The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance
I thank her, and she hoists Evelyn onto her hip and carries her out of the room, like any adoring auntie, leaving the smell of roses behind her—a scent I hadn’t noticed until now, in the draft of her leaving.
As she passes through the doorway, she pauses and says over her shoulder, “Oh! I’ve forgot. I’m meant to tell you that Samuel has gone to the docks to supervise some shipment or another. He won’t be back until late, so we’re not to wait up.”
AT THE SOUND OF THE clicking latch, I gather up my knees in my arms. The sheets are soft and fine, and I realize this must have been Simon’s bedroom. Simon’s bed. Something about the size of the room, and the windows overlooking the river, and the white-painted door in the corner that leads, I suspect, to a private bathroom. Simon’s bathroom. Simon slept on these soft sheets and gazed at this ceiling and bathed behind that door. As I concentrate my mind, as I tread my gaze carefully along the pale walls and the draperies, the few pieces of dark, elegant furniture, this intuition grows into a certainty. This is Simon’s room. Simon was here.
Simon is still here.
I suppose you think I’m crazy. Simon’s death is a legal fact, after all. No one disputes the evidence. His own brother identified Simon’s burned body, and I have reason to trust the integrity of Samuel Fitzwilliam.
And there is the ring. Who can argue with the presence of a ring, recovered from a body in a fire? I look down at my right hand, and there sits the battered gold band, fit with some effort around my fourth finger, just above the knuckle. It’s my wedding ring, my genuine twenty-four-karat wedding ring, the worse for wear; I don’t question that fact for an instant.
But the sight of this poor, tormented bauble, curled in the center of Samuel’s palm, struck me not with grief—as Samuel supposed—but with something else. Some kind of psychological crisis, some kind of dissonance of the mind, in which the solid, indisputable object before your eyes clamors against the understanding in your brain, and that understanding is defeated, pulverized, crushed under the physical evidence of your husband’s demise. And how are you supposed to contemplate what remains? You can’t. You fall asleep instead.
But now I’ve awakened. I have awakened in Simon’s bed and spoken to Simon’s sister, and the cool suggestion of Simon’s presence returns to me, as naturally as the sun climbs above the ocean in the morning, as unsettling as the fingers of a wraith pressed against your neck.
The faint sound of running water drifts through the plaster walls—a sound that should probably fill me with anxiety but instead leaves me weightless with gratitude. Aunt Clara, giving my daughter her evening bath, so I can rest at last. Our sister, Clara said. And it was true. All along, as I plodded through my days in New York, waiting for some kind of inevitable denouement, I had this family. I had a brother-in-law, and a sister-in-law, and a husband whose existence I tried to ignore. And I know nearly nothing about them. The history of the past three years is as mysterious to me as the mangroves growing on the opposite shore of the river, the mangroves surrounding Simon’s burned house on Cocoa Beach.
I turn my head to the window, and the hot blue sky of this foreign land. This Florida, where Simon went to seek his fortune after I left him in Cornwall three years ago, and where he has met some kind of end, and now the remains of him drift about me, his presence slips in and out of my vision, and I have got to find a way to grasp him.
Because that’s the real reason I’ve come, isn’t it? Not because of duty, and certainly not because of love. Not even in order give my daughter a sense of her father, or any of those fine, sentimental things.
No. I’m here because I’ve done enough running away, haven’t I? Enough hiding from what terrifies me. I’m twenty-five years old, a wife and a mother and a sister, and I’ve just watched a jury of twelve sensible men convict my father of murdering my mother. I’ve survived the worst possible ordeal, the question that’s haunted me since I was eight years old, the source of all my waking dread. I have courage now. I have resolve. I have discovered the truth about one man.
Now the time has come to discover the truth about the other.
OVER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, I inform Clara that I’m taking Evelyn to Miami for a few days. We’ll drive off in the Packard as soon as the dishes are cleared and the suitcases packed.
“Miami?” she says. Toast suspended in midair.
“Yes. Miami.”
“Whatever for?”
For fun, I tell her.
Clara finishes her toast and her tea, dabs her mouth with a delicate napkin, and informs me that she’s not going to let us run off without her, oh no.
And by the way, if it’s fun I’m after, the place to go is Miami Beach.
CHAPTER 4
France, February 1917
A personal inspection. That’s what Captain Fitzwilliam told me, anyway, once we had started on our way, out of the stable yard and down the turgid road, twenty military minutes later. The drizzle had let up; the chill descended. Corporal Pritchard rode in the back with the wounded men, while Fitzwilliam sat next to me on the Ford’s narrow seat, bracing one hand on the corner of the windshield while the damp crept in through the cracks in the rubber curtains.
“To inspect your hospital personally, of course,” he said, in answer to my question. “I can’t send patients to an auxiliary hospital without a thorough inspection of the premises.”
Was he smiling? I couldn’t take my eyes from the road in order to see his face, even if I’d had the courage to do it. In any case, the winter daylight was already retiring behind the thickening fog. But I thought I heard warmth in his voice. An impish emphasis on the word thorough, which I was then too unworldly to understand.
“I suppose not,” I said.
“You’re a Red Cross outfit, you said?”
“Yes. The Eighth New York chapter, the Overseas Unit.”
“Which the redoubtable Mrs. DeForest organized.”
“Yes. Mrs. DeForest was very eager to assist in the war effort. Directly, I mean.”
“Of course she was. I can just picture her now. I do wonder if she’ll match the image in my head. But what about you, Miss Fortescue? The astonishing Miss Fortescue.”
I switched on the headlamps, not that it made much difference. The road went around a slight downhill curve, ending in a muddy hollow that required my concentration. When we had plunged through and emerged on the other side, a flatter stretch, straight and bordered by lindens at even intervals, he relaxed his grip on the windshield and repeated the question.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean what you’re doing here, plowing your ambulance through shellfire and whatnot, along roads deemed impassable by my doughty British drivers. Are you a nurse?”
“Not a qualified one, no. That is, I’ve had first aid training and the Red Cross coursework, of course, but I’m mostly here as an auxiliary.”
“A dogsbody, you mean.”
“Not at all.”
“But Mrs. DeForest has you doing all this wretched driving.”
“I happen to like driving.” The road was drier here, slightly elevated. I moved the throttle, and Hunka Tin reached forward. Engine screaming, mud flying from the tires. “My father taught me.”
“What’s that?” he said over the noise of the engine.
“My father! He’s—well, he likes to work with machines.”
“What, a mechanic?”
“Not exactly. An inventor, I guess.”
“More and more extraordinary. What has your father invented?”
“Nothing, really. Industrial gadgets.”
“Aha. Lucrative stuff, I suppose? Greasing the wheels of American commerce?”
We jumped hard over a rut. Fitzwilliam crashed into me. Straightened, apologized. I said don’t be silly. He smelled of disinfectant and human skin and exhaustion. His beard stood in need of shaving; I had felt it briefly on my cheek, warm and raspy, and I thought, That’s what it feels like, a man’s unshaven jaw, like the rasp of sandpaper.
You know, it’s a cozy roost, the cab of a Model T. And the ambulance cab was cozier than, say, a Ford roadster or a coupe, because you had that wooden box stuffed up behind you, and you were perched on the narrow seat, while your legs crowded into the narrower dash. Put a fully grown male in the passenger seat—a man like Captain Fitzwilliam, long-legged and loose-shouldered, oh yes, fully grown indeed—and there was just enough room for breath and awkwardness, for human sweat and anxiety.
“I don’t know about lucrative,” I said. “We don’t much speak about money at home.”
Fitzwilliam rubbed his jaw. I imagined the soft scratch of bristles, somewhere beneath the engine’s rattle. A pair of headlamps surfaced in the gloaming, and a moment later a supply truck labored heavily past, plastered with mud, the driver’s shattered face visible for an instant in the glow of Hunka Tin’s blinders. Then another one, following close. Headed for the front.
“I suppose that was an impertinent question,” he said.
“Impertinent?”
“About your father’s inventions. Quite out of order. It’s been rather a frightful two days, I’m afraid. Stretchers arriving every few minutes. Scrambles the gray matter.”
“Of course.”
“And then I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like, speaking to a lady.”
“What about your nurses?”
“Oh, the nurses. Have you met any of them? They’re all ancient and exactly like schoolmarms. The RANS does it on purpose, to prevent fraternizing. Amazingly successful. One forgets they’re women at all. Liberates conversation to a shocking degree. Mind you, they’re terribly good at what they—oh, look out!”
Hunka Tin blew her left front tire.
IF YOU’VE NEVER HAD THE pleasure of inhabiting an old French château, let me assure you: the reality’s less charming than you’d think.
Oh, they have a way of bewitching you from the outside. A black night had fallen utterly by the time we reached the Château de Créouville—not so much as a breath of moonlight behind all that cloud—but the lamps blazed from the windows of the great hall and the bedrooms above, so that you emerged from the surrounding forest to encounter seven cone-topped stone turrets rising dreamlike against the sky, and a lake shimmering with gold. Captain Fitzwilliam straightened in his seat. “By God, is that it? Isn’t there supposed to be a blackout?”
“Mrs. DeForest isn’t one for hiding.”
“Must be damned expensive, however, burning up all those lights.”
“She doesn’t care about expense.”
“Yes, that’s the lovely thing about having blunt, isn’t it? Well, she’s failed one test already. She’s got to observe the blackout. I suppose the Boche reconnaissance haven’t found you yet, but they will. They’ll think you’re the new staff headquarters, and bomb the blazes out of you.” He sat back and folded his arms against the solid khaki bulk of his greatcoat. Our elbows met, and I was surprised by the size and strength of his, by how much more assertive the male elbow could be. How confidential, there inside a humid little enclave, where you couldn’t help tasting his vaporous breath and the flavor of his soap, detecting each movement of his fingers and jaw, while a castle glimmered nearby against a sooty night. He went on, more whispery: “It’s beautiful, however. Good God. Like a fairy story. Is it built on that lake?”
“Yes. The lake forms a kind of moat around it, only much prettier than a real moat.”
“Oh, agreed. Nasty, swampish things, moats. Imagine this in summer, set against a blue sky.”
Well, I already had. I’d imagined the château in full, vigorous, fertile summer, five centuries ago: teeming with knights and stags, each stone pink in a rising dawn. I had imagined people inside. I had imagined love affairs and troubadours. Long ago, I had learned that you could imagine anything you wanted, that the space inside your head belonged only to you. Furnished and decorated and inhabited only by you, so that your insides teemed and seethed while your outward aspect remained serene.
“You’ve got some imagination,” I said. “If you look closely enough, it’s falling apart.”
“Of course it is. Everyone’s skint these days, including and perhaps especially the upper classes. Except your Mrs. DeForest, it seems. Or is it just Americans in general?”
“Not all Americans are rich.”
“No, but the ones who are …”
We were climbing the drive now, a slight incline, and the tires slipped in the mud. I reached down with my left hand and shifted the Ford into low gear. The windows grew before us; the exuberant decoration took shape. The ripples on the lake made you think of enchantments.
Because everything looks better in lamplight, doesn’t it? Tomorrow, in the harshness of the winter morning, Captain Fitzwilliam would see the crumbling of the old stones, the chunks of fallen fretwork, the brown weeds thrusting from the seams. The sordid state of the gravel, the broken paving stones in the courtyard. How Mrs. DeForest had grumbled! But now, at dusk, in the glow of a hundred lamps, everything was new and luminous. You couldn’t speak for the beauty of it.
And we didn’t. We didn’t say another word, either of us, all the way up the drive and over the stone bridge, beneath the rusting portcullis and into the courtyard. Captain Fitzwilliam leaned forward, and the movement brought his leg into contact with mine. He didn’t seem to notice; the spectacle of the château immersed him. One gloved hand reached out to grasp the top edge of the dashboard, and I thought how gamely he had helped me change the flat tire, how he’d knelt in the mud and turned the bolts while I held the rectangular pocket flashlight, turning it off and on at intervals so the battery wouldn’t quit. The cheerful way he’d risen from the half-frozen slop and said, I could just about do with a bottle of brandy, couldn’t you? As if I were a partner of some kind, a person of equal footing, deserving of brandy and respect.
I hadn’t replied. How could I reply to a thing like that?
I brought Hunka Tin to a careful, battered stop just before the main steps and switched off the engine. There was an instant of rare silence, like a prayer. Captain Fitzwilliam turned to me and said, “Miss Fortescue, I—”
The door flew open, and Hazel popped outside in her woolen dressing gown.
“Good grief! We thought you’d been killed!” she said, and then Captain Fitzwilliam unfolded himself onto the gravel, muddy and unshaven, wet and weathered, and she paused. One foot hovering on the next step, one hand covering her mouth. Behind her, the hinges squeaked rustily, and somebody shrilled about the draft.
“Home sweet home,” I muttered, and went around back to release the doors.
MY FATHER BOUGHT OUR FIRST Ford secondhand when I was eleven years old. We had just moved into a narrow, respectable brownstone house on East Thirty-Second Street, after two years of renting a basement apartment somewhere on the West Side—I don’t recall the exact neighborhood, just that it was quiet and slightly downtrodden, the kind of place where you minded your own business and didn’t get to know your neighbors—and Father came home one day and said he had a surprise for us. I still don’t know why he bought it. We hardly ever drove anywhere; we never left Manhattan. I think he just wanted something to tinker with, or maybe to keep my sister busy. She shared his joy in mechanical things. I didn’t; I learned how to drive and how to keep the flivver in working order, but only because I had to. Because Father said so. When Sophie was old enough, I washed my hands and turned the Ford over to her.
But even if you didn’t take joy in engines, you couldn’t help admiring that car. It was blue—before the war, you could buy a Model T in red or green or blue, just about any color except black—and really a marvel of simple utility, easily understood, made of durable modern vanadium steel, lightweight and versatile, so that you could jam the family inside for a Sunday drive or build a wooden truck atop the chassis and call it a delivery van.
Or an ambulance.
And when I went to Paris and knocked on the door (metaphorically speaking) of the American Ambulance Field Service in Neuilly and begged for a vehicle, I didn’t tell them I hadn’t bent over the hood of a Model T in five years. I just bent like I knew what I was doing, and it all made sense again. The neat, economic logic of engine and gearbox. The floor pedals and the gear lever, the spark retard on the left of the steering wheel and the throttle on the right. And I thanked my father for making me learn, even though I hadn’t wanted to, and I thought—as I drove out of Neuilly, truck packed tight with hospital supplies and spare parts—about that first driving lesson. How frustrated I had been, how angry at Father’s unsympathetic sternness. But why do I have to learn? I don’t care a jot for automobiles, I said recklessly, and he said implacably, Because a car can make you free, Virginia, a car can take you anywhere you want to go.
But maybe need was a better word. A car could take you anywhere you needed to go. Like the garage of a medieval château in north-central France—a garage that wasn’t really a garage, just an old stable, lacking electricity, lit by a pair of kerosene lanterns, smelling of grease and wet stone and melancholy. I didn’t want to be here, cleaning the mud from Hunka Tin’s brave, scarred sides, changing her oil and examining her tires, but I needed to be here. And needing was of a higher order than wanting, wasn’t it? A nobler calling.
BY THE TIME I FINISHED, it was nearly midnight, and the lamps in the great hall had darkened at last. The atmosphere lay black and dank on the stones of the courtyard. I strode from the garage to the main house, carrying one of the kerosene lanterns, so absorbed by the question of Hunka Tin’s suspect fuel line—to replace or not to replace?—that I didn’t notice the fiery orange dot zigzagging at the corner of the western wing until the smell of burning tobacco startled my nose.
I lifted the lantern. “Who’s there?”
The orange dot flared and disappeared. “Your humble servant.”
“Captain Fitzwilliam?”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you. Have you been taking care of your ambulance all this time?”
“Yes.” I raised the lantern higher, and at last I found him, resting against the damp stone wall, arms folded, cigarette extinguished. The peak of his cap shadowed his eyes. “How are the patients?”
“Tip-top. Showered in grateful attention from the ladies of the Overseas Delegation of the—which chapter is it?”
“The Eighth New York Chapter.”
“Of the American Red Cross. Yes. They were delighted to see us. I was reminded of Jason and the women of Lemnos. Except that ended rather badly, didn’t it? In any case, commendable zeal. Commendable.”
“Does that mean we’ve passed your inspection?”
“With flying colors.”
I wondered if he had been drinking. I thought I smelled some sort of spirits on his breath, though I wasn’t close enough to be sure, and the pungency of the recent cigarette still disguised any other smell that might have inhabited the air. His voice was steady, his words beautifully precise. I couldn’t fault his diction. Still. There was something, wasn’t there? Some ironic note at play. I stepped once in his direction, so that the light caught the bristling edge of his jaw. “You’re making fun of us, aren’t you?”
“I? No, indeed. Perish the thought. I admire you extremely, the entire enthusiastic lot of you. So fresh and dear and unspoiled. The fires of heroism burning in your eyes.”
I lowered the lantern and turned away. “Good night, Captain.”
“No, don’t go. I apologize.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“I have not been drinking.” Injured air. “I’ve had a glass or two of wine, served over dinner by your redoubtable directrix, but I haven’t been drinking. Not as the term is commonly known.”
“You had dinner with Mrs. DeForest?”
“She insisted.”
Yes, I had lowered the lantern and turned away, but I hadn’t taken a step. The soles of my shoes had stuck to the pavement by some invisible cement. I don’t know why. Yes, I do. Captain Fitzwilliam had that quality; he could hold you fast with a single word, a single instant of sincerity. Don’t go. I apologize. And there you stood, rapt, wanting to know what he really meant. Wanting to know the truth. All that charm, all that marvelously arid English wit—there had to be something behind it, didn’t there? It couldn’t just dangle out there on its own, a signboard without a shop.
A light flickered to life in one of the bedrooms above us. Fitzwilliam went on. “I made my escape, however. As you see.”
“You might have chosen a warmer place for it.”
“Ah, but I wanted a cigarette, you see, after all that. Rather badly. And my mother, who detests cigarettes, always made us smoke outdoors.”
“I see. An old habit.”
“That, and I was hoping to encounter a certain intrepid young ambulance driver, to thank her for her fortitude. And for enduring the cynicism of a jaded old soldier along the way.”
“That wasn’t necessary.”
“Not to you, perhaps. But essential to me.”
The handle of the lantern had become slippery in my bare palm. I had left my gloves in the garage. Essential. That word again. “Well, I’m sorry to have put you to the trouble. I hope you weren’t waiting long.”
“Not too long.” He levered himself from the wall. “I just want to be clear. I wasn’t mocking you, Miss Fortescue. I was mocking myself.”
I started walking toward the door, or rather the rectangle-shaped hole in the darkness where the door should have been. The air was opaque and full of weight. I heard the crunch of his footsteps behind me. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Yes, it does. It matters terribly. All this, it’s no excuse to lose one’s humanity.”
“You haven’t lost your humanity. I saw you working, back there. You cared for those men; you were—you were passionate.”
“The way a butcher cares for his pieces of meat.”
“That’s not true.”
“It shouldn’t be, but it is. It’s the only way to get along, you see.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Because you haven’t been here long enough. Believe me, once you’ve seen enough chaps minus their limbs or their faces or guts, that’s the worst, entrails hanging from a gaping hole in what once was a nobly intact human abdomen …”
He stopped talking. Stopped walking. I stopped, too, and turned my head, pulse racketing. His eyes were stark and gray, his skin was gray. But that was just the light, the feeble light from the lantern I held at my knee.
“Forgive me,” he said.
“There’s no need.”
“It’s the wine, I suppose. One should never obey one’s impulses after drinking a bottle of wine.”
“You said it was a glass or two.”
“I might have been modest.”
How strange. He wouldn’t look away. I wanted to look away, but it seemed rude, didn’t it, turning my eyes somewhere else when he held my gaze so zealously. As if he had something important to say. In fact, I couldn’t move at all, even if I wanted to. Like a nocturnal animal caught in the light from the kitchen door. My knuckles locked around the lantern, my cheeks frozen in shock.
“You should rest,” I said softly. “You shouldn’t be out like this.”
“I might say the same of you. Shall we go in together?”
“Of course.”
He reached forward and took the lantern from my hand. My fingers gave way without a fight. Shameful, I thought. He lifted his elbow as well, but I ignored that. I ignored all of him, in fact, as we walked silently toward the entrance of the château, through which the great had once streamed, the ancient de Créouvilles in all their glory, shimmering and laughing, and now it was just wounded soldiers, common men, nurses and doctors in bleak clothing. I ignored him because I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do. When he opened the door for me, I stepped through and sped for the staircase.