The Wild Rose
Page 20
A woman wearing a long silk kimono and ropes of pearls around her neck made her way over to him, cornering him by the dining room mantel. “You’re Seamus Finnegan, aren’t you?” she said. “I recognize you from your pictures. Were you at the Royal Geographical Society tonight? I’ve just come from there. Saw that smashing girl, Willa Alden. The one who’s mapping Everest. She gave a marvelous presentation. Completely spellbinding.”
“Good God,” Seamie muttered. Desperate to get away from the chatterbox, he excused himself. The only place in the whole house where people were not congregating was on the staircase, which was across from the foyer. He made his way to it, getting jostled as he did, and nearly knocking over a marble bust of Shakespeare with green laurels on his head. When he got to the stairs, he climbed halfway up them and sat down. This was a good vantage point. And a quiet one. He would wait for Albie to walk by, tell him good-bye, then make his way home.
As he waited, finishing off the champagne still in his glass, the front door banged open yet again. A new, and noisy, group had just come in—two men and a handful of women. The men, in suits and overcoats, were tipsy. The women, in long, slim-cut silk dresses with ropes of glass beads around their necks, were laughing at something. One of them, Seamie noticed, was not wearing a dress. She was wearing trousers and a long silk coat.
He couldn’t quite see her face. Her head was down because she was unbuttoning her coat. But his heart started to hammer nonetheless.
“No,” he said to himself. “It’s not her. It just looks like her, but it’s not. It’s just a coincidence. A bloody great coincidence. Everyone here dresses strangely.”
“All hail our conquering hero!” one of the men suddenly shouted, grabbing the laurel wreath off Shakespeare’s head and placing it on the woman’s.
“Oh, do stop, Lytton,” the woman said, looking up and laughing. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“Fucking hell,” Seamie said.
It was Willa.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A volley of cheers rang out. Applause echoed in the foyer. Willa Alden looked around herself shyly, mortified by the attention. She gave a quick bow and tried to back out of the foyer into the dining room, but a drunken man swooped down on her, lifted her up, and deposited her on the table in the center of the hallway, banging her false leg against the table as he did. She clamped down on a groan of pain as she struggled to find her balance. The leg was throbbing. If she didn’t get some laudanum down her throat quickly, she was going to be in trouble.
She tried to get down, but some silly woman was throwing roses she’d swiped from a vase. Guests in the other rooms craned their necks to see what was happening, or ran into the foyer to join in the applause.
“I give you the mountain goddess Cholmolungha!” Lytton Strachey shouted, bowing and salaaming. Willa had known Lytton, a brilliant, acerbic writer, before she’d left London, known he could be a bit dramatic. His antics had amused her in the past, but now she very much wished he would stop.
“Thank you,” Willa said awkwardly, to the people who were clapping for her. “Thank you so much.” Then she turned to Lytton and hissed, “Get me down!”
Lytton did as she asked, taking her hand as she jumped off the table. The leg sometimes made such jumps tricky. The last thing she wanted to do was to knock the damn thing off in front of so many people. That would be quite the party piece.
“Willa Alden,” Lulu said, striding into the foyer and enfolding her in an embrace. “Leonard Woolf just came to fetch me. He saw you at the RGS. He said you’d just arrived, and here you are! I thought so often that I’d never see you again.” Lulu released her. “Oh, just look at you. You’re positively swashbuckling.”
“It’s so good to see you, Lu,” Willa said, forcing herself to smile and be charming. “It’s been ever so long. You are impossibly ethereal and more beautiful than ever. You look as if you exist on air alone.”
“Air and champagne,” Leonard Woolf said. He was Virginia Stephen’s fiancé and a literary critic. He was clever and bookish, like the Stephen girls and all their friends. He’d come to the RGS with Lytton tonight. Willa had met him after her lecture.
A man, tanned and blond and handsome, came up to them. “Lulu, I just wanted to say thank you and good night,” he said.
Thank God, Willa thought. While Lulu was talking to him, she could slip off and take her pills. But no such luck.
“Tom, you’re not leaving, are you?” Lulu cried. “You can’t! Not until you’ve met Miss Alden. She’s another adventurer, just like you.”
Willa smiled at him. She was in such terrible pain. She’d just given an hour-long presentation, then fielded questions for another hour and a half. She had thought this was going to be a small gathering of friends, where she might be able to quickly take some medicine, get a bite to eat, and then collapse in a soft chair. She had not expected this—a large and noisy party. There would be so many people to meet. So many hands to shake. So much chattering.
“It’s an honor, Miss Alden,” Lawrence said. “I was at the RGS tonight. Your lecture was wonderful. There is much I would still like to know, but I will not keep you. I’m sure you’re quite spent. I’ve given one or two talks at the RGS myself and I know how draining they can be.”
“On what topic, Mr. Lawrence?” Willa asked, struggling not to show her pain, to be interested and polite. She wanted no one to think about her leg or guess at her pain. She wanted no one’s pity.
“Carchemish. The Hittites. That sort of thing,” Lawrence replied. “I would just like to say that you must come to the desert. There’s so much to be discovered there, and you won’t have to suffer altitude sickness to do it.”
“Oh, the desert won’t do for our girl,” Strachey said. “She prefers her quests to be impossible. She likes to chase that which she can never have. It’s so hopelessly noble. So impossibly romantic.”
“Are we still talking about a mountain, Lytton? Or your newest boyfriend?” Lulu asked archly.
They all laughed. Lulu invited Tom to lunch; Tom accepted and then invited Willa to supper. Lytton swanned off in pursuit of a drink. Leonard said that Willa must be famished, and then he and Virginia went off to the kitchen to make her up a plate, and Willa found herself suddenly alone in the midst of the huge roiling party.
Thank God, she thought. The pain was nearly blinding now. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled the pill bottle out. She spotted a half-empty bottle of champagne on the floor by Shakespeare’s pedestal and grabbed it to wash the pills down. She knew she should join the party and be a sociable guest, but she couldn’t, not until she got the pain under control. She decided to sit down on Lulu’s staircase. Just for a few minutes. Just long enough to swallow a few pills and rest her leg.
She walked over to the steps stiffly, trying not to limp, and saw that someone had beaten her to them. A man was sitting halfway up the stairs, looking at her. Her heart leapt as she recognized him—Seamie Finnegan, the man she’d once loved. And still did.
“Seamie?” she said softly.
He raised his glass to her. “Congratulations, Willa,” he said. “I hear the lecture was quite a success.”
“You didn’t come,” she said.
“No. I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“I was busy.”
She flinched, feeling as if she’d been slapped, but quickly recovered. She wouldn’t show him her hurt feelings. She had no right to. She was the one who’d left; she wasn’t allowed to have hurt feelings.
“Yes,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady and light. “I can see how busy you are. Well, the lecture was a success. I met some fascinating people, too. Quite a few of them, in fact. I see more people here in an hour than I do in a month in Rongbuk.” She paused, then smiled and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I must get by you. Have to freshen up a bit.”
Seamie moved over on the step to let her pass.
“Lovely seeing you again,” Willa said.
“Y
es,” he said tersely. “Lovely.”
Willa, who’d been resting her weight on her good leg, took a step forward now onto her false one. As she did, a white-hot bolt of pain shot up into her hip. She cried out, stumbled, and fell. She hit the steps hard, losing her grip on the champagne bottle and her pills. Immediately, Seamie was at her side, lifting her back onto her feet.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her, alarm in his voice.
“My leg,” she gasped, nearly blinded by the pain. “Where the hell are my pills?” she said, desperately looking about herself. “Do you see them anywhere?”
“They’re here. I’ve got them.”
“I need them. Please,” she said, her voice ragged with pain.
“Hold on, Willa. This is no good,” Seamie said. “If your leg is that bad, you should be lying down, not standing on it.”
She felt him pick her up and carry her upstairs. He knocked on a door, opened it, then carried her inside a room. It was someone’s bedroom. He put her down on the bed and lit a lamp. He disappeared for a few agonizing seconds, then reappeared with a glass of water.
“Here,” he said, handing her the glass, then opening the pill bottle. “How many?”
“Four,” she said.
“That’s a lot. Are you certain that—”
“Give me the bloody pills!” she shouted.
He did. She swallowed them down then fell back against the pillows, desperately hoping they would do their work quickly.
Seamie walked down to the foot of the bed and started unlacing her boots. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want anything from him; she remembered his cutting words to her on the stairs.
“Don’t. I’m all right. Just go,” she said fiercely.
“Shut up, Willa.”
She felt his hands pulling her boots off, rolling up one of her trouser legs. Felt him undoing the buckles and straps of her fake leg. Then she heard him swear. She knew why. She knew what the flesh below her knee looked like when she overdid it.
“Look at you,” he said. “Your leg’s a mess. It’s swollen and bleeding.” He looked up at her. “This is what you’ve been wearing?” he said angrily, holding the leg up. “What is it? Animal bone? It’s barbaric.”
“Yes, well, there aren’t many prosthetic factories at the base of Everest,” she snapped.
“There are in London. You have to see a doctor and have something proper built for yourself. You’re going to lose more of your leg if you don’t. Your body can’t take this kind of punishment. No one’s can.”
And then he was gone. Willa looked at the ceiling, teeth clenched, as she waited for her pills to kick in. They weren’t as good as the thick brown opium paste that she smoked in the East, but she’d run out of that weeks ago, somewhere around Suez, and had to make do with what she could buy aboard the ship, and then laudanum pills from London chemists.
A few minutes later, Seamie returned carrying a basin of warm water, clean rags, carbolic, salve, and bandages.
“I’m sorry I shouted at you,” she said, her voice more civil now, for the pain had backed off a little.
“It’s all right,” he said, placing the basin on the night table and sitting down next to her on the bed.
“No, it isn’t. I … Ouch! Blimey! What are you doing?” Willa said, as Seamie dabbed at her leg.
“Cleaning up this mess.”
“It hurts. Can’t you just leave it alone?”
“No, I can’t. You’ll get an infection.”
“I won’t. I haven’t in Rongbuk.”
“Probably because it’s so bloody cold there. Germs can’t survive. This is London, remember? It’s warmer. And dirtier. So … how have you been?”
“How have I been?” Willa asked incredulously.
“Since the funeral, I mean,” Seamie said. “How’s your mother? Your family?”
She saw what he was doing—making conversation to take her mind off the pain, but steering away from anything contentious, from anything smacking of the past.
“Mother and I get along as well as can be expected. Albie and I don’t. He barely speaks to me.”
“He’ll get over it,” Seamie said.
And what about you, Seamus Finnegan? she wondered, looking at him, at his handsome face. How have you been? But she did not ask him that question. She thought, again, that she had no right to. Instead she talked about her father’s funeral, and about all the people who’d come to the abbey to pay their respects.
“The burial was the hardest part,” she said. “Going through the tall black gates of that cemetery, so gray and dreary. With the hearse all draped in black, and the horses with their ghastly black plumes. All I could think about as they carried my father’s coffin to the grave site was the Tibetan sky burial ceremony, and how I wished he could have had one.”
“What is it?” Seamie asked, ripping a length of gauze with his teeth and tying it around the dressing he’d made for her leg.
“When someone dies in Tibet, the family takes the body to their priests and the priests take it to a holy place. There, they cut the flesh into bits and crush the bones. Then they feed it all—flesh, bones, organs, everything—to the vultures. The birds take the bodily remains, and the soul, liberated from its earthly prison, goes free.”
“It must be a hard thing to watch,” Seamie said, rolling her trouser leg back down over her knee.
“It was at first, not anymore,” Willa said. “Now I prefer it to our own burials. I hate to think of my father, who so loved the sea and the sky, buried in the cold, sodden ground.” She stopped talking for a bit, as her emotions got the better of her; then she laughingly said, “Though I can’t quite imagine how I’d convince my very proper mother to feed her husband to a pack of vultures.”
Seamie laughed, too. “He was a good man, your father,” he said. “Proud of you, I can tell you. Proud of your climbing. Of what you’d achieved on Kili. He was so distraught to hear of your accident, but even so, he was proud you’d summitted. I remember that, I remember—” He suddenly stopped talking, as if he’d forgotten himself and now regretted what he’d said.
Willa, anxious herself not to bring up what had happened on Kilimanjaro, quickly started talking, desperate to fill the awkward, painful silence.
“You must tell me about the South Pole,” she said. “It must’ve been so wonderful, to be part of that expedition. I can’t even imagine it. To do what you’ve done. See what you’ve seen. To have been the first party to ever reach the South Pole. How amazing. You’ve achieved so much, Seamie, really. You’ve got everything, haven’t you? Everything you ever wanted.”
Seamie looking at the roll of gauze he still held in his hand and didn’t reply immediately. Then he said, “No, Willa. Not everything. I don’t have you.”
Willa, stricken by the sadness in his voice, could not speak.
“I promised myself not to see you again,” he said. “Not to ever talk about this. But here you are. And I need to know. For eight long years, I’ve needed to know how you could do it, Willa. How you could tell me you love me, and then walk away from me.”
Willa felt as if he’d seared her with his words. His pain—the pain in his voice and in his heart—hurt her more than her leg, more than the fall at Kili had. It hurt her more deeply than any pain she’d ever felt. “I was angry,” she said quietly. “I blamed you for what had happened, for the loss of my leg. And I was jealous. You could still climb. I couldn’t.”
“Blamed me?” he said, his voice rising. “Blamed me?” He stood up, anger contorting his face. “What was I supposed to do?” he yelled at her. “What the hell was I supposed to do? Let you die?” Furious now, he threw the wad of gauze across the room, then smacked the basin off the night table, sending bloodied water everywhere.
“What was I supposed to do?” Willa yelled back. “Pretend everything was rosy? Return to England? Have a nice church wedding? Cook and sew and play housewife while you went off to the South Pole? I’d rather have died!”
Willa balled her hands into fists. She pressed them against her eyes. The pain inside her had become an agony. She reached for her prosthesis and started to put it back on, desperate to get away from Seamie.
“Go, Willa. Run away again. That’s what you do best,” he said, watching her.
Willa turned to him, tears of anger and grief in her eyes. “I was wrong! All right?” she shouted. “I know that. I’ve known it for the past eight years. I knew I’d made a mistake the minute I set foot on the train out of Nairobi, but I couldn’t turn around. It was too late. I was afraid—afraid you wouldn’t have me back after what I’d done.”
Seamie shook his head. “Oh, Willa,” he said, his voice cracking. “I loved you, for God’s sake. I still love you.”
Willa began to cry. “I love you, too, Seamie,” she said. “I never stopped loving you. I’ve missed you every day since I got on that train.”
Seamie crossed the room, took her tearstained face in his hands, and kissed her. She pulled him down on the bed next to her. They sat there, facing each other. Willa started laughing. Then she cried again. Then she kissed him hard, twining her fingers in his hair. To have him in her arms again, to feel him so close to her, it was nothing short of joy. A joy she had not felt for eight long years—mad, intoxicating, and dangerous.
“I love you, Seamus Finnegan,” she said. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Seamie kissed her back hard, as she’d kissed him. He slid his hands under the tunic she was wearing, and the sweet shock of his touch made her gasp. He pulled the tunic off her, cupped her small breasts and kissed them. She fought with the buttons of his shirt, fumbling with them, until she got them undone, then she pulled him down to her, loving the feeling of his skin against hers, the warm, heavy weight of him on top of her.
She wanted this. Wanted him close to her. So much. She caught one of his hands in hers and kissed his palm. And as she did, she saw it—his wedding ring, gold and shining.