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

When I returned to Stefan’s cabin a half hour later, he was sitting up against the pillows and staring at the porthole opposite, which was open to the breeze. The rooftops of the fort shifted in and out of the frame, nearly white in the sunshine. It was too hot for blankets, and he lay in his pajamas on the bed I had made expertly underneath him that morning, tight as a drum. “Here are your books,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Like a bear in a cage.”

“You are certainly acting like a bear.”

He looked up from the books. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve had worse patients. It’s good that you’re a bear. Better a bear than a sick little worm.”

“Poor Mademoiselle de Créouville. I understand your brother has ordered you to stay with me and nurse me back to health.”

“Not in so many words.” I paused. “Not in any words at all, really. He sent over a few clothes and a toothbrush yesterday, with the doctor, but there was no note of any kind. I still haven’t the faintest idea who you are, or what I’m doing here.”

He frowned. “Do you need one?”

I folded my arms and sank into the armchair next to the bed. His pajamas were fine silky cotton and striped in blue, and one lapel was still folded endearingly on the inside, as if belonging to a little boy who had dressed himself too hastily. The blueness brought out the bright caramel of his eyes and, by some elusive trick, made his chest seem even sturdier than before. His color had returned, pink and new; his hair was brushed; his thick jaw was smooth and smelled of shaving soap. You would hardly have known he was hurt, except for the bulky dressing that distended one blue-striped pajama leg. “What do you think?” I said.

He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. “You are a nurse. You see before you an injured man. You have a cabin, a change of clothes, a dozen men to serve you. What more is necessary for an obedient young lady who knows it is impertinent to ask questions?”

I opened my mouth to say something indignant, and then I saw the expression on his face as he lit the cigarette between his lips with a sharp-edged gold lighter and tossed the lighter back on the nightstand. The end of the cigarette flared orange. I said, “You do realize you’re at my mercy, don’t you?”

“I have known that for some time, yes. Since you first walked into that miserable boathouse in your white dress and stained it with my blood.”

“Oh, you’re flirting again. Anyway, I returned the favor, didn’t I?”

“Yes. We are now bound at the most elemental level, aren’t we? I believe the ancients would say we have taken a sacred oath, and are bound together for eternity.” He reached for the ashtray and placed it on the bed, next to his leg, and his eyes danced.

“If that’s your strategy for conquering my virtue, you’ll have to try much harder.”

Stefan’s face turned more serious. He placed his hand with the cigarette on the topmost book, the Goethe, nearly covering it, and said, “What I mean by all that, of course, is thank you , Mademoiselle. Because there are really no proper words to describe my gratitude.”

I leaned forward and turned the lapel of his pajamas right side out. “Since we are now bound together for eternity,” I said, “you may call me Annabelle.”

Of course, my full name was much longer.

I was christened Annabelle Marie-Elisabeth, Princesse de Créouville, a title bought for me by my mother, who married Prince Edouard de Créouville with her share of the colossal fortune left to her and her sister by their father, a New England industrialist. Textiles, I believe. I never met the man who was my grandfather. My father was impoverished, as European nobility generally was, and generously happy to make the necessary bargain.

At least my mother was beautiful. Not beautiful like a film star—on a woman with less money, her beauty would be labeled handsome —but striking enough to set her apart from most of the debutantes that year. So she married her prince, she gave birth to Charles nine months later and me another four years after that, and then, ooh la la, caught her husband in bed with Peggy Guggenheim and asked for a divorce. ( But everybody’s doing it, my father protested, and my mother said, Adultery or Peggy Guggenheim? and my father replied, Both. ) So that was the end of that, though in order to secure my father’s cooperation in the divorce (he was Catholic and so was the marriage) my mother had to leave behind what remained of her fortune. C’est la vie. We moved back to America and lived in a modest house in Brookline, Massachusetts, summering with relatives in Cape Cod, until Mummy’s appendix burst and it was back to France and Saint Cecilia’s on the storm-dashed Brittany coast.

“But that is medieval,” said Stefan, to whom I was relating this story a week later, on a pair of deck chairs overlooking a fascinating sunset. He was still in pajamas, smoking a cigarette and drinking a dry martini; I wore a lavender sundress and sipped lemonade.

“My father’s Paris apartment was hardly the place for an eleven-year-old girl,” I pointed out.

“True. And I suppose I have no right to complain, having reaped the benefit of your convent education. But I hate to think of my Annabelle being imprisoned in such a bitter climate, when she is so clearly meant for sunshine and freedom. And then to have lost such a mother at such an age, and your father so clearly unworthy of this gift with which he was entrusted. It enrages me. Are you sure you won’t have a drink?”

“I have a drink.”

“I mean a real one, Annabelle. A grown-up drink.”

“I don’t drink when I’m on duty.”

“Are you still on duty, then?” He crushed the spent cigarette into an ashtray and plucked the olive out of his martini. He handed it to me.

I popped the gin-soaked olive into my mouth. “Yes, very much.”

“I am sorry to hear that. I had hoped, by now, you were staying of your own accord. Do you not enjoy these long hours on the deck of my beautiful ship, when you read to me in your charming voice, and then I return the favor by teaching you German and telling you stories until the sun sets?”

“Of course I do. But until you’re wearing a dinner jacket instead of pajamas, and your crutches have been put away, you’re still my patient. And then you won’t need me anymore, so I’ll go back home.”

He finished the martini and reached for another cigarette. “Ah, Annabelle. You crush me. But you know already I have no need of a nurse. Dr. Duchamps told me so yesterday, when he removed the stitches.” He tapped his leg with his cigarette. “I am nearly healed.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“Perhaps he is a romantic fellow and wants you to stay right here with me, tending to my many needs.”

Suddenly I was tired of all the flirting, all the charming innuendo that meant nothing at all. I braced my hands on the arms of the deck chair and lifted myself away.

“Where are you going?” asked Stefan.

“To get some air.”

The air at the Isolde ’s prow was no fresher than the air twenty feet away in the center of the deck—and we both knew it—but I spread my hands out anyway and drew in a deep and briny breath. The breeze was picking up with the setting of the sun. My dress wound softly around my legs. I wasn’t wearing shoes; shoes seemed pointless on the well-scrubbed deck of a yacht like this. The bow pointed west, toward the dying red sun, and to my left the water washed against the shore of the Île Saint-Honorat, a few hundred yards away.