“Shh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
He opened those eyes just long enough for me to decide that they were probably brown, but a very light brown, like a salt caramel. He tried to focus and I thought he failed, because his lids dropped again and his head turned an inch or two to the side, away from me.
But then he said, almost without moving his lips: “Stay, Mademoiselle.”
I smoothed the sheets against his chest, an excuse to touch him. He smelled of gin and antiseptic. I thought, It’s like waiting forever for the film to start, and then it does.
“As long as you need me,” I told him.
3.
At half past eight o’clock in the morning, Stefan’s mistress arrived.
Or so I assumed. I could hear a woman on the other side of the cabin door, shrill and furious like a mistress. She was remonstrating with someone in French (of course), and her opponent was speaking back to her in German. Stefan opened his eyes and stared, frowning, at the ceiling.
“I think you have a visitor,” I said.
He sighed. “Can you give us a minute or two, Mademoiselle?”
“You shouldn’t see anyone. You have lost so much blood. You need to rest.”
“Yes, but I’m feeling better now.”
I wanted to remind him that he was feeling better only because he had a pint of Annabelle de Créouville coursing through his veins. I rose to my feet—a little carefully, because a pint of blood meant a great deal more to me than it did to him—and went to the door.
The woman stopped shrilling when she saw me. She was dressed in a long and shimmering evening gown, and her hair was a little disordered. There was a diamond clip holding back a handful of once-sleek curls at her temple, and a circle of matching diamonds around her neck. Her lipstick was long gone. Her eyes flicked up and down, taking me in, exposing the line of smudged kohl on her upper lid. “And who are you?” she asked, in haughty French, though I could tell from her accent that she was English.
“His nurse.”
“I must see him.”
I stood back from the door. “Five minutes,” I said, in my sternest ward sister voice, “and if you upset him even the smallest amount, if I hear so much as a single word through this door, I will open your veins and bathe in your blood.”
I must have looked as if I meant it, for she ducked through the door like a frightened rabbit, and when six minutes had passed without a single sound, I knocked briefly on the door and opened it.
Stefan lay quite still on the bed. His eyes were closed, and the woman’s hand rested in his palm. She was curled in the armchair—my armchair, I thought fiercely—and she didn’t look up when I entered. “He is so pale,” she said, and her voice was rough. “I have never seen him like this. He is always so vital.”
“As I said, he has lost a great deal of blood.”
“May I sit with him a little longer?”
She said it humbly, the haughtiness dissolved, and when she tilted her head in my direction and accepted my gaze, I saw a track of gray kohl running down from the corner of her eye to the curve of her cheekbone. She had dark blond hair the color of honey, and it gleamed dully in the lamplight. Her gown was cut into a V so low, I could count the ribs below her breasts. I looked at Stefan’s hand holding hers, and I said, “Yes, a little longer,” and went back out the door and down the narrow corridor to the stern of the ship, which was pointed toward the exposed turrets of the Fort Royal on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, where the Man in the Iron Mask had spent a decade of his life in a special isolated cell, though no one ever knew who he was or why he was there. Whether he had a family who mourned him.
4.
I had sent a note for Charles with the departing doctor, in the small hours of the morning, and I expected my brother any moment to arrive on the yacht, to assure himself of Stefan’s survival and to bring me home.
But lunchtime came and went, the disheveled blonde departed, and though someone brought me a tray of food, and a bowl of hot broth for Stefan, Charles never appeared.
Stefan slept. At six o’clock, a boat hailed the deck and the doctor’s head popped over the side, followed by his bag. The day had been warm, and the air was still hot and laden with moisture. “How is our patient this evening?” he asked.
“Much better.” I turned and led him down the hallway to Stefan’s commodious stateroom. “He’s slept most of the day and had a little broth.” I didn’t mention the woman.
“Excellent, excellent. Sleep is the best thing for him. Pulse? Temperature?”
“All normal. The pulse is slow, but not alarmingly so.”
“To be expected. He is an active man. Well, well,” he said, ducking through the door, “how is our intrepid hero, eh?”
Stefan was awake, propped up on his pillows. He shot the doctor the kind of look that parents send each other when children are present, and listening too closely. The doctor glanced at me, cleared his throat, and set his bag on the end of the bed.
“Now, then,” he said, “let us take a look at this little scratch of yours.”
On the way back to the boat, the doctor gave me a list of instructions: sleep, food, signs of trouble. “He is quite strong, however, and I should not be surprised if he is up and about in a matter of days. I shall send over a pair of crutches. You will see that he does not overexert himself, please.”
“I don’t understand. I had no expectation of staying longer than a day.”
The doctor stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “What’s this?”
“I gave you a message, to give to my brother. Wasn’t there a reply? Isn’t he coming for me?”
He pushed his spectacles up his nose and blinked slowly. The sun was beginning to touch the cliffs to the west, and the orange light surrounded his hair. The deck around us was neat and shining, bleached to the color of bone, smelling of tar and sunshine. “Coming for you? Of course not. You are to care for the patient. Who else is to do it?”
“But I’ll be missed,” I said helplessly. “My father— You must know who I am. I can’t just disappear.”
The doctor turned and resumed his journey across the deck to the ladder, where his tender lay bobbing in the Isolde’s lee. “My dear girl, this is nothing that young Créouville cannot explain. He is a clever fellow. No doubt he has already put about a suitable story.”
“But I don’t understand. What’s going on? What sort of trouble is this?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said virtuously.
“Yes, you do. What sort of trouble gets a man shot in the night like that, everything a big secret, and what … what does my brother have to do with any of it? And why the devil are you smiling that way, like a cat?”
“Because I am astonished, Mademoiselle, and not a little filled with admiration, that you have undertaken this little adventure with no knowledge whatever of its meaning.”
We