Overseas (53 page)

I crested the hill and dropped down to a walk, scanning the ground below me. The slope dropped away to a ledge, along which the footpath stretched until it dipped down through a shallower portion to the grassy lakeshore at the bottom.

Where was the cemetery?
I wondered, confused. I could only see the lake, rimmed by trees and meadow grass, gray and fitful under the uncertain skies. I tripped down the footpath at a jog, drawing close to the ledge, and abruptly it came into view, perhaps a quarter-mile to my right, hunched up against the shelter of the ledge: a few short rows of plain marble tombstones, surrounded by a waist-high white fence.

It was empty. The air whooshed out of me. Relief not to see Julian’s dead body in a heap at the bottom of some grave marker; alarm now, that we’d been wrong, that they hadn’t come this way after all. Now what did we do?

I fingered the BlackBerry in my coat pocket. I’d sent several e-mails to Julian, even a phone call, but nothing had come back. The phone hadn’t even rung, just gone straight to voice mail. Probably he’d left it in the restaurant, or Arthur had taken it. I drew mine out anyway and tapped in another message.

Where are you? Getting desperate.
My fingers hovered for an instant, and then I added,
I love you
. Send. I put the phone back in my pocket and looked again toward the cemetery.

Three figures now moved warily among the tombstones.

The breath seized up in my chest. I couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t even discern hair color in the murky cluttered air, but I knew who they
were. I could hear their voices, raised in argument, carried directly to my ears by the wind off the lake.

I wanted to run, to fly to them, but my muscles had frozen into horrified immobility. What were they doing? What were they saying? One of them was backing up, hands raised, palms outward. Was that a flash of gold in his hair? I couldn’t tell. “Julian!” I croaked out, but the wind, blowing in my face, swallowed my words whole.

Then another one raised his arm, pointing it, something dark and gleaming in his hand. Julian—was it Julian?—started slowly toward him, hands still forward, coaxing. “No!” I heard myself scream.

They couldn’t hear me, of course, not with that wind in my face, but then the man with the gun glanced in my direction. He stilled for an instant, and then he turned and ran into the trees.

“Wait!” I yelled, but the other two were already after him, running out of sight toward the lake, hidden by the branches and leaves.

I scrambled down the ledge, not bothering to take the footpath down the easier way. Pebbles skittered out from under my sneakers, slick with rain. I jumped down the last few rocks, landing heavily on my feet, and started running toward the cemetery.

Julian’s ancestors had chosen this spot well. It was high enough to overlook the lake, and sheltered from the aging effects of the weather by the ledge behind it and the surrounding trees. I hardly felt the rising storm at all now. My feet beat against the turf, the damp sparse shaded grass, until I reached the burial plot and spun around.

Nobody. Just a dingy white fence, looking as though it could use a coat of paint, and the tombstones laid out in a grid, with gravel tracks that badly needed raking; each grave looked identical to the others, words chiseled at the top in plain Roman lettering, names and dates and Latin tags that meant nothing to me.

I looked toward the trees, trying to discern which direction they’d run, and at that second an unmistakable sound cracked along the wind.

“No!” I screamed, and then I heard another one.

The sensation of cold trickled down my spine, as though someone were pouring ice water onto the back of my neck. Stay calm, I thought. I felt my brain begin to float upward, detaching, trying to see the situation objectively. Just another problem to solve.

“Kate?”

I started and looked around. “Who’s there?”

“Up here. Did you find anything?” It was Hollander, of course, standing at the top of the ledge and looking down anxiously.

“No one’s here,” I heard myself say, “but I think I just heard gunshots from the woods. I’m heading over to check it out.” Why didn’t I sound panicked?

“Good God. Wait. I’ll be right down.”

He turned to the right, to follow the path, and I scanned the area around me, the grassy lakeshore with its stands of birch and chestnut and English oak, all rustling erratically in the rain-dashed wind, smelling of cool damp earth. Where had they gone?

Something moved in the trees. I gasped reflexively and looked hard, straining my eyeballs. Was it just the storm? I walked closer, each step deliberate, my heart starting up a steady quick rhythm against my ribs.

There it was again! A flash of muted color, just for an instant, at the base of a large mature chestnut. “Who’s there?” I demanded.

No answer.

“It’s Kate,” I called out. “Where’s Julian?”

A figure stepped away from the tree, a slight brown-haired figure, wearing a tweed jacket over chinos, collar turned up protectively against his neck. Arthur Hamilton.

“Kate?” I heard Hollander call from behind me.

“Arthur.” I stepped nearer. “Arthur, it’s me. Kate. How are you? Can you tell me where Julian is?”

He shrugged. His hands were shoved in his pockets, moving around restlessly.

“Arthur, you can tell me. I won’t be angry. You’ve had a difficult time.”

“Bad show,” he muttered. “Very bad show.”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, ignoring the frantic ringing in my ears, the rising panic. “Very bad. So where’s Julian, huh? Where’s Geoff?”

I was only fifteen feet away now. I could see the expression on his face: dazed, wondering, a little cross maybe. He had a small cut below one eye, beginning to swell, and a dark splash of a stain marring the weave of his jacket, just below the upturned collar.

“Come on, Arthur,” I said. “You can tell me. Let’s sit down.”

He shook his head. “The boathouse. All dead,” he told me. “Bad show.”

“No,” I said, “they’re not all dead. You didn’t kill them, did you?”

“Geoff. I couldn’t manage it. Never could. Geoff did it.”

“Geoff did what?” I begged. “He couldn’t shoot Julian. He didn’t. Tell me he didn’t.”

“So it’s good night, sweet prince,” Arthur said, staring at the ground. “At last. Flights of angels… all that… rubbish.”

“Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.”

“I loved him,” Arthur said. He looked up at me. “The rest is silence,” he added, and pulled a gun out of his pocket.

“Oh no,” I repeated.

He raised it to his mouth and fired.

I
CRUSHED MY HANDS
over my head and whipped around and ran back toward the cemetery, toward the ledge, running into Hollander. “They did it! They killed him! Geoff shot him! Shot Julian!”

“Oh God,” he cried, shutting his eyes. “Oh God!”

“He just shot himself! Right there behind me! His
brains…
”

“Who?”

“Arthur Hamilton! So do it, Professor. Do it
now
! Send me back! Please, I can’t stand it!”

“Oh God!” he cried again.

I grabbed his shoulders. “Do it now! Before I pick up that gun and shoot
myself
!”

His eyes snapped open and he stared at me.

“Do it!” I screamed. I fell to my knees at his feet and bent my head.

I felt his hands on my shoulders, gripping me, and the wind and rain lashed at me, hard, in one long unbroken gust. “
Do it!
” I screamed again, and the air emptied out of my ears, and I was tumbling, tumbling endlessly through a frozen void, and then I woke up to the steady beat of a March rain streaming on my face.

Amiens

I
never slept that night. How could I waste a single minute of my final night with Julian? I couldn’t have slept, even if I’d wanted to. Every nerve vibrated, as though a magnetic current looped continuously through my body.

I hadn’t told him. What would have been the use? He wasn’t going to change his plans, decline his duty as an officer, renounce his every principle. Better to let him go on thinking he could trick fate, foil divine will; that by shifting the time of his raid or by some other petty adjustment, he could avoid Hollander’s reach. That he could stay in this century, return to me, marry me, and be a father to our child. A beautiful dream; why not let him hold on to it until the end?

I could scarcely move in that narrow bed. I lay pressed against his drowsy flesh, cheek to toe, and watched him sleep, gazing at his dear familiar face in the faint light from the moon outside the thinly curtained window. This man-child version of Julian: part soldier, part schoolboy, and yet with everything I loved about him already inside.

Had I ever come to terms with his beauty? Not really; it had only become entwined, in my mind, with the beauty of himself, with his quintessence. The Julian I loved. And I realized I couldn’t let him stay here, to be killed at the Somme or at Passchendaele or some meaningless night raid, like the one he was about to undertake. He had twelve certain years of life
ahead, including one perfect summer; he’d done so much good with them. All those Southfield investors, all those endowments and retirements assured. Sterling Bates saved from bankruptcy, livelihoods made safe by the sheer force of his personality and his ingenuity and his example. A baby he’d conceived with me, who would live on after him, or rather before him; a baby I’d love with all the strength in my body, a baby I’d raise to worship the memory of its golden father.

Any and all of those things far outweighed my own selfish need for a little more time with him, stolen from fate.

At one point, well after midnight, he stirred, some part of his unconscious mind fumbling with the unfamiliarity of another body in the bed with him. He opened his eyes sleepily, a bit confused, terribly boyish, and looked across at my face on the pillow. “Kate,” he breathed.

I reached out and placed my hand on his cheek, and I kissed him. I kissed him with every bit of that tenderness, that passion I felt for him, and then I made love to him. I had the advantage; I knew exactly what he loved, what made him cry out with pleasure. All those endless beautiful hours of practice, and I used them well. I brought him shuddering to completion, almost outside himself with the strength of his release, and then I held him to my breast, soaking him into my skin, whispering to him how eternally I desired him, adored him, loved him.

So he wouldn’t need to hear it from me later. He’d know.

When dawn broke, he awoke again, and this time he took me in his arms and possessed me with an exuberant male confidence—a man of the world already!—that made me smile, before I went mindless with anguished bliss, gripping the robust curve of his shoulders and marveling at him.

No, I didn’t waste a moment. Not even an instant.

He rose reluctantly, pressing kisses all over my body, in all those newly discovered places, murmuring words of wonder and love and gratitude. He washed and dressed in the numbing air; I helped him with the buttons, straightened his tie. Then I made myself ready while he went back to his
own room to shave and gather his things. It didn’t take long, and when I was dressed I sat down and wrote a few lines on a piece of paper, though I knew it would make no difference, though I had no right even to try.

When I finished, I slipped down the hall to his room and rapped on the worn wooden door. It opened at once.

“Darling.” He tucked me into his arms, his cheek damp and sleek against my temple. “My train leaves in half an hour. Will you come to the station with me?”

“Of course,” I said. I pressed my nose into his neck and inhaled deeply.

“I’ll remember everything. I’ll change the time of the raid, and I’ll be careful. No wild risks. I’ll return to you, safe and whole. I won’t fail you, I promise.”

“Of course you won’t, my love. Of course you won’t.”

He sat us both down on the bed in a creak of old springs, turning me around so my back rested against his chest. “You must go back to England, where it’s safer. I’ll be due for a week’s leave in another month or two. We’ll be married then—legally, I mean; you’re already my wife—and you can live at Southfield with my parents. Our child will be born there. I’ll write straightaway and start preparing them. Darling, don’t be worried,” he said, kissing my hair. “You look so frightfully glum. You mustn’t. Everything will work out perfectly. I’ve someone to live for now. Two of you.” He let one hand slip downward.

I covered his hand with mine. “I’m the luckiest woman in the world. To have found you. Your loving, open heart. You hardly know me, and you’ve taken me in, accepted every word I’ve told you. Given me this perfect night, when I thought I’d never hold you again.”

He chuckled against me. “Darling, the honor was entirely mine.” His arm twisted; he checked his watch and sighed. “It’s time.”

He took my hand and slung his pack over the other shoulder, and then he led me out the door and down the stairs and into the deserted street. The last of the rain had blown away in the night, and a clean new sun backlit the attic rooftops in palest gold. A few streets away, the cathedral
bells tolled dolefully through the air, calling the faithful to matins, the same service at which I’d found Julian two days ago. His hand squeezed mine; he was thinking the same thing.

“Only two days,” he said, “and I feel reborn.”

“You’re insane,” I laughed. “You trusting fool. Of course I’m a complete imposter, trying to land you as my husband, trying to pass off this baby as yours. I mean, really. A
time traveler
. You’ll believe anything, won’t you?”

“As long as it comes from your lips,” he said, laughing too.

We made it to the station with a few minutes to spare. I spotted Geoff Warwick down at the other end of the platform, alone; he gazed at me with angry contempt and looked away. “That man,” I said, “just doesn’t like me.”

“Don’t mind him. He’ll come around.”

“No, he won’t.”

“Now,” he said, firm and officerlike, turning to face me, the brim of his cap casting a diagonal shadow across his face. “First of all, no sadness. We’ll be together soon. I’ll write as often as I can. I’ll send something for you to live on as well, until everything’s all legal and proper and so on. What are your immediate plans?”