Gift from the Sea (8 page)

“Now see here, young man, Mr. Hunter has told me all about this business of meeting some imaginary contact at the docks. Don’t you think that after everything the folks here have done for you already, you owe them a bit of respect, not to mention honesty?”

“It is the truth,” Stefan insisted, his voice a low, bass hiss.

“You were to make contact with someone at the docks by the twenty-fifth of this month and then what?”

There was a long pause and then with a tired sigh Stefan admitted, “I don’t know. I was to be given further instructions. Surely you understand that in times like these such matters demand secrecy even among those involved.”

“Yet the fact remains—”

“Perhaps the person could not come. There are still three days until the twenty-fifth, are there not? We could try again.”

The bed creaked and Maggie knew that Dr. Williams had gotten up. She could hear him replacing instruments in his bag. “Here’s the thing, young man. No one blames you for coming up with some story that might save your hide, but mysterious messengers in blue scarves carrying umbrellas is a little melodramatic, even for times like these.”

Maggie’s hand shook slightly, rattling the china. She pushed the door open and carried the tray to the bedside table. “Here we are,” she announced as she removed the warming covers and set them aside, releasing steam and the inviting scent of oatmeal with apples and cinnamon in the bargain. She handed Stefan a napkin and then the oatmeal, all without once meeting his eyes.

“Looks good and smells better,” the doctor said as he snapped his bag shut and headed for the hall.

Maggie followed him, her mind brimming over with questions, questions she would have thought her father might have answered before sending her off on that wild-goose chase. She watched Dr. Williams climb onto his sleigh and knew this was neither the time nor place to question him.

“I’ll stop by this evening,” he said. “If he’s truly up to it, then by all means try to get him standing, Maggie. And keep in mind that he has every reason
not
to want to stand given the fate that likely awaits him. If you need to, use Sean to force him.” He pulled on his gloves and let himself out.

Maggie watched Dr. Williams snap the reins. The horse tossed his head and started forth. Alone with their prisoner, she marched back down the hall and into his room, closing the door behind her with a bang that made his head jerk up and the spoon clatter back into the bowl. “Now then,” she announced, “since you claim to be so anxious to get back on your feet, suppose we strike a bargain.”

His eyes narrowed with suspicion and caution.

“I will help you walk
after
you tell me what’s going on and why you are involving my father and me in your schemes.”

I
f Stefan had thought he might have the upper hand in the battle of wits with Maggie because he was a man, even one with compromised health, he was wrong. She stood there, hands planted on her slim hips, her eyes locked on his, defying him to contradict her. He considered his options.

“I have the whole day,” she reminded him with a little shrug as she turned to leave. “We can do this my way or not at all.”

“What will you tell the doctor?” he asked when she was out the door and ready to close it. “Has he not ordered you to work with me—to make me stand and then walk?”

He had barely said the word
ordered
before she had covered the distance from the door to his bedside and was pointing her forefinger at his nose. “Be very clear about this, Stefan Witte,” she said. “No one ‘orders’ me. Do not for one moment think that because I am a woman and you are a man, you have any special power or rights over me.”

“But the doctor is—”

“—in charge of your treatment. However, if
you
fail in
following his orders for your care, he understands that I cannot force you. Keep in mind that he and my father are already suspicious of your will to recover, given the fate that awaits you.”

Stefan scowled at her but she did not blink, only lowered the accusing finger. “Now, if there is nothing else,” she said and turned once again to leave.

“Please sit,” he said wearily. “We will talk and then we will stand, yes?”

He saw her study him, searching for some sign that this was a trick. “You’ll tell me about the ruse to meet a contact at the docks?”

“It was no ruse,” he protested. “You must—I need for you to believe that.”

“Why should I?” She pulled the rocker closer and sat down. She rocked forward, her elbows resting on her knees. “Why should any of us believe a word you say?”

“Because we are on the same side,” he replied and was pleased to see that this statement had finally garnered a reaction other than suspicion and anger. Her eyes flashed with interest and surprise.

“You confuse me, Stefan Witte,” she admitted as she rocked back and folded her arms as if to create a barrier between them.

Stefan smiled. “Then we are—how do you say it? In the same boat?”

“How can you make light of this? You are in serious trouble and I am trying to understand you.”

“Why?”

Her eyes widened as if the question had not yet occurred to her. “I have no idea,” she said softly. “It just seems that perhaps it might be important.”

“It is more important than you could possibly imagine, Maggie.”

“That you were supposed to meet someone wearing a blue scarf and carrying an umbrella?”

He waved her question away impatiently. “That is but a small kernel of the whole.” He sighed, slumped back onto the pillows and glanced toward the window. Outside the snow had started again and the wind had picked up. “Perhaps God has changed His plan,” he muttered, more to himself than to her as he fingered the small gold cross at his throat.

Maggie abandoned the rocking chair and began pacing along the foot of the bed, her hands clasped behind her back. “You can’t honestly believe that you are on some sort of mission here.”

“We are all on God’s mission,” he replied, giving her his full attention once again. “Even you, Maggie Hunter.”

She paused in her pacing, but the look she gave him was filled with cynicism.

He seized the moment to press his advantage. “Mrs. Chadwick has mentioned that you think you no longer believe in God.”

“We are not discussing my faith, or lack thereof, here. We are not discussing faith at all. Your so-called mission is political. Please don’t put any other face on it.”

“But you have doubts? You ask why God could allow such a thing as this war?”

“Of course I do,” she snapped.

“Then you have faith,” he replied. “Because the only solution to doubt is faith.”

“That’s a ridiculous logic.”

Stefan smiled at her with something he knew Maggie
read as pity. “In life we never know what a new day will bring and yet we go on. We believe that the sun will rise, that the fog will lift, that the flowers will conquer the snow. We believe that the storm will abate and calm waters will eventually carry us to port.” He shrugged. “Faith.”

Maggie frowned, then turned briskly to her duties. “So, besides being a spy, traitor and deserter, you are also a minister?”

“I am no traitor and no spy.” He ground out the words as if each were a bitter pill.

Maggie kept her back to him, but he knew that he had touched a nerve.

“If you think of doubt as questioning your faith, then perhaps you will see that I am correct,” he continued in the pleasant voice of a teacher. “And if events that challenge your beliefs have made you doubt—made you question what God could be thinking in allowing such things—then you have faith.”

“You are speaking in riddles.” But she turned to face him and moved a few steps closer to the bed. “I will grant you that I have wondered about…things that have happened recently.”

“The death of your intended,” Stefan said.

“That and other things,” she admitted.

“And you wonder why God allowed this good man to be taken from you at the very moment in both your lives when you were just beginning to find your way in this world?”

She raised her head and met his empathetic stare with a stony glare. “I see what you are trying here, Stefan Witte. Well, it won’t work—not with me. You may have hoodwinked others with your gold cross and your pretense at being a friend, but…”

Stefan sat forward, every muscle tensed as if at any
moment he might literally leap from the bed and take her by the shoulders to shake some sense into her. “I have left my homeland and risked my life to come here,” he pointed out. “Few people would make such sacrifices for mere political gain. What do you take me for?”

She met his challenge with her own. “I take you for the spy that I believe you to be. I take you for someone who has come to this island in order to find some way to the mainland where you and those who probably came with you that night—”

“For the last time, no one came with me,” he said, his voice hoarse with frustration. “It is complicated,” he admitted after a minute. “How to make you understand that I believe you and I share the same goals when it comes to this war.”

“I doubt it.” Maggie flung the words at him.

“Then I am wrong that if you had the power, you would end this tomorrow?” The question hung there between them, Stefan stubbornly waiting for an answer and Maggie just as stubbornly refusing to give one. “I am not a traitor to my country or a spy for yours, Maggie.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Your English is exceptional. Of course, as a translator you would be proficient.”

He could see that she was working through the questions that would naturally spring to mind. “I am German,” he assured her. “I am a translator for the German government. All of this is true.”

Now she was frowning. “How can we possibly be on the same side?”

“I do not mean that I am in favor of what your country and its allies are doing any more than I believe my government is right to pursue this quest for domination—not at the cost of its own citizens. Not at any cost.”

“America is there to try to end this,” she argued.

“As am I on the side of ending this war. From what I have learned and seen in my short time with you, I believe that you and your family also are in favor of such a thing. So you see, we are not so different after all.”

Maggie rocked back in the chair and folded her arms. She seemed about to say something but simply pursed her lips and waited for him to continue.

“I do not like what is happening to my country, my homeland,” he said quietly. “In the name of war, many innocents are suffering, dying.”

Maggie glanced toward the photograph of his sister and nephew on the bedside table. “Your family?”

Stefan closed his eyes against memories he did not want to relive. And yet those memories might be the very thing to finally get through to her before it was too late. “When the British succeeded in blockading the North Sea, a blockade that prevented food and other essentials from reaching the innocent citizens of my homeland, I blamed them. It was then that I volunteered for service. I could not stand by while the very old and very young were denied the basic things necessary for survival.”

“Go on.”

He opened his eyes and looked at her, trying to decide if it was worth continuing. “My sister, Uma, married young. Her husband was a soldier and he was killed in the beginning days of the war, leaving her and my young nephew, Klaus.”

Maggie picked up the photograph and studied it closely. “Your sister is very beautiful.”

“Yes, she was—once. That picture was taken in happier times.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died,” he replied, his throat closing over the words. “And Klaus, as well.”

“How?” Maggie whispered as she continued to study the photograph.

“They starved,” Stefan replied and watched her carefully as the words sank in.

“Starved? I mean how could that be? They were—they look so…”

As was always the case when he forced himself to recall the process that had led to his sister’s tragic end, Stefan had to fight against his rage at the unfairness of her death. “She did not have enough to eat,” he snapped. “How else does one starve to death? And what she had for herself she fed to her son—to no avail, for he died, too.”

Maggie’s features contorted and for an instant Stefan thought she might burst into tears. “That’s barbaric,” she whispered, running her thumb over the laughing faces of Uma and Klaus.

“Yes.”

“You must have been so very angry,” she said, her eyes meeting his.

“Yes.”

“At the Allies—your enemy.” She was watching him carefully now. “Certainly the British for the blockade.”

“At first,” he admitted. “But then two things happened that changed everything for me. Our parents had died before the war, so there was only Uma and me. When I went to bury my sister and nephew, I made a startling discovery. My sister was working with the underground, people in Germany and Austria who believed the war was wrong and were working to sabotage the effort.”

“Traitors?”

Stefan shrugged. “Or heroes—only history can truly say. Either way, I was doubly angry now, for I wondered if she had been denied food rations because the authorities suspected her.” He stared at Maggie for a long moment. “In many ways she was a little as you are, outspoken, even defiant.”

“But how did you know she was working against her own government?”

“At the cemetery, a man came to pay his condolences. He pulled me into his embrace and whispered some startling words to me. ‘Your sister was a patriot, and now you must take up her cause.’ Later that evening as I was emptying my pockets, I found a postal envelope with a key inside.”

“No message?”

“None. I recognized the key as the kind that fits a postal box. So I went to the postal station nearest my sister’s apartment and opened the box that matched the number on the key.”

“And found?”

“A single sheet of paper, an advertisement for a pain medication.”

Maggie actually looked disappointed.

“I tossed the paper in the trash as I left. Then a woman came running after me waving the paper. ‘Sir, you dropped this,’ she called to me.” Stefan’s attempt at a falsetto imitation of the woman’s voice sent him into a fit of coughing.

Maggie was immediately at his side, lifting him so that he could lean forward, then holding a basin with one hand while she supported him with the other. He gagged and coughed until he was able to force out the phlegm and breathe again.

“Deep, slow breaths,” she coached as she set the basin aside and lightly rubbed his back and shoulders. “That’s good.” She eased him back onto the pillows and went to attend to the basin. When she returned to his bedside, she looked uncertain.

“Perhaps this is too much,” she said, more to herself than to him. “You need your rest,” she announced in her nurse’s voice.

“No. I will finish this part for there is much to tell and as you have reminded me, time is not on my side.”

Maggie sat on the edge of the rocker. “Only this part—the woman in the post office—then you must rest.”

Stefan nodded and cleared his throat. “When she was close enough for me to explain that I had deliberately discarded the advertisement, she pressed the paper into my hand and said softly, ‘Read this carefully—for Uma.’ Then she was gone.”

“I don’t understand,” Maggie said.

“Neither did I, but I had to report back to my unit. We left that very night for the front in Belgium.”

“But the paper?”

“On the train north, I read it more carefully.”

“And?”

Stefan shook his head. “The only odd part was that the source for purchasing the concoction was from a chemist shop in a small town in Belgium, the town where my unit was being sent.” Stefan fought against a grimace as pain shot up his fingers and toes.