Beatriz Williams - The Wicked Redhead

Now, this Dr. Fitzwilliam of hers is a handsome fellow, I’ll give him that, though his hair has turned to silver and the skin of his face has toughened under the sun. His eyes are hazel and terribly sincere, and his smile is too cheerful for my taste, exposing a vast amount of perfect dentistry. I guess Mrs. Fitzwilliam likes it well enough. He exchanges this speculative look with Anson, who is scowling fit to thunder, and turns to me. Speaks in a profoundly correct English accent, not softened at all by the Florida climate. “Can you sail, Miss Kelly?” he asks.

“I can learn.”

“In other words, she can’t tell a sheet from a sail,” Anson says, “aside from the fact that her right arm’s almost certainly sprained. Anyway, Gin, you can’t just leave Virginia onshore by herself, in her condition.”

“That’s all true,” says Mrs. Fitzwilliam. “So why don’t Ollie and Miss Kelly take the motor launch by themselves, Simon? You could keep me company onshore.”

“But—”

And Mrs. Fitzwilliam lowers her chin and sends some kind of telegraphic message in her husband’s direction, some kind of Morse marital code I can’t quite comprehend, and I’ll be damned if the good doctor doesn’t just cut his sentence short and lose himself in translation of those blue eyes.

“I think that sounds like an excellent idea,” I say, just to move things along.

Dr. Fitzwilliam runs a hand through his hair and casts a look at Anson that puts me in mind of a hound dog in the act of apologizing.

“I don’t see why not,” he says.

“Now, hold on a minute, Doc. I thought you were supposed to examine her first, before any kind of strenuous—”

“Oh, she seems about as healthy as you do, in my professional judgment,” the doctor says airily, “and in any case, Marshall, I was just thinking you might be better off in a motor launch yourself, in your bruised condition.”

“ My condition’s just fine. It’s hers I’m thinking about.”

“Why, then! It’s settled, isn’t it?” Dr. Fitzwilliam takes his wife’s arm. “Come along. The launch is moored directly to the warehouse, there.”

SOMETHING I should tell you about, before I step on that motor launch with Anson. Head out to God knows where on the skin of the Atlantic, the two of us together.

On the second day of our journey south from Maryland, we woke at dawn. Or rather, Anson woke at dawn and roused me by the mere act of whispering my name— Ginger —against my ear.

The sleep had done me no good, I’m afraid. My arm had stiffened in the night, and the rest of me just hurt. We lay as a pair of spoons on our left sides, because of the injuries to our respective rights, attached by the exact same intimacy in which we had fallen asleep six hours before, and for a minute or two, or maybe more, neither of us moved a muscle. Maybe we couldn’t. As bad as Duke had beat me, he had done Anson worse: hung him by his arms inside a wet, frigid building made of mountain stone, while his earlier wounds gaped untended, in such a way as Christ Himself must have suffered upon His holy cross. So I guessed Anson’s limbs ached too, his muscles lay stiff alongside mine, his head drummed an old, fatigued beat. Above our heads, our left hands clasped. I felt the slow thud of his heart passing through his shirt and mine, to enter into my shoulder and spread along my bones like some kind of uncanny medicine. I said, We’re alive, at least, and he said, Yes, thank God . Didn’t ask me how I felt, how I was doing, any of that rote, empty talk. Didn’t mention my brother, who had died for our sakes, nor his brother, who had nearly died for mine alone. Didn’t tell me about love nor lust nor devotion, not pity for my present misery nor awe for our mutual survival. Just lay with me while the sun did creep up the edge of the sky outside our walls, and those words we didn’t utter lay there too, like smoke against our skin, like incense filling our lungs, like a benediction laid upon us.

The air began to take on light, and Patsy stirred in the cot beside us. Anson kissed my hair and ear and cheek and said it was time to go, we had rested enough. Go where? I whispered, because I had plumb forgotten where we were supposed to be headed, and he said, Florida, and I guess I might could then have asked him what waited for us in Florida, what lay at the end of our road, what was the nature of this life to which we were fleeing together.

But I did not. Maybe I was scared to ask, maybe I was too numb to care. I helped him clumsily with his coat and shoes, and he helped me clumsily with mine. We woke Patsy and carried her out through the drizzle to the waiting automobile, and I settled us both inside while Anson returned the key to the motor inn’s office. Started the engine and the automatic wipers and rolled back onto the black highway, and we never did stop for the night again. Just drove on, by sun and by moon, catching food and sleep by the side of the road, until the clouds parted and the air commenced to dry out and warm, and sometime in the middle of the third night we came to rest on a stretch of beach they call Cocoa, for no reason that I can properly tell.

And I don’t recount all this history to you now in order to illuminate some measure of what we endured together, Anson and I, before arriving at this earthly paradise. I don’t hold with wallowing in past afflictions; I like to walk into my future looking square ahead. Just to point out, so delicately as I can, that we have yet no actual future to speak of. No covenants between us, no vows of any kind, no physical sacrament to reunite us in the wake of that horrifying rupture at my step-daddy’s hands. Only a blind trust in that thing —that smoke and incense, that benediction, whatever you care to call it—that has taken form in the darkness around us.

Such that whatever lies upon this road along which we presently hurtle, it is surely made from this unknown substance. We ourselves are built of it. For better or worse.

NOW, I have taken to the seas but one other time in my life—if you don’t count the Hudson River ferries, which I don’t—and in that instance, as in this one, Oliver Anson Marshall himself was my pilot.

Then, we traveled in a racing motorboat, and the speed of that craft near enough flattened my chest forever into the fashionable silhouette. And if that boat was your naughty little sister, sleek and fast and amoral, why, this one’s your mama’s lazy uncle. Old and slow and overfed, kind of prone to fits and starts of his engine, if you know what I mean. Still, we’re free, aren’t we, the two of us. Making a white trail toward the ocean, while the sun heats our skin and the draft cools it right back down, and the other craft go about their business, large and small, without paying us any mind. We might be waterbugs on a pond so great as the universe. Free.

As you might expect, Anson’s not best pleased with me for my overturning of his usual neat plans. Gives me a dose of what they call the silent treatment as we head off down the Indian River, disturbing the peaceable green water with all the noise and energy of our sturdy motor. The draft rattles the brim of my hat until at last I remove the damned thing and toss it on a bench, and the sudden freeing of hair is like plunging from a cliff. Exhilarating and messy. “I remember the last time the two of us went on a boat ride together,” I call out, over the noise of the engine. “Was it only last week?”

“Didn’t end so well, as I recall.”

“Oh? I thought it ended pretty well, indeed. Best ride I ever took.”

A slow blush climbs over the top of Anson’s collar and up his neck.