fare in the London drawing rooms, apparently, after so many years of restriction and rationing and self-denial. A growing taste for adventure.
“Oh, there won’t be anything to see in there,” says Mr. Burnside. “The ship’s already loaded and left, and we’re not due to receive any goods this morning.”
“I’d like to have a look, all the same.”
He nudges aside his sleeve to check his watch. “Well, I can’t object to that. But it is nearly lunchtime, and we’ve still got the offices to visit, haven’t we? And your poor daughter looks like she might stand in need of a rest and a cool drink, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, you do seem pleased to offer up your opinion on a variety of matters, Mr. Burnside.” I strike off down the dock, holding Evelyn’s hand. “Even without being asked for it.”
“That’s what I’m paid to do, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Give you my opinion. Your husband, in his will, made very clear that—”
I turn so quickly, Mr. Burnside nearly stumbles into my chest. He’s an inch shorter than I am, and his eyes are forced to turn up to meet mine. I can tell he doesn’t necessarily welcome the mismatch.
“Let me make very clear, Mr. Burnside, that my late husband’s wishes are really no longer the point. My wishes are your business now, and if you find that task impossible, I’m afraid I’ll simply have to find myself a new lawyer.”
He steps backward. Snatches the cigar from the corner of his mouth. Widens his eyes to regard the cast of my expression, which—after two and a half years of motherhood—is formed of iron.
“Of course, ma’am.” He inclines his head. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. I presume the warehouse is locked?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you have the key?”
“I do.”
“Then let’s proceed, shall we?”
I swing Evelyn onto my hip and cut through the sweating atmosphere in long, masculine strides to the white double doors at the base of the dock.
As it turns out, Mr. Burnside is correct. The warehouse doors swing open to reveal nothing at all: no cargo, at any rate. No waiting crates of citrus and avocado. Along the walls, ropes and tools hang at neat intervals, and the air—unexpectedly cool—smells of the usual dockside perfume, hemp and tar and salt and warm wood.
And something else.
I tilt my chin and sniff carefully. There it is again, sweet and spicy and tonic.
“Is something the matter, Mrs. Fitzwilliam?” asks Mr. Burnside, lighting his cigar.
“Nothing at all.”
“What smell, Mama?”
Evelyn’s wrinkling her tiny nose. Her face has grown pink from the heat, and I consider the possibility that Mr. Burnside’s correct about this, as well: she needs a rest and a cool drink.
“Smell, darling? What do you smell?”
“It’s my cigar, I expect,” Mr. Burnside says quickly.
“No, it’s not that. I smelled it, too.”
“Just the fruit, then.”
“Possibly.” I try the air again, but the flavor has disappeared in the overpowering fog of the lawyer’s cigar. “Though it didn’t smell like fruit to me. If anything, it smelled like brandy.”
Mr. Burnside turns for the door and laughs. “Ha-ha. Brandy? Your nose is playing tricks on you, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. Though I guess, if some of last night’s shipment had gone off in the heat … happens sometimes … sitting in the sun like that …”
I wave away a delicate blue plume of smoke and cast a final gaze along the clean, well-organized walls of my late husband’s warehouse, and as I do I’m reminded, against my will, of the neat canvas walls of a casualty clearing station in northern France, everything in its place, equipment and instruments and creature comforts, while the rain drummed outside. Of a pair of hazel eyes, turned toward me in supplication.
“Perhaps,” I say.
Evelyn’s squirming weight pulls at my arms. I allow my daughter to slide to the scrubbed wooden floor. I take her hand, and together we follow Mr. Burnside through the doorway, into the suffocating Florida noon.
WE’RE LATE FOR OUR VISIT to the offices of the Phantom Shipping Lines, on the second floor of a large, businesslike brick building set across from the Phantom Hotel, which now belongs to me, according to the terms of Simon’s will. My husband, you see, articulated his last wishes in clear, simple terms: in the event of his death, everything—every single article he possessed—should pass to his wife, Virginia Fitzwilliam of New York City.
A dressmaker and a coffee shop occupy the storefronts on the ground floor, and the stairs for the upper floors lie behind a plain wooden door around the corner. Mr. Burnside reaches for the knob and unlocks it with a small Yale key from the chain in his jacket pocket.
The stairs are wide and bare, and Mr. Burnside tells me to watch my step as I climb, holding Evelyn by the hand. The wood creaks softly beneath our feet. Simon climbed these steps, I think. Simon’s feet caused the same soft creak.
“If you’ll allow me,” Mr. Burnside says, stepping around my body as we reach the top of the staircase and a square, high-ceilinged foyer made white by the glare of the sun through the window at the opposite end. He strides for a door halfway down the wall on the right side, the one facing the river, and unlocks that, too. The top half is made of frosted glass and also bears the name PHANTOM SHIPPING LINES in the same uniform black letters.
“After you,” says Mr. Burnside, stepping back, and Evelyn and I walk through the doorway into a beautiful, spacious room, lined on the east and south walls by large sash windows, shaded from the ferocity of the Florida sun by a series of green-and-white striped awnings. Above our heads, four electric fans rotate quickly. The walls are white, the furniture simple: a pair of desks, a sofa, armchairs, table, cabinets. Everything necessary, I suppose, to run a small, legitimate shipping company, sending fresh, nutritious Florida citrus and avocados to the kitchens and dining rooms of Great Britain.
The room is occupied, of course. After all, business goes on, though the owner of Phantom Shipping Lines has died shockingly in a house fire four months earlier, leaving his company and all the rest of his worldly goods to a wife who, I suspect, most people here in Cocoa never knew existed. A young woman in a navy suit sits erect before a curving black typing machine, the clattering of which has abruptly ceased, and a middle-aged man looks up from the desk on the other side of the room and gazes at us from beneath the green shade covering his brow.
More. There’s another man, stepping just now from a doorway along the north wall, closing the portal behind him and turning to face me. But he’s not the man that—at some hidden depth of consciousness, unknown to logic—I suppose I’m expecting to find before me. Whole and alive.
No. This man is burly and straight-shouldered, grim-faced
