“It does seem the ideal getaway,” she said. “A sleepy little village like this.”
“Yes, well, it is, except when a zeppelin crashes at your front door. The town is still all abuzz with it.”
“That’s right. Was it far from your house?”
He turned to point across some barren fields. “You can still see the scorch marks on the earth.”
Indeed she could. A long black trail seared into the ground. The war was everywhere these days.
At the house, he scraped his boots clean, then ushered her into a spacious square reception hall, with wainscoted walls and a large chandelier looming overhead, and called out, “Jane! Our Ibsen girl is here!”
It was a clever play on words—the Gibson Girl was once a popular American icon, an ethereal beauty with delicate features and upswept hair, an image that could no longer hold its place in the horrors of a war-torn world—and Wells’s wife answered with a welcoming, “Show the dear girl into the drawing room. I’ll be right down just as soon as I’ve finished cleaning up your mess. Do you know that you spilled a bottle of ink last night?”
“Leave it for the housekeeper.”
“She’s in town getting the groceries.”
Wells shrugged guiltily—“I sometimes work quite late,” he whispered—before beckoning her into the next room. Here, the walls were lined with bookshelves, and Rebecca couldn’t resist going straight to them, to see what the great author himself was reading. Conrad, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Gissing, Kipling, along with a number of less expected books from the likes of Marx, Engels, Henry George, and other socialists and utopians. There were also dozens of Wells’s own books, many in their foreign editions. What must this be like? To see so many of your own works bound in leather, with beautifully embossed covers, and translated into a dozen different tongues? Would she ever be able to see such a display of her own works?
Perhaps Wells had been reading her mind. “Someday,” he said, “if you keep at your writing, you may have the pleasure of surveying your own oeuvre. How old are you now, if I may ask?”
Blushing, she replied, “Nearly twenty,” and he laughed.
“All of that, are you? Well, then, you’d better get cracking.”
When Jane came down, she had a warm smile, but did not extend a hand. “My skin’s stained blue from the ink.”
“I’m sorry, dear, I must have fallen asleep at the switch,” Wells apologized.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Jane said good-naturedly, motioning for them all to be seated. Rebecca took a wingback chair to one side of the fireplace, and Wells sat directly opposite. Jane sat on a well-worn loveseat, and picked up a bit of knitting from the side table. Rebecca suspected that she was glimpsing them in their accustomed spots, and felt all the more like an intruder. How in the world had she wound up here?
To put her at her ease, Jane asked several questions about her journey up from London, and Rebecca was only too happy to fill in the trivial details. Then the conversation moved on to her family—her absent father, who had simply vanished six years before, her two sisters, her attempts to be an actress. “My mother was dead set against it, but that only made me more determined than ever.”
“But you’ve dropped those plans?” Wells asked.
“They were dropped for me,” she replied, with a smile. “I enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Art, and after giving several performances there that were, shall we say, less than well received, I saw the writing on the wall.”
“But you did take away something from your stage career,” Jane prompted her, and Rebecca laughed.
“If you mean my new name, yes—Cicily Fairfield was retired forever, in favor of Rebecca West, the last part I played.”
Tea was served by Mrs. Willoughby, now returned from the market, and when that was done, Jane excused herself to attend to some correspondence. “I’ll leave you two to discuss literary matters.”
And that was when Rebecca felt, for the first time, the full force and effect of Wells’s personality and his undivided attention. Although he had struck her as rather ordinary when she had first seen him on the train platform, now she was entranced by the blue-gray eyes that looked at her with such penetration—she was used to male attention, but not from someone so deeply interested in who she truly was—and even more so by the ungovernable tide of his conversation. She had never heard one man throw off so many brilliant ideas, so many casual aperçus, with such ease, or ask her—a young woman most noted up until now for her good looks—for her own opinions and views. With some of them, he was in agreement—women’s suffrage, for example—but with others, even when he disagreed, he did so with such respect and intelligence that she never felt the least bit slighted or condescended to. Before she knew it, she had missed the last train connection back to London, and was invited by Jane to stay for dinner and the night.
After the last of the wine and cheese, Jane ushered her to a bedroom upstairs, and provided her with everything she might need, including a voluminous white flannel nightgown. “You’ll look like an angel once you’ve put that on,” Jane said, and with a chuckle Rebecca replied, “If only my mother could hear you say that.”
Before turning in, she looked out the window at a freshly painted barn, quite white in the moonlight, and a boxed herb garden under a winter screen; a covered stone well that might have served as an illustration in a children’s book stood beside it. She could also just discern some croquet wickets, and the rough borders of a tennis court, with a drooping net.
It was like a little paradise that Wells and his wife had constructed here, she reflected, before banishing the very thought, because if that was true, then that left only one role for her. It was a meaty role indeed, playing the serpent—the kind of role that actresses vied for—but hadn’t she given up on such dramatics?
She heard the soft patter of slippered feet outside her door, and Wells’s muted voice, saying, “Good night. Sleep well.”
“Thank you, and good night, Mr. Wells.”
There was a short pause. Was this exchange meant to continue?
But then the footfalls receded . . . and she was left to wonder what might have happened if—and not as the proper Cicily Fairfield, but as the bold Rebecca West—she had opened that door.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kurt pressed his eye to the peephole he had whittled into the wall of the hayloft—it hadn’t been easy, using only his jackknife—and looked out at the back of the big brick house. In the three days that he had been hiding in the barn, he had become accustomed to the rhythms of the house and the comings and goings of its inhabitants. A middle-aged couple, an occasional housekeeper, a gardener now and then. But tonight, something was different—another light was on in one of the upstairs rooms, and he caught a glimpse of a woman, younger and trimmer than the other women, standing at the window in a white nightgown. Then she drew the curtains, and moments later extinguished the light.
He lay back on the hay, exhaling slowly, trying to ignore the ache in his rib cage and the throbbing pain in his broken ankle. He had been lucky to survive at all; he knew that. When the flames in the fuselage had come charging at him, he had strapped on his parachute and leapt from the zeppelin, but too late, and too low, for the canopy to open properly. He had been buffeted wildly in the wind from the failing rotors, and then hurled into the top of a grove of trees, which had probably saved his life but done considerable collateral damage. Winded and hurt, he had still had the sense to gather in the shredded chute and clutch it to his chest. It had provided him with the warmth to make it through the worst night of his life, hidden among the uppermost boughs.