Her heart is wild and loose inside her chest.
“Are you feverish?” he asks, misunderstanding.
“No, I’m perfect,” she answers and laughs.
“Do you remember everything?” she asks.
“Every moment, no.”
“I wish I could. How long can you stay this time?”
“Until Tuesday, anyway.”
“What about the patients?”
“The Monday patients have been rescheduled.”
August, too, has a set of rooms on Beacon Hill, one of which he uses as an office. Streeter, who still attends to August when he is in the city, gambles on the horses and seems, despite the odds, to have made a small fortune for himself.
“Did I tell you that I have a patient with intractable shell shock? The man was nineteen when he went to war. He’s thirty-two now. He can’t stop cowering at any loud noise. He’s woken up screaming from the same horrifying dream for twelve years. His wife is beside herself. She keeps asking, ‘How long? How long?’”
“Don’t give up on him,” Etna pleads.
She remembers her own affliction, now immortalized in August’s monograph on her case, the one he wrote after completing his training in psychiatry. To think of herself still wandering the earth, unaware that she has children. She cannot bear to imagine.
“How long before the last soldier of the Great War is dead?” she muses.
“Theoretically?” August peers out the window. “Well, if the boy got to France just under the wire in 1918, when he was seventeen, and he lived to be ninety-five, say…” He pauses. “His last Remembrance Day would be November eleventh, 1996. If he lived to be a hundred, it would be November eleventh, 2001.”
“Unthinkable!” she exclaims.
“Unthinkable.”
“They’d put him at the head of the parade.”
“I should hope so.”
“What’s the news from Benedict?” she asks.
“Benedict?”
She smoothes the skirt of her dress. “Any news?”
“A family from Virginia is building a house just beyond his.”
“On the hill?”
“If you can call it that.”
“Does Benedict mind?”
“No. I rather think he likes it. More business. There will be carpenters and so forth. Men to feed.”
“Is it to be a summer place?” she asks. “For the family?”
“I think so, yes.”
She leans her head against his shoulder. He encircles her waist with his arms. What is it, after all, that she has done with her life? She had children and found them again. She fell in love at nineteen and again at forty-two. She tried to be an independent woman. She has earned her living by making pictures, some that disturb, some that please.
“Are you ready to go down?” he asks. “The lobsters await. Benedict’s wife cooked them up. They’re still hot in the paper bag. We’ll eat on the back porch?” He kisses her hair.
She remembers the day they married. They stood by the sea in front of the cottage, only family in attendance to hear their private words. August gave her an emerald ring, and afterward they drove to Portsmouth for a celebratory lunch. They drank Champagne and devoured oysters and stayed until nearly teatime.
Acknowledgments
My enormous thanks to Asya Muchnick, whose lovely demeanor and skill have been a joy to me; to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my kind, funny, and razor-sharp agent, who is always there when I need her; to Michael Pietsch, good friend and editor, who has been with me for nearly two decades of writing novels; to Caroline MacDonald-Haig, a London Blue Badge guide with tremendous knowledge of London, who shepherded me through that city; to Ivor Braka, who was kind enough to let me see the interior of his London house; to Lucie Dean, friend and enthusiastic guide, whose idea of “research” in London so closely matched my own—a necessary visit to the Imperial War Museum followed immediately by a trip to Harrods; to Katherine Clemans and Amy Van Arsdale, who both hold doctorates in psychology and who corrected mistakes in certain portions of the manuscript; to Richard Beswick, my British editor, who contributed a great deal to this book, both by pointing out Americanisms that would have been incorrect in British English and by giving me the idea of the trial; to Christopher Clemans, whose editorial acumen has recently been an inspiration to me; and to my good-natured husband, John Osborn, who silently put up with my moaning through all seven drafts of this novel and who is always ready to celebrate any good fortune that comes my way.
About the Author
Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of seventeen novels, including Rescue; A Change in Altitude; Testimony; The Pilot’s Wife, which was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club; and The Weight of Water, which was a finalist for England’s Orange Prize. She was awarded the John P. Marquand Prize in American Literature. She lives in Massachusetts.
anitashreve.com
Books by Anita Shreve
Stella Bain
Rescue
A Change in Altitude
Testimony
Body Surfing
A Wedding in December
Light on Snow
All He Ever Wanted
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
Fortune’s Rocks
The Pilot’s Wife
The Weight of Water
Resistance
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.
Sign Up
Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters
For more about this book and author, visit Bookish.com.
Table of Contents
Welcome
Title Page
Dedication
Marne, March 1916
Chapter 1
London, October 1916
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Thrupp, New Hampshire, 1896–1915
Chapter 10
Camiers, November 1915
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
America, February 1917
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
New Hampshire, March 1918
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
London, January 1919
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
The Coast of New Hampshire, 1930
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Anita Shreve
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Anita Shreve
Author photograph by Deborah Feingold
Cover design by Nneka Bennett
Cover photograph of woman by Richard Jenkins; background by Popperfoto / Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual propert
y. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
littlebrown.com
twitter.com/littlebrown
facebook.com/littlebrownandcompany
First ebook edition: November 2013
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
ISBN 978-0-316-21544-2
Anita Shreve, Stella Bain
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends