Wilde, even Bronte and Austen for good measure. His father found reading difficult enough with only one eye, impossible when that eye’s vision was impaired with age.

  Ben crossed into the room and yanked the drop cloth off the bed. Dust plumed up from the motion. Tomorrow he’d get new linens and pillows, not to mention clothes and toiletries, food for the pantry. He should probably see if the old car was still in the garage and what he’d need to do to get it running again.

  The linens in the closet were old and thin but seemed to have been laundered sometime in the last year. Ben turned the thermostat up and tried to ignore the burnt-toast smell of the heat coming on for the first time in ages as he put sheets and blankets on the bed. Memories were trickling bac
k to him. His father teaching him how to make hospital corners―the way he’d been taught in the army―guiding Ben’s hands as he showed him how to tuck and fold the fabric, always smoothing the corners down with the backs of his fingers. “Like this, Benny.” His father never lost patience. Ben copied those movements now. He felt like a ghost in his own memories. He turned off the light and stepped out of his shoes, climbing into the bed, unaware of the tears cutting tracks down his dusty face. He was asleep at once.

  It wasn’t the knock at the door that woke him up. He’d actually been awake for what seemed an immeasurable amount of time. He was freezing. Too cold to move, too cold to check the time on his phone. It was still dark; whether it was morning or night, he couldn’t say. Had he even plugged in his phone? He’d need to call the caretaker about getting the furnace looked at, that was for certain. If he could ever get out of bed. He was too frozen to do anything but lie there and shiver, teeth chattering.