Marcia Talley - The Last Refuge

‘We saw the explosion on CNN. Everyone assumed you were aboard, too.’

‘Sometimes I wish I had been.’

‘But it’s better to be alive, Drew, surely. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you if the Navy finds out you’re not dead?’

‘After being AWOL for almost a year? Let’s just say that I’m not planning on doing any time in Leavenworth.’

‘So, what happened next?’

‘After the explosion, I took out the guard, borrowed his clothing and got the hell out. It took me a while, but I’m here.’

‘How did you get out of Swosa with no passport, no money?’

‘It helps to be fluent in the language, and…’ He paused and we both heard the door across the hall creak open. There was a light tap on the door.

‘Amy? I heard voices. You OK in there?’

Alex.

I wasn’t sure I could imitate Amy’s Yankee twang, so I mumbled sleepily, ‘Fine. Just a nightmare. Sorry I woke you. G’night.’ I held my breath, fearful that Alex might decide to comfort Amy in person, but after a few seconds, the light pad of stocking feet confirmed that he’d returned to the room he shared with Michael.

As much as I wanted to hear the rest of Drew’s story, I knew it could be dangerous for everyone if he stuck around much longer. ‘We’re going to church at nine o’clock tomorrow,’ I whispered. ‘Amy and I will figure out a way for the two of you to talk.’

‘St Anne’s, you mean? On Church Circle?’

‘Yes,’ I said, thinking fast. ‘The restrooms are through the door to the right as you enter the narthex. Nobody should be using them during the service, so you can wait for Amy there.’

A slight creak of the chair, a whispered, ‘Thanks.’

For several minutes I remained huddled in my corner, arms wrapped around my knees, imagining I could still hear him breathing. ‘Drew?’

But Amy’s husband was gone. And I’d never even seen his face.

‘I’ve never been a morning person, so waking up at 5:30 a.m. to start cooking breakfast for a whole houseful of people is a real chore. It’s getting so I don’t mind eating porridge, but the next time one of the cameramen sashays into my kitchen with an Egg McMuffin, I’m going to kill him. ’

Karen Gibbs, cook

After Drew left, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay in bed with my heart pounding, trying to calm it. Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat. But my heart still pulsed hot in my ears like a piston.

I lay shivering in bed until dawn’s pale light began to filter in, giving shape to the room’s spare furnishings. I got up, pulled Amy’s robe off the hook on the back of the door, wrapped it around my shift. Leaving my ball gown lying in a heap on the floor, I crept from Amy’s room, tiptoed into the hall and down the stairs, through the hyphen into the main house where the occasional wine glass abandoned on a window sill or on the steps of the Chippendale staircase were reminders of the excesses of the previous evening.

On the second floor I paused, smiled demurely at the camera. So what if future viewers thought Hannah’d been bed-hopping? It might even juice up their ratings.

When I let myself into my room a few seconds later, everyone was still asleep, but sometime during the night, Amy had awakened and pulled the bedcovers over Gabe and tucked him in.

I approached the bed and shook Amy gently by the shoulder. ‘Amy,’ I whispered. ‘Wake up.’

There was no response, so I shook her again until she stirred.

One eye opened. ‘What?’ As if suddenly realizing who she was and who she was supposed to be, she propped herself up on one elbow and said, ‘Oh, Hannah, I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep. What time is it?’

‘Dawn. Sunday,’ I said. I needed Amy wide awake before I told her about Drew. ‘We need to talk, but not here.’ As Amy climbed out of bed and began tugging at her corset, smoothing her rumbled clothing, I slipped out of her robe and began rummaging in the half-light through the chest at the foot of my bed, coming up with one of my everyday gowns, a simple linen frock – could have been blue, could have been black – that laced up the front.

‘In the kitchen?’ Amy asked, sounding worried.

‘No. Meet me inside the summer house. There are no cameras there. And go quietly. I’ll join you in a few minutes.’

In the garden, dew glistened like cobwebs on the grass. To save my shoes, I kept to the terraced walkway that bisected the garden and led straight down to the two-story summer house that had been William Paca’s pride and joy. A statue of the god Mercury balanced on tiptoe at the peak of its octagonal roof.

I crossed the Chippendale bridge that spanned the fish pond and found Amy sitting on a bench inside the folly. I sat down next to her and took her hand.

‘It’s bad news, isn’t it?’ she said.

I squeezed her hand. ‘Honestly, Amy, I don’t know. You’ll have to be the judge of that.’ I’m not one of those break-it-to-’em-gently kind of people. Best to dive right in, get it over with. ‘Drew’s alive.’

Amy covered her mouth with both hands and screamed into them. She turned to face me, eyes wide and dry. ‘No, no.’

‘It’s true. Last night I slept in your room, and sometime in the middle of the night, Drew broke in. He expected to find you there, of course.’

‘Why didn’t he…’ Amy fumbled for the words.

I finished the sentence for her. ‘Why didn’t he simply knock on the front door, say, hey, it’s me, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated?’

She nodded.

‘Drew believes it’s important that he stay dead for a while, but he wants to see you very much.’

‘I don’t understand. The helicopter…’

‘I’m not sure I understand either, Amy, not entirely. Drew will have to explain. He knows that we’re going to church this morning, and is going to wait in the restroom. During the service, we’ll have to figure out a way to get the two of you together for a talk.’

Amy didn’t look happy at the prospect of seeing her husband again, which puzzled me until she said, ‘But, I don’t want to leave the show.’

‘Why would you have to?’

‘You don’t know Drew.’

That was true. I didn’t even know what her husband looked like, since carrying wallet-sized photographs of loved ones in our handbags had been forbidden, too. And nobody had any Hans Holbein miniatures, either. But I figured if Drew had been trained to extract a foreign dictator from his armed compound in a foreign country, surely he could extract his wife from a historic home in Annapolis, Maryland. There must be something holding him back. ‘You’ll need to talk to him, Amy. Then you can decide what you need to do.’

Jack Donovan was out of sorts at breakfast Sunday morning. Not long before dawn, George Washington (Founding Father informed us) had been whisked away. Not the way he had come – on horseback – but in a black limo, in order to make an early morning flight from BWI to New Orleans, where he would be shooting an episode of Treme .

Jack took Washington’s desertion as a personal insult. ‘Inconsiderate,’ he sputtered as he stood at the buffet heaping smoked bluefish on his plate. ‘Especially when we went to all the trouble preparing this spread.’

We? What do you mean, we? Jack’s sole contribution to the breakfast feast spread out before him had been the bluefish itself, a ten-pound beauty given to him by one of his Middleton Tavern cronies at their last meeting. Karen – who had smoked the fish, scrambled the eggs, pickled the herring, sliced the ham and balled the melon that Jack was busily tucking into – Karen was the only individual with any claim to being put out, in my opinion. Or possibly French Fry, who stood behind Jack’s chair at that particular moment, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue.