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

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Because you haven’t been here long enough. Believe me, once you’ve seen enough chaps minus their limbs or their faces or guts, that’s the worst, entrails hanging from a gaping hole in what once was a nobly intact human abdomen …”

He stopped talking. Stopped walking. I stopped, too, and turned my head, pulse racketing. His eyes were stark and gray, his skin was gray. But that was just the light, the feeble light from the lantern I held at my knee.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“There’s no need.”

“It’s the wine, I suppose. One should never obey one’s impulses after drinking a bottle of wine.”

“You said it was a glass or two.”

“I might have been modest.”

How strange. He wouldn’t look away. I wanted to look away, but it seemed rude, didn’t it, turning my eyes somewhere else when he held my gaze so zealously. As if he had something important to say. In fact, I couldn’t move at all, even if I wanted to. Like a nocturnal animal caught in the light from the kitchen door. My knuckles locked around the lantern, my cheeks frozen in shock.

“You should rest,” I said softly. “You shouldn’t be out like this.”

“I might say the same of you. Shall we go in together?”

“Of course.”

He reached forward and took the lantern from my hand. My fingers gave way without a fight. Shameful, I thought. He lifted his elbow as well, but I ignored that. I ignored all of him, in fact, as we walked silently toward the entrance of the château, through which the great had once streamed, the ancient de Créouvilles in all their glory, shimmering and laughing, and now it was just wounded soldiers, common men, nurses and doctors in bleak clothing. I ignored him because I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do. When he opened the door for me, I stepped through and sped for the staircase.

“Miss Fortescue?”

“Yes?” Breathlessly, without looking down. Hand on the bannister. Under my foot, the stair creaked noisily.

“My room is in the west wing.”

“Yes.”

“So I suppose it’s good night.”

The word night tended upward, like a question to which I was supposed to know the answer.

I said, “Yes. Good night.”

THE KINGSTON ACADEMY GIRLS KNEW I was different from them. Girls always do. I was too afraid to speak to anyone—too afraid I would say something I shouldn’t—so I sat by myself on that first day and didn’t say a word.

There was one girl. Amelia. She was the ringleader, the girl everybody listened to. “Let’s play the husband game,” she said when we were outside in the small courtyard after lunch, and everybody wrote something on a piece of paper and put it inside the crown of Amelia’s hat, and when they drew out the pieces of paper and read the words aloud, they were the names of boys, and the name you drew was the name of the man you were going to marry. Henry, John, Theodore, George. The girls all giggled when they read the names, as if they actually believed in it, and I sat there on a wooden bench next to the brick wall of the courtyard—there was a cherry tree growing feebly nearby, I remember that—and I hoped no one would notice me.

But Amelia did. That was why she was the ringleader; she never missed a thing. She came up to me, and her brown eyes were like keyholes, small and well guarded. “Pick a name, Fortescue,” she said, shaking the hat. “That is your name, isn’t it, Fortescue?”

I now know she only meant the question rhetorically, but at the time I quaked in panic. Because my surname wasn’t Fortescue, was it? I was really Faninal, unique and infamous. I shook my head at Amelia and said No, thank you.

Well, Amelia wouldn’t stand for that, not right there in front of the other girls. You couldn’t allow any petty rebellions. The new girl always had to be put in her place.

“I said, pick a name, Fortescue!” She rattled the hat again, right in my face, and again I refused, and her eyes, which had been keyholes, became tiny slits. “All right. If you’re too scared,” she said, and she picked a piece of paper from the hat and read out the name, and everybody—all the girls—burst into hysterical giggles.

I sometimes wonder if I should have obeyed Amelia. Would everything have taken a different path? Would I have become like the other girls, and my old Faninal life dissolve harmlessly into my past? Would I have entered into the Kingston universe, the ordinary female universe, in which pretty dresses hung like stars and marriage was the gravity that held everything together?

Or would I have remained stranded on my bench, while the other girls went to parties, met boys, discovered dark corners, were kissed and fell, unafraid, into love?

EXCEPT FOR MRS. DEFOREST, WHO HAD a grand suite in the west wing, the nurses slept in a row of narrow bedrooms, like nuns in a convent. Mary’s door was closed and dark, and Hazel’s. We were all so exhausted after so much excitement.

And me. Virginia Fortescue. I climbed into bed at last, trembling and aching, incurably awake, my nerves shot through with some kind of foreign stimulant I could not identify.

She is absolutely essential.

I stared at the gilded ceiling and thought, over and over, I have certainly not fallen in love; that is impossible.

Dixie Highway, Florida, June 1922

We’re rushing down the highway in the blue Packard, Evelyn wedged happily between us, suitcases lashed precariously into the rumble seat, and I’m laughing at some joke of Clara’s, laughing and trying to keep the Packard straight on the road, which is soaked and slick from a morning downpour.

“Miami Beach is just heavenly,” Clara’s saying, “just endless fun. I know all the right people, too. They think I’m a proper aristocrat, and they’ve fallen all over themselves to make my acquaintance. There’s nothing an English accent won’t get you, in American society. I suppose there’s some tremendous meditation there on republicanism and human nature, but I haven’t got the brains for it this morning.”

“Have you been there often? Miami Beach?”

“Oh, back and forth, really. Samuel goes to Miami on business, and I won’t be left by myself in dull old Cocoa, not if you paid me. I’ve done enough of that all my life! Being left behind.”

“What kind of business?”

“Heaven knows. Banks, I suppose. Or estate agents. Everybody’s buying land in Florida these days, you know. Oh, look! There’s the ocean. Isn’t it dazzling? You couldn’t pay me to return to England, either. For one thing, there aren’t any men left, and you’ve got heaps of strapping young fellows here. To be perfectly honest—you don’t mind if I’m perfectly honest, do you?”

“I don’t think I could stop you.”

“Well, as I said, to be perfectly honest, I was rather shocked to discover that you were still married at all. To Simon, I mean. That you hadn’t divorced him and married someone else. Some devastatingly attractive Yankee chap. You can’t have lacked for admirers.”

The Packard’s wheels slip in the mud, and I use this momentary distraction—righting a motorcar on a treacherous road, a nimble skill I still possess, thank God—to think of a suitable reply. When the Packard’s running straight and smooth once more, I squint briefly at the sun and say, “Not really. I didn’t go out. I was too busy with Evelyn.”

“But your sister! Surely your sister must have wanted to go out. Didn’t you chaperone her, or something like that? I think I read she had a suitor.”

“Read where?”

“Why, in the papers, of course! How do you think we discovered where to find you? Your father’s trial occupied all the headlines. I’m afraid I devoured them shamelessly. You were such a mystery to us, after all.” She pauses and turns to me. “I hope you don’t mind? I couldn’t very well not look. I’m not that noble.”