Overseas (58 page)

“
Help?
For heaven’s sake, sweetheart, it wouldn’t have existed without you. So no more tedious rubbish about spending a little money now and again. You’re my properly legal wife now, thank God, and I take great pleasure in exercising my husbandly right to buy you whatever I jolly well please.”

I opened my mouth, but he placed his finger over it.

“That being said, darling, I’m not so thick I’d give you exactly what you didn’t want, just in order to please my own vanity. You’ll be happy to know I spent nothing at all on your birthday present. Not a single centime.” He beamed at me virtuously.

“Really?”

“Indeed. In fact, you might well say it’s something that already belongs to you.” He pulled himself upward and reached one long arm toward the picnic basket.

“What, a ham sandwich?” I inquired.

“Ye of little faith.” He flipped open the lid and fished inside. “It’s two things, really. The first is rather practical. I nicked it from the hotel manager in Paris.” He handed me a yellow legal pad and a pen.

“Very nice, Julian. I could use one of these.”

“Sweetheart. It’s for your business plan.”

“My business plan?”

“Mmm.” His arm curled around me. “You said something, in the middle of some argument or another, back in Manhattan, about how you couldn’t just go back to work anymore, because of me. The rather long shadow I’ve apparently cast. And I realized you’re quite right.”

“Julian, it’s not your
fault
. And it’s all so silly now, after what we’ve been through. Unimportant.”

“For now, perhaps. But once we’re back home, settled into our lives, you’ll want something more.” He paused for a single self-deprecating chuckle. “All those years, my darling, I thought it was enough I’d built a fortune to lay at your feet. I pictured selling off Southfield, being able to sweep my sweet Kate into a life of idle luxury. Rather proud of myself, I was. And then I found you at last, and it began to penetrate—through the swirling mists of adoration, you understand—that my beloved has rather a fierce streak of independence underneath her quiet exterior. That she wouldn’t quite be content as my—what was it?—
arm
candy
?”

“That didn’t come through in those two days in France, when you claimed to have fallen in love with me?”

“Have a little pity, Kate. I was but a young pup then, overcome by your beauty, without a clue to the modern female mind. But I know you better now, darling. You want to accomplish things, your own things, and you won’t be happy without it.”

“But I don’t even know where to start.”

“I daresay you’ll think of something. Because I don’t want any more rubbish about dolls and gilded cages and bloody
chauvinists…
”

“I didn’t mean that, Julian. You know I didn’t.”

“Then let me prove it to you. You can do anything you want, sweetheart. Bookstore. Café. Start your own fund, if you like. Even a—what were your words?—a pansy philanthropic foundation, I believe. We’ve all the resources you need.”

“You’d seed me?”

A tender smile touched the edges of his mouth. “Darling, this fortune of ours—
ours
, Kate—isn’t meant to cage you, to limit you. It’s to set you free, sweetheart. Free to do whatever it is that makes you happy, that fulfills you.”

“And what about you?”

“What
about
me?” He shrugged. “I’ll be busy enough helping sort out that damned fiasco back home. Or else rescuing Hollander from his latest folly, God rot him. I shall simply cheer you on from the sidelines.”

“Oh, really?” I reached out with one toe and poked his leg. “And how long is
that
going to last, do you think? I know you, Julian, and you won’t be able to help yourself.” I bent closer. “And you know what? That’s fine. I can’t do it without you, you know. I’ll be counting on your help. Your advice.”

“Be careful, darling. Invite me in, and I might try to manage everything for you. Interfere remorselessly. Protect you from every vicissitude.”

“Oh, I’m learning how to deal with you. Keep you at bay with a few well-timed shrewish remarks.” I looked back down at the yellow pad. Blank. An open promise. Whatever I’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this. “Thank you. I’m overwhelmed. This is… this is the most amazing gift. And a little misleading, you know.” I looked back up. “It’s going to be pretty expensive, in the end.”

“Oh, you’ll make us a handsome profit on it, I’ve no doubt.” He rubbed my chin with his thumb and smiled broadly. “And now for your second gift, which is rather more in the sentimental line.”

“Am I going to cry?” I set the legal pad down in the sand.

“I should jolly well hope so.” He reached back in the basket. “Ah! Here you are. Only twelve and a half years late. Beastly old postal service.”

I stared down at the envelope in my hands. “What’s this?”

“You’re supposed to open it, darling. I daresay it will all become clear.”

I turned it over. It was addressed, in a lopsided black scrawl, to Mrs. Katherine Ashford, 29 rue des Augustins, Amiens. I turned my eyes back to Julian’s face. “Oh God. How did you… ?”

“I kept it in the pocket of my tunic, darling. I meant to post it once I returned to the trenches. In my ever-damned arrogance.”

It wasn’t sealed. I lifted the flap with shaking fingers and drew out the folded paper inside. It felt crisp and new, only a single sharp crease across the middle. “Didn’t you ever open it?” I said.

“No. I always thought I’d wait for you to do that. Ah, there it is.” He reached over to collect me. “What a weepy female you’ve become.”

“Sorry,” I whispered. I unfolded the letter; a smaller sheet slipped out, the left side slightly ragged.

“I made a clean copy for you, from the notebook. Ironically enough,” he drawled, “my everlasting fame, as you put it, comes from a mere first draft.”

I held up the paper. “Overseas,” he’d scrawled at the top, and the fourteen lines followed, spare and evocative, the ending now devastatingly clear:
“… in this shadowed hour/The vision guards my faith, while overseas/Her heart beats mine, defeats eternity.”

“Your poem,” he said.

I nodded. There was no point in trying to say anything. I turned back to the enclosed letter.

He cleared his throat. “It’s not long. I was in a hurry.”

I read it through twice, and then the poem. I put the one sheet back in the other and folded it up again and slipped it back in the envelope.

“Was that all right?” he asked.

I nodded and turned and let him ease us down into the sand.

“Happy birthday.”

“A year ago,” I said, a long silent moment later, “I didn’t even know you. Didn’t even know this much love existed in the world. Isn’t that funny?” I spread my fingers out on his chest, watched the slow rise and
fall of his breath. “Charlie and a couple of the other analysts took me out for my birthday. My twenty-fifth. Kind of a big deal. We went to this Tex-Mex bar in Tribeca and did tequila shots.”

Julian snorted.

“I did
not
do that many,” I said defensively. “I’m not much of a partier. But I
was
kind of hungover the next day.”

“Poor darling.”

“Anyway, that was my last birthday. Now here I am.”

“Here you are. No tequila shots, I’m afraid.”

“No. Thank God. Just you.” I turned over in his arms and lifted myself, so I could stroke his cheeks with my hands. “Thank you. Darling Julian. The most wonderful birthday presents in the world. Both of them.” I lowered my head and kissed him.

“Mmm. You’re quite welcome.”

“You know, you’re very good at all this. At love. At marriage. The whole husband thing.”

He grinned. “It’s my life’s work, after all.”

I kissed the tip of his chin. “When we get back, I’m going to take
such
good care of you.”

“You already do.”

“I’ll get up early and make you pancakes.” I kissed a trail down the underside of his chin to the hollow of his throat.

“Oh, ha bloody
ha
. I’ll believe
that
when I see it. Ow!”

I’d just pinched his side.

“Maybe just on Sundays.” I followed with a tickle. “And bubble baths.”

“
Bubble
baths? Oh… for God’s…
sake
,” he managed, between gasps of laughter.

“Back rubs. With that yummy coconut oil.”

“That’s… more… like it. Kate,
stop
it… little
minx…
” He writhed helplessly.

I coiled my body and leaned into his ear. “Beat you to the water.”

I took off running, a dead sprint, powder flying from my feet. Ahead,
beyond a hundred sloping yards of clean pale sand, the lagoon glowed aquamarine under a white sun.

He timed it all perfectly, as he always did, snaking his left arm around my waist and hauling me down with him just as the wavelets hit my thighs. The crystal water splintered above us; his sunlit body wrapped around mine; our wet laughing heads bobbed up together.

Tempting the gods.

So many people—knowingly and unknowingly—contributed to the publication of
Overseas
, it hardly seems fair that I only have space to single out a few.

I’m forever grateful that my search for a literary agent began and ended with the incomparable Alexandra Machinist, who plucked me from the slush pile in one whirlwind week, and whose faith in my writing makes everything possible.

My warmest thanks belong to Rachel Kahan, Lauren Kaplan, and all the wonderful team at Putnam, both for their reckless enthusiasm for
Overseas
and for their expert advice and guidance in turning the manuscript into a book people might actually want to read.

While I spent most of my professional life on the fringes of Wall Street, I turned to my dear friends Anne and David Juge for specifics on the structure of investment banks and capital markets divisions in particular. I’m deeply grateful for their perspective and their support; any dramatic license or outright error is, of course, entirely my doing.

I owe more than I can say to Sydney and Caroline Williams, who have supported and encouraged my writing career at every stage, and who show me every day how to be a better spouse, a better parent, and a better person.

To my parents, who gave me such a solid literary foundation; to Jana Lauderbaugh, who provided shrewd advice on the initial draft; and to my sister, who cheered each step along the journey: this book is as much yours as mine.

The love and loyalty of my family gave me the courage to attempt the lunatic challenge of writing a novel for publication. To my four precious children, and to my beloved husband, Sydney, I can only offer my heartfelt thanks and my promise that, next time, I’ll try not to stay up writing past four a.m. on a school night.

I owe a final debt to a young history professor whose name I no longer recall,
though I can conjure her face and Dorothy Hamill haircut like a photograph in my brain. As a junior in college, I took her seminar course on turn-of-the-century Europe and the First World War, which shocked me into awareness of a generation of brilliant young men who’d charged from the trenches of the Western Front into oblivion. In creating the character of Julian Ashford, I borrowed biographical details from a number of these historical figures. Students of the period will recognize, among others, a dollop of Roland Leighton, a hint of Rupert Brooke, and pieces of Julian Grenfell, who lent my fictional Julian both his Christian name and his birthdate (the latter, I swear, by coincidence). But Ashford’s habits and personality are completely his own. He leapt from my brain onto the page, and I hope he does some lonely bit of justice to the men who, in dying, gave him life.

A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA from Columbia University, Beatriz Williams spent several years advising senior executives on communications and corporate strategy before turning to the more productive pursuit of writing novels. She lives with her husband and four young children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.