Page 40 of The English Wife

“We’ll find our way together.” Bay twined his fingers through hers, and the feeling of his bare hands against hers was somehow more intimate, more binding, than any hurried coupling. “You will make an honest man of me, won’t you?”

He was turning the tables on her, Georgie realized, putting himself into her power. It was, she thought, so very like Bay. She might be nothing more than a chorus girl, but with a few words he could make her feel like a queen.

“You should marry a Livingston or a Van Whatnot,” she said, her voice scratchy.

Bay’s brows quirked. “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

“That’s an ill-fated example.”

“True enough. But trust me when I say that I am old enough to know my own mind.” Softly, he quoted, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.”

Georgie bowed her head over their joined hands. In a muffled voice, she said, “I’ve felt that way for weeks. But I knew … I knew there was nothing in it, that there couldn’t be anything in it.”

“You’re my fixed mark, my compass, my lode star.” Freeing one hand, Bay put a finger under her chin, tipping her face up to his. “We don’t need to go back to New York straightaway. We’ll go to Paris and Venice; we’ll travel the outer corners of the earth. Marry me—under whatever name you choose, so long as you live with me and be my love.”

She wasn’t the lode star; those were his eyes, drawing her forward when she ought to retreat, like sailors following the song of the siren even unto the ends of the seas.

“More borrowed words?” she said.

“If I had words fine enough of my own to give you,” he said, “I would. Will you take these? I love you. It sounds so plain, doesn’t it? But it’s as simple and true as that. I love you, and I don’t want to lose you now that I’ve found you. And I will try, I will try as best I can, to be a proper husband to you.”

She was caught, like a fly in a web; she couldn’t accept him, but she couldn’t bring herself to refuse him.

Cravenly, Georgie said, “I’m sorry, Bay. I’ve been … I’ve been hiding for so long.”

He put an arm around her shoulders, nestling her into the curve of his body, where her head fit comfortably just beneath his chin. “It’s a bit like being an expatriate, isn’t it?” he said, his voice muffled by her hair. “You don’t know which language to dream in anymore. Which part of you is real.”

“Yes.” Georgie buried her cheek in his waistcoat, feeling her resolve ebbing away. How could she give him up when she knew him better than she knew herself? She loved his perception, his thoughtfulness, his way of looking at the world first this way and then that, always weighing before he spoke, always seeing all sides of a debate. She loved him for it. She loved him.

It was a terrifying thing to love someone. Better to tell herself that it was a business proposition or self-preservation, that she was marrying him to escape from Giles or secure her future. Self-interest, cold and simple.

But it wasn’t, was it?

Georgie made one last attempt to set him free. “I don’t know if I could be Annabelle. That life is gone.”

“You don’t have to be anything you don’t want.” She felt his chin move against her hair as he tilted his head down. Thoughtfully, he added, “I’ve always thought that Orsino must have gone on calling Viola Cesario, even after she abandoned her breeches.”

Georgie felt herself torn between tears and laughter. Only Bay. Only Bay would say such a thing.

Georgie turned in his arms, lifting up a hand to cup his cheek, his skin warm and rumpled beneath her fingers, her America, her newfound land.

“I love you,” she said brokenly. “I love you so much.”

Bay smoothed a lock of hair back from her face. “George,” he said tenderly. “My George.”

EIGHT

New York, 1899

George. Georgiana. Giles.

George. Georgiana. Giles.

The northbound train shook and grunted as it pulled away from the city, past tenements and factories, farmland and dairies. In its rhythmic panting, Janie could hear the three names cycling endlessly one after the other. George. Georgiana. Giles. Nonsense sounds, like something out of a children’s rhyme, repetition leaching them of all meaning, all significance.

Janie turned to frown through the window, but it was grimed with frost and coal smoke, giving the retreating buildings the air of a French painting, the sort that was all blur and daubs until one looked at it just the right way. The book Janie had chosen for the journey lay unopened in her lap, the pages uncut. It was a tale of adventure, a sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda, which she had devoured with guilty delight in the arid privacy of her own room. She had been looking forward to the publication of Rupert of Hentzau for some time, but her mind refused to take ship, remaining instead in the buzzing hive of the World Building, where Mr. Burke might, at this very moment, be dictating staccato messages to the telegraph operator.

A man’s hand, descending on the back of her seat, broke her from her reverie. Hastily, Janie scooped up her book and began to cut the pages; there was a certain type of man, she knew, who made a practice of taking the seat next to an unaccompanied lady. The best defense was feigned absorption.