“Laura is the lady I am marrying when her divorce comes through in May.”
“Not the one you told me you were going to marry a year and a half ago — the one you’d only met twice for a total of about an hour and a half.”
Bill chuckled. “You got it.”
“The Scottish Admiral’s daughter, right?”
“That’s it.”
“Jesus. You’re a man of your word. Where is she now?”
“Asleep.”
“Yeah, where?”
“Right here. The yellow bedroom, on the right, down at the far end of the top landing, view down to the creek. Need more detail?”
“Yeah. Where’s your room.”
“Not that far to the south. Next door actually. As far away from my mother’s room as I can manage. She won’t move out till we’re married.”
Boomer yelled with laughter. “Now I know why you’re coming south. Free at last, you rascal.”
The two men chatted on for another ten minutes about the Navy and mutual friends, and agreed to travel from New York to Johannesburg on January 29, arriving in South Africa on the morning of January 30. That would give them a couple of days to get the yacht sharpened up for the voyage.
News of their impending arrival was faxed from New London to Tasmania the moment Boomer put down the phone. Another fax was sent from Hobart to Port Elizabeth, which had the effect of making the English crew instantly nervous.
The first mate, Roger Mills, read the news glumly. “One of ’em is supposed to be a nuclear submarine Commanding Officer, the other’s a millionaire rancher from Kansas who was a submarine weapons expert for about fifteen years. Both outstanding sailors. Shouldn’t think either of them will stand for a lot of bullshit.”
The following morning in Kansas was clear, bright, and cold. Bill was out at 0700 and back for breakfast at 0830. His mother was out, and the slim, beautiful Laura Anderson was pouring coffee as he kicked the snow off his boots, took off his sheepskin coat, and headed for the great log fire that burned in the entrance hall throughout the winter.
Bill stood six feet two inches tall. As a teenager he had honed his body while wielding a sledgehammer mending fence posts for his father. He had never lost that hard edge even in the Navy, where he served for months on end in submarines. Out here in Kansas, back on the historic family ranch, riding horses all day, he still had the build of a Navy wide receiver, which he could have been had he been prepared to take football seriously. He actually looked like a slender Robert Mitchum. He had unnaturally broad shoulders, and in uniform he had looked like a god, with his piercing bright blue eyes. The fact that he had never lost the rolling gait of the cowboy had caused certain girls almost to faint with admiration as he strode over the horizon.
Laura had not reacted precisely like that when they first met, but anyway, right now she brought him a mug of coffee as he stood by the fire, thawing out. He took it “black with buckshot,” which was a throwback to his Navy days working in Fort Meade with Admiral Arnold Morgan, who thus referred to the tiny saccharine pills he fired into the brew from a blue container.
Laura kissed him lightly on the cheek and told him, as she told him every morning, that she loved him beyond redemption. And that she regretted nothing.
Bill smiled and put his arm around her. “You’ve been very brave,” he said. “And it’ll all work out in the end…I have a surprise for you.”
Laura’s green eyes widened. “You have?”
“I have. We’re going on a vacation. At the end of this month. We’ll be gone for four and a half weeks. And you’ll probably die when I tell you what we’re doing.”
“I will?”
“We’re going to South Africa, and then we’re going to sail a big sixty-seven-foot sloop to the southeastern tip of Australia. We’re going with an old friend of mine, a Navy commander, Boomer Dunning and his wife. It’s a brand-new boat, beautiful interiors, big engine, and a crew of three, plus a cook.”
“Well, it sounds wonderful, my darling. But are you sure I’m ready for the Southern Ocean? That’s the Roaring Forties, isn’t it? Dad says it can be the most fearsome place in the world.”
“It can. But it’s not really so bad in the high summer. Which February is down there. All it really means is that we sail almost the whole way with a stiff, gusting westerly astern, which should get us there real quick. Two of the crew are very experienced hands, and Boomer is a world-class ocean racing skipper. I sailed with him last August in Newport while you were in Scotland, remember?”
“Oh, I do. He’s the nuclear submarine CO, isn’t he? Weren’t you both in that short Maxi race, round Block Island, in the big Greek boat?”
“Whaddya mean, in it? We won it,” chuckled Bill.
He kissed her on the cheek and noticed the tiredness in her face — the kind of tiredness that comes when a person is taking an endless mental beating, as Laura now was. As they had both known she would when first they had embarked on their long adventure together. The divorce had been a nightmare, but the custody battle had been much worse. Bill did not know how much more Laura could take of it, and whether she might, in the end, leave him and return to Scotland.
Boomer’s forthcoming voyage had come as some kind of a godsend to Bill Baldridge. It provided an opportunity to take Laura right away from the endless lawyers’ letters, the government forms, and the court proceedings half a world away. Each one of the cold, emotionless documents seemed to confirm in her mind that in the eyes of the law she had abandoned her two daughters and was an unfit person to raise children. Both she and Bill knew the assertion to be spurious lawyers’ rubbish. But it made no difference. In the Scottish legal system, and in the media, no one else agreed with them, and the wheels of justice ground ever onward. The letter that had arrived only this week suggested there was no chance she would be permitted to see the girls before July at the earliest.
They had entered this relationship with their eyes open. After only three meetings with her American Naval officer, Laura had left her children at home with their nanny and their father and flown to New York to meet Bill. He was, she knew, the only man she had ever truly loved, and the only man she ever would love. They had stayed at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue opposite Central Park, gone to bed together before dinner and stayed there for the night. In the morning Bill Baldridge had told her flatly he was going to marry her. She did not know it, but that was the only time in a somewhat rakish bachelor life he had ever uttered those particular words to anyone.
Bill then took her to the opera on successive nights, before flying her out to Kansas to meet his family. Bill’s mother, Emily, and she instantly became soul mates, and after one week Laura flew back to Edinburgh and told her husband, Douglas Anderson, a landowner and banker, that she wanted a divorce and that nothing would change her mind. Douglas Anderson was stunned. His parents, the inordinately wealthy border farmers Sir Hamish and Lady Barbara Anderson — he a senior magistrate, she a power on the main board of the Edinburgh Festival — were equally shocked. As for Laura’s parents, Admiral Sir Iain and Lady MacLean could scarcely believe it, though they had received some warning when Laura had made the journey to Kansas.
The problem was going to be the children. Except that the problem had turned out to be a bit bigger than Laura expected. The custody fight had turned into a public battleground. Douglas Anderson, the deputy chairman of the Scottish National Bank, had consulted the Edinburgh law firm of MacPherson, Roberts and Gould, who had made one thing very clear. If his two daughters, Flora, four, and Mary, six, were not to be whisked off to the American Midwest and never seen again, Anderson had but one course of action.
He must file for divorce immediately, citing his wife’s adultery with this Naval officer from the United States. They must then make every effort to paint Laura as a totally unstable woman, prone to affairs and utterly unsuited to raise her two children.