06-The English Girl by Katherine Webb

Author:Katherine Webb [Webb, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

That night, when sleep finally came, Maude dreamed of the desert. She dreamed of the silence and the way everything slowed down so that the distant past and the future seemed to come within her reach, and she was set free. She dreamed of that sense of serenity, which nothing – not solitude or love or the ragged hole in her chest – could spoil, and woke up weeping for it because life without it was suddenly intolerable. For the first time in her life, being near Nathaniel was intolerable. She scrambled to be away from him. Hoping that the pain would ease once she was home, she boarded the ship from Haifa to Southampton a week early, kept to her cabin, travelled on to Marsh House and immediately discovered that she’d been wrong. There was no peace to be had in being home, in being far from Nathaniel, and there was nothing to make it easier. Maude’s tougher than the pair of you, she remembered her father saying to her brothers once, long before. She tried to remember what it felt like to be tough, but all she felt was weak, unwanted, full of pain.

Not even her father’s obvious disappointment could keep her at Marsh House, so full of echoes of Nathaniel Elliot, and of the ticking clock, reminding her that she had been left behind again. That she would always be left behind. She stayed a mere week before leaving for a hotel in Constantinople where she would write her book. She felt she had to be in a place where neither she nor Nathaniel had ever been before – a place without memories of him, or them. She was invited repeatedly to dine at the consulate, and then into the homes of other expats there. She made a few friends, although the women generally found her too hard, too forthright. Marcus Whittington, the eldest son of a British shipping magnate, seemed to hang on her every word, dropped his chin diffidently when he spoke to her and had an inexhaustible supply of questions to ask her. She was puzzled by it at first, until his sister made a pointed remark and Marcus’s cheeks flamed. In spite of her wealth, Maude had never had a suitor before. She was too short, too plain, too brusque. Marcus was a year younger than her, a scholar of the Byzantine Empire; compiling his first history of it. He wasn’t too tall, or too vibrant – he had the kind of constitution that Elias Vickery would deem watery; but he was fiercely bright, kind, even-tempered, willing to travel with her or to let her go it alone – essentially willing to agree to whatever might induce her to accept his hand.

Maude tried to countenance doing so. As husbands went, she was unlikely to find a more suitable one; he had plenty of money of his own, and he adored her. Elias wrote to her that her mother would have approved – which was his way of gently encouraging her.

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