The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance
“Miss Fortescue?”
“Yes?” Breathlessly, without looking down. Hand on the bannister. Under my foot, the stair creaked noisily.
“My room is in the west wing.”
“Yes.”
“So I suppose it’s good night.”
The word night tended upward, like a question to which I was supposed to know the answer.
I said, “Yes. Good night.”
THE KINGSTON ACADEMY GIRLS KNEW I was different from them. Girls always do. I was too afraid to speak to anyone—too afraid I would say something I shouldn’t—so I sat by myself on that first day and didn’t say a word.
There was one girl. Amelia. She was the ringleader, the girl everybody listened to. “Let’s play the husband game,” she said when we were outside in the small courtyard after lunch, and everybody wrote something on a piece of paper and put it inside the crown of Amelia’s hat, and when they drew out the pieces of paper and read the words aloud, they were the names of boys, and the name you drew was the name of the man you were going to marry. Henry, John, Theodore, George. The girls all giggled when they read the names, as if they actually believed in it, and I sat there on a wooden bench next to the brick wall of the courtyard—there was a cherry tree growing feebly nearby, I remember that—and I hoped no one would notice me.
But Amelia did. That was why she was the ringleader; she never missed a thing. She came up to me, and her brown eyes were like keyholes, small and well guarded. “Pick a name, Fortescue,” she said, shaking the hat. “That is your name, isn’t it, Fortescue?”
I now know she only meant the question rhetorically, but at the time I quaked in panic. Because my surname wasn’t Fortescue, was it? I was really Faninal, unique and infamous. I shook my head at Amelia and said No, thank you.
Well, Amelia wouldn’t stand for that, not right there in front of the other girls. You couldn’t allow any petty rebellions. The new girl always had to be put in her place.
“I said, pick a name, Fortescue!” She rattled the hat again, right in my face, and again I refused, and her eyes, which had been keyholes, became tiny slits. “All right. If you’re too scared,” she said, and she picked a piece of paper from the hat and read out the name, and everybody—all the girls—burst into hysterical giggles.
I sometimes wonder if I should have obeyed Amelia. Would everything have taken a different path? Would I have become like the other girls, and my old Faninal life dissolve harmlessly into my past? Would I have entered into the Kingston universe, the ordinary female universe, in which pretty dresses hung like stars and marriage was the gravity that held everything together?
Or would I have remained stranded on my bench, while the other girls went to parties, met boys, discovered dark corners, were kissed and fell, unafraid, into love?
EXCEPT FOR MRS. DEFOREST, WHO HAD a grand suite in the west wing, the nurses slept in a row of narrow bedrooms, like nuns in a convent. Mary’s door was closed and dark, and Hazel’s. We were all so exhausted after so much excitement.
And me. Virginia Fortescue. I climbed into bed at last, trembling and aching, incurably awake, my nerves shot through with some kind of foreign stimulant I could not identify.
She is absolutely essential.
I stared at the gilded ceiling and thought, over and over, I have certainly not fallen in love; that is impossible.
CHAPTER 5
Dixie Highway, Florida, June 1922
We’re rushing down the highway in the blue Packard, Evelyn wedged happily between us, suitcases lashed precariously into the rumble seat, and I’m laughing at some joke of Clara’s, laughing and trying to keep the Packard straight on the road, which is soaked and slick from a morning downpour.
“Miami Beach is just heavenly,” Clara’s saying, “just endless fun. I know all the right people, too. They think I’m a proper aristocrat, and they’ve fallen all over themselves to make my acquaintance. There’s nothing an English accent won’t get you, in American society. I suppose there’s some tremendous meditation there on republicanism and human nature, but I haven’t got the brains for it this morning.”
“Have you been there often? Miami Beach?”
“Oh, back and forth, really. Samuel goes to Miami on business, and I won’t be left by myself in dull old Cocoa, not if you paid me. I’ve done enough of that all my life! Being left behind.”
“What kind of business?”
“Heaven knows. Banks, I suppose. Or estate agents. Everybody’s buying land in Florida these days, you know. Oh, look! There’s the ocean. Isn’t it dazzling? You couldn’t pay me to return to England, either. For one thing, there aren’t any men left, and you’ve got heaps of strapping young fellows here. To be perfectly honest—you don’t mind if I’m perfectly honest, do you?”
“I don’t think I could stop you.”
“Well, as I said, to be perfectly honest, I was rather shocked to discover that you were still married at all. To Simon, I mean. That you hadn’t divorced him and married someone else. Some devastatingly attractive Yankee chap. You can’t have lacked for admirers.”
The Packard’s wheels slip in the mud, and I use this momentary distraction—righting a motorcar on a treacherous road, a nimble skill I still possess, thank God—to think of a suitable reply. When the Packard’s running straight and smooth once more, I squint briefly at the sun and say, “Not really. I didn’t go out. I was too busy with Evelyn.”
“But your sister! Surely your sister must have wanted to go out. Didn’t you chaperone her, or something like that? I think I read she had a suitor.”
“Read where?”
“Why, in the papers, of course! How do you think we discovered where to find you? Your father’s trial occupied all the headlines. I’m afraid I devoured them shamelessly. You were such a mystery to us, after all.” She pauses and turns to me. “I hope you don’t mind? I couldn’t very well not look. I’m not that noble.”
Unlike the sloppy road, the sky is blue and clear, the sun white against the windshield. Not so hot as yesterday, either, though it’s only nine o’clock in the morning. Plenty of time for the heat to build, plenty of time for the tropical air to move in like a well-cooked sponge. For now, though, I’m enjoying the coolness of the breeze on my neck, the tiny goose bumps that raise the hair on my arms. I glance in the rear mirror, almost as if I’m expecting another car behind us, and say, “Then I guess you probably know more than I do. I haven’t looked at a newspaper in five months.”
“Really? Don’t you want to know what people are saying?”
“Not at all.”
“But your father! My goodness! Aren’t you curious to know what becomes of him now?”
I glance down at my daughter, nestled between my right leg and Clara’s left. Her soft head is already drooping against my ribs, her eyelids heavy and inattentive. The honeysuckle smell of her hair drifts upward into my throat. I turn a few inches to make absolutely sure my sister-in-law can hear my words over the engine.
“A court of law has just convicted my father of the crime of capital murder, Clara. So you’ll forgive me if I really don’t give a damn what becomes of him now.”
TWO HUNDRED MILES AND SEVEN hours later, I point the Packard eastward along a narrow causeway, according to Clara’s confident directions. The afternoon sun glitters joyfully on the water around us. To the left, a pair of oval islands slumber in the sunshine, too perfect for nature.
“Isn’t it clever?” Clara says, standing up on the floorboards, clutching the top of the windshield. The draft whips her bobbed hair about her cheekbones. “Carl’s dredging the bay to make beaches and islands. Just wait until you see the hotel.”
“Who’s Carl?”
“Carl Fisher, of course. He’s an absolute genius. He’s the one developing all this.” She makes a sweeping arc of her right hand, taking in everything spreading out before us: the oval islands made of dredged sand, the long strip of palms and mangrove and building plots on the barrier island beyond. “Miami Beach,” Clara says dreamily, and closes her eyes.
“I don’t see any beaches.”
“Those are on the other side, facing the ocean. The hotel’s right over there, along the bay, so you can watch the speedboat regattas right from your window. Or moor your yacht out front!” She laughs.
“If you’ve got a yacht, of course.”
“Even better if it’s someone else’s yacht, though. That way you haven’t got to take care of it, or remember to pay your staff.”
“Crew.”
“Yes, of course. Crew!” She laughs again and sits down, pulling Evelyn onto her lap. “You’re going to love Miami Beach, darling girl. We’ll take you to the casino first thing tomorrow.”
“The casino?”
“Oh, it’s not that kind of casino. At least, not by daylight. It’s a bathing casino. Lovely beach right on the ocean. Swimming pools. It’s heavenly. If I were going to build a mansion, I’d build it right here in Miami Beach. On the ocean side, I think, so I can watch the waves arrive from across the world.”
I don’t know if I agree with her. In the first place, I wouldn’t want to live in a mansion—too much grandeur, too much trouble—and in the second place, the ocean’s such an unreliable neighbor, isn’t it? Noisy, wet, tempestuous. Apt to spit up storms and unwanted visitors on your doorstep, without warning.
But my eyes and my shoulders are drained by the long drive in the sun, and I don’t possess the strength to argue, or really to speak at all. I grip the Packard’s large steering wheel between my hands—the white cotton gloves gone gray with dust—and concentrate what force remains on the slim, straight causeway before me, until our wheels roll onto dry land once more, and Clara points me left, up a wide and unhurried avenue, toward the Flamingo Hotel.
AN ELEPHANT BROWSES THE LAWN outside the hotel entrance.
“Look, there’s Rosie!” Clara exclaims. She hoists Evelyn onto her lap—much hoisting has been done this day—and points one graceful finger toward the beast, while I attempt, between astonished gapes, to keep the Packard in a straight line for the hotel entrance. If I’m not mistaken, a pair of golf bags hangs on a yoke from Rosie’s shoulders. Evelyn squeals and throws herself against Clara’s restraining hands.
“Why on earth do they keep an elephant?” I ask.
“For fun, darling! My goodness. Haven’t you ever heard of fun? There are two of them, actually. Elephants, I mean. Carl and Rosie. They do children’s birthday parties and caddy for the golfers and that sort of thing. Better than being cooped up in a zoo or a circus, I should think.”
Evelyn wants to stop the car and say hello to Rosie. I tell her we’ll meet the elephant later. My daughter’s face is brown from the sun, and she’s full of spirit after being cooped—in the manner of an elephant in a zoo, I suppose—inside the narrow front seat of a Packard roadster all day. Our several stops at fruit stands and service stations seem only to have fueled her excitement. She exclaims at the palms lining the drive, the red-suited bellboys scrambling to meet us, and as I steer the car to the curb at the grand portico entrance, I think, Maybe this trip has been good for her. Maybe Florida is good for her.
Maybe little girls should have a chance to see the world a bit, while they’re still young enough to see it in wonder.
“NOW THEN,” CLARA SAYS, when the last of the room service dinner is cleared away and Evelyn’s bathed and put to bed. “Where shall we go tonight?”
“Go?”
“Yes. Go. Go out, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, because you can’t tell me you’re actually in mourning for my brother, God rest his villainous soul.”
“No, of course not. But—”
She wags a finger. “But nothing! Of course, the winter season’s long over, so there’s not nearly so much going on. But the casino will be open, and I know a dashing little place up the coast—”
“You must be joking. Who’s going to look after Evelyn?”
“Evelyn?” She looks to the connecting door.
“Yes. My daughter. We can’t just go running off like that and leave her alone.”
“But why not? She’s sleeping, isn’t she?” Clara’s delicate face is a picture of puzzlement. Brows all bent, lips all parted.
“She might wake up, and then what?”
“Can’t we just—well, lock the door?”
“If there’s a fire?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. There won’t be a fire. Even if there is, look at all this marvelous water! They’ll have it out in a flash.”
I laugh, a little weary, and sink onto the settee. “Clara. I don’t mean to be rude, but I can see you’re not a mother.”
“Well, if I were, I shouldn’t be so frightfully dull about it as you are. Children need to learn a little independence, don’t they?”
“She’s not yet three years old.”
“Well!” Clara sits, too, in a ripple of accordion-like pleats, atop the armchair before the desk. Or rather she perches, right on the edge, like a bird about to take flight, and I think again how unexpectedly young she looks, though she must be in her late thirties. I can’t remember exactly how old. Her skin is so fresh and unlined, her hair so dark, her brows so crisp. She doesn’t wear any cosmetics, except for a bit of lipstick, now smudged, as if she doesn’t know how to blot. Maybe it’s a cream she uses, or maybe it’s a trait she’s inherited from some fortunate ancestor. Maybe it’s her good spirits. I’ve heard good spirits make all the difference.
“Yes. Well.”
“What a nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to stay in, then. I don’t suppose your scruples will allow us to roam so far as the hotel restaurant?”
“No.”
“The tea garden?”
“Even worse. It’s outside.”
“The lobby?”
“Maybe for a minute or two, to collect messages or leave instructions.”
“My goodness. How reckless. Well, then.” She springs back to her feet and dusts off her hands. Her dress floats around her narrow little figure. “You leave me no choice.”
“You’re not going out alone, are you?”
“I might, if I were here by myself. In fact, I rather believe I would.” She pauses. Bites her lower lip. Gazes upon me with remorseful huge eyes. “Oh, rats! Look at you. I can’t lie. Very well. To be perfectly honest, I’ve already done so, on frequent occasion.”
“Here? In Miami Beach?” I glance out the nearby window at the yacht basin below, where perhaps a dozen golden-lit pleasure craft bob like apples in a barrel. Our suite occupies the seventh floor, at least a hundred and fifty feet from the nearest boat, and still I can hear the trails of mad, giddy laughter, the drunken song rising upward to drift through the crack in the window. “Do you think that’s wise?”
“Of course it’s not wise. Goodness me, no. But you never have any fun if you’re wise. You never get the chance to live, and why did we go through all the trouble of surviving that awful war and everything else, if we don’t mean to live?”
How my throat fills with bitter words. I can taste them at the back of my mouth, flavored with experience. Because the opposite of wisdom is folly. Because when you’re foolish, you get hurt. When you abandon your good common sense for the sake of your impulses, you find yourself in trouble.
But Clara doesn’t wait for me to answer her question. Her face has gone aglow, like the lights strung along the decks of those yachts in the harbor below. As she turns for the door, she continues in her confident, modern voice. “But this time I’m here with you, dearest, and I’d never abandon a sister to an evening of stultifying boredom, just for the sake of my own amusement. No, no. As the saying goes, If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain …”
“What are you doing?”
Clara pauses before the door, tilting her chin in a martyred pose. “I’m off to collect a mountain for you, my darling. Or at least a bottle of champagne, which is just as difficult in this strange Puritanical teetotal nation of yours.”
BEING CLARA, SHE RETURNS BEARING not just champagne but dessert, pushed through the doorway on a mirrored serving trolley by a waiter who’s paid to ignore the distinctive round-bellied bottles dangling from each of Clara’s slender hands. “I couldn’t decide,” she says, setting down each one, “so I had him bring them all.”
I can’t tell her that I hate champagne, the taste and the smell and the zing of bubbles against my nose, which brings such painful memories rushing against my skull, I sometimes hold my breath on those rare occasions when champagne must be endured. Clara’s so triumphant, so full of joy at her successful mission—God only knows where she found these bottles, and what she had to do to obtain them for us—I just keep quiet. Wince at the shhh-pop of the first cork. Take my glass and sip as small as I can: a toothful of bubbling wine.
Clara drains half a pint or so and reaches for the strawberries. “That’s better. Now where were we?”
“We weren’t anywhere.”
“Do have one of these chocolates. The pastry chef makes them himself. One by one. I watched him once. Mesmerizing.”
I took a chocolate.
“And for heaven’s sake, drink your fizz. You’ve no idea what promises I made to obtain it. No, no. Not another miserable little sip. Properly. Like this.” She tipped back her head and finished off the glass and poured herself another.
“I can see you’re an expert.”
“You don’t need to be an expert to enjoy champagne.” She made a little leap and plopped herself on one of the beds. “How I do adore this hotel! We stayed here when we first came to Miami Beach, Samuel and I. That was March, after we’d been to identify poor Simon’s body. I couldn’t stand to stay in that dreary little town, so we came here to recover. Just like you! That’s why I thought of this place, when you said Miami.”
I lower myself to the edge of the other bed. “That wasn’t necessary.”
“Yes, it was. I could see it in your face, when we saw the elephant. You were enchanted—as enchanted as darling Evelyn—only you wouldn’t admit it. You daren’t admit your enchantment anymore. Because of Simon, I suppose.” She drinks her champagne and stares at the ceiling. “I say, I rather fancy a fag. You don’t mind, do you?”
I tell her I don’t mind at all, and she leaps up again and rummages through her handbag until her hand emerges in possession of a slim gold case. She knocks out a cigarette and lights it in a series of quick, graceful movements that mesmerize me. When she’s finished, and the cigarette burns from her fingers, she lifts the champagne bottle and wanders dreamily across the room to where I sit on the edge of my bed. “Refill, darling. Now be a good girl and drink it.”
For some impossible reason, I obey her and drink deep, and this time it isn’t so bad. As if those first few sips have numbed the nerves that connect sensation to memory. Anyway, everything’s different now, isn’t it? This is Florida, sun-warmed and hibiscus-scented. The icy champagne just fits, somehow.
Clara watches my face. “That’s better, isn’t it? There’s nothing a bottle of vintage fizz can’t cure, I always say. And you need it more than anyone. You’re in desperate need of a good roaring drunk, Virginia Fitzwilliam.”
“Am I?”
“Oh, yes. Poor thing. I’ll bet you’ve been blaming yourself for the past three years, telling yourself you can’t have any fun, that you don’t deserve any fun because you made such a dreadful, dreadful mistake trusting Simon.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. I thought so in the beginning, after I realized what he really was. But then Evelyn came.”
“Oh, Evelyn. Of course. No, I don’t suppose you can regret her.”
“Never.”
“And you can’t really hate Simon, can you, when he gave you such a daughter. Oh, my darling! What a terrible burden you’ve been carrying, between Simon and your father. All these dreadful men pressing around you.” She wandered back to her own bed and made that same little skipping motion, landing on her back, one white-stockinged leg dangling from the side. “You mustn’t blame yourself, you know. It’s not your fault that men are such beastly bounders.”
“I don’t blame myself.”
“Oh, lies! Yes, you do. And you’re punishing yourself for it. You’re doing penance for allowing yourself to be taken in. Not once, but twice! First your father, and then Simon. Or is it the other way around?”
In a single awkward, unpracticed movement, I lift the glass to my lips and drink all the champagne, all of it, jiggling the stem so that the last drop tracks along the bowl and into my mouth.
Clara turns on her side and examines me. “Ah! I’ve got it right, haven’t I?”
“Not at all.”
“Yes, I have. I’m a terribly keen observer of other people, you understand. We younger siblings always are. I knew right away, as soon as I saw you. My poor Virginia. My poor brave darling.”
I rise from the bed, and this time I’m the one who takes the bottle in my hand. I’m the one who pours the champagne into my glass, almost to the rim. “I’m not brave at all, though. If anything, I’ve been weak. Weak and blind.”
“Because you wanted to be loved. You had no mother, no other family. My God! That man was your father. And Simon was your lover. Of course you wanted to believe in them. I remember the first time I saw you, clinging to Simon like a lovely pale little vine—you’re so tall, and yet you didn’t look tall at all then—and I thought, oh, the poor dear sweet thing. What am I going to tell her? How am I going to warn her?” She reaches forward—I’m standing next to her, because she left the champagne bottle on the small table between our two single beds—and she seizes my empty left hand. “And your father, too. It’s the same thing. You wanted so desperately to believe that he was good, that he wasn’t a murderer. You had no choice but to believe in him. He had all the money, and you had a sister, and then the baby. Where else could you go? You simply had to believe he was innocent. To go on believing. Oh, come here, darling.” She pulls me onto the bed with her and puts her arms around me, and while I’m absolutely not crying a bit—my eyes are dry, my chest still—I find myself helpless to resist her. She has paralyzed me. “You’re safe now, anyway. They can’t lie to you anymore.”
“What a shame. They were both excellent liars.”
“Oh, you don’t need to tell me that! Simon was just—what’s the word? He was congenital. I don’t know about your father, but Simon was simply born that way. A liar. He was an expert, a natural. He knew exactly what to say to you, to make you believe him. He knew exactly what you wanted to hear.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Of course, it made him terribly charming. All the local girls used to go mad for him, whenever he came down from school at the end of term. You can only imagine what a clever seducer he was. He was no more than fifteen, I think, when he got started. Yes, fifteen at the oldest. I remember because I happened upon him with a girl one afternoon, the summer I turned ten. There was a pretty little secret garden on the grounds, you see, just perfect for that sort of thing, all walled and sunken and loads of benches and sweet-smelling roses. I used to play there all the time. I thought it was a fairy garden. Don’t laugh! Oh, the stories I used to make up, the darling little fairies of my youth. Anyway, that’s where I saw them together, although I was so young at the time, I had only the vaguest idea what was going on. Just that it seemed rather beastly, like a pair of naked white rabbits.”
We’re lying on our sides, spoon-fashion, because the bed is so narrow. Clara’s arms are secure around my chest, her breath sweet in my hair. I’ve drunk the champagne too quickly. The opposite wall floats before me. A pair of watercolor landscapes, framed in white, bob and merge along the sea-green wallpaper. I picture a ten-year-old Clara wandering across a wet Cornwall lawn. Turning the corner of a brick wall and finding Simon stretched on a bench or a blanket, atop some faceless, budding, writhing girl. In my imagination, she has blond hair and smells of peaches.