Will Thomas - To Kingdom Come

She came out from behind the screen, wearing only her nightdress. It was unbuttoned. I saw the gap, the long, thin gap of ivory-colored flesh, all the way to the floor.

“It is very cold in a marriage bed, all alone,” she murmured, her hand stroking my cheek. She pulled me over onto the bed. She was wearing a new French perfume that made my head spin. Her soft lips pressed urgently against my own. I was intoxicated. I could feel my own passion begin to ignite. However, I had been training for months in the production of explosives, and I knew what kind of chemical reaction would happen if things went too far.

“No!” I said, pulling myself away, off the bed.

“What is wrong?” she asked in a low voice. “Have I displeased you? I only wished to show you how I feel about you.” The latter came out almost petulantly. She pulled the corner of a blanket over her bare limbs.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. My shirt was suddenly damp; my heart was pounding. “I care for you, as well,” I said. “More than you know. But I cannot accept what you … offer. It is not mine to take. It belongs to your future husband.”

“But what if you are my future husband?” she countered, looking me in the eyes.

“Then I should have it after we are married. Not now.”

She slowly pulled the blanket up over her head. I heard her sniff back a tear.

“I’ve been a fool,” she said from inside her makeshift cave. “You must think me terribly wanton. I’ve never done anything like this before in my life.”

“I believe you,” I said. “And I’d never think you a fool.”

“I don’t know what it is about you, Thomas Penrith,” she continued. “You’ve got me thinking the maddest thoughts and doing the wildest things. I’m not like this, you know. I’m a sensible girl.”

“I know. I’ve been thinking the same thoughts about you, Maire.” I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it. She came out from beneath the blanket, which had disheveled her beautiful auburn hair.

“I’ve been seduced by Paris and the pretty clothes and the opera,” she said. “And by you, or at least the thought of you. You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I was worried that Willie might have had a prior claim on you,” I told her.

“Willie,” she said with a sad smile. “Willie is wonderful and handsome and a man of great talent, but he is not a-a lover. You are a lover, Thomas. You smolder.”

Smolder, eh? She said I smoldered. I had the absurd desire to go down to the street and inform passersby that I smoldered. Me, Thomas Llewelyn. Or was it Thomas Penrith? Or Charles Beaton? No matter. No woman had ever told me that before.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I care for you too much to allow this to happen. Part of me is mad for it, but another part will not allow it. I cannot stay here. I need some fresh air.”

I threw on a jacket and was about to quit the room.

“Stay,” she demanded, seizing my wrist.

“I cannot. I must clear my head.”

“No, I mean come to stay in Dublin when this is all over. Stay with me.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing.”

“Stay, or take me with you.”

My head was suddenly swollen with millions of thoughts. They were far too heavy for my weary shoulders.

“Perhaps,” I said, as I dashed out into the hall. Having escaped the scene, I leaned my shoulders on the other side of the door and breathed in cooler, less electrically charged air. I heard a sob, almost a wail in the room behind me. My hand reached toward the knob, but I mastered myself. I ran through the hallway and down the stairs.

In the street, a sound escaped my throat, a more masculine version of Maire’s wail. I could feel my heart thumping, shooting blood too quickly through my limbs and head. I lurched like a drunkard until I found a bench, where I collapsed and buried my head in my arms. When I’d taken this case, I hadn’t meant to fall in love.

Was it love? Barker told me once that women were my weakness, and I tended to agree with him. I had not known Maire for more than a few weeks, but how long did a man need to know a woman before falling in love? There is such a thing as love at first sight. Certainly, Maire was a woman any man could fall for. I could picture going home to her after a day’s work, her fussing over me, looking at her by the fire. What had Thomas Hardy said, in Far from the Madding Crowd? “Whenever you look up, there I shall be-and whenever I look up, there will be you.”

I madly combed my fingers through my hair. Who was I trying to fool? Did I really expect to go home from our offices in Craig’s Court to an I.R.B. princess? Would Barker allow it? Would she? Would I contemplate leaving my position as assistant to go build bombs for the Irish and become a traitor to England? Of course not. As Barker had told me, the minute she found out I was a spy, Maire would hate me with as much passion as she had almost just loved me.

I got up, pulled my jacket collar up over my open shirt, and stuffed my hands in my pockets. I had hurt her. I hadn’t meant to, but I had done it, anyway. It was not her fault that she had been caught up in this. Damn her brother for involving an innocent girl in this dangerous business. And damn me for breaking her heart, because it was inevitable that I would. I was not going to leave Barker’s employ, and I would never build another bomb after this case, not if I had anything to say about it. So I found myself desiring Maire, yet not allowing myself to have her, wanting to go with her but forcing myself to follow the path I had promised Mr. Anderson and Sir Watkin-aye, and my own employer-that I would follow. In the end, if all went according to plan, the English would triumph, the Irish would be imprisoned, and poor Maire would be left behind to bear the brunt of my handiwork. By doing that which I believed to be right, I would make myself the lowest of bounders. There was no satisfactory solution.

Mercifully, she was asleep when I got back. I crawled into my makeshift bed on the chaise longue, and soon was asleep myself.

I awoke the next morning as she moved past my bed. A polar wind came with her. It was no less than I deserved, I thought, and I bore it stoically. I got up and threw on my clothes, leaving her to her toilette.

“Why don’t you try the little cafe on the corner this morning?” she suggested. “I shall be down in a while.”

Had she suggested a cafe in the middle of the Gobi, I would have found a way to get there. Anything to please her. I couldn’t bear her glacial coldness, and I felt I had behaved like a cad the night before, though I would have been a worse cad had I allowed myself … It was simply a matter of choosing the lesser evil.

So it was that I was seated at a picturesque cafe in the middle of Paris, sipping a strong cup of coffee and spreading preserves over a warm croissant when Maire O’Casey came over to my table. She was wearing another new dress, an aniline-dyed cobalt blue that fit her like a glove. From somewhere in the city, she had purchased a rouge pot, and her lips were the color of cherries. With her hair pulled back loosely, she looked fresh out of one of the paintings by the fellow Renoir, who obviously had a passion for redheads. No man watching her-and, believe me, every man in the street was watching her-would have taken her for an Irishwoman. She looked like a Parisian society woman.

I dropped my knife on the table. This was the vision from my dream, down to the last detail: the coffee, the preserves, the woman in the blue dress. She moved slowly through the crowd, leaned over me, and whispered in my ear. “I forgive you.”

A jolt of electricity ran down my spine as if I were a tree trunk split in half. I don’t know if it was her breath on my ear or the memory of my dream.