Beatriz Williams - Along the Infinite Sea - Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

The woman stopped shrilling when she saw me. She was dressed in a long and shimmering evening gown, and her hair was a little disordered. There was a diamond clip holding back a handful of once-sleek curls at her temple, and a circle of matching diamonds around her neck. Her lipstick was long gone. Her eyes flicked up and down, taking me in, exposing the line of smudged kohl on her upper lid. “And who are you?” she asked, in haughty French, though I could tell from her accent that she was English.

“His nurse.”

“I must see him.”

I stood back from the door. “Five minutes,” I said, in my sternest ward sister voice, “and if you upset him even the smallest amount, if I hear so much as a single word through this door, I will open your veins and bathe in your blood.”

I must have looked as if I meant it, for she ducked through the door like a frightened rabbit, and when six minutes had passed without a single sound, I knocked briefly on the door and opened it.

Stefan lay quite still on the bed. His eyes were closed, and the woman’s hand rested in his palm. She was curled in the armchair— my armchair, I thought fiercely—and she didn’t look up when I entered. “He is so pale,” she said, and her voice was rough. “I have never seen him like this. He is always so vital.”

“As I said, he has lost a great deal of blood.”

“May I sit with him a little longer?”

She said it humbly, the haughtiness dissolved, and when she tilted her head in my direction and accepted my gaze, I saw a track of gray kohl running down from the corner of her eye to the curve of her cheekbone. She had dark blond hair the color of honey, and it gleamed dully in the lamplight. Her gown was cut into a V so low, I could count the ribs below her breasts. I looked at Stefan’s hand holding hers, and I said, “Yes, a little longer,” and went back out the door and down the narrow corridor to the stern of the ship, which was pointed toward the exposed turrets of the Fort Royal on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, where the Man in the Iron Mask had spent a decade of his life in a special isolated cell, though no one ever knew who he was or why he was there. Whether he had a family who mourned him.

I had sent a note for Charles with the departing doctor, in the small hours of the morning, and I expected my brother any moment to arrive on the yacht, to assure himself of Stefan’s survival and to bring me home.

But lunchtime came and went, the disheveled blonde departed, and though someone brought me a tray of food, and a bowl of hot broth for Stefan, Charles never appeared.

Stefan slept. At six o’clock, a boat hailed the deck and the doctor’s head popped over the side, followed by his bag. The day had been warm, and the air was still hot and laden with moisture. “How is our patient this evening?” he asked.

“Much better.” I turned and led him down the hallway to Stefan’s commodious stateroom. “He’s slept most of the day and had a little broth.” I didn’t mention the woman.

“Excellent, excellent. Sleep is the best thing for him. Pulse? Temperature?”

“All normal. The pulse is slow, but not alarmingly so.”

“To be expected. He is an active man. Well, well,” he said, ducking through the door, “how is our intrepid hero, eh?”

Stefan was awake, propped up on his pillows. He shot the doctor the kind of look that parents send each other when children are present, and listening too closely. The doctor glanced at me, cleared his throat, and set his bag on the end of the bed.

“Now, then,” he said, “let us take a look at this little scratch of yours.”

On the way back to the boat, the doctor gave me a list of instructions: sleep, food, signs of trouble. “He is quite strong, however, and I should not be surprised if he is up and about in a matter of days. I shall send over a pair of crutches. You will see that he does not overexert himself, please.”

“I don’t understand. I had no expectation of staying longer than a day.”

The doctor stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “What’s this?”

“I gave you a message, to give to my brother. Wasn’t there a reply? Isn’t he coming for me?”

He pushed his spectacles up his nose and blinked slowly. The sun was beginning to touch the cliffs to the west, and the orange light surrounded his hair. The deck around us was neat and shining, bleached to the color of bone, smelling of tar and sunshine. “Coming for you? Of course not. You are to care for the patient. Who else is to do it?”

“But I’ll be missed,” I said helplessly. “My father— You must know who I am. I can’t just disappear.”

The doctor turned and resumed his journey across the deck to the ladder, where his tender lay bobbing in the Isolde ’s lee. “My dear girl, this is nothing that young Créouville cannot explain. He is a clever fellow. No doubt he has already put about a suitable story.”

“But I don’t understand. What’s going on? What sort of trouble is this?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said virtuously.

“Yes, you do. What sort of trouble gets a man shot in the night like that, everything a big secret, and what … what does my brother have to do with any of it? And why the devil are you smiling that way, like a cat?”

“Because I am astonished, Mademoiselle, and not a little filled with admiration, that you have undertaken this little adventure with no knowledge whatever of its meaning.”

We had reached the ladder. I grabbed him by the arm and turned him around. “Then perhaps you might begin by explaining it to me.”

He shook his head and patted my cheek. His eyes were kind, and the smile had disappeared. “I cannot, of course. But when the patient is a little more recovered, it’s my professional opinion that you have every right to ask him yourself.”

The next day, Stefan roared for his crutches, an excellent sign, but I wouldn’t let him have them. I made him eat two eggs for breakfast and a little more beef broth, and he grumbled and ate. I told him that if he were very good and rested quietly, I would let him try out the crutches tomorrow. He glared with his salt caramel eyes and directed me to go to the Isolde ’s library and bring him some books. He wrote down their titles on a piece of paper.

The weather was hot again today, the sun like a blister in the fierce blue sky, and every porthole was open to the cooling breeze off the water. I passed along the silent corridor to the grand staircase, a sleek modern fusion of chrome and white marble, filled with seething Mediterranean light, and the library was exactly where Stefan said it should be: the other side of the main salon.

It was locked, but Stefan had given me the key. I opened the door expecting the usual half-stocked library of the yachting class: the shelves occupied by a few token volumes and a great many valuable objets of a maritime theme, the furniture arranged for style instead of a comfortable hours-long submersion between a pair of cloth covers.

But the Isolde ’s library wasn’t like the rest of the ship. There was nothing sleek about it, nothing constructed out of shiny material. The walnut shelves wrapped around the walls, stuffed with books, newer ones and older ones, held in place by slim wooden rails in case of stormy seas. A sofa and a pair of armchairs dozed near the portholes, and a small walnut desk sat on the other side, next to a cabinet that briefly interrupted the flow of shelving. I thought, Now, here is a room I might like to live in.

I looked down at the paper in my hand. Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ; Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education ; Dumas père , Le vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard .