Chapter 35
Going back never helps you move forward, but William does it anyway.
He calls Helen, crammed into a narrow telephone booth on Trelawney Row as rain pours down the glass door. Other people feel your absence.
It took a great deal out of him, going to that hospital, and it didn’t seem to change the lieutenant. But it rattled William, his own words pinging around his mind.
Give her the privilege of deciding for herself. He isn’t certain he’s brave enough—or selfish enough—to do this.
“Hello, who’s this?” comes Helen’s cheery voice.
Your very broken husband. Who can scarcely bear to be without you.
He started these calls to check in on her, and to assure himself she was still alive after news of the great fire right in Tewkesbury.
While his life had been exploding in Europe, the munitions plant where many of their neighbors and friends worked had exploded.
But now, the calls are purely for him.
“Hello? Hello, who is there?”
He holds his breath. It’s astonishing how sunny this woman can be, despite all she’s lost.
“You might as well speak, whoever you are.” Her voice softens. “It’s all right.”
He slams the receiver down, heart pounding.
He forgot about the cough on his last call.
He’d let on there was someone on the line, and blown his cover.
But then he lifts the receiver and rings her again.
It might be the last time, if the auction is tomorrow and the rest of Merryn’s story is lost to time.
Thankfully, Helen is still there. Her voice is still soft when the operator connects them. “If you need to speak, I will listen. You won’t shock me.”
He will.
“Nor will anything you say offend me.”
It would.
“And there’s a reason that, of all the people you might have called, you’ve reached me. Many times. You see, I’ve lost my husband to the war, so I understand a fair bit about loss and death. Do you believe in coincidences?”
The line remains silent. She’s so understanding with strangers. So warm and approachable. It has been so long since she’s used this tone with him. What sort of man could wear out even Helen’s patience?
“Ho there!” a man’s voice sounds on her end. He’s in her house. Their house.
“I’ll just be a minute,” she says to the man, voice muffled, then she uncovers the receiver and speaks to William again. “Whenever you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to hear.”
A click, and the line goes silent.
Cradling the receiver to his ear, he slides down the wall of the booth and lets her voice echo in his ear…
but it’s drowned out by the memory of the man’s short, clipped voice.
Does this mean he cannot think of her anymore?
Cannot have this indulgence? The broken pieces of his soul fracture a bit more.
He mustn’t jump to conclusions, though. The man might be a neighbor, a hired hand, perhaps even family. She hasn’t moved on. She hasn’t.
She should. He hopes she does.
But he cannot bring himself to grasp that actually becoming a reality.
Marriage is not a gradient. He can hear the artist, Florence, flinging these words at him. You either are or you aren’t.
He is. He always will be.
But she isn’t.
He sets off running, feet pounding toward the soldiers’ hospital.
It has been three days since his first visit and it would be hundreds more before he returned of his own free will.
His delusions of helping someone have melted away, but Florence begged him.
Pleaded. And his heart, as it turns out, isn’t completely dead after all, for he could not resist the pleas.
With Persephone tucked on his shoulder and Helen’s voice warming the deepest reaches of his heart, William passes through the front desk area with a quick check-in and makes his way to the garden again. The lieutenant isn’t there.
He asks, and the orderly directs him to a large, open dining room where someone is slumped in a wheeled chair in the window bay. He’s in a thick robe and slippers, without the poise he’d clung to before. William comes alongside him. “Good day, Lieutenant. How are you?”
Lieutenant Carmichael is hunched to the side, part sad, part angry. His gaze sharpens as he sees who it is. “Get out.”
“You remember me, I see.” William perches on the window bay, heart hammering. “Florence is a fine artist. I’ve seen her work.”
“Nurse!”
“You already know that, though,” William hastens on. “That’s how I met her—at the studio in Newlyn. She’s helping me track down a woman in a painting and I’m doing her a favor in exchange. An unofficial agreement of sorts.”
His eyes flash, but he doesn’t rise. Doesn’t beat William into a bloody pulp.
His wrists, William notes, are shackled to the chair arms. But this time, Samuel’s eyes are lucid, his stare direct.
Samuel is present, and William will push him.
“Do you know how many hours she’s spent helping me track down some stranger?
A great many, I’d imagine. And in exchange, she has asked me for merely one favor—that I speak with the man she’s hopelessly gone on—you. ”
He’s breathing hard beneath his robe. His slippered feet shift. “You’re a spy.”
“Indeed. Sent from the outside to see if your heart still belongs to a lonely artist in Newlyn who wishes to marry the man who once asked her.”
He stares at the floor. His nostrils flare.
“Don’t tell me you’re un-asking her to marry you. Because she might hold you to your word.”
“That’s the word of some other man. It wasn’t I who asked her.” His face is suddenly lucid, not frantic or lost. It’s focused, with broken pieces on the surface. “That man…is lost.”
William bows his head, feeling the echo of those words in his soul. Helen married a different man—one tall and slender, far too cocky and ambitious. He’d give anything to return to that time, but as his wiser self.
Then Samuel’s thumb is striking the chair arm with quickening beats, muscles twitching in his neck.
“Nurse!” William looks down the empty hall.
“It’s no good.” Samuel grabs him with a shaking hand. “If you call them they’ll stick me with something and our conversation will be over. I’ll be gone again until they feel like bringing me back.”
William stares at the man. Not gawking, but feeling. “You cannot live this way forever.”
“What choice do I have?” he says through gritted teeth.
“Do you know what a wise artist once told me? She said sometimes a person must become lost to find what’s important. She was speaking of the lost woman she’s helping me find, but somehow she was talking about herself, too. And you.”
A nurse rushes over and shoos William away. But Sam Carmichael clamps a hand on her arm. “Merryn.”
William comes around to stand before him again. “I beg your pardon?”
“It’s Merryn, isn’t it? The woman Florence is helping you find.”
“It is.” He clutches his trembling hands. “How did you know?”
His shoulder jerks. “Wrote me a letter. I didn’t answer.”
“Why not?”
The nurse shoves a mug at him, and he stares down at it. Another tic. “Don’t take kindly to her helping some other gent.”
William keeps silent. Waiting.
The lieutenant takes a long drink. “Why are you looking for her?”
“I believe I’m living in her cottage, up St. Ives way. I’ve found her portrait behind the wall, and…”
The man’s face swivels slowly. “William Thatcher. That’s who you are, isn’t it?”
William’s back stiffens. “Indeed.” He searches the man’s lean face.
“Merryn isn’t lost. She doesn’t care to be found, but she isn’t lost.” Those red-rimmed eyes focus on William. “Except by you.”
A chill ripples down his spine. “How did…where…who is she?”
Another sip of tea. A few more tics. “That’s…a long…story.” He’s breathing harder now. “You I’ll tell. No one else, but you can know where she is.”
“St. Ives?”
He shakes his head. “But worth…the trip.”
“What is her name? Her whole name.” He’s close. Terribly close to finding her. He nearly hits the mug out of the man’s hand, but the nurse watches from a safe distance, arms folded over her chest.
“Merryn Dunn. Grew up here, came back for a spell when I was a lad. She took to my mum.”
“Please. Tell me where I can find her now.”
“If you promise…me one…thing.”
“Anything.”
“Hear…her out. Merryn. Don’t…be mad. Not right away. She…loved you.”
He squeezes his hat in his hands.
“One…more thing.” A pause. “Tell Florence…she can come.”
Merryn’s house is on the seashore. It’s a rose-covered Tudor-style in Fawley, a two-hour train ride away, overlooking the rocky Peel Cove.
Somehow it looks like her—quiet and regal with feminine charm and rosy color.
Warm and inviting. Simple…yet complex beneath the surface.
She…loved you. Those words have repeated through his mind since he heard them.
Adjusting the wrapped painting under his arm, William pushes through a waist-high gate that leans inward, blowing with the wind. A black sheep butts against his hip. He pauses to pet the creature but jerks upright when tiny pins sink into the back of his neck.
Persephone.
He tucks the kitten in his cloak so she won’t see the other animals, and knocks on the door.
A man answers, ducking in the arched doorway with a frown. “Help you?”
“Yes. I-I-I’m looking f-f-f…ahem.” A pause. He tries again. “Merryn Dunn. I’m looking for Merryn Dunn, please.”
A quick nod and a warm smile. “I’m her husband.” His voice is resonant and intentional. He isn’t hurried. “Won’t you come in? I’ll see if she’s ’round back.”
He vanishes deep into the shadowed house before William can ask the man’s name.
Is it Rupert…or Ansel? Soon, a door closes somewhere, and footsteps sound on flagstone.
She approaches with a slow, measured tread, nothing in this life inducing her to hurry anymore.
He squints into the dim house and sees a slender woman, the crisscrossed window lattices casting a shadow that conceals her face for a moment.
Then she steps into the sunlight and her hair is threaded with silver, her face radiant.
It’s her.
She looks exactly the same, except for one thing—whatever happened to her after she’d stopped writing in the notebook, whatever choice she made back then, she’s just as lovely, but she isn’t lost anymore.
“Oh my heavens, how can it be? Will, you’re alive!” She clasps her hands as if to restrain herself from embracing him. After she collects herself, she guides him through the house where paintings line the narrow hallway that is open to the sea breeze. “I’ve just made some tea. Please, join me.”
With a nod, he takes one long, deep breath as they step out into a rambling rose garden. Helen would love it here.
They sit on two stone benches and he leans the painting against his bench, uncertain how to bring it up, what to ask.
She fidgets with the teapot before glancing up at him. “I checked the papers every day while you were fighting. I looked for your name…and it was there eventually.”
He presses his lips together.
“Missing in action, presumed dead. I hardly dared to hope.” She blinks back tears, pressing her laced fingers against her mouth.
She pours tea for both of them. “I’ve thought about you so often. It’s like a dream, seeing you here. There are so many things I wish to say to you.” She cradles her teacup. “Mostly…that I’m deeply, deeply sorry.”
William leans back and waves off the odd apology, and a squeak reminds him to move gently. He scoops the kitten out of his leather satchel and, on impulse, holds it out to the woman beside him. “Would you like to hold her?”
She sets her tea down and immediately draws the tiny kitten close, rubbing the top of Persephone’s head with her cheek. “Mm, she’s darling. Has she a name?”
“Princess Persephone.” For once, he doesn’t feel foolish giving the whole name. “Rescued from a build site.”
“Are you, indeed?” The woman glows, her lovely porcelain features contrasting with the raven-and-silver plait hanging down her back. Then she looks up at him again, her eyes dewy. “It seems you’ve grown up nicely, young Will.”
“Was I…was I called Cecil once?”
She blinks. “How do you know that name?”
“Your notebook.” Heat pools in his chest as he realizes how invasive that must seem.
“I found it. In the wall. With…a painting.” But why didn’t he recognize the stories of Cecil?
Why didn’t he remember Cheltenham Prep, Lady St. Laurent, Sabine?
The only ring of familiarity had come from gazing upon Merryn Dunn’s face.
“The cottage.” She brightens. “You’ve cleaned up Dunn Cottage.”
Another flush of heat. “Not so much cleaned up as…well, inhabited.”
“And have you found it to be an adequate sanctuary?”
Peace overtakes his embarrassment just thinking of the place. There’s a palpable presence there, one with whom he’s wrestled. And a physical peace he cannot explain. Bit by bit, it has managed to penetrate his soul. “Yes.” He smiles. “Yes, I suppose I have.”
Her smile is wide and gratified. “I asked Mother to leave it to you.”
“Anwen Dunn.”
“There’s something unexplainable about the peace one finds there. I wanted you to have that. Your life was never easy.”
His heart is pounding. “We’ve met before.”
Her face clouds, then clears. “You remember.”
A shrug. “Afraid not. Just assuming. Everything I know of you I learned in that notebook…or from the painting.” He rests one hand on the paper covering it.
He does not mention how long he spent staring at her face.
How much company the oil paint version of her provided.
“Why did you stop writing in it? That memory book, I mean.”
“Well, I began it because I had this fear that everything would be lost again. That I’d strike my head and everything new would fall out.” She touched her plaited hair. “I meant to keep track of the new memories, but then…” She lays both palms flat on the bench.
“You recovered your old memories.”
She considers him. “What do you know of memory loss, young Will?”
Young Will. “Enough to envy it.”
Her eyebrows rise.
“You were damaged by the lack of memories. I was damaged by the opposite.” He accepts Persephone back as she clambers toward familiar arms. “You look…whole. Healed. Which is why I assumed you found them again.”
A quick smile. “Not exactly. I never got them all back. I did happen upon a few important ones, however. I was glad, yet they were…not what I’d expected.”
“Tell me,” he says, leaning forward.
That lost look returns to her face. “Regretful memories are a weight,” she says sadly. “Always bent on pulling us back to the bottom of the sea even after we’ve fought to reach the surface and be free of them.”