A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [42]
“I’m off to bed soon, but do if you plan to remain here.”
Innes, too, would be off to bed soon. He hoped a fire had been made up in his room. If not, the sheets would be frigid. At school, ice had sometimes formed in the pitchers beside the beds.
“Louise has a slight nervous condition,” Hazel said.
Harrison nodded, wondering if this was treachery on Hazel’s part, quashing Louise’s chances, or was it merely a warning? Innes did not say what he thought, that Louise was desperate to love whomever might love her in return. Attention, Innes could see, had all been given to the older sister. “I gather you’re engaged,” Innes said.
There was a kind of dull anxiety about Halifax evenings. The knitting of socks. The rubbers of bridge. The shipboard dances. An officer in France, if he made it back, would offer an escape.
“You wouldn’t be a suitable candidate for medicine had you not deduced that,” Hazel said.
“Tell me about him.”
“In a sentence? He is a lieutenant commander with the British Royal Navy.”
Innes, thinking that if he loved someone, a sentence would never do, asked, “He’s not a surgeon then?”
“No,” Hazel answered, glancing away from Innes and toward the fire. “He’s in manufacturing.”
Money or good looks must have attracted, Innes thought, knowing even as he had this thought that attraction defied logic, just as it was doing now in the Fraser sitting room.
“Will you settle here?” Innes asked.
“That is a decision for Edward to make,” Hazel answered, raising her chin.
Hazel would move away then. Even Young Street, with its better sort of person, would not suit. Already, Innes found he minded Hazel’s future absence. Halifax, full of possibility just hours ago, would seem empty without her.
“Mr. Finch—Innes—I think you will do well in your profession.”
“I hope you are right.”
“You have intuition and empathy. I saw it at dinner and again at cards.”
“Thank you.”
Hazel gestured toward the windows. “I hate the curtains,” she said with feeling. “There’s a lovely view out there of the harbor and the ships in the moonlight. When the war ends, and I have my own house, there will be no curtains on the windows. I’ll want to see the lights, the stars.” She stood. “I’m off to bed now.”
Innes, jealous of that future house with its naked windows, rose with her.
“I’ll see you at breakfast,” she said. “Ellen, our cook, will do a Scottish breakfast in your honor.”
“I will be honored then.”
“Do you miss your family?”
“More so as the years pass,” he confessed. “In the beginning, I was impatient to be away. I was cruel in that, I think. I have a brother in France.”
There was a pause while each imagined the brother in France, a country neither of them had ever seen.
“Did you ever think of medical training yourself?” he asked.
“It was not encouraged,” she said, moving toward the door. “Louise will be sorry not to have said good night to you. My mother must be worse than I thought.”
“I hope to see them both at breakfast.”
“I hate this war,” Hazel said, turning. “Hate it.”
Innes was surprised by the ferocity of the statement. “We all do,” he said.
“No. Not all. Some prosper.”
Innes wondered if she was thinking of Edward, who was in manufacturing. “One could say that physicians prosper,” Innes offered. “Careers can be made.”
“For physicians, I believe it exhausts more than it enhances,” she said.
“Is your father exhausted?”
“Yes, and I worry about him. But he is a man of discipline.”
“And are you?” Innes asked, opening the door for Hazel. She crossed the threshold, moving close to him.
“Not at all,” Hazel replied. “No, not in the slightest.”
Soon Innes would go to bed, Agnes thought. He would sleep between frigid—no, warm—sheets. In the morning he would have his Scottish breakfast, and then the unthinkable would happen. Some of the Fraser family would die. One would be blinded. The power that Agnes had over Innes and Hazel and Louise—Agnes, who was powerless to affect her own life—was