The Ambassador's Daughter (22 page)

I step out of the apartment building and close the door behind me, then I reach for the flowers. They are a pretext, of course, an excuse to come and see me. At the bottom of the hat, my hand closes around something cool and metal. The flowers are held together by a finely linked bracelet of pearl, wrapped around the stems. “Oh, Georg. I couldn’t possibly accept this.”

“It’s just a small token of my gratitude for your work, and for your kindness while I was ill. It was my mother’s.” He takes the bracelet from the flowers and fastens it around my wrist. “She believed that such things were to be worn, not shut away in a drawer from the light.”

I open my mouth to protest. Such an elaborate gift isn’t proper—I don’t know him well enough. And it must hold a great deal of sentimental value for him, if he cared enough to bring it along with him to France. But the bracelet seems to forge to my skin as if a part of me and I cannot refuse it. He lifts my wrist to adjust the clasp. “What’s this?” Illuminated in the glow of the streetlight is the scratch, red and swollen, from where Ignatz had grabbed me in threat. I am seized with the urge to tell Georg the truth about everything. There is a calm confidence about his demeanor that makes me want to trust him and I know he could fix this. But I cannot.

“I scraped myself earlier,” I lie, cringing at the need to meet his concern with deception. Does he believe my explanation? Eager to distract him, I pull out a strand of honeysuckle from the bunch, inhaling the warm, fresh scent. Then I put the sprig in my hair, which is undone, combed long and full around my shoulders. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”

He nods formally, then takes his hat and turns to go. Behind him fireflies blink in the darkness.

“Wait.” Setting the flowers on the table inside the doorway, I step out onto the street. The damp pavement releases its smells of earth and stone and waste.

He turns back, eyes hopeful. “Would you like to take a walk?”

“You shouldn’t be walking anywhere in your condition.”

“Nonsense. Come.” I follow him down the dimly lit street. The air is more summer than spring now, any hint of a chill gone. Crickets chirp unseen and water trickles down the gutter along the roadside. “I love to walk at night,” he adds.

I nod. I’ve often felt the pull from my open window to stroll the deserted streets and hear all of the noises so buried in the chaos of the day. I haven’t done it, of course; for me alone, it wouldn’t be safe. But walking beside Georg, I feel somehow protected. We pass a church and I peer up at figures carved in stone that stare down piously, demanding our repentance. The streets hold their breath, as if at any moment someone might step out and apprehend us.

We reach the park at the end of the street, the pavement fading into a dirt path that runs along a stream. Georg offers his arm and I hesitate. Then I reach out and wrap my hand around his thick forearm, the material of his uniform scratchy under my fingertips, skin warm beneath. We walk in silence for several minutes. The stream grows wider until it opens into a small lake with untended banks, flush with high curved reeds.

“Look.” He points upward. I follow his hand, amazed at the bed of stars that unfurls above us. On the streets, the lights and tall buildings make it hard to see the sky properly. But in the shrouded darkness of the park nothing stands between us and them save a gentle canopy of branches and leaves. “Orion’s Belt. The stars can be a kind of navigation tool when you are at sea. We have more modern equipment, of course, but in past centuries sailors navigated the world by the stars. As long as I could find Orion’s Belt, I wasn’t lost. The stars helped center me.” There is a kind of hollowness to his voice, as though longing for such a centering now.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t come to you these past two nights.” I do not elaborate on my argument with Papa, knowing his misgivings would be hurtful to Georg. “I hope I haven’t set you back too far in your work.”

“I wasn’t worried about that. I thought you were angry or upset.” His voice trails off. He was concerned that I was put off by the things he said the other night. Despite his delirium, he remembers, and that makes his words real and impossible to deny. “You can stop working for me. The position I’ve put you in is untenable.” My breath catches. Does he know somehow about Ignatz and the missing document, after all? For a moment, it is as if I am transparent, exposed. “I would understand if you didn’t want to upset your father.” I relax slightly. It is Papa’s concerns he’s picked up on intuitively. But I hate how that makes me sound like a child.

I consider what he has said. It had not occurred to me to stop working for him. I could even ask Papa to let me return to Berlin. It would solve many problems—Papa would no longer be angry and Ignatz, if he believed my termination involuntary, would have to accept that I could no longer help. But it would feel like giving up. And seeing Georg every day is the last thing I want to forgo.

No, I do not want to leave him. “Not at all,” I say finally. “I won’t give up on what we are doing.”

His shoulders drop perceptibly with relief. “Good. I wanted to see you, too, because I have exciting news.”

“Oh?”

“I received a new file from Berlin, one that had been lost in the archives—or so they thought. It belonged to a diplomat called Leimer, who had so many ideas similar to ours about how the German ground forces could partner with the West in peacetime. But then Germany signed the alliance with Russia and it was all moot. Leimer killed himself in protest.”

“How awful!”

“Indeed, but his notes may have some suggestions about how to combine the strengths of the two militaries that could be most helpful by analogy for our work.”

“Have you gone through it yet?”

He shakes his head. “The file is massive and it only came late today.” Yet he had broken from working on it to come find me. “I thought that perhaps if we divided it, we could get through it more quickly. Of course, the documents are already in German, but I thought that if we worked together it might go faster.” Though, there was no need for translation, Georg was taking me into his confidence with the materials, treating me as his partner.

I think of the document I’d taken for Ignatz, seemingly disappeared. I do not know where it has gone, the extent of harm it might do in the wrong hands. Georg has not noticed it is missing, at least not yet. I look at him helplessly. I want to tell him everything. But I would have to admit what I had done and then he would despise me. And what could he do? Best to say nothing.

I shiver. Georg starts to remove his coat. I wave him off. “I’m not cold, thank you.” My voice comes out more harshly than I intended. We are at a precipice, a place where one more step will make return impossible. I cannot bear to have him closer to me—even if it is only his coat.

“Oh...” He falters. “I’m sorry,” he apologizes, mistaking my reticence for offense. Suddenly we are talking about something much larger than a coat. “If I said or did something...” He thinks I’m angry. The truth is just the opposite—it is my feelings and attraction to him that made me push him away.

Unable to bear the notion that I have hurt him, I reach out and touch his arm. “It’s not that.” Our eyes meet.

“Margot...” He lowers his head and suddenly his lips are lightly on mine, a question. I hesitate for a faint breath and then I am kissing him back, harder, swept away by things I had not dared to imagine. His hand cups my cheek. His mouth tastes of the sea and sand and faraway harbors, of longing and loneliness and loss, a wave pulling back from the shore, threatening to drag me along with it. Stefan has kissed me before but it was nothing like this....

Stefan.
His face appears in my mind. I put my hand on Georg’s chest, then pull away. “I can’t.” I struggle to catch my breath and right the world that wobbles around me. My cheeks burn. This is wrong. What kind of horrible woman am I, kissing another man while my husband lies wounded in a hospital bed? Georg’s embrace holds everything I have ever needed, though I had not known until this very moment it existed. But it doesn’t matter—I made a promise that I will honor. “I can’t,” I repeat.

His face crumbles. “I mistook your intentions and I apologize.”

I reach for him. “Not at all. It’s just that things are very complicated right now.”

He pulls his arm from my grasp and steps away. “You needn’t worry,” he says. His voice is as stiff and formal as the day we met, all traces of the familiarity and closeness we’ve built up since then. “I understand now. You don’t regard me in that way. It doesn’t matter if it is about position or religion or something else. I accept it, and I won’t bother you about it again....”

No,
I want to shout. I have never cared about those societal things and the notion that I do not like him, well, nothing could be further from the truth. But his logic makes sense—we are two young people and both, he thinks, single. There is no reason we could not be together if we chose. He smiles ruefully. “I should thank you. It has been a useful reminder of why I do not dabble in affairs of the heart.” He turns abruptly. “I should see you home.”

“Georg, wait...” I do not want to leave or to let go of this moment, the most real of my life. But he has already started from the water, back toward the garden path. I reach for him again. Suddenly the ground shifts beneath me. The bank. I’ve gone too close to the edge and the earth, softened by the recent rains, begins to give way. I fall backward as if in slow motion, my hands reaching toward Georg and closing around emptiness.

I sail through the air for what feels like several seconds before crashing into the water, icy as it engulfs me, seeping through my clothes. I flail my arms and try to kick, but my legs become tangled amid my skirt. The water begins to close over my head.

Georg is beside me then, pulling me to the surface, one arm around my neck and the other my waist as he guides me to shore. “Are you all right?”

“Quite.” I tremble, as much from my terror at encountering the water as from the night air, frigid against my wet skin. “I told you I wasn’t much of a swimmer.”

He laughs as we reach the bank. “That’s an understatement. The water is hardly deeper than you are tall, though panic can make things seem much worse.” Then his expression grows serious. “You’re soaked,” he says, apparently heedless that he is wet, as well. He wraps me in his coat and this time I do not protest. “We need to get you back to the hotel.”

I stand, holding my soaked skirt aloft so as not to trip. “I’m fine.” But I am unable to stop my teeth from chattering. “I’ll just head home.”

“Come back to the hotel and while your things are drying out, I can show you the Leimer file.”

“Fine,” I relent, my curiosity about the new documents piqued. It would be better, too, to avoid seeing Papa and Celia like this and facing their questions.

Ten minutes later, we reach the hotel and he leads me up the back stairs to avoid the lobby. Inside, I wait uncertainly in his sitting room until he reappears, producing a soft, gray dressing gown. “Put this on.” I walk to the water closet and come out a few minutes later, his oversize robe swimming around me. He takes my dress from me and hangs it by the fire he’s started. “This should dry in no time.”

He looks toward the desk, piled high with his papers, and I expect him to pull out the file. But instead he hands me a cup of tea. “Sit.” I hesitate. Talking to him in such a state is ridiculously awkward and improper. But there is something strangely delicious about being swallowed by his oversize robe, the familiar smell of his aftershave wafting up from the collar. I wanted to come here tonight, I realize, and it had nothing to do with the new documents or avoiding Papa. I draw my knees up close beneath me as he adds wood to the fire.

He stands and walks into the bedroom once more, then returns a moment later with a small tube. “Let me see your wrist,” he says firmly, kneeling in front of me. He squeezes some salve from the tube and rubs it into the wound where Ignatz had grabbed me, the warm pleasure of his touch mixing with dull pain, stirring something deep inside me.

Finally, he sits across from me, then stares into the fire, not speaking. Is he thinking about our kiss, or the fact that I pushed him away? I stop, flooded by regret, feeling Georg’s lips so full on mine. The kiss was like nothing I have ever experienced. Live for the moment, Krysia would have admonished. It was all any of us had anymore. But I had turned away, letting as ever all of my self-doubts ruin the kiss. Surely there would not be another.

I notice for the first time the sword that is on the mantelpiece. A shiver runs through me. “They permitted us to keep our weapons,” he says. “I do not, of course, carry mine here.”

“Have you ever used your sword?”

“Technically, it’s a saber.” Though his tone is not unkind, I am embarrassed, as though I should have known. “No.” His jaw sets grimly. “I haven’t used it, but the destruction I’ve caused is no less egregious. I hate war.”

“But you’re still in the navy. Isn’t that something of a contradiction?”

He shakes his head. “I’m a sailor and I can’t abandon that. And I’m proud to serve Germany, even now. I believe that a military, properly designed, can be a deterring force, a valuable part of international relations and peace.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes. We should be working. There is much to be done. I realize then that I am not just helping Georg. It has become my mission, too. “You mentioned the Leimer file?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, as if while we were talking, he had forgotten. He goes to the desk once more and pulls out a file several inches thick. “They don’t appear to be in any particular order,” he notes, dividing the stack in two and handing half to me. I begin to page through the materials, noting on a separate paper a few pages of interest. We work alongside each other in silence.

“Your dress should be dry,” he concedes some time after midnight, an unmistakable note of reluctance to his voice. “Perhaps if you’d like to take some of the documents, you can review them while I’m meeting with the delegation tomorrow.”

“Certainly,” I reply, marveling at the ease with which he gives me access to the material. How can I possibly betray him again?