As for Michael, he needed more than rest; he needed restoration. The blast had left him badly damaged. He came in and out of consciousness, and when awake, he was prone to fits. Two days earlier, as they prepared to board the ship at Cobh, the sun had punched through the clouds for the first time in weeks. Francis took a moment to admire the way the harbor came alive under the sun’s influence, gray flannel transformed into a field of diamonds. He had an arm around Michael, supporting his unsteady steps, and as Michael lifted his face and the warmth of the sun touched him, he seemed to smile. But then his lids fluttered open and it was as if someone had stabbed an ember in his eye. His hands went to his face, his legs buckled, and he emitted a gurgling cry. When he tumbled, two of the pursers double-timed it over to the brothers and between them lifted Michael off the quay and carried him up the gangplank. That had been the first test of the FC Plan, and the quick attention of the pursers, each of whom Francis rewarded with a pound note, was proof positive that the plan was working.
Now the FC Plan had passed another test. He had navigated a first-class dinner, steered conversation away from that pesky royal visit, and perhaps impressed an American or two with his—dare he say?—nobility. He had even chosen the proper spoon, a sure sign of good things to come.
MICHAEL—YES, THAT was his name. He knew that now, though he had been grasping at it for what seemed like weeks, so long that he had begun to wonder if he even had a name, or if his mind had become so porous that names could find no purchase. But now he knew. He was Michael. He was Michael and he was in a bed with a red and gold cover, in a small room with round windows on one wall. Next to the bed was a table with a glass of water and a lamp that cast a pale glow, beyond which lay another bed just like his. On the other side of his bed was a leather chair and in the chair sat an old man with a sharp, beakish nose and a spray of white hair above his lean face. The man wore spectacles—round, black, and heavy—and a creamy white suit and waistcoat. A black cravat, like some leafy night-blooming flower, ran riot from his shirt collar. Michael nodded to the old man and the old man nodded in reply. He’d never spoken to the old man but he knew the man had been there—in that chair, in this room—for… for… for as long as Michael could remember. Was that a day? A week? More? It could not be his whole life because out on the fringes of his memory, in that spot where his own name had hovered just out of reach, there were other, brighter moments, and he could only hope that they would return to him like the wreckage of a ship pushed, ebb after ebb, to the shore.
“I’m Michael,” he said to the man, who raised his shaggy eyebrows as if appraising this bit of information. The man nodded again and crossed one knee over the other, letting his left foot bob above the carpet. He did not seem to be in any hurry to answer. He looked like a man who had resigned himself to waiting for a train that was still many hours from the station. Michael shrugged and reached for the glass of water on the nightstand, but his grip was feeble, and he watched as the glass hit the table, splashed water across the polished wood, and toppled to the floor. All of this transpired without a sound. Michael sat back against his pillow and clapped his hands: all was silence. He shouted, Hallooooooooo, felt the strain in his throat, but where was the sound?
“Why can’t I hear—” he began to say to the old man, and startled at the sound of his voice. He lurched forward. “Why can I only hear myself when I’m talking to you?”
The old man looked at Michael over the rims of his spectacles as if he were noticing him—really taking note of him—for the first time. Then he tilted his chin up and peered at Michael through the lower half of his lenses. During his inspection of Michael he became distracted by something on his trousers, and with great care he plucked a tuft of dust from his knee and flicked it to the floor. Slowly his tongue wet the corners of his lips. All of this seemed preliminary to speaking, but he said nothing. Was this man a doctor? Michael wondered. Was that the reason for his excessively white wardrobe? He considered the possibilities: hospital, infirmary, sanatorium, insane asylum.
The man’s chin dipped and Michael leaned closer, expecting some explanation—My boy, you’ve been in a dreadful accident but all will be well. When the man’s mouth opened, however, a torrent of sound—the Noise!—came pouring out of him. If Michael had been pinned at the bottom of a waterfall, the sound could not have been any louder; it was the fury of sea waves assaulting the cliff face. He clapped his hands over his ears but it made no difference. The circular windows roared like the mouths of cannons. Michael writhed on the bed and drew himself into a ball. The Noise continued to pulverize him. Not until the old man shut his mouth did the sound wane, though it did not cease entirely, but merely seemed more distant, as if he were in a cottage above the sea rather than chained to the rocks below.
Not a doctor at all, Michael thought. A torturer, that’s what he was. But he also had to admit a third possibility, that the old man was an angel of the avenging variety. That would explain the white clothes, the voice like a thousand brass cymbals. He had not seen it immediately because he had always thought of angels in flowing robes with brilliant halos and massive wings of white. Still, that cravat troubled him: it was black, as were those hard owlish spectacles. Could the man be a devil? Or a pooka, of the sort he’d heard in the stories told by the woman who did their washing back in Ballyrath?
Ballyrath. The word jarred something loose: that was his home. The woman—Mrs. Greavey, that was her name. The washing on the line, like white pennants strung between two posts. The cottage with its white walls and thatched roof, and the green hills in all directions. This and more came rushing back at him. Ballyrath. He had been a boy there, and he had left home for the seminary with its gray stone and gaudy stained glass, its black cassocks and narrow cots. The long tables, the gloopy eggs and gristly rashers of the morning meal. He could smell the sugared fumes rising from the censer during the consecration, could feel the pages of his Augustine and Aquinas; each leaf crackled when turned, as if the books had been waterlogged and poorly dried. All of this had bloomed suddenly in his head, but none of it explained how he had arrived here, or where here was.
He had his name, he had these moments in time, but there was an unfathomable gap between there and here. He thought about finding a mirror, hoping his appearance could offer some clue, but he couldn’t make his body do its part. He wasn’t paralyzed—he had figured out that much. But he felt so heavy, so tired, as if the effort of remembering had sapped him. He took a deep breath and let his head loll on the pillow. The old man—not a doctor, possibly an angel, likely a devil—remained in his chair. If this was a visitation by some divine or demonic presence, then Michael had to ask: What had he done to deserve this pain? He felt sleep coming on again, the exhaustion of his limbs overtaking him, and in that moment he stumbled on one last question: Am I dead?
FRANCIS EASED THE door open, just wide enough to slip through the gap. He didn’t want to risk waking Michael if the mercy of sleep had been granted to him. And if Michael was awake, or in that half-aware state that had gripped him since the accident, then the light from the corridor would only increase his punishment. Sound didn’t bother him—he seemed deaf as a post, to be honest—but Francis had seen the way sunlight or a bright room could send him into spasms. In the quiet of the cabin, Francis removed his tuxedo jacket and black trousers and hung them in the closet, next to the three suits he had bought for the trip. In the days before the Britannic set sail, he had stashed Michael in an upmarket quarter of Cork where he thought it least likely anyone would look for them. He had heard praises heaped on a local forger while he was in Mountjoy, and while he waited for his false papers from the man, he found a tailor who could provide him with clothes befitting his new station. He had paid a small fortune for the passports and a smaller but still substantial sum for his new wardrobe, but that investment was already paying dividends. More than looking the part, he was the part. For Michael, he had pulled two changes of clothes from the racks of a men’s shop, guessi
ng at the sizes. He would tell anyone who asked that his brother had lost so much weight that nothing fit him right. Michael had always been a stripling, but honestly, he was a skeleton now.
Just as Francis turned out the bedside lamp, there was a soft rapping at the door, barely audible but insistent enough to catch his attention. His heart skipped and he cast about for something, anything, he could wield in his defense—but no; if it was the visit he was dreading, it would not come with a genteel knock. That would be a foot-against-the-door sort of visit. He rose and pulled on his dressing gown, another new purchase, and cautiously turned the knob.
Anisette stood in the corridor, her fist poised for one more dainty knock. At the sight of Francis, she beamed; she had a bright, chipper, Oh, there you are! way about her.
“Sir Angus,” she said, her expression shifting from smitten to solemn. “You must forgive me—well, forgive all of us. Here we were at the table, gabbing away about nonsense, while you carry this terrible burden. Not that your brother is a burden—far from it, I am sure—but you must think us the most insensitive, callous, heartless—”
“Really,” Francis said, “it’s—”
“Deplorable,” she said, with a note of finality. “That’s the word for it.” Anisette lowered her voice to a whisper. “If I may ask, is everything… all right?”
“Yes, quite,” he said. Since becoming Angus, he had come to rely on that word. “Or as well as can be expected, under the circumstances.”
“Our sympathies are with you. We—well, I—I wanted you to know that.”
This business of dining with heiresses was new to him. Should he be flattered by the attention or was this part of the routine? An after-dinner visit to a young man’s bedroom seemed like a bold stroke, but perhaps in the world of the bejeweled and be-moneyed these late-night tête-à-têtes were as commonplace as Pimm’s Cups and tea sandwiches. Anisette stood before him as if at a garden party; it was almost midnight and she looked as dewy as the morning. If she lowered her voice, it seemed not out of deference to the hour and the possibly scandalous nature of her intent, but rather out of a well-bred wish to respect Sir Angus’s privacy regarding matters medical. The young Miss Bingham exuded calm and good grace, blithely unaware of—or, he had to consider, completely uninterested in—the disordered state of his robe and pajamas.
“Thank you for your concern,” he said. “You’re very kind.”
She pressed one hand over her heart and canted her head to the side. Her lips puckered into something between a kiss and a pout. Tears were a distinct possibility. “No,” she said. “You are very kind.”
Before Francis could continue the volley of mutual admiration, her mood shifted: in a flash she was again all smiles and dry eyes, a vision of milk and apples. Her fingers plucked the sides of her gown and she bobbed, just slightly. Was that a curtsy?
“Well,” she said. “Good night, then.”
Francis closed the door and returned to bed. “Equo ne credite, Teucri!” he said aloud, into the darkness. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.” The words felt clumsy in his mouth. He hadn’t used his Latin in ages. If Michael were awake—if he weren’t stone-deaf, Francis reminded himself—he would have no trouble with that one. Aeneid. Book Two. Give me something harder than that, he would say. I’m not a complete eejit, you know. It was a game they had grown up playing, the only game their father had ever played with them. He would toss out lines—Homer and Virgil were a regular part of the rotation—and the boys would compete to be the first to identify the source and render an on-the-spot translation. That they considered it a game, rather than an endless final examination, said a lot about life in the cottage in Ballyrath. A schoolmaster father, his three sons, and no feckin’ idea how to talk to one another like normal folk.
And now: another knock at the door, louder than the first. Had the young Miss Bingham screwed up her courage and returned for another round of compliments? Yes, he was very kind, but he was also exhausted and desperate for a night’s sleep. Francis hauled himself out of bed and readied his smile, his Quite, quite. Only it wasn’t Anisette. He opened the door to Marion Walter leaning against the jamb. She did not speak, but he was sure that he could hear the purr in her throat. She looked at him in a vague and unfocused way, then over his shoulder at the dark room behind him, and then she was inside and the door was shut. She leaned against the wall and drew him toward her, plucking loose the drawstring on his pajamas. She tasted of gin and tobacco, and the scent of her neck was sharp: dried flowers wrapped in leather. He had a fleeting thought of nights on the cheap along the Grand Canal in Dublin, but this was no dark alley. This was first class. She pulled him closer, and as he bunched the watery silk of her gown around her hips, she bit him hard on the shoulder. The rest was sudden, frenzied, and audible from the corridor.
ANISETTE SNUGGED THE duvet under her chin. What would Maman say if she knew? To go to his room? To knock on his door? To have him answer half dressed—which meant half undressed? After everything that had happened in New York, Maman would kill her, plain and simple. But what a gentleman he had been! And hadn’t Maman been telling her for months that the purpose of the trip was to meet a better class of people? The best thing to do, Maman had said, was to let the dust settle and then return in triumph.
And hadn’t tonight been a triumph? She had worried that the Walters—such awful people—might ruin everything with their bickering but they hadn’t been anything more than a distraction: the drunken fat man stuffed full of roast beef and loud opinions and his fairy-tale witch of a wife. Mrs. Walter was the wicked queen in Snow White—the same pale skin, black hair, and nasty laugh—with just a dash of Anisette’s older sister, Félicité, thrown into the mix. That woman had tried to draw Angus into her web all night—yes, she was a spider, too; that’s just what she was—but he was too good for her, too quick on his feet, and maybe (fingers crossed!) a little too interested in Anisette to get tangled up in that woman’s web.
But now New York was waiting for them and it was the same old New York they had left. Except that they had made the acquaintance of Angus MacFarquhar, and he was the most charming man Anisette had ever met. If that witchy Mrs. Walter was the evil queen, then surely Angus was the prince and Anisette herself was Snow White (she could hear Father’s voice: Foolish girl!). Maman had already promised to invite Sir Angus to dinner and who knew where it would go from there? She did hope that Félicité would be in Newport or Greenwich or anywhere that wasn’t New York, and while she was making wishes she added another that Father would be on his best behavior.
Father on his best behavior—that was the silliest thought she’d had all night. Hadn’t Father made a joke of their entire holiday? The storm before the Sturm. He’d called them a two-woman economic-aid package for the jewelers and dressmakers of Europe and said it would be their last chance to use their French—that soon the whole continent would be speaking German. Anisette hadn’t found this funny in New York and now, months later, she considered it cruel. Despite some sunny days, the mood in Europe was mostly one of gloom and doom. It was already infecting her fledgling memories of their travels. She wanted golden recollections of the Piazza San Marco and the Uffizi and the Louvre. In the months and years to come, she wanted to take solace in Botticelli’s Venus, the sunrise over Santa Maria della Salute, the verdant angles of Versailles, and the view from the top of the Eiffel Tower. It was her dream vision of Europe, shadow boxes built from books and paintings and her hothouse imagination before she’d even left New York. All she’d needed was the actual stuff of experience to fill out the spaces she had already cleared for each perfect, crystalline moment of her Grand Tour.
The reality of Europe wrecked it for her. Yes, she saw Rome and Venice and Florence and Paris and plenty more and they were beautiful—so much like she had imagined them. But the delicate case she had made for each porcelain memory had been smashed to bits by sights too big and ungainly to fit neatly into any frame. In Munich, soldiers walked the train pla
tforms with their machine guns and their dogs, eager to bark and to bite. Vienna was buffed to a gleaming carapace of red and black, like painted lips over savage teeth. And all of France seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for the punch to land. Just on the other side of the French border, gangs of workers were digging in the fields. When she asked a man on the train what they were planting, he gave a sad, tired laugh and said, “Cannons.”
Lying in the dark, with the ocean moving beneath her, she thought of all the lovely people she had met and she wondered when the net would fall upon them. They would all be caught up in whatever came next. But here at least was Angus, and for a little while he would be in New York, not in Europe, and he would be safe.
THE FARM
CRONIN HAD LEFT ALICE in the kitchen, on her hands and knees giving the floor a good scrubbing. The mess was his fault, but it couldn’t be helped. The people here called the time between winter and spring mud season, but this year the mud just wouldn’t end. The snow had been late in melting, then came a month of rain, and then out of nowhere it was as hot as the middle of July, and here it was barely the first of June. Alice insisted on a clean house, and she wouldn’t take any lip about clean enough. The plates were kept to a high polish, and the pans scoured with steel wool until they shone like they were newly bought from the store. Alice was house-proud, and Cronin might tease her about it but he wouldn’t think of saying a word against her. She had saved his life. Simple as that. The house, the farm, the boy, and now the baby—all of it he owed to her. Without her he would be a broken-down man, a stranger in this land piling one day on top of another with no hope of it ever adding up.
Cronin was a man who still woke, stricken, in the middle of the night, wrestling ghosts he had thought he could outrun by putting an ocean between them and himself. The old stories said that fairy folk couldn’t cross water, and he was a fool for thinking that ghosts were bound by the same rules. Now he knew better. Your ghosts were always with you. They rode you like a jockey rides his mount, and if you ever got half a mind to throw them, that’s when they dug in their heels and went to the whip.
The World of Tomorrow Page 2