The Merrills had been happy to have anywhere at all to sleep last night and had not expected to share a bed, so they had not been disappointed. All the women had slept in one room, and the men in another, glad for any accommodations at all. This morning, Tony Merrill had given the old woman whose house it was all the guineas he had left, and had kissed her soundly on both cheeks after a humble and stumbling Portuguese thank you.
It seemed that no one else would have done it, if he had not. Claire was silent, moving and walking and reacting like a human being, but unspeaking, just as the man who had lain all night on a pallet at Tony’s feet, still, and, Tony suspected, unsleeping, in spite of his exhaustion. Rajat and Merrill had been instantly asleep, in fact, Rajat was snoring when they came in. This morning, however, Tony had seen Varian Drew’s sapphire-blue eyes, cool, expressionless, and he had sighed and known quite well that nothing had changed.
His own inspiration toward settling matters drove him to book the Drews’ passage in the same cabin. Tony came back up the hill to his wife and whispered it in her ear, and her face lost its merriment even as he spoke the words.
“Tony,” Claudia began quietly, glancing up to see if anyone else was within hearing distance. “Very unwise.”
“Possibly. But I think it is our last resort, darling,” Tony said, and pulled her around the corner lazily and kissed her eyebrow. “Have I mentioned how very much I like your eyebrows when you are serious?” he teased, and she could not help but smile, and it was with a great deal of pleasure that he demonstrated to her his approval also of her mouth when she smiled. “You shan’t care that I intend to lock you into our cabin for the next several days, until we are come home to England?”
“You shan’t have to lock me in,” Claudia teased back instantly, and then blushed, and glanced up at him unsurely. “I thought— I thought you didn’t care for this, you know,” she confessed suddenly. “That we were friends, and that you wanted a comfortable wife, and that was all.”
“But we are friends, and you are a comfortable wife,” Tony pointed out, “and also very brave, and very beautiful, excessively intelligent, extremely well-read, and very, remarkably,” Tony said, smiling down at her, and caressing her smooth cheek with his broad finger, “quiet. And I am quite sure that I am presently to discover that you are a woman of wonderful and inexpressible passions, are you not, my dearest Claudia?”
“I rather believe,” she said, blinking at his cravat— he was the only one of them who had actually managed to retain his baggage— and then meeting his gray eyes with her calm smile, “that I am. And I see that you shall make me most wonderfully and inexpressibly happy.”
“If that means making love to you while whispering sonnets in your ear,” he returned, watching her face from beneath those deceptive eyelids, “then you are perfectly right. Hallo, Rajat.” Merrill turned without apparent embarrassment, without releasing his wife, to greet the silent, turbaned young man who had stopped on the other side of the doorway until it was suitable for him to enter. The young man smiled faintly at Lord Merrill, came inside the small room, and bowed to the lady.
“I only wished to tell you,” he said quietly to Claudia, “that your deliberation— ” he hesitated slightly over the word— “is balanced now by progress and success, and your waiting is completed. You have accomplished; you journey is changed now to constancy,” he said, and smiled once more and bowed again and left them alone.
They smiled faintly, placidly, at each other, feeling the fire beneath the calmness in the cool shadows of the house.
with an exhausted sigh, Claire Drew came inside her cabin aboard the HMS Ulysses, an English 44-gun fifth-rate frigate, after enduring an uncomfortable quarter of an hour with Sir Robert Calder, her godfather, one of her father’s oldest friends, who had spent many evenings in that pretty pink house in the almond grove on the hill at Faro.
Drained of energy in spirit as well as in body, Claire was not precisely ill, but sick of heart, unspeakably spent, so that every forced smile, every greeting, every polite word was an unbearable effort. For a moment she stood against the closed door, resting her forehead on the polished cherry, one slender hand still on the brass of the latch and one laid against the wood, her eyes closed, trembling violently and unable to control it.
Then the latch moved under her hand, abruptly, without a warning knock. She released it and backed away as the door opened, and drew in a silent, shaking breath as she opened her eyes on her husband, filling the doorway, his blond head like a torch, his blue eyes driven into brilliance, every muscle of his body suddenly tense as he saw her, as he met her eyes for the first time.
“Oh, Christ,” Varian Drew said quietly, in a helpless undertone, looking away, anywhere except at his wife. Just as suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone.
She was still in her peasant clothes; she unbound the scarf around her head and wrapped it tightly around her waist as the Portuguese women did, and went out into the companionway. At the sight of him hanging to the brass rail of the steps, his back to her, his head bent, his thick shoulders tense, she halted.
“Varian.”
The head came up instantly, though he did not turn around. “Yes?”
“You may have the cabin. I will find another,” she said quietly, and went the other direction, across the large, open stem deck where they had laid out the wounded beneath the thick beams of the deck above, past the enormous main spar sunk into the depths of the ship, nodding politely at the busy English sailors, straight back to captain’s quarters astern, and knocked on his door.
Sir Robert was busy; he smiled fondly at her and told her to come inside, and finished up with his first mate, and then asked her what she wanted. It struck her instantly that she did not wish to explain it to him; the ship was crowded, he very likely did not have another cabin, and to ask for one with so many wounded aboard was the height of insensibility. “I only wished to know who is in charge of tending the wounded and to offer my services as a nurse,” she said quietly.
He smiled at her across his map-desk and put up his compass and pen. “My ship doctor is aboard another vessel with the more seriously wounded, my dear Claire, so I am very happy indeed to have the finest nurse I know on board,” he said, and then she saw that she was, after all, still needed, and somehow it took away a little of the pain. She nodded, and asked him what sort of supplies he had, and instantly he gave her complete charge over all of it. With a small sigh of relief, Sir Robert came over and patted her shoulder, thinking how very grown up she had become since her father’s death, and took her down to the ship’s infirmary.
They set sail when the winds freshened at sunset, after the last of the wounded had been brought out from the beaches, supplies had been unloaded, and papers had been exchanged with General Moore— and after he had got his sugar. They sailed northwards, straight up the coast, with the sandy beaches of Vimeiro and Caldas de Rainha, white as a shroud in the full moon, giving way around ten o’clock to the rocky cliffs at Nazaré, where the village chapel lit up the night three hundred feet above the ocean at the top of the cliffs, as they turned westward away from the dangerous beach and went out toward the open sea.
Then there were wounded to see to; they had to be fed, row by row, with steaming soup that the cook had sent up from the galley, and then they had to be tended, each of them, wounds seen to, many of them for the first time, and bandages changed and dried blood washed away, and the feverish given quinine and set apart from the more fortunate. She had two cabin boys to wait on her, and the three of them were busy; Claire worked steadily in her peasant dress, her scarf tied around her waist like an apron, and then directing Consuela and Elena after they found her.
The ocean was still after dark; they picked up a gentle sailing breeze toward morning, after Claire had fallen, exhausted, into a stiff, straight-backed chair in the infirmary and laid her head down on the small table before her and slept where she was.
Claudia found her there at dawn; she ca
me inside, her lovely face changed more from the last nine hours of her life than from all the four-and-twenty years gone by before, with a new gentleness in her voice as she saw her sister, sleeping, her head laid down in her arms.
Claudia reached to turn up the lamp on the wall over the cabinet. “Claire, dearest,” she said, kneeling, touching her shoulder. The dark head moved, and then blue eyes opened on sister’s face beside her.
Claire’s head came up in an unwilling alertness. “Something is wrong?”
Claudia’s calm blue eyes darkened faintly as her slender brows drew together, an obvious reminder that she was a sister to the woman here, whose thick straight brows and blue eyes so mimicked her own. “No; Varian has asked me to come and find you. Have you slept at all?”
“Yes,” Claire nodded briefly. “A few hours. I shall be up at dawn; Sir Robert has asked me to take charge of the nursing.”
“You haven’t asked him for another cabin, have you?”
The blue eyes fell to her sister’s peasant blouse. “No. But I shan’t need one. There isn’t much time for sleeping.”
“Varian has left the cabin; he asked me to tell you,” she said gently. “Will you go up and sleep for a while, now that he has left?”
The pale face turned bloodless in the lamplight from the wall, and she shook her head. “No; there is no need,” she said, and drew in a breath and stood up, turning away from her sister.
Claudia rose also. “You will be ill, if you don’t rest,” she said quietly. “I shall feed them breakfast and look after them for a while, if you will go up and sleep. Just for a few hours. Do it for me, Claire?”
“Claudia— I— ”
“I told Tony he ought not to have done it,” she said calmly. “I’m very sorry; but try to be sensible, won’t you? We shall be at sea for several days, perhaps as long as a week. You cannot be of any worth at all to these men who need your skill, if you allow yourself to fall ill from exhaustion on the first day.”
“Yes, I know,” Claire said quietly. Her dark head bent over her clasped hands, her back straight and stiff before her sister, the peasant blouse and scarf bright and cheerful against the lamplit cherry-wood of the neat, orderly cabinets behind her. She drew in a deep breath and nodded. “Very well; if you will promise to wake me at— at ten,” Claire said, her rough black skirts rustling as she turned to face her sister. She pulled the soiled scarf away from her waist and threw it tiredly on the table. An expressionless blue gaze rose to meet Claudia’s pleasant, slightly anxious eyes. “You won’t let him— You will see that I am not disturbed, won’t you?” she said quietly, and when Claudia nodded, she went past her into the predawn darkness outside in the narrow companionway.
An uneasy, unwilling truce, distant and uncommunicative, prevailed over that single cabin for the next six days until they put in at Gravesend. They came and went without seeing each other; she slept for three or four hours at a time while Claudia watched over the wounded and Varian Drew haunted the port bow.
It was inevitable that Claudia would have at least once found herself too busy to climb out into the crisp ocean sunlight to speak to the man who stood there at the rail; she sent Tony instead to tell Varian that his wife was sleeping below, and Tony, placid and bland, forgot to do so. It mattered not whether it was unintentional; what mattered was that Varian Drew went below and opened the door to his cabin to find his wife, asleep, curled into a defensive and indefensible-looking ball, lying on top of the coverlet in the corner of the small bed, her hands tucked up under her chin, her feet hidden beneath her skirts.
He halted, thunderstruck, every muscle in his body willed to stillness, and then, after a second of hesitation that verged somewhere on the edge of flight, somewhere at the edge of a chasm, he closed the door quietly behind him and came inside.
For a long while he sat at the small table against the smoothly polished wall, leaning back carefully against his chair, staring at his wife. She was still in sleep, as still as though she were dead, still with the flat exhaustion that he had once endured himself. She looked pale, as colorless as after she had been ill in May; there were blue shadows in the once-rosy face beneath her eyes, where her long lashes lay motionless against her soft skin. She slept like a child, but the lines around her mouth were not childish, and the small hands beneath her chin were not open like a child’s, but closed tightly, even in sleep. She sighed, once; she moved slightly, frowning, those thick, straight brows, drawing together in sudden pain of something in her sleep. With a small silent oath, he stood and came to stand over her.
The dark hair lay tied at her neck, spreading out over her shoulders, and he lightly brushed a strand of it away from her face. His finger came away wet; he stared down at her for a moment longer, and touched the linen of his pillow beneath her cheek. It was cold; damp, wet, where she had been crying. Even in sleep she had been crying.
He went outside without waking her and climbed back into the sunshine of the August ocean to stare out westward toward the afternoon sun, and when he went down at dusk, she was gone. The cabin bed was neat and untouched; but the linen on the pillow was still damp, as it had been, cool, with a touch of dampness that he had thought was just the sea air. Each night he had come downstairs and laid down on the linen, had slept there, never realizing that he slept next to her tears if not to her, and unwilling to accept that he could still care that he did.
After enduring four days of agonizingly becalmed seas and then two days and nights of blistering late-summer squalls, the seven of them arrived at last at Gravesend and parted, without discussion, the morning they docked.
Claudia saw Varian Drew as he was leaving; he had borrowed a shirt from Tony but still wore his India trousers and his well-worn bush boots, and the odd clothes made her brother-in-law seem even more like a stranger. When she told him briefly that Claire had asked to go home with them to Merrill House for a few weeks, he did not seem to care; as she watched him take his leave of Sir Robert and stride quickly down the gangway, with Rajat close behind him, Claudia thought that neither of them, neither Claire nor Varian, cared at all.
And then a little later, when Tony had brought a hired carriage up to the docks to collect them, and the two sisters had given Sir Robert a last embrace and thanked him again for bringing them home to England, Claudia saw Rajat sitting on the carriage box next to the coachman. His brown face was impassive beneath his turban, but Claudia caught his eye as she climbed into the carriage, and she knew that Varian had sent him back.
They made the journey home to Essex in two days in easy stages. For Claudia, the journey brought a peaceful sense of completion, and it was accomplished gradually, as all good things are, within the casual, ever-present embrace of her husband as she sat between Elena and her large and placid Tony, facing a silent, expressionless Claire and drowsy, matronly Consuela.
They arrived at Merrill House just at first dusk in the midst of a summer rainstorm; the house was lit up to welcome home its master and its new mistress, and as Claudia came inside and greeted the servants by name, servants she had known since childhood, and gazed around the large and placid expanse of Merrill House, she smiled at her husband, who said simply, “Welcome home, darling,” and kissed her in the front hallway in plain view of a dozen servants, and then instructed his household that dinner should be set back an hour and, without the least embarrassment, took his bride upstairs to his chambers and closed the door on the world.
It remained to Claire to find herself a bed, which the housekeeper did without question, and with a warm welcome also for herself; the five daughters of Sir Colbert Ffawlkes had been the delight of the neighborhood for two decades, and there was no one in Finchingfield who did not know and love them.
Consuela drew her a bath, and Elena unpacked, and then Claire dressed in a gown that Chloe had sent over to Merrill House for her, with a note that Chloe would wait until next week to call, as both of the children had the influenza. After Claire had wandered around downstairs in the ab
sence of host and hostess for a good quarter hour, she came upon Rajat seated cross-legged in the floor of the library beside the lamp table, with a book open in his hands.
“Good evening,” he said politely, closing the book as she appeared in the doorway.
“Rajat!” she said in surprise. “I thought you had gone with— to London.”
“Yes,” he nodded, and added, “Drew has sent me here for a little while. Perhaps you will like to continue our lessons,” he said, referring to his English.
She came inside and sat down beside him in a chair. “Perhaps you will teach me Urdu,” she said slowly, staring at his brown face.
“It is not necessary,” he said. “But there are many other things which you may wish to learn, of my ancestors,” he added, with a polite inclination of his head.
“When did you come here?”
“But I have come with you, Doña,” he said. “On the carriage. I have come with you from Gravesend. Very welcome orders.”
“What do you mean, very welcome orders?” she inquired, having heard him say the phrase so many times.
“Drew has given me orders. I am grateful to accomplish for him,” he said simply, if not quite correctly.
“Varian?” she asked, hardly audible.
“Of course. He is my master, I am his servant; and yet he has made me his friend. We benefit from each other. It is good when the two are balanced together,” he said.
“Rajat— ” She halted for a moment, gazing at him. This was unwise territory at best. “He has played your game, has he?”
A small bow. “You wish to play again?”
Claire Page 23