King of the Sea

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

It was what he now sought, he realized: something in between. An in-between kind of marriage. Wasn't it what he already had? No! In fact, he had no marriage at all. Try and make the courts believe that! Try and make Hilda believe it, even. She had everything she wanted, just the way she wanted it: a husband who wasn't there to "bother her" most of the time, and who'd been so emasculated by her fastidious disapproval that his "botherations" had almost ceased, anyway, a fine pair of sons who were settling well into their chosen professions; a bright daughter who was biddable, good looking, and modest; a home to be proud of; and a circle of friends as wide and diverse as any could wish for; and, to be sure, a more-than generous allowance. Try convincing Hilda that such a marriage was a mere charade!

"Why?" he suddenly cried, raising his eyes toward the chill skies.

A myriad twinkling stars ignored him. The question startled him. It had come suddenly

and from nowhere, not pausing to form itself in his mind before it erupted. He realized then that he had not actually thought of God for years. Well ... in a way he'd thought of Him. He'd said his prayers every night, of course, conducted services at sea every Sunday, married the occasional couple, committed the occasional body to the deep, but he had not ...

what was the word? With a sardonic smile he realized the word was bothered. He had not bothered God for years. And now, suddenly, God had bothered him!

"Why?" he repeated aloud. Was it a test? Had these ten days of Paradise been granted him merely to show him what he had lost, or never found, with Hilda? Was he now expected to play the Archangel Michael to himself and Teresa, casting them outside its gates and locking it against

them for ever? "Why?"

Or was Teresa a reward? "Well done, thou good and faithful servant!" He had, indeed, been a good and faithful servant. The chances he'd had to go astray- and never taken one of them! Such fidelity deserved recognition. And what better reward could anyone ask than to be given a second chance?

"Second chance, indeed!" he said morosely to God. "The first was no chance at all. I asked for bread and You gave me a stone. Why?"

So this new life with Teresa ... no, this possible new life with Teresa would be like his first real chance in life. God must know that. God knew everything. He knew their paths were going to cross. He knew they'd fall in love. He knew they'd "eat of the Tree of Knowledge." (Why was there no word for it half as beautiful as the act itself?) If she was quickened now with child, He knew it was going to happen even before they met! And yet He still allowed them to meet, He still allowed it all to happen. He could have stopped it at any moment - He was all-powerful, wasn't He? - yet He hadn't intervened.

"Why?" A thought almost too great for his mind to contain suddenly occurred to him: No matter what I decide, God already knows it! If I sever all connection with her, He knew I'd make that decision, even before He allowed us to meet. And if, on the other hand, I decide to marry her God alone knows how, but ...

He chuckled at the unintended significance of the words. God did, indeed, know how, and had always known how.

So what it boiled down to was this: He, Frank Troy, could decide any way he liked and it would be God's will, at least in part. For if a person, or a God, has power to stop something He knows beyond doubt will happen and yet does nothing to prevent it, how can He later claim He didn't will it to happen? Especially if He did everything to make it happen

allowing two perfect strangers to meets like that. There was some flaw in the reasoning somewhere, but he couldn't see it.

"Why else?" he asked aloud.

A myriad twinkling stars ignored him.

She was tucked up in bed, lying on her back with her eyes closed, when he at last returned. He stood there awhile, knowing she was only pretending to sleep, willing her to look up at him and smile. If there had been any last lingering trace of doubt in his mind, about how to resolve this impossible dilemma, the sight of her lying there was enough to resolve it. She was surely the most beautiful woman who ever lived. The candle's glow bathed her face in its warm radiance and his heart vaulted with pleasure at the thought that she was now his, just as surely as he was now hers.

He knelt at the side of the bed.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" she said mildly, still not opening her eyes. "I forgot to say my prayers." "Sssh!" He slipped a hand between the sheets and

found her n***d. She gave a little scream and jumped a foot, skewing her torso beyond his easy reach. "Oh God, it's cold here, too," she complained, straightening herself up again, preferring his icy touch as the lesser torment. "Sorry." He pulled his hands back to the edge of the bed, still keeping them under the covers to warm up. "I didn't realize how cold it was out there."

"Did you swim or what?" "I floundered," he told her. "Will you marry me?"

Tears brimmed in her eyes. She blinked and they

rolled down her cheeks.

"Yes?" he prompted.

"Darling Frank!" She sniffed glutinously. "Do you ever doubt it? Hold me. Don't mind if you're pure ice, just hold me."

His hands were merely cool now but her body felt like an oven. "Your chest is all breasts," he murmured in wonder.

"Get in!" she urged. "By all the holy ... be quick!" He raced out of his clothes, scattering them to the four corners of the cabin, and slipped in beside her. He half turned to blow out the candle but she put a hand to his shoulder and said, "No!"

Her insistence surprised him. "I'm not ashamed of us. We need no cloak of darkness for this joy."

He bridged her body with his knees and elbows, making a protective arch of himself above her. She was like a small furnace beneath him, writhing and giving out little sighs of happiness. Their loving was a piece of magic that never lost its wonder, nothing, it seemed, would ever make it dim. When he felt the warmth of her belly engulf him, the sensation was as bewitching as always. And she taught him how to love her, too. With sighs and little expressions of joy she encouraged him in the ways that pleased her. And when this or that did nothing to increase her pleasure, her tender, silent patience nudged him elsewhere. Afterward, when they had recovered their breath and their heartbeats fell to a mere racing pitch, he said, "Would you prefer us to set up home on this side of the Atlantic, then?"

"D'you mean it?" she asked incredulously. "It's for you to decide," he assured her.

"Lord love you, Frank, my angel!" She flung herself upon him and smothered his face with kisses. "There's nothing goes on in my head you don't know about and understand, or so I'll swear."

"Why d'you say that?"

"Will you hark at him! Didn't you know what did be going through my mind at just that instant? There was I, thinking to meself, if he asks me to set up house in London, how will I tell him?"

"Ah, yes."

"And there was you, thinking to yourself, the last place on God's earth she'd want to be living is where me and Hilda once set up home."

"House," he corrected her. "I never truly had a home with her."

"Whisht now!" The quick hail of her kisses dwindled to a gentle rain. "Don't be thinking you need blackguard her memory just to please me. Sure, the happier you were with her, the greater's the compli ment to me!"

"I'll say not another word, then. So it's agreed? We'll set up home here?"

"Near New Haven?" she suggested. "Between there and New York?" "Or Boston, perhaps. I call there more often than

New York or anywhere else. Why?" "My brother Ignatius and his wife Concepta live near New Haven, Connect-i-cut." Playfully she pronounced every syllable, smiling to show she knew it wasn't done, really. "He'd be company when you're at sea."

"Whatever you wish," he said. "But if I were only two days in Boston or New York, I'd spend a lot of it on the trains."

"Sure, we'll lepp that ditch when we see it," she said, slithering off him and settling at his side. "Why wouldn't I sail with you? Lots of wives do."

"Not while they're having babies," he said. "Can

you imagine giving birth in that last great storm?"

She gave a little shiver of pleasure against him. "Having babies!" she echoed. "Lord, I can't wait. I wish I was eight months gone. I wish it was over and done with. I wish this next year could pass just like that!" She gave a light puff, as if blowing out a candle. "I'd love to be holding him in my arms this minute, the milky little thing! Don't they smell only gorgeous! I held Bridey O'Gorman's in my arms just before ... incidentally Tommy O'Gorman was born plain Gorman, did you know. He acquired the '0" in mysterious circumstances just before his marriage. Did I tell you that?"

"How would I know?" he asked with a laugh.

"God, you're right, Frank. I do talk too much, don't I. You talk instead! Tell me about your boys Kathy, is it? What sort of a colleen is she?" - and

"I told you about them already. Aren't We've got a long..." you tired?

"Tired? I'm on fire! You set me all on fire! Poor Bridey may think it 'fiercely exaggereeaated, but for meself I think you could write ten million books in praise of it without a whit of exaggeration. I could go at it all night. Aren't I only awful! But couldn't you?"

He groaned. "You should have met me twenty

years ago. "Pretend I did, then!"

She began moving her hands over his protesting body, recruiting his animal spirits for a new assault upon his will and better judgement.

L AWRENCE LAY FLAT out on the threadbare carpet, where he was most comfortable, looking up at Emma, who was sitting on the even more threadbare sofa, where she was least uncomfortable. With one half of his mind he was thinking she was still the sweetest and most adorable creature ever, but the other half had to admit that her life story (which she was unreeling at his request and at some length) made just about the most boring tale he'd ever heard.

It was now April, almost the end of April, in fact - a full month since they had unwittingly made such a thrilling spectacle for Catherine and Aunt Daphne in Highbury Fields. In the intervening weeks he had, by sheer force of will, achieved an impossible amalgama tion of his two earlier daydreams. He had rented a flat and installed her there with an allowance of thirty shillings a week, which, his friends assured him, was about the going rate for "a bit of fluff of one's own." They thought him no end of a dog for starting so early and he said nothing to enlighten them as to what was really going on.

In fact, if he had tried to describe it, he would have failed, for he had no clear idea himself. All he knew with certainty was that he was embarked upon one of the most exciting adventures he was ever likely to experience. All those wan poets who mooned around in their garrets, catching consumption and bewailing the fact that their beloved was as a closed book to them, a baffling, unknowable divinity who walked in ethereal mystery ... and so forth. They just went the wrong way about it, that was all. He, Lawrence Troy, was going to show them!

At least, that had been his idea in the beginning. Unfortunately, the goal seemed as elusive to him in the prosaic, everyday world as, in verse, it seemed to them. He took to reading all the great love poems in the language and was sickened to realize that his entire being leaped up in agreement with their despair. "Beloved" was, indeed, just another way of saying "utterly and absolutely mysterious enigma beyond all comprehending." ... an

How, for instance, could he lie here now, listening to her distressingly detailed recall of some tedious and long-done family argument in Whitechapel, knowing what a bore she was, and yet adoring her to distraction, not wanting her to pause for breath even? How could he still bless that quirk of fortune which had thrown them together? If that wasn't a mystery worthy of any poet's pen, he was a Dutchman.

"Are you listening at all?" Emma asked. "I should jolly well think so," he assured her. "What did I just say?"

He was glad she hadn't asked what she'd said a minute ago; her most recent words were still ringing in his ears. "About your brother, telling your father he'd made five bob his first day up the markets."