Chapter Nine Forget-Me-Nots
In which a stolen morning teaches two strangers to laugh together
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Ten feet away, in a curtained berth still dark against the growing daylight, the thick-set man surfaced slowly from sleep, some instinct tugging at him before he could name what had disturbed it.
It was the particular stillness of a stopped train, he realized — the absence of the wheels' steady drum, replaced by the ordinary hush of open country and, somewhere close by, an emphatic snore that only sharpened the silence around it.
He was running back through the events of the previous evening, sorting duty back into place in his still-waking mind, when a second small click — a latch, somewhere nearby — brought his head out through the curtains fast enough to catch, at the far end of the aisle, a man slipping quietly through the vestibule door with two suitcases and an umbrella in hand.
Him. He knew it instantly, with a certainty that curdled at once into fury at his own carelessness. He'd nearly let his man walk clean away while he slept like a stone.
He lunged half out of the berth before remembering he was still in his undershirt, yanked back to grab his trousers, and hauled the window shade up hard enough to rattle the glass, pressing his face to the pane.
There they were — man, woman, luggage and all — already down on the cinder bed outside, slipping away while he'd lain there snoring like a farmhand. His opinion of himself, in that moment, was not a generous one.
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Graham made his way back to Calie's side without meeting a single wakeful porter or passenger, though a low, distant rumble reached his ears as he came — the express, right on schedule, bearing down from somewhere behind them.
Whatever they meant to do, it would have to be done quickly now, before their own train's departure made their absence impossible to hide.
He had thought, at least, to pull the stateroom door shut behind him. With any luck, and a few more stops before Buffalo, no one would easily trace where they'd left the train at all.
He had no idea at all that a pair of sharp, resentful eyes was, at that very moment, watching him from a fourth-car window.
Calie stood already on the cinder path, looking off toward the little village with an expression he couldn't quite read — some private, wistful hope that a change of scenery, however small, might loosen the weight she'd been carrying.
She was, if she were honest with herself, half afraid he'd think better of the whole plan the moment he returned.
Graham swung down beside her and scanned the track in both directions.
No conductor, no brakemen in sight — only, far off, a black speck growing steadily larger, and the faint tremor already running up through the second rail beneath his shoe.
They needed to be down the embankment and out of sight before that express thundered past.
He looked up the length of the steep cinder slope and then at her — slight, exhausted, dressed for a wedding trip and not for scrambling down a railroad embankment — and felt a fresh stab of doubt about the whole scheme.
She hesitated only an instant at the top, reading the expectation in his face, then set her jaw and started down.
He tried to hold both suitcases, the umbrella, and her hand all at once, and managed for perhaps six steps before the grade won out entirely; the luggage went skidding on ahead of them under its own momentum while Graham devoted both hands to keeping his companion upright on the swift, undignified descent that followed.
It was not, by any reasonable measure, a graceful arrival — both of them thoroughly disheveled, scratched by cinders, every shred of dignity left somewhere up on the embankment behind them — but they landed at the bottom more or less intact, and Calie, to Graham's considerable surprise, burst out laughing.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, still holding both her hands, searching her face with real concern.
The express roared past overhead before she could answer, drowning out laughter and question both, and by the time it had gone and their own delayed train had grumbled itself back into motion and pulled away, the two of them stood alone on a country road in the gray-gold light of five o'clock in the morning, hats askew, hands still joined, laughing at nothing and everything at once.
Calie found herself oddly moved by his concern.
It sat so strangely against everything those letters had ever suggested about the man she'd married — letters that had never once, in three long months, asked what she wanted, only informed her, in increasingly ugly terms, what he intended to have.
There had never been so much as a hint of care for her happiness in any of it.
And here he stood, genuinely anxious over a scraped knee.
Perhaps, she thought, watching him fret, he won't be quite the ordeal I feared. And then, immediately: But how could a man who wrote those letters have any real gentleness in him at all? It can't be genuine. I mustn't let myself believe it.
"I shouldn't have let you go down that way," Graham was saying, thoroughly contrite. "Not after everything you went through last night. I had no idea it was so steep — truly, I didn't. I don't know how you'll forgive me."
"I'm not hurt in the least," she said gently, startled again by his solicitude, and felt an unexpected tightness rise in her throat at the plain kindness in it — the kind of kindness that made no sense at all coming from him, and yet here it was.
"Only a little shaken. I think it was rather fun, actually, don't you? "
A small smile tugged at her mouth, and something in Graham answered it with a sudden, entirely unfamiliar urge to draw her close and kiss her — a thought he'd never once, in three years, entertained about Judy Bristol.
"I — yes, I suppose it was, if you're sure you're all right."
"Not a scratch," she said, though this was not, strictly, true, and they both began laughing again for no reason either could have named, which somehow made everything feel a good deal lighter.
"If your shoes have half the cinders in them that mine do," Graham said, shaking one foot and then the other, "you'll want them out before we walk another step." He glanced at her small, impractical shoes with real concern.
He found the only available seat was a pair of stacked suitcases, arranged them for her with exaggerated ceremony, and knelt in the road at her feet before she could protest that she was perfectly capable of managing her own shoes.
He drew one shoe off, shook the cinders free, and — with far more gentleness than the task strictly required — passed his hand once over the sole of her stockinged foot to be sure nothing remained.
The small, entirely ordinary intimacy of it struck him harder than he expected, and he found himself talking, a little too quickly, about the weather and the departing train and anything else that might make the moment feel less charged than it plainly was.
Calie watched him, quietly astonished at her own reluctance to stop him.
There must be something he wants from me, she thought, with the wary instinct of three months' hard practice.
He's never kind without a reason. And yet nothing in his face suggested calculation of any kind — only a kind of careful, half-embarrassed tenderness that made the whole theory feel suddenly, uncomfortably wrong.
If only it were real, she thought, and the thought startled her with how much she wished it. If only he really were this, and had never written a single one of those letters.
"You're tired," Graham said, catching the shadow that crossed her face, abandoning his fumbling attempt at the shoe's tiny buttons. "I shouldn't have let you off that train at all."
"I promise you I'm not," she said, brightening with visible effort, unwilling to let the moment's small grace slip away so easily. Then, laughing outright at his clumsy fingers, "You'll never manage those buttons that way. Here — there's a hook in my bag."
She produced a small silver buttonhook and watched, plainly delighted despite herself, as he turned it over twice without the faintest idea how to use it, before she finally pulled off one glove and did the job herself, quick and neat, her bare fingers flashing in and out of the tiny loops while he watched in something close to wonder.
By the time they had gathered up the suitcases and started down the road, the two of them felt, absurdly, like old friends setting off on a picnic.
Graham caught himself, more than once, on the very edge of mentioning Washington, or the office, or some other detail of the real life waiting for him at the far end of all this — and stopped himself each time.
Not yet, he told himself firmly. Not until I can leave her somewhere safe, with the means to look after herself, so she isn't dependent on me for one moment longer than she has to be.
If all went well, they might catch a train from Pittsburgh that very night and be in Washington by tomorrow.
Then, his message delivered at last, he would tell her everything — the whole absurd, unforgivable truth of it.
Until then, silence seemed the kinder cruelty.
Color had begun creeping back into Calie's pale cheeks with the exercise and the morning air, and Graham found himself, without quite planning it, reciting the first lines of a poem he'd loved since college:
"The year's at the spring, the day's at the morn—" He waved the umbrella toward a hillside catching fire with dew and early sun. "Morning's at seven; the hillside's dew-pearled—"
"The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn—" Calie finished, unexpectedly, pointing to a lark rising into the pale blue overhead with a trill that seemed to answer the poem itself.
Graham turned to her, genuinely delighted. "You know Browning."