In the face of that it was hard to understand why he hadreceived them with kindness. Instinct, based on no solid evidence, warned her that Sir Michael was not a man who routinely bothered himself with unrewarded kindnesses.
Passing them was a wide float that nested a press, the printers aboard working with quick economical movements to make broadsides. Two youthful apprentices leaned off the back, tossing the fresh inked pages into greedy outstretched hands in the crowd. Sir Michael caught one and handed it to Merry with a smile.
“A souvenir for you, Mistress Merry,” he said.
Mistress Merry, quite contrary, how does your garden grow.… It had been a favorite tease of the village children. Merry could barely hear it without wincing. She might have told him not to keep calling her that if she hadn’t been worried that the pain would be exposed in her voice.
Glancing at the paper, she saw that it was an ode about the Battle of Fort George last May, between her nation and his. No matter that his purpose here was peaceful. He was still her enemy. It was incredible that they hadn’t discussed it, not once, although she’d been in New York a week. Aunt April had always been there, fawning and frightened, until this morning, when she had stayed in her rooms, avoiding happily the noisy, shoving crowds. Mostly Aunt April had talked to him about England: gossip, much of it, and the rest politics, the arts, fashion, and the latest books. They had talked of New York too, which ironically he knew much better than Merry, because he had been here often before the war. He had many friends here, and she met them at dinner at the mansion of the Austrian trade commissioner, where Sir Michael was staying and where he had somehow gotten an invitation for Merry and her aunt to stay as well.
Folding the paper in half, Merry considered Sir Michael’s face, where deep half-circle lids lay open over green irises with spokes of silver. His nose was a nice shape, even if thebridge was rather high, and the spare line of his mouth bent stiffly at the corners when he smiled, producing a pair of shallow and not unattractive dimples. Scissored brown hair barely slit with gray curled forward stylishly over his ears. Carl, of course, was going to be furious with Aunt April when he heard about all this.
“What is war,” said Carl’s sister abruptly, scraping tight the paper’s crease between her gloved thumb and forefinger, “if we can stand together like this and watch a parade?”
The green-silver eyes glanced thoughtfully at the crowd around them. “Theydon’t seem to mind if we stand here together,” he said.
Obviously not. It was the kind of thing she had discovered he was likely to say: a slightly preposterous half gambit that shook her unsteady poise with aggravating efficiency.
Around them on the pavement the many gay, anonymous celebrants moved, swarming and shouting and turning in a crisp sigh of early spring garments, freshly brushed for the day, just-turned white collars on the little boys and flat new ribbons for the girls. Even if the restless crowd could have identified Sir Michael as British, the men and women of New York, intelligent patriots that they were, had a far greater hatred for their own Madisonian government, which had declared this costly, tiresome war that was destroying the economy of their city. Damn the British Navy, which had blockaded their port; but damn,damnthose idiots in Washington who had struck Britannia on her stuffy cheek and brought this clumsy war down upon the hapless American merchants.
“My point stands,” said Merry and was grateful it came out sounding less feeble than she knew it was.
Granville lifted his hand, where wide dark knuckles rode from the black, tight-fitting sleeve of his coat. He was, by far, the most elegantly dressed man Merry had ever met, certainlynotexcepting those in her family.
“Do you see that pedestal?” he asked her, pointing into the bowling green before them, to where a wide slab of marble lay beside a marshal, whose job it was to chastise anyone who stepped on the grass here, or harassed the spindly, long-suffering trees. “There was a statue of King George III on it, torn down in 1776 and melted into shot. It might have been one of those pieces that killed my uncle, fighting here a year later. He left four children below the age of seven, one of them blind.” There was a short silence while she looked away from him. Then he said, “Merry, it goes back and forth. Will it really help if we blame each other?”
Will it really help if we blame each other?As Merry stood wondering if there was something wrong with his logic or her own, Sir Michael looked down at her, his eyes still in complex, mature calm, and said, “Anyway, we’ll have enough time to work it out, won’t we, on the way to England?”
It was a ridiculous error. Merry stared up at him with a start. “I’m not going to England.”
Correcting her with the censureless care one might use with a child who has spoken a faulty lesson, Granville said, “You are. The day after tomorrow on theGuinevere,with your aunt. It’s all right. You can trust me. Your aunt and I have talked about it, and I understand why she doesn’t want it to become known.”
And then he smiled at her as though he had not with a single sentence blown the sane structure of her life into slithering fragments.
A few moments had passed, blank and ugly, before Merry could organize her blood-stripped muscles into activity and begin to walk backward from the well-mannered face with its features slowly realigning themselves into compassion and concern.
“Merry? Dear God. What have I said? Can it be—could it really be that you didn’t know?”
As he began to come toward her she turned and fled from him, her velvet slippers striking hard on the coarse gravel path, her heart banging in her chest as she wove between grouping families and the dull-green stacks of shrubbery that squatted like trolls under the elms.
For once, her size helped. Quickly he was lost in the tall crowds, and when she came to a break in the line of spectators, she gripped the iron railing that lined the Battery and kicked her legs over, one at a time.
The political societies were passing in review, and Merry dove through a herd of Republicans, with their buck’s tails dangling forward from their hats. Some laughed drunkenly and tried to reach for her as she passed frantically among them.
When her feet found the neat ocher bricks of the sidewalk, for the first time in her life she lifted her narrow white skirt and ran full out over the busy pavement toward the house five blocks up Pearl Street, where Aunt April would be waiting with, she prayed, a denial of Sir Michael’s words.
The house of the Austrian trade commissioner was ruddy brick, tastefully decorated in bluestone with eyelet window curtains in the upper stories that lent the home a friendly and feminine look. It was not the place, surely, where one would hear grim news. Merry nearly collided with a cake vendor as she swung through the white picket gate into the small cobbled front yard, and the sweet odor of hot spiced gingerbread swirled around her as she stopped to lean dizzily against the cistern that caught soft water from the rain roof. Then she climbed the stoop, knocked, and was admitted almost immediately by a pretty Austrian maidservant, who looked curiously at Merry’s pale cheeks and glittering eyes.
The rooms within were narrow rectangles with low ceilings, eerily quiet at this time of day while their elderly host and his wife napped, nicely insulated from the street noise.Everywhere beautiful imported furniture in the French taste gleamed sleepily in the hazed sunlight, and walking soft-footed through the corridors, it was hard to believe that not many days’ journey away American settlers lived in rough cottages and feared Indian attacks.
Willing temperance to her breathing, Merry laid her hand on the door and entered quietly into the cream-and-copper suite that her aunt had enjoyed these last seven days.
Merry’s aunt, protector, and guardian was on her knees laying tissue-wrapped nightgowns in a cedar chest. Her gaze flew like a startled pigeon to her niece. She couldn’t have looked more guilty if she’d been hiding a corpse.
“Aunt April, it’s not true. Is it?” asked Merry tightly.
Aunt April stood, her face raw with worry. Beseechingly she offered her hand. “Merry—forgive me, Merry.”
They were like mother and daughter. Between them there was no need for accusation, for evasion, or for lies. Merry saw confirmation of Granville’s words in her aunt’s fearful eyes, in the set of her chin; no spoken words could have announced the truth more unmistakably. Anger, love, and pity met between them and remained unspoken also, clashing and mingling like great waves, which broke in lonely desolation into helpless undercurrents. Compassion fought the keen smart of betrayal within Merry; moving clumsily, like a machine that needed oil, she took her aunt’s hand. And when she could force herself to speak, the words came out like a sigh.
