Chapter 20
You can’t imagine the waiting I endured on the way to Ireland.
The eternity of seconds pressing down on my shoulders, tick-tock.
Train after train. The ferry. Another train.
The closer I came to Queenstown, the longer it took, because it seemed everyone was converging there; everyone had a loved one they hoped had been saved; everyone needed to know, needed to see. Especially the press.
I don’t know if it was fate or fortune that had you there as well. All I know is I was so glad you were there, with me.
I think I could have endured it alone. I don’t know, but I think so. But because of you, I didn’t have to. My burden was shared.
At least the sea didn’t keep him. He’s not lost to the waves, to the sharks and crabs like so many others. We buried him, and I’m grateful for that small mercy.
JUNE, 1915
MEDMENHAM, ENGLAND
Giuseppe found her at Winter Queen. He arrived on a day so balmy it was as if the cold had never been, as if tragedy had never struck.
Rita’s telegram to him from Queenstown had been delayed, long delayed; the war had frayed the edges of all civility and certainly modern technology.
She’d sent it the morning following the sinking.
Count de Cippico had received it in Naples eight days later.
(At that point, Italy was already sliding irrevocably into the conflict, revoking its official alliance to Germany and Austria only days before, leaning more and more into the eager embrace of the Allied Powers.)
A further flurry of communication had established that Rita and her sister had departed Ireland by then, had made their way back to their parents and the sanctuary of their family estate.
Alfred was well gone by the time they’d arrived; the army would not wait. But he’d left letters for them both.
I’m so sorry. I love you. Your grief is mine. I will kill those rotten Hun swine every chance I get. Every bullet I fire will be in your names.
So turned the glorious world.
ONLY ONE OF Lady Allan’s dead daughters was recovered, Gwen, a week after Rita and Inez had left.
The body of Anna was never found. But both of the maids who’d been traveling with the Allan family showed up at the Queen’s Hotel that second afternoon, everyone expressing shock and amazement that any of them were alive.
Lady Allan’s husband had been notified of the sinking, that she had been saved, and was on his way.
There was nothing left for Rita to do, other than bend down to kiss Marguerite on the cheek as she said goodbye and whisper God bless, the softest and kindest words she could think to say, substitutes for the other words she was thinking but could not say.
I’m sorry I couldn’t find them for you. I’m sorry your girls are probably gone. I’m sorry for your guilt, your unreasonable guilt, because your heart still beats without them. I know it haunts you, because I’m haunted too.
Lady Allan had clasped Rita’s hand in hers and nodded, her eyes shimmering. Rita kissed her other cheek, gave her fingers a squeeze, and left.
WINTER QUEEN WAS mostly unchanged. So far, George’s dire predictions about it being bombed had not come to pass, but then, every dusk, the windows were covered in thick black cloth, and all the exterior lights were extinguished.
No headlamps for the autos, no lamplight for the carriages.
No mild, candlelit glow from the waxed-paper lanterns dotting the garden trees.
There was nothing anyone could do about the estate being so close to the Thames, but Charles and Pauline were diligent about obeying the blackout restrictions.
Nothing could stop the moonlight, though, its stark silver luminance, brighter than a Broadway spotlight. Even Inez, usually pagan and barefoot beneath the full moon, retreated from its glare.
When the wind was right, it was possible to hear the whine of the German aeroplanes in their raids, miles away.
Worse still, and far more numerous, were the enormous, bloated Zeppelins, which made hardly any noise at all, delivering their packets of death from high above, beyond the reach of bullets fired from the ground.
There were nights when the eastern edge of the sky burned orange from all the fires in and around London, like some false, hellish sunrise.
Rita could not help but wonder, when it was all over, what would be left of the Old Smoke.
What, in fact, would be left of the whole world.
Yet Winter Queen’s mist would still rise, beautifully reliable.
At times, it came so swift and ferocious that the moon was devoured and the black cloth wasn’t needed, although still applied.
Within minutes, everything would be erased, the water, the sky, much like those foggy hours aboard the Lusy.
Mab mantled her forest in thick gray, opaque, and those were the nights that Rita slept easiest.
But her lover arrived on a clear day, a buttery soft day.
It was just over a week since Italy had declared war on Austria-Hungary and all the chaos that had subsequently ensued: boundaries asserted, troops mobilized, governments scrambling.
Despite their exchange of telegrams, Rita wasn’t expecting to see the count anytime soon—maybe weeks, maybe months, fingers crossed—and had done her best to put her worry for him, her longing for him, out of her mind and body.
When she heard the motorcar crunching along the drive, she was outside in the garden, helping with the removal of those paper lanterns, since they hadn’t been lit in ages and likely wouldn’t be again for some while.
She was standing on the top rung of an old wooden ladder, had just removed a turquoise globe from its hook.
She’d bent to hand it to a waiting maid as the sedan came into view around a break in the trees, a gleam of jet against the green and blue.
Inez, when she wasn’t cloistered in her room, had resumed her childhood habit of gazing down at the koi in their pond, something Rita could not begin to fathom.
If she never had to look at a lake or pond or any ocean again, it would suit her fine.
But Inez had not spent long hours adrift in a northern sea, tossed and helpless amid gulls and porpoises and the dead. So.
In the years since Rita had moved away, Maman and Papa had installed a limestone bench beside the pond, so at least her sister was no longer sitting in the dirt, her hair draping down like a siren’s mane over the water.
The bird cherries arching above her had come into their full bloom a few weeks past, but errant blossoms still clung to the branches, and the air was still laden with their sweet almond scent.
Occasionally one would flutter, detach, waft slowly down to the earth.
Inez wore solid black. They all did. It was sometimes stifling in the growing heat of the season—black silk, black muslin, black sateen—but Rita didn’t mind.
At times still she’d wake up in the middle of the night, shivering in the dark, so chilled from her nightmares of the ocean it was as if she’d been stranded in a blizzard.
As the motorcar drew nearer, she looked back at her sister. Inez had come to her feet to face the drive, a wraith speckled with sunlight; they exchanged a quick, troubled glance. A trio of cherry petals clung to Inez’s hair and right shoulder, ivory dots that she didn’t brush away.
Rita climbed down the ladder. She walked to the curve where the driveway bent closest to the manor house, a wide spread of crushed gray-and-white oyster shells fronting the entrance.
If this was about Alfred …
If it was a military car, and news about Alfred …
The sedan slowed, stopped. The rear door opened without waiting for the driver to exit. Giuseppe stepped free of the auto.
She was moving before she was aware of it, walking, then trotting. He turned and saw her emerging between the trunks of the cherries and oaks and gnarled yews.
She was running, and then she was flying. He caught her up in his arms and swung her in a circle, two people fully immersed in the remedy of each other’s presence, acting younger than their years and propriety allowed, uncaring. When their lips met, her lashes were damp, and so were his.
Inez melted back into the shelter of the house.
“IS THERE TO be a funeral?” the count asked. “I would like to pay my respects.”
They were in the west parlor, a cozier space than the grand red salon, or the library, or the conservatory. Maman and Papa sat with them, the four of them taking tea. After greeting Giuseppe in the entrance hall, Inez had politely declined to join them, citing a headache, and returned her room.
“No,” Rita answered. She stirred her cup. “We had one in Queenstown before we left. Well, what might pass for one. Inez insisted he be buried there, in the Old Church cemetery. It’s where—where—”
She lost her words, scowling at the tea.
“Where they buried the bodies no one could identify,” Pauline finished for her quietly. “Three mass graves.”
Giuseppe looked distressed. “George was not unidentified. Yet he was put in one of those—”
“No,” Rita said, quick. “He has his own plot. We had a vicar and a prayer service, and a temporary headstone installed. We’ll go back and order a better one after … after matters calm.”
After the smell, she thought. After the grief had blown away, scrubbed away with a clean wind.
Giuseppe regarded her from under those long dark lashes, his lips drawn flat. He and George had been friends, she knew. Good friends, for years.
“It’s a beautiful place,” she told him. “Idyllic, te lo prometto. The greenest grass you’ll ever see. Clouds and trees. Bells sounding from the cathedral. Birds, all kinds of birds, singing and singing.”
“Perhaps. But to be so far from his home, his loved ones—”