They stayed in New York for almost three weeks and hardly left the suite. Everything they needed, or wanted, and everyone they wanted, or needed, to see, came to them. In that time, they were interviewed by the representatives of the White Star Line, by officers of the New York Port Authority, by lawyers working for the Senate, and by the reporter for the New York Times with whom Nora had negotiated for an exclusive, to limit William’s exposure to the press. And the Bank of New York sent a representative over to help them set up an anonymous fund for needy Titanic survivors and work out a calculus by which funds would be allotted and distributed.
They also acquired small but respectable wardrobes and collections of personal items, to replace some of the material possessions they’d lost to the sea.
And William recovered, more or less. His fever went away and his physical strength returned. His hands and feet had a constant, humming ache, and Dr. Gunther expected that might never go entirely away, but they worked well enough. Otherwise, by the time they were ready to pack up their new belongings and bid farewell to the Ritz-Carlton, he’d regained his body.
It was his mind that still held itself aloof.
Not entirely; he did feel stronger in mind as well. The gauze had peeled back, more or less. He was able to focus well enough, and engage sufficiently enough to comport himself with their visitors. He could hold a conversation. He remembered some things about the wreck of the Titanic—only bits and pieces, but enough to hold him to this reality. It all made him tired, but he could manage well enough that no one noticed that anything was amiss.
No one but Nora, of course. She watched him with an eagle’s eye and knew at once when he’d hit his limit. And she was a militant nursemaid, bossy and resolute. He found it charming. She took good care of him, much better care than he’d have taken of himself.
What worried him—and her, because he’d talked with her about it—was his distance from himself. The gauze had pulled back from the daily world, but who he was, and why he mattered, why anything mattered—he couldn’t keep hold of that. He couldn’t seem to feel. Like the cold Atlantic had numbed his heart the way it had numbed his hands and feet.
Unless he was dreaming, when he felt fear and loss and a hopeless, relentless certainty that he’d failed.
Or if he was with Nora, or even thought of her. She was the vessel of every good thing he had, everything he loved. She was everything, and when she was away, even for a short while, the blackness crept in from the distant shadows of his mind and threatened to take him over.
He’d told her, and she endeavored not to be away from him longer than necessary, but they couldn’t live forever with him pining after her, staring like a lonely puppy at any door she’d gone through. He couldn’t live with himself for much longer feeling this way.
Why did he feel like this? He was alive. He’d beaten tremendous odds and had survived. More than that, he’d recovered. And most of all, he’d kept Nora safe. He hadn’t failed. They were together; he hadn’t betrayed her trust. They were about to begin the life they wanted.
But nothing in that life seemed worthwhile. Only Nora.
Small hands came around his waist and clasped on his belly. William folded his own hands over hers. He looked away from the view of a Central Park morning and smiled over his shoulder. “All packed?”
“I am. You know, I feel the strangest touch of melancholy. All this time, I’ve been counting the minutes until we could leave this place, and now that we’re ready to go, I’m a little sad about it. I’ll miss the people here.”
He turned and pulled Nora into his arms. “We’ll stay here when we come for a real visit.”
“I’d like that. I hope everyone will still be here.”
“This is the top of the ladder. They won’t want to leave.”
“Good. I want them all to stay put.”
A knock on their door and a call from the other side: “Bellman!”
William took his wife’s hand. He could still feel her warm softness, but as if a layer of gauze were between them. “It’s time to go.”
Of course, William always traveled across the country on a Scot-Western train, and he usually traveled on the Cruise Line. Not always; neither his father nor he displaced a paying fare, and they both liked to travel on other lines and in less luxurious cars so they understood every traveler’s experience.
But on this particular occasion, his only son returning home with his new bride after an icy brush with death, Henry Frazier had, as the saying went, pulled out all the stops. The Destiny Car of the Cruise Line, their most elegant accommodation, awaited William and Nora at Grand Central Station, and tall, solid barriers had been erected on the platform to shield them from the view of the teeming hive of reporters and spectators who wanted a glimpse of one of the heroes of the Titanic and his beautiful English lady.
The buzz of Grand Central and the clamor of the greedy crowd echoed around them in the cavernous space, but between the temporary walls, William and Nora were alone, except for the porter, who bowed as if he were greeting royalty.
“Good morning, Mr. Frazier, Lady Frazier.”
It wasn’t precisely right to call Nora ‘Lady Frazier,’ because the title wasn’t his. According to English custom, a lady who married a commoner was known by her title and first name. She was ‘Lady Nora Frazier,’ or ‘Lady Nora.’ But that had befuddled nearly every American they’d encountered, who either called her ‘Lady Frazier’ or ‘Mrs. Frazier.’ Only the Ritz-Carlton staff had gotten it right; they dealt with titled Britons regularly and knew the protocols.
Nora didn’t mind what she was called, as long as it wasn’t ‘Tate.’ In fact, she seemed to prefer ‘Mrs. Frazier.’ William wouldn’t be surprised at all if her title didn’t eventually drop away entirely.
“Allen. Good morning.”
Allen began to help Nora into the car but stepped back when William moved to do it himself. He stepped in behind her.
“Oh! It’s lovely!” Nora exclaimed, as she took in the car before her.
Like most luxury cars, the Destiny was laid out as a long, narrow hotel suite, with sitting room, bedroom, an office, and a washroom. The difference was in the quality of the appointments, which made the Central Park Suite they’d just checked out of look like a five-cent-a-night room in a Hell’s Kitchen flophouse. Real gold gilt adorned the wood-paneled walls, imported silk covered the soft furnishings, the wood furniture was made of ebony, the carpet was hand-woven and imported from Persia. The windows were leaded in a Tudor pattern. Every single appointment was of the highest possible quality. The ornate décor wasn’t William’s taste at all, but there was no denying its comfort or beauty.
The car itself had been fitted with a revolutionary kind of shock absorber, designed specifically for the Cruise Line—and his father’s true innovation of the project. It reduced the typical rock and weave of a traveling train to almost nothing. For his part, William considered that a loss. He rarely slept better than he did on a train, soothed by the motion of its passage. Like a babe in a cradle.
While Nora explored the car, William was stuck at the door. As soon as he’d seen the Scot-Western logo on the side of the car—before that, as soon as they’d stepped into Grand Central and he’d heard the workaday noise of a train station at peak activity, something inside William had started to shift. Each familiar marker of a journey he’d taken scores, hundreds, of times in his life had made the shift more pronounced. Now that he was standing in the Destiny Car, his hand on the dark-paneled wall, the rich smell of wool and silk and wood polish circling his head, the station sounds rumbling beyond the well-insulated walls, William could scarcely breathe.
“Mr. Frazier? All right, sir?” Allen asked behind him.
Nora turned, the skirt of her pretty traveling dress swirling around her ankles. “William?” When he didn’t move, she hurried back to him.
He took her gloved hand before she could reach for his forehead. “I’m all right, darling.”
“What is it?”
How could he explain? Words came again when he called them, but they were on him in a rush right now. So many kinds of feelings—feelings that had been cowering in the dark corners of his mind, drowning in icy water, for weeks. That was the shift: those things he hadn’t been able to reach were stirring, stretching toward him.
Finally, a way to describe it appeared to him, and he clasped Nora’s hand.
“Home.”
When he’d booked this trip, a world and a lifetime ago, he’d planned an epic honeymoon for his new bride: A sumptuous sail across the Atlantic on the maiden voyage of a spectacular new ocean liner. Two weeks in New York City. A luxurious journey on the finest train in America, with week-long stops in Boston and Chicago, and a long weekend in Denver, before arriving in San Francisco to be feted by his eager family. He’d wanted to show her all of his home.
Instead, they hurried toward San Francisco and scarcely left the train, and all Nora saw of the country was what passed by the leaded windows. She was transfixed by the view and regularly marveled at the breathtaking variety of climate and landscape, asking hundreds of questions, which William was delighted to answer.
When they went through the Rockies, and the Sierras, she stared in gaping wonder, and turned to him more than once with tears on her cheeks.
It wasn’t enough; he’d wanted her to experience America with every one of her senses. He owed her another honeymoon.
But when they crossed into California at Tahoe, while Nora stared goggle-eyed at the view, that shift in William’s soul was an earthquake. This was home. This. He was home.
He was home, he was home, he was home.
“How do I look?” Nora smoothed her skirt for the hundredth time, then fussed with her sleeves and adjusted her hat.
William grabbed her fidgeting hand and pulled her close. “You’re beautiful, as always.”
She cocked a blonde eyebrow at him and put her hand on his chest before he could get her as close as he wanted. “’As always’ isn’t good enough. It means you’re not really looking, and I have to be perfect. I’m meeting your parents, for heaven’s sake.”
“You’re beautiful as always because you can’t possibly be more beautiful. You are perfect, my love. But your dress is especially lovely today. Strikes just the right note.”
She wore a sedate, dove grey traveling suit with a high-necked white lace blouse and a broad-brimmed grey hat festooned with blue ostrich feathers. He’d sat with her in the sitting room of the Central Park Suite while she’d discussed this outfit at length with the dressmaker. It was her ‘meeting his parents’ suit—stylish and attractive, but modest and mature. William, who wore black suits always, had long ago given up wondering at the fuss women made about clothes; he’d spent enough time with his mother on her speaking circuit to understand that women’s clothes were rhetorical choices.
He moved her hand out of his way and drew her tight to his body. “My parents would love whomever I loved, Nora, because I loved her. But they will love you because of who you are.”
Her nervous tension softened with a sigh, and she looked deeply into his eyes. “How am I so blessed?”
“I ask myself the same question every day.” William ducked under her hat and brushed his lips over hers. Through the leaded glass behind her, he saw his family on the platform. “They’re waiting.”
“All right. I’m ready.”
When William stepped down and his feet hit the platform, before he could turn and help Nora down, his mother rushed forward, crying out his name, and threw herself into his arms.
As soon as he was holding her, the earthquake that had been shaking inside him broke him apart, and tears sprang up. He was mortified to be crying—damn, he was sobbing—but he couldn’t stop. “Mom. God, Mom.”
She wept, too, holding him hard, her hand on his head and his back, pressing him tightly to her. “William! Oh, love. Oh, love! It’s all right, my sweet boy. You’re home now. You’re home.” She held him until they were both calm, and William rested on her shoulder until he thought he could look up and face the audience of his weakness.
It was Nora he saw first. Still standing on the step, one hand pressed to her heart, tears streaming down her beautiful face.
He stepped out of his mother’s embrace and held out his hand to his wife. As she stepped onto the platform, he cupped her face and, with his thumbs, wiped her tears from her cheeks. She lifted onto her toes, and he bent to meet her for a kiss.
He turned to his mother. “Mom, please meet the love of my life. Nora, this is my mother, Angelica Frazier.
“I’m so very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Frazier.” Nora spoke with shy politeness and offered her hand.
His mother passed that hand right by and hugged her. Nora—significantly shorter than his mother—nearly lost her carefully chosen hat as her stunned head hit his mother’s bosom.
“It’s an honor and a delight to meet you, lovely Nora. I’ve been waiting for years to meet the woman who could hold my William’s heart.” His mother stepped back but held on, her hands around Nora’s slim arms. “But no ‘Mrs. Frazier’ nonsense, please! I’d love for you to call me Mom, as William does, but if that’s too intimate just yet, then please, I’m Angelica.”
“All right … Angelica.”
“Son.”
William turned to his father. “Hi, Dad.” He held out his hand, and his father grabbed it. They shook like gentlemen for a second or two, and then something happened in his father’s eyes, an unexpected gleam, and William was yanked forward. His father hadn’t hugged him since his days wearing short pants, but he settled fully into that warm embrace now.
Standing on a train platform in Oakland, California, William felt the gauze lift from the world and the wood from his soul. He was home. He was home.
When his father let him go, Nora was there, finishing a hug from Aunt Adelaide. She smiled through her tears and said, “And his father. May I call you Henry?”
His father didn’t say a word. He simply nodded and opened his arms. Nora stepped into his embrace as if she’d been born in this family.
She was home, too.
William felt good, he felt restored, as he and his wife and family left the station and rode to the Port of Oakland and the ferry that would carry them to San Francisco and the house in Presidio Heights.
His first flutter of anxiety came as the driver pulled the car up and stopped. But he grabbed his skittering mind by its lapels and assured himself that it was fine. It would be fine. He’d spent three days on the Carpathia without additional incident. A short skim across the Bay, in full sight of land in nearly all directions, was nothing. He’d taken this ferry thousands of times. It was fine.
That stern internal lecture got him out of the car smoothly. Not even Nora noticed a change in him. He made it all the way to the pier behaving like a normal human being, a grown man. He kept his eyes assiduously away from the typically choppy Bay, fixed them firmly on Nora, and he was fine. It was fine.
But then he put his foot on the pier. It was solid, but the ferry docked there bobbed—almost imperceptibly, but William saw it. He felt it. And he couldn’t go farther. As he tried to stay calm, to overcome this absurdity and move forward, his body rebelled, and instead he went backward, quickly, nearly tripping over his feet. All the air in the world was sucked away in a noisy rush, and he couldn’t breathe. Vaguely, he knew he was making a scene, people were watching as he reeled away, gasping for breath, and his family ran after him, calling his name.
His father caught him and grabbed his arms. “William! It’s all right! You’re all right!”
But he couldn’t breathe. Jesus Christ, what was happening? What was wrong with him?
Adelaide shoved his father out of the way and grabbed William’s hands. “Look at me, William. Look at me. Only me. Come on, dear heart. Just me.”
He looked down into her eyes and focused. The clamor in his head settled slightly, but not the clamor in his chest.
“Good, good. Now, breathe with me. Just as I do.” She took a deep, slow breath through her nose and blew it out through her mouth just as slowly, pursing her lips. He tried to follow, but he couldn’t get nearly as deep a breath as she had. She took another breath, staring into his eyes, holding his hands, and another, and another, until finally he could match her breath for breath, and the crisis was over.
His aunt held his hands until his breathing was normal, and he sighed his relief. Nora ran up to him and embraced him at once. “William!”
He held onto her and took strength from her. “I’m all right. I don’t know what that was.”
“A stress reaction,” his aunt supplied, leading him to sit on a bench. He brought Nora down with him and kept her close. “I’ve seen it in soldiers. You experienced an extreme trauma, William. It’s bound to have an effect.”
“Are you saying I’m having a nervous breakdown?” His parents stood right before him, beside his aunt, but he couldn’t meet their eyes.
“No. I’m saying your mind sees a large body of water and remembers that trauma, and relives it.”
“I don’t remember it, Adelaide. All I remember is disconnected images. Except for those, I’ve lost everything from just after dinner that night to waking up in the Carpathia with Nora beside me.” She squeezed his hand when he said her name.
“My expertise is not psychiatry, but in my opinion, the memory loss itself might be the source of this mental stress. You can’t make sense of an event you can’t remember.”
“What sense is there to make of it at all, Addie?” his father asked. “Who can make sense of tragedy like that?”
“That’s not what I mean, Henry.” She huffed and put her hands on her hips. “This isn’t the place to discuss it. We’ll talk when we get you home. But here’s the choice you need to make right now, dear: which home? We can take the long way around and go to the ranch, away from the Bay. Or we can get on this ferry and go to the city. The first is easy, the second very hard. But it will only be harder the longer you put it off.”
“You want me to get on the ferry.”
“Yes, I do. I think you need to. But it has to be your choice.”
William forced his eyes up. He looked between his mother and his aunt, across the pier, out at the Bay. Thousands of times, he’d crossed that water. He’d swum in it all his life, cold as it was.
He’d swum. In the cold.
Kicking his legs. Got to keep kicking. Don’t let the cold in. Stay warm. Stay awake. Stay alive. Get back to her. Get back to Nora. Be with her. Be with you. I’ll be with you. I’ll be with you.
“I’ll be with you,” Nora whispered, holding his hand to her chest, and William nearly leapt from his skin.
“Son.” His father crouched before him and set his hand on William’s knee. “I know you can do this. You’re strong. You’re tough. You make me proud. Make me proud now.”
“Henry, no,” his mother said.
“It’s okay, Mom.” William sucked as much air into his lungs as he could get, against the chest-crushing panic that was surely on its way back. He clasped Nora’s hand in both of his and let himself fall into her serious eyes, full of love and worry. “I’ll do it.”
Getting across the Bay was one of the hardest things William had done in his life, and he was deeply ashamed that that was true. He was on a ferry his family owned, in completely familiar surroundings, and yet he’d had to sit near the center of the boat and clasp his hands together to stay outwardly calm. Nora sat with him, and his mother—two women he meant to protect with his life, for his lifetime, bookending him so that he wouldn’t fly apart.
It was awful.
But he made it. And though he could have cried when he was on land again and could get away from the water, the trip had gotten incrementally easier, and he had gotten incrementally calmer, as they’d neared San Francisco.
He’d choked up again showing Nora the house in Presidio Heights and watching her awed glee at the view around it. His emotions were definitely back, and rioting inside him for having been cooped up in his shadows for so long.
They spent a quiet and recuperative evening at home. After dinner, he and his father relaxed in the library. Mainly, William napped, stretched out on the sofa with a book on his chest. The exhaustion that had clamped onto his shoulders when they’d arrived in their suite in New York had never entirely eased, and this day of his wildly careening mind had wrung him dry.
His mother and aunt had collected Nora and dragged her out to the garden for ‘girl talk,’ and William sincerely hoped that hadn’t been a secret code for ‘party planning.’ As he’d expected, his mother had been planning a soirée to celebrate their marriage, but she’d postponed it indefinitely upon word of the wreck, and William was in no hurry to put that event back on San Francisco’s social calendar. What he wanted was quiet. He had to get his feet back under him and get control of this ‘stress reaction,’ or whatever it was, even if it was a fucking breakdown.
Into the quiet of the room, his father said, “When you’re ready to get back to work, you let me know. You’ve been missed, son.”
At the thought of traveling up and down the West Coast, and back East, looking for the next Big Thing in transportation, the fatigue pressed harder on his shoulders. But his job, and his place, was at his father’s side, and he’d been away for six months. He opened his eyes and sat up, setting aside the book he’d hardly read a paragraph of. “I want to get Nora settled first, get our home settled. Then yes, of course.”
“Your home? You’re not staying here?”
“You thought we would?” William had always lived at home, but he’d been a single man. He’d assumed that when he married and started a family, he’d buy a home for them. As his father had done for his family.
His father folded up the paper and set his spectacles aside. “There’s more than enough room here, and even more at the ranch. I think your mother would be very disappointed if you moved away. She wants her grandchildren around her.”
“Not away, Dad. Still in the city. And we’re in no hurry for children. Nora is young, and she wants some time of her own first.”
A heavy white eyebrow lifted high. “Well, your mother will be conflicted as hell, son. She’ll be delighted you married a woman who knows her own mind, but appalled to have to wait for her to start popping out babies.”
William chuckled. “We probably shouldn’t tell either of them about this conversation.”
“No, we should not.” He came over and sat at the other end of the sofa. He didn’t say anything right away, but William could tell he wanted to. His father was eloquent but not garrulous. He spoke his mind clearly and with forthright assertion, but he rarely exposed any doubt or weakness, or even anything too intimately personal about himself. Only his wife was privy to the deepest workings of his heart and soul.
When he did disclose something tightly held, he got a look in his eyes, like he’d made himself relive the thing first before he shared it. He had that look now.
“When I was on the line, back in, oh, what was it … ’68 or ’69, I guess. We were laying track through the Sierras, and that was damned hard work. Going through the mountains … shit. One time, we’d set a charge to take out a big hunk of rock in our way. Done it time and time again. It was routine. Every day through that span—set a charge, get clear, blow it, lay track, come up on another block, do it all over again. I guess it was the routine that got us that day. Seemed like everybody got sloppy at once—the charge was too big, the fuse was too short, people didn’t clear back far enough.” He paused, staring into the empty space before him, as if his mind had gone back to that day. “When it blew, it turned five men to hash. Part of a head landed right at my knees. One eye, hanging out of its socket like a marble on a string. Guy by the name of Rusty had been wearing that head not fifteen seconds earlier. Good guy. Had a wife and a kid, who traveled with us. She was a good cook. I stood there in the blast zone and saw what was left of my friends, and all I could think was it looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse.”
He stopped and drifted off again, staring at the dark fireplace. Knowing there was a point to this story, William waited quietly.
“I was young, barely more than a boy. Years before I met your mother. Doing my time on the line, like my father wanted. I dreamt about Rusty’s head, and all those hashed-up men, for years after. It got in my head something terrible so I couldn’t even look at raw meat without thinking I’d cry or puke or who knows what.”
To this day, his father didn’t like to be around the kitchen when a meal was prepared. William had simply thought it was one of the generally open-minded man’s more traditional views about who belonged in the kitchen. But he also liked his meat cooked well—he was the bane of chefs in fine restaurants all over San Francisco who lamented that he ruined their steaks by ordering them well done.
William understood the point of the story. His father had had a traumatic event in his past, and a consequent ‘stress reaction,’ too. In fact, he understood his drive to invent a safer tunneling method as well. Henry Frazier’s greatest innovation, inspired by his greatest trauma.
“It’s the guilt, I think, as much as the event. Being okay after something that hurt so many people. It’s hard to face that, feeling lucky and guilty for it. You got to get right with that, son. I can stay away from the kitchen. You can’t stay away from the Bay.” He tried on a grin. “Not until somebody builds that bridge.”
William didn’t want to stay away from the Bay. He wanted to be himself. “I know. I need some time.”
“And you take it. Love that sweet girl you brought home, get her settled in. But don’t wander too far. Have a think before you move out. You’re all we’ve got, William.”
William leaned back in the armchair in the corner of his bedroom and watched Nora settle in. Mrs. Ma and her daughter, June, had unpacked their bags that afternoon, and Nora puttered around the room, finding her things.
She wore a dainty nightgown that fluttered around her legs as she walked from the closet to a bureau to the dressing table his mother had had brought in for her. That table didn’t match the rest of the furniture, because William favored a heavy, sharp-edged style, and the dressing table was lighter, more feminine. If this was going to be her room, too, they should redecorate.
Picking up her new sterling-silver hairbrush, she sat at that dressing table and fussed with her hair. William missed her long locks, too; he’d fantasized often about wrapping them around his hand, but hadn’t gotten the chance. But the soft curls were beautiful, the way they caressed her face, and in San Francisco, she wasn’t quite such an oddity—or better, they were more tolerant of oddities here. The city was a daily mélange of all different kinds of people; it took some doing to scandalize even the top of the social ladder. An atypical hairstyle wouldn’t cause much of a stir.
“What do you think of the city?” he asked.
She smiled into the mirror, meeting his eyes in their reflection. “It’s so beautiful! And unique! The houses are so many colors. And everything looks so shiny and new and bright.”
“That’s because it is. An earthquake reduced us to rubble six years ago.”
Her smile faltered. “I know. I meant no offense.”
“None taken, darling. But that’s why the city looks as it does. The rubble is cleared away, but we’re still rebuilding.”
“Not this house, though. This house survived.”
“It did. Comparatively minor damage.”
“I’m glad. It’s a magnificent house.”
“It’s no Tarrindale Hall.”
She made a bunched face and got up from the dressing table to sit on the side of the bed, facing him. “Tarrindale is a musty old ruin. Full of ghosts.”
William knew perfectly well that Nora adored her home. She’d spoken of it many times in glowing, wistful terms, and he understood what she was doing now: aligning the house with her father so she wouldn’t be homesick for it, now that she’d rejected him. So he didn’t challenge her criticism of the manor.
“This house is delightful. It’s so lovely and bright. Everything here is bright.”
William chuckled. “Let’s remember this talk in the morning, when you wake to an impenetrable wall of fog at the windows.”
“You know there’ll be fog?”
“There’s usually fog in the morning. Most days, it burns off by noon, and the rest of the day is sunny. Up here on the hill, the fog clears a little earlier. Then it comes in again in the night. When it doesn’t burn off, it stays chilly and damp all day, even in the summer.”
“Well, sunny afternoons sound lovely.” She stood again, and William caught her hand before she could begin her busy buzz around the room again.
“Nora, how would you feel about staying here—making our home in this house, with my parents?”
She frowned. “Isn’t that what we’d planned to do?”
Another thing he’d simply assumed, that they’d take their own house. He was a novice at this marriage business and had left all the important questions—children, home—for after the wedding. He wondered what else they’d missed knowing about each other. But these important questions seemed easily resolved between them, and this one made him laugh.
“Apparently, everyone but me planned that we would live here, yes.” He pulled her to him and set her on his lap.
Smiling, she looped her arms around his neck. “What did you think we’d do?”
“I thought we’d buy a home of our own, maybe build one.”
“But why? Do your parents want us to go?”
“They absolutely do not. I just thought—don’t you want to be the mistress of your own home?”
She shrugged. “Honestly, I’ve never thought of it.” She did now, looking over his shoulder, out the window, where the city twinkled below. “It rather frightens me. I don’t know how I’d manage a house of my own. My instruction was lacking, I’m afraid. I was a terrible student of the domestic arts.” She met his eyes again. “Do you want to live away?”
William thought about that. He’d always assumed he would. But he loved this house, and the ranch, and his parents. There was plenty of room, and sufficient privacy. This was his home.
“No, I don’t. Maybe, when we’re ready to have children, we can consider the question again. Or not. There’s room for children here, and my mother would explode with happiness to have grandchildren living under her roof.”
“Your mother is an impressive woman. Your aunt, too. I’ve never known women like them.”
William nodded. “They’re mighty.”
“’Mighty,’ yes. That’s the word. They’re warriors.” She played with the ends of his hair, where it lay on his neck. He’d taken off his shirt and suspenders and had been relaxing in only his trousers. “Your mother wants me to work with her. To tell my story about what happened in England.”
“You mean go on a speaking tour with her? Fight for suffrage?” Nora nodded, and William sighed. “I’m sorry. She shouldn’t have brought that up, not today. We just got home.”
“I don’t mind. I want to do it. I want to keep fighting, even though I left England. As you said, I can use my voice and my pen. Here, I can fight for justice in both countries, and I can be safer when I do it, I think.”
“You absolutely can. I’ll keep you safe.” He thought about his breakdown on the ferry, his outrageous weakness, and slammed his eyes shut against the memory. “I’m sorry about today.”
“What do you mean?”
“The ferry. I hate this weakness that’s insinuated itself in my head.”
He’d dropped his head; now, she lifted his chin with her small hand and stared into his eyes. “It’s not weakness.”
“Nora, please. Of course it is. I hate it, and I’m sorry.”
“William, think for a moment, please. What do you think it says, to me, that you’re so appalled by the stress you’re experiencing right now? When I’ve experienced something similar, when my mind, too, has had difficulty making sense of reality, and you told me that I was strong and brave. Were you lying to me? Humoring me as you would a child?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why are you not also strong and brave?”
“It’s different.”
“How? Because you’re a man and supposed to be strong, and I’m a woman and supposed to be weak?”
He didn’t have an answer to that, because yes, that was it. He was supposed to protect her, care for her. Save her. He was the hero, not the victim. And of course he couldn’t say that aloud, not to Nora.
Her wry smirk and the lift of her eyebrow told him he didn’t need to say it. “Fine. I suppose it would be too much to expect you to be entirely perfect and enlightened. So let’s think of it in your ‘manly’ terms. You saved at least a dozen women and four children, William. That’s what we know from the accounts. In your heroics, you endured tremendous horror and pain, and you very nearly died. It’s only been a month since it happened. If you’d broken your leg, your bone would still be mending.” She framed his face in her hands and leaned close, staring into his eyes with such intensity her blue-green gems seemed to catch fire. “You’re not weak, William. You’re injured.”
Overcome with love, he tried to pull her close and hold on, but she slipped from his grasp, off his lap, and settled on her knees on the floor, between his legs. When she smiled up at him and took hold of the waistband of his trousers, William grabbed her hands.
“Nora.”
Though they’d been together almost nonstop since he’d woken in her arms on the Carpathia, and they’d been more emotionally intimate and vulnerable with each other than ever before, they hadn’t made love since their last night on the Titanic. It was him who’d held them back. At first, he’d been confused, and then ill. As his body healed, and, to a great extent, his mind, still he’d held back, not from a lack of desire or need for her, but from that numb, wooden place inside him. He’d felt everything he’d ever felt for her, more intense than ever, but there was that place of disconnection, that distance from himself. He was a stranger in his own body and hadn’t felt worthy of her.
He still didn’t, no matter the wisdom of her words just now, and he meant to hold her off until he was again the man she’d married. A man who didn’t collapse into a quivering mass at the sight of a body of water.
But Nora twisted her hands in his grip and laced her fingers through his. “William. I love you. I want you. Let me love you. Please. Don’t hold yourself back from me any longer. We’re home now. This is our beginning.”
He wanted her. God, so much. So he relaxed and let her take him.
Smiling, she opened his trousers. By the time she reached into his drawers, he was fully erect, and her smile grew into something hungry and smug. He watched, rapt, as she pressed a kiss to his tip and then opened that beautiful mouth to flick her tongue over it. After weeks of convoluted, confounding emotions and needs and a constant thrum of incompleteness, William found himself undone by his wife’s tender attention.
She was still learning the art of this act; only once more after the first time, when he’d felt the clench of her back teeth on his skin, had she made the attempt. That second time had gone better, though she’d been shy and too careful, reacting nervously with his every groan.
This time, she seemed more confident. Maybe it was his own vulnerability that had emboldened her. She kept her eyes locked with his as she tasted him, licking him all over, long laps up his shaft, tiny, teasing flicks over his head, swirls at his tip. Her hand held him firmly at his base.
Then, when his arousal had reached the place where it clamped his chest and he could only pant, she sucked him in, taking him in deep enough that he could feel the press and writhe of her tongue against his head and shaft. Her hand squeezed as she pulled back and sucked him in again, and he groaned as the hot need pooling at the floor of his gut began to boil.
“Nora. Nora!” He grabbed her arms—remembering not to be too forceful—and she paused with her mouth hovering just at his tip, tantalizing. She didn’t speak, only stared at him, waiting. “I need to be in you.”
She let him go, and he moaned at the loss of her touch. But he couldn’t feel too forlorn, as she stood before him and dropped her nightgown away, exposing her lovely bare body. William squirmed to rid himself of his own clothes, but he didn’t leave his chair.
When he didn’t get up, she gave him a bemused look. He reached up for her hand, and then she smiled. As she began to sit on his lap, he turned her and brought her down with her back to him.
“Oh,” she sighed, understanding. There was so much yet he had to show her about love. He lifted her and positioned himself, bringing her back down, slowly. They both sighed together, a harmony of pleasure, as he filled her.
“Oh.” She repeated the quiet sound as her bottom rested on his thighs, and he pulled her back to rest on his chest. “Oh.”
“All of you is mine this way,” he breathed against her ear as he covered her breasts with his hands, feeling her nipples become tiny pebbles against his palm. The sensation was duller than it had been before his night in the sea, but no less potent.
The sound she made in answer resounded with carnal satisfaction, and she lifted her arms over her head, finding his head, twisting her fingers in his hair. He played with her nipples, plucking and pinching, running his fingertips over the tightly gathered skin, and she writhed on him, her chest arching up to meet him, to deepen his touch, as her hips rocked on him.
“God, yes. Ride me.”
She moaned at his whispered words and rocked harder on him, arching her back in a graceful bow over his chest. Her unreserved response to his touch, to her own pleasure, their connection, enflamed William’s own need. He’d been wrong, so wrong—there was nothing numb inside him, not when Nora was in his arms. She brought every corner to life, brought light to every shadowy place.
“Oh, oh, oh,” she chanted, and he could feel her body ripening for its climax. Leaving a breast, he dipped his hand low, between her legs, pushing through her dripping folds to the swollen node of her pleasure.
“Oh! William, yes! Please!” she cried out, loudly, as he excited her. Her hips went wild, and he shifted beneath her, giving her the last bit of him, until she arched like an acrobat and went perfectly rigid, except for the pulse of her core around him.
He was close himself, too close. He clenched down everywhere to hold off until she was done. When she was, before she took the time to enjoy her afterglow, she sat up and lifted away, until his shaft, hard as steel and sensitive as an exposed nerve, was free of her. He groaned at the painful loss, but she reached down, between her legs, with both hands, and took hold of him, pumping him, fast and firm.
That was all he could take. “Fuck! Nora! Jesus!” He came, like a fire hose, all over the imported carpet at their feet.
She went limp, and with his last ounce of strength, he was able to ease her back to rest on him. They reclined like that, sweaty and breathless, for a long time.
“You swear more now, since what happened,” she eventually said, the words mumbles of near sleep.
He kissed her shoulder, brushed his nose over the damp, soft, fragrant skin of her neck, brought his lips to her ear. “Do I? I’m sorry.” He always tried to watch his language around women, but he supposed he hadn’t been paying as much attention lately.
“Don’t be. It’s … appealing. At times like this.”
He chuckled and snugged her close. “I’ll remember that.”
“William, I love you.” Her voice was more wakeful now, and she turned in his arms, settling into the cradle of his embrace.
“And I love you.”
“This is our beginning.”
It had been very nearly two years since he’d first met his friend’s young sister, on the Ladies’ Mile at Hyde Park. William thought of all that had happened, all they’d been through, in those two years. As he played the events over in his mind—what he’d witnessed, what he’d experienced, what she’d experienced, what he knew of only in secondhand accounts, even when they were his own experiences—his mind reeled. So much had happened. So much life and love, trial and tragedy. So much loss and return. Too much for such a short span of time. Too much for any one lifetime.
Yes, it did indeed feel like a beginning now, with all that behind them. They’d survived. Their love had survived. Here, on Nora’s first night in the house of William’s birth, the past was a closed book. This was the first page of their story.
“Yes,” he agreed, holding her tight. “This is where we start.”