The House at Mermaid's Cove(85)

I shook my head. “I . . . I shot him . . . I . . . I didn’t m . . . mean to . . . I . . . th . . . thought I’d . . .” I began to shake uncontrollably.

He drew me closer and kissed my mouth, stilling the rattle of my teeth. “Please, don’t get upset; we’ll sort him out. We need to get going now—quickly, before anyone else comes. Can you just hold on while I cast off?”

I nodded. I should have done it, but I was paralyzed by a mixture of horror and revulsion. It was only when the man that I had shot let out a grunt of pain that I snapped out of it. The wound was at the top of his left arm. The sleeve of his jacket was bloody, but if an artery had been severed, it would have been completely soaked by now. I asked George if there was a knife up on deck that I could use to cut the jacket off.

“I know what ’Is Lordship would say,” George muttered. “Finish the bugger off! The only good German’s a dead German.”

“This war’s taken enough lives already, George,” I said. “He might be the enemy, but he’s a human being, just like us.”



It was fully dark by the time we reached the open sea. The German was tethered by his ankles to the bunk bed he was lying on, and his good arm was bound to his body. Jack had insisted on this. If, as George had suggested, Jack would have preferred to shoot the man dead or dump him over the side of the boat, he didn’t say so. He hadn’t protested when I’d asked him to help me. He’d simply said that we needed to wait to get him belowdecks until La Patelle was far enough up the estuary to be safe from any harbor patrol. So, I’d covered the man with a blanket and sat beside him, ready to clamp my hand over his mouth if any boat approached us.

Once we got the German down to the galley, I swapped the bandanna I’d used as a bandage for the nun’s skullcap I’d taken off when I boarded the boat—the strings on the cap made it easier to tighten, to stem the loss of blood.

“Quel est votre nom?” I asked him as I screwed the top back onto the bottle of iodine I’d found.

“Gunter,” he breathed. “Qu’est-ce que vous allez faire de moi?” What are you going to do with me?

I told him that we would take him back to England; that he would be treated in a hospital and then would go to a prison camp. I asked him if he had a family in Germany, and he told me that he was married with a son and a daughter. I said that I would make sure that the Red Cross sent word to them that he was okay. Later, when I went up on deck to retrieve the jacket I’d had to cut off him, I found a wallet with a photograph of his wife and children tucked inside. The little boy was about the same age as Ned, the girl a year or two older than Jacqueline. Tears stung my eyes as I held it up to the hurricane lamp I was carrying. I’d almost killed their father. In the end, we were just the same: ordinary people dragged into terrible situations.

I took it to show Jack in the wheelhouse. He bit his lip as he stared at it. “I’m thankful, for their sake, that he’s alive,” he said. He took one hand off the wheel and slipped it around my waist. “You know, when I thought you might be dead . . . the . . . the sense of loss . . .” He pulled me closer. “It was . . . overpowering. I kept thinking about what you’d said that last night we were together, that bricks and mortar were more important to me than people.” I felt him draw in a long breath. “One day Ned came to me, crying. He’d fallen down and cut his knee. He wanted you, Alice. He wanted to know where you were and why you hadn’t come back. It struck me then, like a body blow, what it was going to be like for him growing up without a mother or a father. I suddenly saw what you’d tried so hard to tell me: that a grand house and a noble name have no real value if they cause pain.”

I stretched up and kissed the side of his face. “That’s good to hear,” I murmured. “I’m sorry I was so heavy handed about it—but you know I had to say it.”

He nodded. “I realized something else that day Ned hurt his knee. I took him fishing in the rock pools to try to cheer him up. When we passed the boathouse, he said he wished he could live there, instead of at Penheligan. When I asked him why, he said: ‘Because it’s a happy place.’ That cut me to the quick. But he was quite right. Penheligan has never been a happy place—not in all the time I’ve lived there.” His hand slid up my back, stroking the hair at the nape of my neck. “I’ve been happier these past few months, visiting you at the boathouse, than I’ve been in years. I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to believe that someone so steeped in the beliefs I’d turned away from could be a better person than me. But you are. You offer your love with no strings attached; you always put other people first. What you did for Miranda was amazing: you sacrificed your own safety to ensure hers.”

I kissed him again. I was going to tell him how much I’d missed him when we were apart, that what I’d longed for more than anything was to be back there with him, lying on a blanket on the sand, under the stars. But his lips were on my ear, nuzzling the skin, sending shivers of rapture down inside.

“We don’t get many chances to be happy, do we?” he murmured. Then, with one hand still on the wheel, he dropped down on one knee. “Alice, will you marry me?”





Chapter 27

The sea was the color of the jacaranda flowers that heralded spring in the Congo, lilac blue in the twilight of a September evening. Our ship was gliding through the English Channel, heading south. We could see the lights of France twinkling across the water. By midnight, we would be off the coast of Brittany, passing close to the place where things could have turned out so very differently for Jack and me.