The Glass Ocean

by Beatriz Williams

  In response, he put his hand over hers on his arm, and led her to the lifts. Owing to most everyone else being at dinner, they had the lift to themselves, but stood on opposite sides without looking at each other just in case someone was waiting on the Promenade Deck level when the gates opened. With a steady pace they passed her suite then took a left in the second corridor.

  Checking to make sure nobody was lurking in the hallway, Robert opened the door to allow her inside, then followed, shutting the door behind him. It was a small room with a single bed, but, as he’d pointed out before, he had a window looking onto the sea. A dim lamp sat on the bedside table.

  He stood near enough to touch her, but didn’t move. “Are you sure, Caroline? I don’t want there to be any regrets. And I certainly don’t want to be your teaser stallion.”

  “My what?”

  “Never mind.” He took a step closer, his breath warm on her face and smelling of wine.

  “What about Ida?”

  “Ida?” He seemed genuinely confused.

  “She said you’d met.” She emphasized the last word to make it clear she understood it could have a myriad of meanings.

  “She has a whippet, which is how I met her. She was walking her dog in Regent’s Park and mine—also a whippet—had just died. I couldn’t resist.”

  “And that’s all? You’re not lovers?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Why? Are you jealous?”

  “Of course not. I just wanted to make sure that . . . this isn’t something you do on a regular basis. I want to be special.”

  “Oh, Caroline,” he breathed. “You have no idea how special you are to me.” He closed the distance between them but still didn’t touch her. “Are you sure you want this?” he asked again.

  She brought her arms around his neck, threading her fingers through his hair, realizing that she’d been wanting to do that for a very long time. She pressed her lips against his, needing to show him that regret was the last thing on her mind.

  “Well, then.” He spun with her in his arms, pressing her against the door. “It’s just the two of us here. No one else exists right now but the two of us. Here. In this room. What was before or what is to come doesn’t matter.”

  “Even Ida?” she said against his neck, her words almost a gasp as he pulled her closer so there could be no doubt of his desire.

  “No one.” His fingers slid around to her back. “I do love this dress, but I’m afraid it must go.” Expertly, he unfastened the small buttons down her back, while she pulled at the tie around his neck and then the fastenings on his waistcoat, all the while their lips and mouths explored each other, afraid to separate, as if any space between them would allow in thoughts that didn’t belong in their here and now.

  She was barely aware of their clothing being removed, or any sound from the engines or the corridor outside. She was only aware of him, of Robert, and the taste of him on her tongue, and the feel of his fingers on her bare skin in places she’d never been touched before.

  He placed her on the bed and smoothed his long body over hers. She wore her stockings and garters still, but not the shoes. Her fantasy had to give way to practicality at some point. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t turn off the lamp and refused to let her cover herself with her hands.

  “Don’t,” he said, raising her arms over her head to rest against the pillow. It was wanton, but she didn’t care. This room was her new world where she could be someone else. Or perhaps this was the room where she could finally be her.

  “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.” He lowered his mouth to one breast and licked slowly. “Or this,” he said, moving his mouth to the other breast.

  “How long?” she gasped.

  “Since the first words you ever said to me. In the Talmadges’ rose garden.”

  She arched her back, needing to be closer to him. “What did I say?”

  “You called me your knight in shining armor.” He trailed hot, wet kisses up to her throat. “And then you said you’d love me forever. You kissed my cheek and then ran off to dance with someone else.”

  “Oh, Robert,” she said, remembering now, remembering the girl she’d once been. “Why did you go away?”

  “Shh,” he whispered, pressing his lips against hers again. “Before or after doesn’t exist. It’s just you and me. Here. Now.”

  She lifted her hips to meet his, feeling the rocking rhythm of the great ship beneath them until her limbs crumbled like sand and the buttery light of dawn stained the walls.

  Chapter 15

  Tess

  At Sea

  Wednesday, May 5, 1915

  Tess’s eyes and mouth felt like they’d been scrubbed with sand. Even the pale dawn light was an affront, too bright by far.

  But there was no use trying to sleep. When she had, all she saw in front of her was that roll of music, those odd diagrams on the last page. And Ginny’s face, familiar and foreign at the same time.

  Nellie, Mary Kate, and the woman whose name none of them had learned—Inga? Helga?—were snoring in their bunks when Tess crept out onto the deck. It was so early that not even the most ambitious English nannies were filling their lungs with freshness or forcing their charges to perform open-air calisthenics.

  She found a chair on Shelter Deck. It wasn’t hers, of course. She couldn’t afford the fee. But it was too early in the morning for the owner to demand his rights. She was doing him a service, really, warming it, Tess told herself, and hunched her shoulders against the morning chill as she concentrated on sketching the stragglers who were beginning to appear on deck: a nurse rocking a fractious child; an elderly woman being wheeled in a Bath chair, so draped in rugs that she looked like a perambulating bolt of cloth. Out to sea, Tess could see the hazy outline of a ship. It wavered in the mist and was gone. There was nothing but Tess and open sea and open sky. And her sketchbook.

  It was what Tess always did when she felt like she couldn’t quite breathe. She put her emotions into pictures, letting her pencil do her thinking for her. Words might lie, vows might be false, but a picture was what it was, as long as one had the wit to see it.

  She sketched the vague outline of the ship. One of the British naval escort the captain had promised them? It was too far away to tell. Tess knew about as much of naval ships as she did of spies and codes and secret plans. Which was to say, nothing at all. She added a jaunty British flag to the top, as if by drawing it she could make it more real, more solid, anchor it by them for protection.

  Line by line, image by image, Tess could feel the tension in her shoulders release, the grip on her pencil relax. She wore the lead to nothing, sharpened it, and began again. Two girls appeared together with their nanny, playing. Sisters. Tess’s imagination replaced their starched pinafores with calico, their hoop with a bag of marbles, or possibly three shells and a pebble. Tennessee and Virginia Schaff, rolling into town just in time to roll out of it again.

  It had been shell games for the under-twelves when Tess was only six and Ginny sixteen. Shell games and marbles and trick cards. They’d moved on to more elaborate cons as Tess’s skirts lengthened with her legs and she began to pile her hair on top of her head instead of plaiting it in braids. It was Ginny who’d come up with the idea of using Tess’s skill with a brush to play a different kind of shell game, a grown-up shell game. A game in which, she swore, no one would get hurt.

  But that page in the Hochstetters’ safe. That was something else entirely. Numbers, codes, plans. They wouldn’t get slapped on the wrist and sent to kick their heels in the British equivalent of the Tombs for a few months. What did people do to foreign agents? To spies? Tess didn’t know, but she had the uneasy feeling it involved blindfolds and firing squads. Whatever they were paying, it wasn’t worth it.

  A piano. That was what she was drawing now, without even thinking of it. A piano with a woman seated on the bench. But it wasn’t Caroline Hochstetter she placed at the keys. The hair on the woman at the piano w
as fair, not dark, her hair curly, not straight; her figure was an hourglass, not a fashionable rail. Tess’s fingers faltered on the pencil. She’d drawn herself at the piano, not in the elegant Hochstetter parlor, but in a simple front room, with antimacassars on the chairs and an oil lamp on the table. What she might have been, perhaps. What she still might be, if she and Ginny could only go straight.

  Not that she’d ever play the piano like Caroline Hochstetter. Being tone deaf was something of a barrier.

  But, all the same. If she could only convince Ginny to drop whatever this was, to come away with her. . . . This could be the two of them. This could be their front room, somewhere in Devon.

  Tess’s pencil, as always, was ahead of her mind. She was already sketching a second figure in the doorway. But it wasn’t Ginny. It was the figure of a man, tall and lean, propped against the doorframe.

  “Hullo, Cinderella.” The man’s face disappeared in a jagged line of lead as someone tweaked one of the curls that had escaped her haphazard chignon. “Taking the air?”

  Tess breathed deeply, relaxed her death grip on her pencil, shamefully glad for the error that had eliminated the man’s features in one fell stroke. “I might, if people around me didn’t insist on breathing it.”

  “Now, now,” said Robert Langford, leaning comfortably against the arm of the neighboring chair. “Didn’t your nanny ever tell you it’s important to share?”

  “I didn’t have a nanny.” Just a sister. A sister who told her it was important to take, because if you didn’t take first, someone else would and then you’d be left with nothing at all. Tess squinted up at Robert’s blurred outline, lifting a hand to shield her eyes against the sunlight, which seemed to be coming as much from within him as without. “You’re bright and cheerful this morning. What happened to the whisky and tears?”

  “Who needs whisky when they can sup on the nectar of the gods?”

  “You mean moonshine?” said Tess grumpily. All of this gratuitous cheer was distinctly grating when all she wanted to do was brood in peace.

  Robert beamed beatifically upon her. “I mean love, you ignoramus. ‘Drink to me but with thine eyes and I’ll not ask for wine’—or whisky or ’shine. My inebriation is an exaltation of the soul.”

  “Oh, the soul, is it?” Tess applied her pencil to her sketch just a little too hard. The lead left grooves on the page. “Is it the soul that left those marks on your neck, then?”

  Robert had the grace to look abashed, but only for a moment. He grinned at her. “Thanks for that. I’ll raise my collar points and look like a Regency dandy, all chin in the air.”

  “And head in the clouds,” retorted Tess, sticking her pencil behind her ear. No use wasting good lead. “What happened to all that highfalutin rubbish about wanting to possess heart and body together?”

  “What makes you think I haven’t?” Robert rested a hand on the back of her chair, making her skin tingle with the proximity. “Don’t try to fright me out of my good humor. ‘Sufficient unto the day’ and all that. I appreciate your concern for me, but . . . ‘The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.’”

  “Ha. If you’re fool enough to believe that . . . But you’re right. It’s none of my nevermind.” Grudgingly, she added, “I hope you’ll both be very happy.”

  “So do I.” Robert’s face lit up like a boy’s, and Tess found herself wanting to give Caroline Hochstetter a swift kick in the shin. Just on general principles.

  “Shouldn’t you be off writing ballads to your ladylove?” inquired Tess disagreeably, retrieving her pencil.

  “She’s sleeping,” said Robert, as though Caroline were the only woman who had slept in all of history. Probably garbed in white samite and wreathed in roses. He leaned a hand against the back of Tess’s stolen deck chair. “What’s that you’re doing?”

  “Sketching.” Tess hastily flipped the page. Robert leaned over to squint at the picture, a quick sketch of two girls playing hopscotch while their governess hid a yawn behind her hand.

  “You’re quite good,” he said.

  “You don’t need to sound so surprised.”

  “You’re right, I needn’t.” Robert smiled down at her, golden in the sunlight. “You’re a woman of many talents, Miss Fairweather. May I?”

  There was nothing incriminating in this book, Tess had seen to that. This was for her own thoughts and fancies, nothing to do with a job. But she handed it over reluctantly all the same. This was her book, her private place. Letting someone else see it felt a bit like strolling the deck in public in her combinations.

  Robert flipped past studies of the boat, the sea, Mary Kate with her mouth open in a monologue, Nellie pointedly writing letters, a group of second-class passengers clustered around the piano by the balcony. He laughed out loud at a picture of Captain Turner looking pained as Margery Schuyler tugged on one arm and Prunella Schuyler on the other. A seagull eyed Prunella’s hat in a distinctly considering way.

  When he caught his breath, Robert said, “Have you thought of setting up as a caricaturist? Punch has nothing on this.”

  “If anyone would hire me,” said Tess, repossessing her sketchbook. Haltingly, she added, “I would have liked to be a proper artist. To paint my own compositions. But I never learned properly. My—my aunt couldn’t afford lessons.”

  “You’re self-taught? That’s all the more impressive.”

  It wouldn’t be, thought Tess, if he knew the means by which she had acquired her practice. Most students, she knew, copied Great Masters to study their technique. Few tried to pass them off as originals. Tess tucked her sketchbook protectively under her arm. “I have a knack, that’s all.”

  Robert drummed his fingers on the back of her chair. “I know a few people on Fleet Street. It’s one of the benefits of being a lowly journalist. If you would do me the honor of entrusting me with a sample sketch or two . . .”

  Tess looked swiftly up at him. “You’d put in a word for me?”

  She couldn’t quite hide her surprise. No one gives you something for free, Tess. Always look that gift horse in the mouth. That’s what Ginny would tell her.

  “Why not?” With disarming charm, Robert said, “I’d be doing them a favor, not the other way around. Besides, I don’t feel we’re quite quits. I owe you for holding my hand through the Slough of Despond the other day.”

  Not just his hand. But that was all behind them now. And, as Ginny had pointed out to her so eloquently, there had never been much “them” to be behind. Just one impulsive kiss. It wasn’t as though he had kissed her. She had kissed him. No matter how much he seemed to enjoy it at the time.

  Not enough, apparently, to dim his ardor for Caroline Hochstetter.

  Stop it, Tess told herself. A kiss was a kiss, but a job was a job. A proper job, not the sort that might land them behind bars. She could make a home for herself and Ginny, convince Ginny to drop this latest scheme. There was the money, yes, but also the prospect of being an artist, a proper one, paid for her work. Not that she hadn’t been paid for her work before, but it would be nice to be able to own it, instead of skipping town with each effort.

  “I told you,” said Tess gruffly. “No thanks required.”

  Robert raised a brow at her. “No witty rejoinder? No attempt to put me in my place? I rather thought you were looking a bit wan, Miss Fairweather. Have you had breakfast?”

  She hadn’t even thought of breakfast. “I think I’ve missed my sitting.”

  “That’s easily remedied. What ho! Patrick! There is a lady dying of famine in our midst.”

  In the warm glow of being called a lady—a lady!—it took Tess a moment to react. “No, don’t. There’s no need . . .”

  “There’s every need,” said Robert gravely. “Don’t you agree, Patrick? Cunard rather frowns on famine.”

  “We can’t have that, sir,” agreed the steward, appearing like a genie. “If I might, I would suggest an immediate repast alfresco.”

  “Just the thing, Patr
ick. I’ll leave the details to you. Crumpets, kedgeree, what have you.” A coin passed from Robert’s hand to Patrick’s, a substantial one from the look of it. Tess didn’t know whether to feel cosseted or indebted. Or perhaps both. Neither, she decided, was good.

  “Mr. Langford. Robert.” Tess yanked at his sleeve and Robert finally looked down at her, his eyes dancing with amusement.

  “Did you have a special request I neglected to convey? Do you object to kedgeree?”

  “We can’t do this.” Not just because Robert bore the marks of his night with another woman on his neck. Tess scrounged for another excuse, one that would save her pride. “He’s a first-class steward.”

  “And I’m a first-class passenger,” said Robert, “ministering to a damsel in distress. Hunger ought to count as distress, don’t you agree?”

  “I’ll be more distressed if they boot me off the boat.”

  “It’s hardly a hanging offense,” mocked Robert. “Here now! Don’t look like that. Patrick won’t say a word. I’ve known him since my first trip out. He’s as true blue as they come.”

  Tess thought about Ginny, about the stranger looking out at her from Ginny’s face. They’d shared a bed for years. She’d thought she knew everything about her sister. But Ginny was lying to her, hiding something. Something big. Something dangerous. Something coded among the numbers and letters on the last page of a Strauss waltz.

  “Do you really ever know that about anyone?” Tess knotted her hands together, feeling the bones hard beneath the skin. “You think you know someone—but what if they’re not who you thought? How do you know?”

  “That’s a grim topic for a fine morning.” For a moment, she thought he meant to change the subject, but he didn’t. He mulled it over, before saying, quietly, “People like simple stories. Good and evil, hero and villain. We try to mold people into familiar roles, roles we can understand. The devoted mother, the heartless adulteress, the wastrel, the toady, the patriot—the traitor. But it’s never that simple, is it?”