And after-Rory liked the after. She'd simmer for a long time and whisper about pretty near anything and he found himself talking about God knows what and playing lightly at both the entrance and exit to lovemaking.
As the Taranaki lost contact with land, an unplanned and unknown phenomenon happened, triggered by the realization that these could be their last moments together, ever.
Whatever restraints there may have been, caused by age and circumstance, disintegrated in a violent implosion that burst open locked vaults in each of them, freeing a rush of exquisite realization. The intensity and desperate grasping for each other took them to somewhere new.
Daybreak found the Taranaki tied up at the Glasgow Pier dead across from the Wellington Rail Station. The moonstruck lovers held hands tightly on their balcony and looked down to the gangway where a line of travelers debarked and marched with their porters to the waiting train. Rory and Georgia thanked the master of their fate for granting them three more nights together.
On the final night out, the sea was extremely kind to them. They were allowed the most exhilarating sight of a fellow steamer passing in the opposite direction with cabin lights ablaze and a zephyr dimly blowing dance music from the ship's lounge. Each vessel blew off fireworks of recognition, followed by the other ship's being swallowed up by utter silence and darkness. The allegory was not lost.
Georgia lay tossed and disheveled on the bed in a most alluring way. Sailors at Uncle Wally's always had something to sell from the Orient. Rory had bought her a forest green silk kimono, which now was flung askew so that the lyrical lines of her rounded body spoke a single word...woman. Aye, the robe had found itself to the right one.
Her rusty hair was kept at working lady's length and made her whiteness seem touched by a perfect master. The flash of emerald, the high linen sheets intertwined, all made her no less in his eyes than an ancient goddess. He studied her from across the cabin, unblinking, as time seemed suspended. He was exhausted but had utter clarity. Rory could no longer hold back the tide of questions.
What was it that changed so abruptly the instant he tried to say farewell to her? The idea of fear came to him. Conor had told him never to stifle fear but to realize it, examine it, and gain control of it. That makes the man.
The fool is the one who lies to himself that he has no fear. Rory believed his bouts of genuine fear were few, once he stopped being afraid of his father. Now, it was not a fear of a mean person or suddenly being smashed up, but another kind of fear altogether. As the South Island left his sight, he became weak and dizzy. Jesus, he told himself, I'm afraid. For all the passionate desires to leave New Zealand, the actual moment of cutting the bind had sent him into a sweat.
He hid his feelings from Georgia. She should not see him frightened. As he brought himself under control, he thought, God knows the idea of battle is thrilling, not frightening. This long dream of Ireland after the war was nothing less than Homeric.
So, what's to fear, lad? Fear of the unknown? Well, not fear, just anxiety...normal curiosity speeded up. Rory was an independent entity, he knew that.
Or...do all men know a kind of sorrow as the lights offshore blink off? He had received letters from mates who had already left the country or joined the army. Some of these lads had left rotten lives in rotten homes, but they were homesick to a man.
So, maybe my fear isn't fear at all, he reckoned. The porthole let in a quick sliver of light, which fell over Georgia, and he felt a burst of lust from his throat down to his stomach. He started out of his chair but settled back under the weight of more questions.
I understand something now that I never could quite get before, he thought. I often wondered why Conor was so torn to return to an Ireland that had been like the raw end of a whip to him all his life. The soul is planted in your village and never leaves it. Even though it is the army and Ireland, I can never really leave New Zealand.
Thinking of Conor as he did, his uncle's death swept over him. He clamped down to head off an outpouring of sorrow. With each new deep and uttered sigh the hurt in his chest lessened. He stood quickly and shoved open the cabin door, hoping to see the passing ship. It was long gone. The water was smooth and the heavens put on a spectacular show. Conor had told him that standing the watch on the calm nights was the worst because you remembered all you had had and lost.
"I've lost her," Rory spouted.
Conor had ached for Countess Caroline. Oh Lord, how he ached for her. Maybe it all has to do with the way I now ache for Georgia Norman.
Time and again of late when he went to her cottage past Taylor's Mistake, he had longed to ride with her up in the hills and thrill her with what his life meant.
He fantasized about coming back from the war and telling the Squire to shove it up a round hole in his middle. He'd start off with a few acres and he'd look down on it from a hillock with an arm about Georgia Norman...Georgia Larkin. By Jaysus, I could take on the world with her. She's a rock, and oh, what she'd do for her man. The wisdom of her, the spirit, the courage. And they'd be laughing half the night through.
Well, there it is, Rory boy. My woman, Georgia Larkin. Oh, the sound of it! I'm in love with her. The war has only begun and the South Island and Georgia are already together as a single thought.
Does the realization that you need someone necessarily mean you're in love with her? he wondered. Isn't that rather crappy of me? I mean, he thought, selfish. To even think about asking a woman to give up a marriage with a man who might deserve a second chance. To ask a woman to wait half of forever while you make your rounds of combat. Christ, Rory, get off it. It's bloody awful selfish of you to think that way, and if you care that much for her you can't ask her to chuck her life for you.
Forget my needs, he thought. Forget my fears. Forget it all. There is still this terrible, terrible feeing that makes me want to fall down and cry. I hurt, man! I hurt! I know what the fucking pain is. The fucking pain is that I might never see her again. The pain is...I'll never touch her again. I guess this is the bloody hell of what this goddamned sonofabitching thing of love is. The pain is no less than the pain of Conor's death.
All right, Rory, you've confessed to yourself. The situation is impossible. At daylight, when you say good-bye, act like a man. You be a good man to this woman. You do what is right.
Over the years, Georgia had mastered the abstruse art of controlling her nightmares. They were no longer the stuff of sweat and chills. When annoyance invaded, she'd wake up before the nightmare crossed into bedlam. As soon as she awakened, she quickly read the dream's message. Most of them were very anxious. There would be burning or collapsing buildings or a variation thereof, or a threatening monster or a variation thereof, a flight to the edge of an abyss or a high structure and the beginning of a plunge.
Many times in the past months she reached across the bed when ugliness came in her sleep and she felt something sublime, beyond any measure she had ever experienced. It was Rory Larkin. The inner message quickly let her know she was safe and the full message let her know that this man would protect her. She'd never been protected before, and she wondered why it was a wild colonial boy as unlikely as Rory Larkin who now offered it to her. This sense of great comfort he provided was no less puzzling than the first mesmerizing sight of him, months earlier, with a body full of cracked ribs.
On this last night before Auckland, Georgia's dream was a throwback past horror. She flung her arm to defend herself and it banged against the mattress and abruptly ended her sleep. When she had gotten her whereabouts, she sunk back on the pillow and whispered a gentle curse. The voyage was all but done.
Georgia felt the seductive softness of her kimono and she smiled. Oh, Rory boy, Jesus damned, what have you done to me? She swung her legs off the bed and went to the mirror to touch up. She never wanted the lad to see her as if she had just come out of a steam bath. In the mirror Georgia could see through a porthole to the promenade deck. Rory stood motionless and featureless in the shadows. She began to tie her robe, then let it stay open for him to see what he would be wanting to see. She fixed on him, unseen by him, and luxuriated in just watching him.
Well, Georgia girl, she told herself, you are the queen of fools. For over twenty-eight years you've built a wall that was breached in a single moment.
Georgia had watched the ladies of the Territorial Force Reserve-the erstwhile "Daughters of the Regiment"-stalk and snare. Nurses were of low and middle station and here was a ripe moment to bag an officer, a future innkeeper or, by God, a colonel with a rose garden.
Soldier boys of all ranks either detested women or were overly sentimental about them. It wasn't difficult to tell which was which. Her fellow Sisters chirped and giggled but seldom spoke of love. Love was the automatic marriage prize, was it not? Why did bright and capable women who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps settle for clods or arrogant bores?
Well, who the hell are you to stick your nose up? Calvin Norman was a fine surgeon in the main military hospital in India. He was only in for one enlistment to secure a good reserve rank, gain some necessary military medical experience, and have excellent credentials when he returned to his native New Zealand.
Georgia became his chief assistant in the operating theatre and was duly impressed by the man's skill. He also showed himself to be caring to his patients, a trait not often displayed. Georgia made a deliberate decision. Calvin Norman was a safe settlement and offered a comfortable life as far away from England as the planet afforded, as well as the family she craved. He was seduced and incredibly taken with her. Not the flaming love of her life, because that love was an illusion, but a gentle man who would not hurt her.
Well, old Calvin fooled her good and right, he did. He turned out to be the deadliest in a line of vipers and louts, comparable only to her dear father, Oliver Merriman.
Back in Christchurch and reigning as chief surgeon in the South Island's premier hospital, Calvin had a lot of settling up to do. Bit by bit her husband's pimply, pale-faced, humiliating childhood eked out. He was buffeted by a weakling boyhood in a wild land filled with ruffians who demonized his most formative years.
His long and bitter haul to the physician's oath now afforded him authority. The bully boys all needed him, and their wives were payment on account for his past torment. He was consumed by an insatiable urge to conquest, to prove and reprove his manhood.
From the onset, with her becoming chief matron at the hospital, their union was in trouble. He was recalled to the Medical Corps with the fine rank of major long before the war started, and this was good for him, to get a head start in a career that could well end up in London.
Because Christchurch kept its secrets locked, and open scandal meant ostracism, Norman pleaded with her to keep a lid on things and expressed the first regrets of his behavior. Georgia pledged silence until the war ended. He had only begun to realize the quality of woman he had married.
You've got the rest of your life, Georgia Norman, to dream about why you fell in love with this Larkin bloke...but why the hell did you risk this trip to Auckland and start to turn loose everything you've so far been able to hold inside?
Rory lad had at last broken her cycles of fear. He inflicted no harm, only grace. She had ridden the wild stallion and she knew she'd never have that ride again. Hot and wet and wild and you're smarter than to put a collar on a young rover just as he begins his roving, she mused.
How many times, Georgia girl, have you sat on the edge of a wounded soldier boy's cot and cooed at his faded brown, cracked photograph of a girl whose looks you could hardly make out? The soldier boy had all but forgotten what she really looked like, just as you have forgotten what your dead soldier boy looked like.
Nice chipper lad, he was, Lieutenant Sidney...Sidney...Sidney Clarkeson. First man you weren't frightened of. Through his innocent ways you learned the splendid skill of controlling a man. Face it, Georgia, you weren't all that keen for the marriage. You were sorry he was blown up in battle and you wept sincerely over his remains. But the ache passed too quickly, and you realized it. It might not have been love at all, just a lack of fear.
As other chaps came along, four or five in all, you enjoyed the hell out of men, but the instant that look of possession came into their eyes you moved away quickly.
That look...that look...wasn't your tour of service all about that look of Oliver Merriman's? Your daddy had status, that's what, a clerk and manager for five barristers in Lincoln Inn...as respectable as a middle-class Englishman could aspire to be.
Oh, that sotty bastard! In his cups, he had held her up by her long red hair when she was thirteen and spat on her and slapped her and hurled her against the wall screaming, "Whore!"
Her mom quivered nearby, saying nothing. Mom had taken Oliver Merriman's rage a hundred times saying nothing. Her two older sisters had fled with early pregnancies into marriages in hell.
Oh, Mr. Merriman, the pastor gooed and gushed, and his lovely ladies...if only his flock had the character of that exemplary family!
By the age of fifteen, appearing advanced for her years, Georgia found refuge in Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service and never looked back. She had strong hands, powerful drive, absolute nerve under bloody conditions, and a range of humor and kindness. Most of all, she was a model of perfect and absolute competence.
Despite Oliver Merriman's shadow and the sickening experiences of her mother and sisters, Georgia wanted her men-but no man's cock would reduce her to bondage. She kept firmly in control, never too emotionally involved, and determined to be self-sustaining. No one would control her, not for a blink.
Georgia buddied with them all, from beer with the enlisted lads to elite waltzes at the officers' club. And then she made her Faustian bargain with Calvin Norman.
Rory, still motionless, remained on the promenade deck. Like all captains and kings, colonels and maharajahs, sisters and sweethearts, wives and workwomen, Rory was going to spend the second half of his life trying to get over the first half. Some never do. Would she? How many elders had she met still battling their childhood and their parents? God Almighty, wait till the Irish lassies, let alone the girls of Paris and London, get their hands on that one.
If Georgia had one absolute answer, it was that she knew this night was the end between herself and Rory. Put it to him gently. He will soon forget what you look like, anyhow.
The Taranaki greeted a relentless dawn oozing through a permanent mist as she slid along the line of hills toward Auckland, each crowned with an impossible Maori name generally beginning with a W.
Georgia made a sudden decision to remain on the ship and return aboard her to Christchurch. Rory packed, dazed. The ashen lovers now hated each chug and groan of the ship's engine, bringing them closer to their parting. For an instant, Rory wanted to be Rory and smash up things in frustration. He snapped his satchel shut and looked about. The pair of them were light-headed from the loss of sleep and functioning at whisper level from the final crazy hours of lovemaking.
Good nurse Georgia was now in complete control under duress. "It's been a hell of a trip, all of it, Rory," she said. "Try not to win the war by yourself."
"You'll write?"
"As long as our letters are good for a laugh or two. You're not obligated."
"Let's fuck the nice talk, Georgia. Something's happened."
"I want you to listen to me, Rory."
"Don't talk me down, Sister Georgia. I'm not one of your bleeding corporals in need of a chat-up."
"All right. We've been knocked gaga. There is something powerful between us. War speeds up feelings in a cockeyed way, you know."
"I'm going to say one thing, Georgia, and I mean it. I cannot fathom how any woman is ever going to be like you again. Not in one year or ten years. If you and Calvin Norman do not make it, I'm coming back for you."
"Rory, people get very sentimental at moments like this and make utterly sloppy promises."
He unbuttoned his shirt, took her wrist, and placed her hand on his chest. Georgia fairly swooned. "Things may change," he said, "and I'll not lie to you when it happens. But at this moment I hope Calvin Norman never comes back."
She winced and took her hand away.
"Wishing for a man's death who doesn't deserve to die is no good, Georgia, but that's how much I want you."
She drew him to her and opened her own blouse and lay his head against her breasts. "Close your eyes...listen...will you, now?"
"Aye."
"We were never really on, you and me. An old girl getting over the anger of a feckless husband has all kinds of venom in her. Trying to make more out of what this has really been will make us fall down attempting to keep promises made in an unreal moment of parting. As the promises are broken, we dodge with little lies at first and the guilt grows. All of what you say is well meaning now, Rory, but it can't hold over the long haul."
"Georgia..."
"The military," she continued, "has a number of agonies, you'll learn. There is the day-to-day agony of soldiering-working like a dog, brutal discipline, rotten food, boredom, mud, dysentery. There is the agony of battle. These agonies are very real. No soldier has ever been able to avoid them. Yet the most horrific of all agonies is the memory of home and the woman you left behind. This agony becomes a delusion, blown out of proportion. Although you won't die from it, it is no less agonizing than the other agonies of soldiering."
She felt his tears on her breast and took down her straps so he could smother himself freely.
"You can't control the road you've taken. God knows where it will lead you. And if you get to Ireland-and you will get there-it could be endless. It is utterly unfair for either of us to make any promises. Understand me, Rory?"
"Aye."
She let his kisses rove over what she had put before him until a steward called out that they would be in port soon.
From there on out it was stalwart stuff, wan smiles, misty eyes, stout embrace, and down the gangplank we go. He turned and waved and was gone.
Georgia held together until she was certain Rory was out of sight, then doubled over trying to get air to fight her nausea. The steward caught her wobbling and assisted her back to the suite and helped her onto the bed.
"Some tea, Mrs. Landers?" the steward offered.
"I'll go with the cognac. It's on the ship's desk."
As her color returned and she assured him she was better, he left.
Georgia was grateful she did not falter in the end. So now he was off to his war and she had done what life had brought her to do. The first of her secrets had been safely kept. The second of her secrets was more within her control.
49.
Caroline's departure from Hubble Manor had been preceded by a thunderclap of rage over Roger's brutal squashing of Jeremy's affair with Molly O'Rafferty. The manner in which he savaged the girl's reputation, then condemned her and her unborn child to the garbage heap, was matched only by the way he transformed Jeremy into babbling submission.
Caroline and Roger had managed a week-long silence before the tinderbox exploded, spewing out a quarter of a century of pent-up rage.
Caroline unloaded on Roger his rotten fathership of Jeremy, his use of human fodder in his fields and industries, his bigoted Reformation mentality, and his dirty secrets.
Roger had a thing or two to say about her hypocrisy, her coddling of Jeremy, her obscene spending, which had required the continuous running of the shirt factory. In the hammer blow, he renounced her giving birth to Jeremy for the sake of her father and not for the earldom.
When Caroline left for Belfast, Sir Frederick's private train carried so much of her luggage it indicated her plan to stay away from Londonderry for a long time.
Sir Frederick, recovering from his stroke, seeing his family structure going to a shambles, made a long overdue decision committing the future of Weed Ship & Iron to Caroline. Caroline's hand fit the glove to perfection. As for Sir Frederick, by Jaysus, Caroline would have to sort out the family quagmire.
The removal of Brigadier Maxwell Swan was a sticky proposition, but even Weed recognized that that way of doing business may have had its day. A close and loving relationship between Caroline and Uncle Max had faltered badly over the years and collapsed completely after the factory fire.
The bloody goons who beat off the unions and the Catholics, industrial spies who gleaned the future plans of steel mills and shipyards, and covert financial dealings all had an archaic bent.
The liberal wave could not be diverted and found its way over the Irish Sea to Ulster, bringing a greater consideration for the welfare of the working people. Union-busting was losing its urgency among the industrialists. Slowly, ever so slowly, it occurred to the upper class that happier working people were producing much finer products at far less cost.
It was nothing that would take place overnight, to be sure, but who better than Caroline Hubble to sense the changes and flow with them?
The problem at the yard was that Maxwell Swan and Frederick Weed were covered with enough of each other's fleas to send the other to the hangman's scaffold a hundred times over.
In the end the two old boys, scoundrels and killers though they were, were birds of a feather. Swan was of an age that he wanted to go off someplace faraway and do his sunset years in style. Weed's stroke had shaken him up considerably. As Sir Frederick aged, Swan feared that Roger Hubble would try to pull him into Hubble's personal service. Sir Frederick had always had a keen and jolly sense about him, what with his bouts with the bottle and the ballerinas and his rugby team and his bombastic energy for faster trains and ships.
Lord Roger, on the other hand, seemed keen to kill with a sense of satisfaction. Except for Caroline, the man would have been an utter monster. And the last bloody job...spying on Lord Jeremy, promising to keep the results from Freddie and Caroline...feeling Roger's hot breath on his neck to recruit him away from Belfast.
Sir Frederick Weed, in his most charming and generous manner, took it eye-to-eye with the Brigadier.
"Max," Freddie said, "we're going to have to trust each other."
A sumptuous estate in Jamaica and a hefty pension were laid on the table. Here, he could be among dozens of cronies retired from the military. He could dress formally three or four times a week, complete with medals, and banquet into inebriated unconsciousness...and make those visits to certain well-maintained cabins.