“I believe you may have,” he agreed. “I do try.” He wondered if that would draw another glare, but she gave him a thoughtful nod. He sipped the Jameson, set the glass on the coaster again. “We’re well matched.”
“I think so. I’m glad you do, too.” Kathleen peered down into her gin and tonic, as if the little bubbles that rose and burst there told her something she needed to know. Without raising her head, she asked, “How long are you going to stay in Victoria, Tom?”
Bushell took out his cigar case. “Do you mind?” he asked. Kathleen shook her head, again brushing back a lock of hair that got in front of her eyes. The ritual of getting the cigar lighted gave him something to do with his hands, and gave him half a minute or so in which not to answer her question. After he’d savored the first mouthful of smoke and blown it out, he said, “It’ll be a while yet. Brigadier Arthurs needs . . all the help he can get.”
“He’s trying to hose out the Augean Stables,” Kathleen said. “He knows you’re clean.”
“There is that,” Bushell said, and let it go. Normally, he might have been pleased to turn the conversation from the personal direction in which it had veered to his work. Brigadier Benjamin Arthurs, however, left him sad. The man was earnest, affable, and not very bright. Bushell wondered if Horace Bragg had aided his rise precisely because of that blend of qualities. Arthurs had spent several years not noticing a thing. Now, all at once, he was supposed to purge the Victoria RAM office of whatever Sons of Liberty Bragg had infiltrated into it. At least he realized he was out of his depth - or perhaps he’d had orders from the governor-general’s residence. Bushell didn’t know, or want to know, about that. Kathleen finished her drink and set down the empty glass. She started to say something, stopped in surprise, and began again: “I was going to make us both another one, but I see you’ve not finished your first.”
“I can fix that,” Bushell knocked it back. But as he handed her the glass, he said, “I haven’t been as deep into the bottle lately, seems like. Will you get angry if I call you a good influence?”
“Probably,” she answered. “I sound angry, don’t I? With The Two Georges back, the strain’s off everyone.” She got up, went into the kitchen, and returned in a couple of minutes with fresh drinks. Bushell savored the Irish whiskey for the way it tasted, not for the thick, transparent wall it built between him and the world. He hadn’t drunk like that for a long time, not since ... his married days. But the thought of Irene didn’t make his belly knot, didn’t make his brain and his mouth crave the smooth, musky taste of Jameson. “Must be love,” he murmured.
Kathleen slammed her glass down onto the coaster. “You say that. You even mean it - I think. And so?”
She stared a challenge at him.
Now he wished he hadn’t lighted the cigar so soon. Down along the disputed border between the NAU and Nueva España, the soldiers of the Holy Alliance had the charming habit of sowing fields with land torpedoes and then covering them up so cleverly you never knew they were there . . . till you walked on one.
He picked up his own drink. All at once, his hand and his mouth remembered the urge he thought he’d escaped. Deliberately, he contented himself with a small sip. Wherever he put his foot, something was liable to blow up on him.
“I don’t know,” he said, after the pause had stretched longer than it should have. Kathleen’s mouth drew down into a thin, bitter line. “It’s been fun, Dr. Flannery,” she said, putting words in his mouth with irony sharper than a scalpel. “I’d like to go on having fun as long as I’m in Victoria, Dr. Flannery, and after that I’ll be off to New Liverpool, Dr. Flannery, and it’ll be all done. So long, Dr. Flannery.”
“That would be easiest,” Bushell said. She gave him such a withering gaze, he looked for a better word, and found one: “That would be - safest.”
“Everything we’ve been through, and you talk about - safety?”
He nodded, and then did finish the drink after all. The wall of whiskey kept the world from coming in and him from coming out. Facing Kathleen was terrifying in a way facing bullets had never been. In combat, you just reacted. Here . . . “Falling in love with a police officer isn’t a good idea.”
“Since I’ve already gone and done that, it’s a bit late to worry about it, wouldn’t you say?” she answered. “And he says he’s fallen in love with me. But -“ She shrugged.
“Falling in love is easy,” he said harshly. “What comes afterwards isn’t.” He imagined coming home one afternoon and finding Kathleen in the arms of another man. The mental picture was shockingly vivid. And why not? He’d been through that once. Did he dare risk it again?
“Do you think I don’t know that?” she answered, and he remembered he wasn’t the only one with sorrows in his past. “But if you run away from it for fear of what might happen afterwards, what’s the point of doing it at all? What do you have from me that you couldn’t find on a street corner for a ten-pound note?”
He blinked. Women were seldom so forthright. One thing he’d found about Kathleen was that she was seldom anything she was supposed to be. “Do you know,” he said slowly, “that’s a damn fine question.”
“I wouldn’t mind a damn fine answer, then,” she said, which made him notice he’d used a word he didn’t normally employ in feminine company.
“I haven’t got one,” he admitted. That didn’t seem enough, either to him or, obviously, to Kathleen. He looked with longing toward the glass he’d emptied. “If we go on as we have gone on,” he said, eyes on the ground for land-torpedo tripwires at every word, “then you’re right: we ought to see how long we can go on.”
“And how long would you like to see us go on?” Kathleen asked.
“If I’d known this was what you meant by ‘coming to court,’ I’d have brought a barrister,” Bushell replied. He wasn’t used to being on the defensive; his style was to push hard himself. But when it came to matters this intimate, he found himself barely able to move at all. Did that justify Kathleen’s prodding at him? Maybe it did, if you looked at things through her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said; maybe she was trying to look at things through his. But then she shook her head.
“No, I’m not sorry. It’s something I need to know, because it’ll tell me more about how you really feel.”
“You’re right,” he told her, which, by the way her hand groped for and missed her drink, surprised her more than anything else he could have said. He went on, “I’d like to see us go on for - years.” He couldn’t say forever, not even now; it felt too much like asking for trouble. “I don’t know yet if we can, but I’d like to see it.”
“All right.” Now Kathleen hesitated. “You don’t - have anyone waiting back in New Liverpool?”
“The way that Lozovsky blackguard had a lady friend waiting back in Tsaritsin, you mean?” he asked. Kathleen nodded. He shook his head. “No, nobody like that.” He spoke with assurance, for about the first time since he’d sat down on the sofa.
Kathleen noticed as much, too. “That’s good. I didn’t think so, but . . it’s hard being sure.”
“Lord, isn’t it!” Bushell exclaimed. For that moment, he and Kathleen understood each other perfectly. He looked around the room. His eyes narrowed slightly. “I just noticed - you haven’t got a print of The Two Georges here. All these other lovely things, but not that one.”
“Of course I do,” she said, and then, a moment later, “I keep it in the bedroom.”
“In the bedroom?” he echoed, surprised himself now - it wasn’t a painting he would have hung there.