The House on Cocoa Beach: A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance

CHAPTER 6

France, February 1917

During the night before I left for France, I slept in Sophie’s room, in her bed, the way we used to do when she was small. After Mama died.

Slept. I don’t think we actually slept. We talked until our throats hurt, we laughed into our pillows, and Sophie cried a little. Sophie’s the sentimental one; she tears up at everything, Fourth of July parades and baskets of puppies. Maybe I’ve spoiled her; maybe I’ve been too protective. I held her while she wept, and the old flannel of her nightgown scratched my neck, and the honeysuckle smell of her hair filled my head, raising all kinds of memories. My chest ached. She asked me why I had to go, and I didn’t tell her the truth. I didn’t tell her that I was going to explode, I was going to go mad, I was a pot of salted water coming on to boil under the pressure of an eternal cast-iron lid, and someone was going to get scalded.

Instead, I stroked her honeysuckle hair and said, Because there’s a war on, Baby. There’s a terrible war going on overseas, and I have to help.

She said, I’m going to miss you so much, what am I going to do without you here, and I kept on stroking that hair, blinking my bee-stung eyes, and when I could speak I said, You’ll be fine, you’ll be safe, Father will take good care of you.

I said it over and over, until I believed it myself. Until it almost felt true.

But I couldn’t numb the anguish beneath my sternum. I couldn’t cure the absence of my sister, or the fear that sometimes roused me in those sooty moments before dawn, when the terrible new day smoldered at the horizon, streaked with unknown danger.

AS IT DID NOW, THE morning after I first met Captain Fitzwilliam. I lay on my back and stared at the crumbling ceiling, while my nerves stung and my temples burst. While the tension hurt the muscles of my jaw. Like I hadn’t slept at all, and maybe I hadn’t.

I rolled over and opened the drawer in the bedside table, where I kept a clumsily embroidered sachet that Sophie had given me for my birthday when she was ten. Before I left New York, I had removed the exhausted lavender and slipped inside a small cake of soap, the honeysuckle soap with which I always bathed her, until she was old enough to bathe herself. I held the sachet to my nose and thought, If I can still smell her, she must be all right, she must be safe. Father must be taking good care of her.

The light grew. Time to rise. Time for breakfast, time to wash and to dress and to drive out into the bitter February morning. The bitter February mud. I absorbed a last breath of honeysuckle and threw off the covers.

Mrs. DeForest was one of those women who believed in a sturdy, early breakfast, stocked with protein and vitamins. She worshipped vitamins, the entire alphabet of them. She’d brought her own hens from Long Island, and not one bird had dared to expire along the way. When I stepped downstairs into the refectory at six o’clock, she sat already at the head of the long wooden table, looking clean and practical. At her left sat Corporal Pritchard, shoveling food silently into his mouth, and at her right sat Captain Fitzwilliam, wearing his tunic (but not his belt) and drinking coffee. I saw that his hair was lighter than I had supposed. It was almost golden—or maybe that was only the effect of the vast electric chandelier overhead—and spiked all over in stiff, reflective gray. I was shocked at the familiarity of his face, how I already recognized each angle of bone and each line embedded around his eyes and mouth. How I could say to myself, His skin looks better this morning, less wan, full of color, plumper. He must have slept well, after all.

Mrs. DeForest was speaking. She nodded to me but she didn’t pause. She never paused. “It’s the result of so much planning, you know. No detail too small when it comes to people’s health. I’m a firm believer in clean sheets and fresh, abundant food. We’ve brought our own supplies, and there’s more on the way from our chapter back home. We have an awfully enthusiastic chapter. Nothing is too good for our patients, Captain Fitzwilliam.”

“Indeed.” The captain looked at me. His eyes crinkled some sort of message. I went to the sideboard and lifted a plate. A mirror hung before me, at such an angle that I could watch the two of them, at right angles, his left knuckles nearly brushing her right knuckles.

“Our main ward is the old great hall. That was my idea. You can’t understate the healthful benefits of the circulation of air, and the ceilings in that hall are no less than twenty-five feet high, served by no fewer than twenty fully operational windows. I saw to the refurbishment myself.”

“But doesn’t it get cold? So many windows? The men do hate a draft, Mrs. DeForest.”

Mrs. DeForest set down her fork and steepled her fingers over her plate. She ate eggs and fruit for breakfast—always fresh, no toast—after an hour of morning calisthenics. She had gone to college, you know, and was all up-to-date. She was the first woman I knew who cut her hair short, though pretty soon we were all doing it, bobbing our hair. But she was the first. She said that short hair saved her an hour a day, at least. Her husband was older, and they had never had children. Maybe that accounted for her skin, which was so untroubled and resilient, as she leaned forward over the de Créouville porcelain, that you could have bounced a tennis ball from her cheek, if you wanted to. (Not that I wanted to! It’s only an illustration.) Her fingers were equally young and strong, linked together now at the middle joints, though she must have been forty-one, by my own calculation. “As for warmth,” she said, “you’ll notice two rather spacious hearths, one on each end of the hall, which provide a great deal of heat. Nice, dry heat, Captain, in this awful damp.”

“An inestimable virtue at this time of year.”

My dish was full. I went to my usual chair, to the left of Corporal Pritchard, two seats down. Four nurses sat at the other end of the table, hunched over their plates, eating swiftly, each movement straining with suppressed excitement. The other nurses, I supposed, were on duty in the ward. Mrs. DeForest had worked out a careful system of shifts, based on scientific principles of human efficiency.

“I understand your patients are housed in a barn, Captain?” she said.

Corporal Pritchard set down his fork, lifted his head, and answered for his captain. “Indeed they are, ma’am. A regular French barnyard. Smells like the devil.”

Mrs. DeForest turned to me. “Is this true, Miss Fortescue?”

“I think the corporal—that is, the building was a barn. Before the war. But it’s perfectly clean now, just like a regular kind of hospital. Everything sanitary, as far as I could see.”

Corporal Pritchard shook his head, very mournful. He was a thin, hollow-cheeked man with an oversized nose and a gaze of perpetual hunger, and mournfulness just about hung on his face as if he’d given birth to it, millimeter by millimeter, through his nostrils. I thought he was around thirty years old, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe the war made boys look older, and he was really eighteen. “It’s the summer that’s the trouble, miss. Them pigs running about. But we don’t like to complain.”

At the word pigs, I pressed my coffee cup to my lips and glanced at Captain Fitzwilliam, who concentrated on his toast. The clock ticked, the air yawned. The soft thump of busy feet approached and receded. Mrs. DeForest looked at me, at Captain Fitzwilliam. At Corporal Pritchard.

“Pigs, Corporal?”

“Just in summer.”

“Hmm.” The fingertips tapped. The brow furrowed. The gaze returned to Captain Fitzwilliam, but not the head itself. She had a way of doing that, looking at you sideways. “A barn,” she said.

The captain spoke cheerfully. “You see, Mrs. DeForest, the Royal Army Medical Corps established this particular clearing station in the early days, when we were dashing about digging trenches, and nobody had the least idea we’d still be churning over the same ground two years later. There wasn’t time to build any of your fine modern compounds of huts and wards, according to all those marvelous diagrams prepared beforehand by our diligent staff. Luckily—well, for the men, at least—it’s only temporary accommodation. Until they’re well enough to go back up the line, you know, or else bad enough to continue on to the base hospitals, or even Blighty itself. Well, the really fortunate blokes, anyway, too ripped up to be any use to Haig.”

Mrs. DeForest smacked the table with the flat of her palm. “There. Do you see, Miss Fortescue? This is why we came to France. This makes it all worthwhile. Barns! Barns, if you will!”

I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t why I came to France, not really. That the barn wasn’t all that bad, and the British Army seemed, after two and a half years of war, to be taking care of its wounded in a pretty resourceful manner, given the circumstances. I thought of Captain Fitzwilliam’s keen face, and the competent way he shot an order in its proper direction, hitting the mark bang on the nose, before turning to me and smiling, smiling, as if he’d been playing at darts. But how could you say that to Mrs. DeForest, the president of the Eighth New York Chapter of the American Red Cross, who never got out of bed except to rescue some lesser creature from an awful fate? How could you admit to a variety of motives, not all of them noble?

Captain Fitzwilliam saved me. “You’re an angel of mercy, Mrs. DeForest, and on behalf of the entire British nation, I thank you for your service. That’s a splendid cut of ham, by the way. Splendid.”

She snatched his plate, darted to the sideboard, and heaped on the slices of pink French ham, one after another. How she came by the ham in the middle of the beleaguered Western Front, I never understood. She was just that kind of person. She could pluck priceless haunches of jambon from thin air. She set the plate back before the captain and resumed her seat.

“So you’ll be sending more? Patients?”

“As many as we possibly can.”

“And you’ll tell your colonel how well we’ve cared for your men, isn’t that right? The many advantages of the château?” She lifted the coffeepot and dangled the spout above his cup. “More coffee?”

He nudged the saucer forward.

“My dear Mrs. DeForest. Advantages it is.”

IN FACT, AS I WALKED down the ward on my way to the entrance, I thought the men were maybe a little too well cared for. The zeal of eight Red Cross nurses had left them cocooned in immaculate white sheets, immobile, a little stunned, like flies in the web of an especially greedy spider. The sisters were serving hot breakfast by the spoonful—whether or not the patient was capable of lifting a spoon—and as each man opened his mouth he seemed to be uttering a silent cry for escape.

“It’s a bleeding palace,” muttered Corporal Pritchard, who walked at my side. If you looked carefully, you could actually see the bulge in his stomach where the breakfast lay. Like a massive, self-satisfied tumor hanging from his ribs.

“A château.”

“Like that what them staff officers got.” At either end of the hall, just as Mrs. DeForest promised, two fires burned up the DeForest fortune at a magisterial rate of combustion. A wind-up gramophone played tinny Mozart between the two central windows.

“Your headquarters, you mean? In a château?”

“Yes, miss. A great big one, they say, but that’s just to be expected, innit? The staff sacrificing their youth and health, day and night, for our sake. It’s only right they should have a nice posh castle to lay their weary heads in.” He stood back politely to allow me through the doorway. I liked the way he spoke, the peculiar accent (youf an’ elf) and the natural sarcasm. Outside, on the gravel drive, Hunka Tin stood waiting. I had spent the hour before breakfast in the makeshift garage—the former stables, actually, except all the horses were long gone—while Mrs. DeForest did her calisthenics, and now the Ford looked as bright as new, almost. Mud washed away and engine tuned. Tires all repaired and axles checked. I hadn’t replaced that fuel line, however. Hoped I wouldn’t regret the omission.

“Blimey,” said the corporal, “you ain’t half got a good mechanic.”

“Actually, I’m the mechanic.”

“You, miss?”

The air was bitter, and the engine would be cold. I went around front, released the choke, and turned the engine. “My father had a Model T for years, and my sister and I kept it running for him. He thought we should be self-reliant. Could you switch the ignition for me?”

When the engine was puttering at an easy, patient pace, the corporal slid from the seat and made room for me. “Your chariot, m’lady,” he said. Courtly bow.

“Where’s your captain?”

“Making his regards, I think.”

“His regards?”

He nodded at the steps. “To herself.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“Now, don’t you think anything of that, miss. It’s only what he does.”

“Think anything of what?”

The corporal nudged the brim of his hat and reached into his pocket. He lit a cheap, brown-wrapped cigarette and walked away, a few polite steps, smoking and staring into the dry fountain in the center of the driveway, where a suite of lichen-crusted cherubs stood frozen in frolic. A dark fog wrapped the trees beyond. I realized he wasn’t going to reply and climbed into my seat. The smell of exhaust. The steady vibration of the engine under my hands and my bottom. The things I knew.

After a minute or two, Captain Fitzwilliam emerged from the château, hat and belt in place, and swung into the seat beside me. He smelled of coffee and soap and just the faintest hint of cigarettes, and his cheeks were pink against the ecru of his shirt collar. “Off we go, then,” he said, striking the dash with his palm, like a signal, and he propped one boot against the frame, leaned back his head, and fell asleep.

SO I DROVE, BECAUSE I could do that well, and it steadied my nerves to do something well. Something practical. The fog persisted, and the damp, bitter wind blew on my temples. Behind me, the wooden truck rattled and groaned on its metal chassis. The engine ground faithfully, smelling of burnt oil and gasoline. The road was even more churned and muddy than yesterday, but this time I knew the way, and the morning light was still young and hopeful. I kept to the middle of the road, where the mud wasn’t so bad, though I had to give way to other vehicles: supply trucks and artillery wagons and even, as we drew closer, other ambulances. All crusted with mire. They were headed to the railway station at Albert, for the sanitary trains to the coast, where the base hospitals lay in a chain along the sea, from Étaples to Boulogne.