Beatriz Williams - The House on Cocoa Beach - A sweeping epic love story, perfect for fans of historical romance

“Oh, but I should do that.”

“Dearest, it’s no bother. I adore children. And you must rest, you really must.”

“But she’s only two—”

“I promise, I shall keep my most beady of beadiest eyes on her well-being. You’re not to worry about a thing, do you understand? She’s my only niece, after all. I shall worship her idolatrously. My darling only niece.”

I lean back against the pillows. “Yes. Of course. She’s your niece.”

“There we are. Is there anything I can get for you?”

“No, thank you. I believe my trunks are already unpacked.”

“Yes, they are. I saw to it personally. Such fun, to be ordering maids about in your service. I do hope everything’s comfortable. I do so want you to be comfortable, after everything you’ve endured. Now that we’ve found you at last. Our sister .” She reaches forward and squeezes my hand.

I thank her, and she hoists Evelyn onto her hip and carries her out of the room, like any adoring auntie, leaving the smell of roses behind her—a scent I hadn’t noticed until now, in the draft of her leaving.

As she passes through the doorway, she pauses and says over her shoulder, “Oh! I’ve forgot. I’m meant to tell you that Samuel has gone to the docks to supervise some shipment or another. He won’t be back until late, so we’re not to wait up.”

AT THE SOUND OF THE clicking latch, I gather up my knees in my arms. The sheets are soft and fine, and I realize this must have been Simon’s bedroom. Simon’s bed. Something about the size of the room, and the windows overlooking the river, and the white-painted door in the corner that leads, I suspect, to a private bathroom. Simon’s bathroom. Simon slept on these soft sheets and gazed at this ceiling and bathed behind that door. As I concentrate my mind, as I tread my gaze carefully along the pale walls and the draperies, the few pieces of dark, elegant furniture, this intuition grows into a certainty. This is Simon’s room. Simon was here.

Simon is still here.

I suppose you think I’m crazy. Simon’s death is a legal fact, after all. No one disputes the evidence. His own brother identified Simon’s burned body, and I have reason to trust the integrity of Samuel Fitzwilliam.

And there is the ring. Who can argue with the presence of a ring, recovered from a body in a fire? I look down at my right hand, and there sits the battered gold band, fit with some effort around my fourth finger, just above the knuckle. It’s my wedding ring, my genuine twenty-four-karat wedding ring, the worse for wear; I don’t question that fact for an instant.

But the sight of this poor, tormented bauble, curled in the center of Samuel’s palm, struck me not with grief—as Samuel supposed—but with something else. Some kind of psychological crisis, some kind of dissonance of the mind, in which the solid, indisputable object before your eyes clamors against the understanding in your brain, and that understanding is defeated, pulverized, crushed under the physical evidence of your husband’s demise. And how are you supposed to contemplate what remains? You can’t. You fall asleep instead.

But now I’ve awakened. I have awakened in Simon’s bed and spoken to Simon’s sister, and the cool suggestion of Simon’s presence returns to me, as naturally as the sun climbs above the ocean in the morning, as unsettling as the fingers of a wraith pressed against your neck.

The faint sound of running water drifts through the plaster walls—a sound that should probably fill me with anxiety but instead leaves me weightless with gratitude. Aunt Clara, giving my daughter her evening bath, so I can rest at last. Our sister, Clara said. And it was true. All along, as I plodded through my days in New York, waiting for some kind of inevitable denouement, I had this family. I had a brother-in-law, and a sister-in-law, and a husband whose existence I tried to ignore. And I know nearly nothing about them. The history of the past three years is as mysterious to me as the mangroves growing on the opposite shore of the river, the mangroves surrounding Simon’s burned house on Cocoa Beach.

I turn my head to the window, and the hot blue sky of this foreign land. This Florida, where Simon went to seek his fortune after I left him in Cornwall three years ago, and where he has met some kind of end, and now the remains of him drift about me, his presence slips in and out of my vision, and I have got to find a way to grasp him.

Because that’s the real reason I’ve come, isn’t it? Not because of duty, and certainly not because of love. Not even in order give my daughter a sense of her father, or any of those fine, sentimental things.

No. I’m here because I’ve done enough running away, haven’t I? Enough hiding from what terrifies me. I’m twenty-five years old, a wife and a mother and a sister, and I’ve just watched a jury of twelve sensible men convict my father of murdering my mother. I’ve survived the worst possible ordeal, the question that’s haunted me since I was eight years old, the source of all my waking dread. I have courage now. I have resolve. I have discovered the truth about one man.

Now the time has come to discover the truth about the other.

OVER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, I inform Clara that I’m taking Evelyn to Miami for a few days. We’ll drive off in the Packard as soon as the dishes are cleared and the suitcases packed.

“Miami?” she says. Toast suspended in midair.

“Yes. Miami.”

“Whatever for?”

For fun, I tell her.

Clara finishes her toast and her tea, dabs her mouth with a delicate napkin, and informs me that she’s not going to let us run off without her, oh no.

And by the way, if it’s fun I’m after, the place to go is Miami Beach.

France, February 1917

A personal inspection. That’s what Captain Fitzwilliam told me, anyway, once we had started on our way, out of the stable yard and down the turgid road, twenty military minutes later. The drizzle had let up; the chill descended. Corporal Pritchard rode in the back with the wounded men, while Fitzwilliam sat next to me on the Ford’s narrow seat, bracing one hand on the corner of the windshield while the damp crept in through the cracks in the rubber curtains.

“To inspect your hospital personally, of course,” he said, in answer to my question. “I can’t send patients to an auxiliary hospital without a thorough inspection of the premises.”

Was he smiling? I couldn’t take my eyes from the road in order to see his face, even if I’d had the courage to do it. In any case, the winter daylight was already retiring behind the thickening fog. But I thought I heard warmth in his voice. An impish emphasis on the word thorough, which I was then too unworldly to understand.

“I suppose not,” I said.

“You’re a Red Cross outfit, you said?”

“Yes. The Eighth New York chapter, the Overseas Unit.”

“Which the redoubtable Mrs. DeForest organized.”

“Yes. Mrs. DeForest was very eager to assist in the war effort. Directly, I mean.”

“Of course she was. I can just picture her now. I do wonder if she’ll match the image in my head. But what about you, Miss Fortescue? The astonishing Miss Fortescue.”

I switched on the headlamps, not that it made much difference. The road went around a slight downhill curve, ending in a muddy hollow that required my concentration. When we had plunged through and emerged on the other side, a flatter stretch, straight and bordered by lindens at even intervals, he relaxed his grip on the windshield and repeated the question.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean what you’re doing here, plowing your ambulance through shellfire and whatnot, along roads deemed impassable by my doughty British drivers. Are you a nurse?”