Kathleen reached out and poked him in the ribs. She happened to hit a ticklish spot; he wriggled and tried to get away. She laughed. “If you let yourself, you can be a very foolish man.”
His head whipped around, as if in alarm. “My secret’s out! You can blackmail me forever now. I’m putty in your hands.”
“Hardly putty,” she said, looking at him from under half-lowered eyelids. Then she poked him again. Her finger slid into a shallow groove in his flesh that ran along one rib. “What’s this?”
“I’d say it was an old war wound, except, of course, we’ve never been at war with the Holy Alliance.”
Bushell’s raised eyebrow told how seriously he expected her to take that. He shook his head in some bemusement. Going out onto the frontier showed you how very much the safe, contented Empire was really worth . . . but when you came back with that new understanding, you found you didn’t quite fit into safety and contentment any more.
After a moment, he went on, “It was a worthless little skirmish down near the border with Nueva España - which side of the border we were on depends on whether you like British maps or the ones the Franco-Spaniards print. Of course, if you get killed in a worthless little skirmish, you’re as dead as if it were a real war. One of my men got hit. I was a raw subaltern, green as paint, but I knew I had to go out and pick him up. So I did - and I got this. Sam Stanley brought us both back alive.”
“A couple of inches farther in” - she ran her hand up toward his heart - “and it might have killed you.”
“Really? The thought never crossed my mind.” He waited half a beat, then added, “And if you believe that, I have in my suitcase a fine perpetual-motion machine and an elixir to turn lead into gold.”
She stretched languorously. “After tonight, nothing you say you have would surprise me too much.” She glanced over at him out of the corner of her eye.
He cupped her left breast in his hand. Her nipple grew hard against his palm. She arched her back and made a small noise deep in her throat. He caught her to him. Her mouth was seeking his as his sought hers. “Well!” she said a little later, when their lips separated for a moment: the second time that night she’d freighted the word with more than it was meant to bear. She amplified it: “So soon?”
“Hush,” he said roughly.
Despite that admonition, the second time was slower, less urgent than the first had been. Bushell wondered if his body would betray its promise to him, but it didn’t. When Kathleen’s breath came quick and short and she quivered beneath him, he said “Yes!” to her or himself or possibly God, and yes it certainly was.
“Well,” Kathleen said for the third time, and then, in a much more pragmatic voice, “You’re squashing me.”
“The romance is over so soon, is it?” he said, had had to pull back in a hurry before she could bite him in the shoulder. Their skins, slick with sweat, slid against each other as he went back to his own side of the bed.
Kathleen leaned over, kissed him gently on the lips, curled up beside him, and, in what couldn’t have been more than ninety seconds, fell asleep. He watched and listened to that happen in some bemusement: legend claimed it was a male prerogative. He snorted - softly, so as not to bother Kathleen. He should have known better than to expect her to pay any attention to legend. He lay on his back, fingers interlaced behind his head, staring up at the ceiling, trying to find patterns in random roughnesses of plaster. Even if he hadn’t been celibate these past few years, he hadn’t gone to bed with a woman who might also matter to him outside of bed, either, not till now. That thought brought fright with it, fright hardly less than he’d known with bullets flying at Buckley Bay. He could see into the future, could see himself giving her his heart - and see her breaking it, a month from now, or a year, or five years, or fifteen. He’d been through that once. Next to it, a bullet that slid along a rib was a small wound. After a while, the bleeding stopped and the scar grew old and pale. You could prod that scar, as Kathleen had, and never feel a thing.
The other, though - A man who laid himself open to being twice wounded in love was a fool. But what was a man who, having been wounded once, forswore love afterward?
“A different kind of fool,” Bush murmured, and then, after a moment, “A bigger fool.”
Kathleen stirred and muttered at the sound of his voice. He lay still again, waiting for her to be quiet. Was what he’d said right, or was he just trying to convince himself? He had trouble being sure. At last, though, he nodded. Oh, if you lived your life in a shell, nothing could hurt you, but it was cramped and drab and lonely in there. Yes, you ran risks if you came out, but the world outside the shell was a nicer, freer place - and the company was better.
He slid out of bed and began to dress. The motion made Kathleen stir again. Lying there asleep, she looked absurdly young. Bushell sighed and shook his head. He wondered if he ought to wake her so she could put on whatever night-clothes she wore - and chuckled wryly as he realized he had no idea what those were. Silk negligee? Cotton nightshirt? Flannel pyjamas? So much he still had to learn about her. He decided he didn’t have the heart to disturb her. She was sleeping too contentedly, and he knew from too many long and wakeful nights how precious that was. He slipped toward the door. He started to set his hand on the knob, then turned back and blew Kathleen a kiss. No one saw it, not even her.
“You’re alarmingly cheerful this morning,” Samuel Stanley said as he and Bushell waited for the lift to take them down to breakfast.
“Am I?” Bushell thought about that for a couple of seconds. “Well,” he said, and smiled right in Stanley’s face. His adjutant gave him a suspicious look; neither of them was normally at his best without a couple of cups of tea inside him.
Stanley peered down the hall. “The illustrious Dr. Flannery seems to be sleeping in this morning,” he remarked. “She’s just as likely to be up ahead of us, from what I’ve seen since Doshoweh.”
Bushell nodded. “How’s Phyllis doing?” he asked. That and the arrival of the lift served to distract Sam from thoughts of Kathleen Flannery.
Down in Parker’s, Bushell was pouring milk into a cup of Darjeeling when Kathleen stood in the entranceway, looking around to spot him and Samuel Stanley. Both RAMs got to their feet as she came up to the table. Bushell pulled out a chair for her. “Thank you,” she said brightly.
“My pleasure,” Bushell answered, not least to see how she’d react. If she wanted to pretend in public that nothing had happened in the nighttime, that was her privilege.
Stanley grumbled something unintelligible down into his teacup, then spoke to the world at large: “Two grinning loobies at the table with me, no tea in ‘em, no eggs, no bacon. If I didn’t know better, I’d say both of you were smoking something you shouldn’t be.”
“You can check my cigar case if you like, Sam,” Bushell said. Kathleen snorted a not quite ladylike snort.
The waiter came, took breakfast orders, and vanished as quickly and smoothly as if he’d fallen through a trap door. Samuel Stanley gulped down his tea, poured himself another cup, and pondered the peculiar breakfast riddle posed by companions who were not scowling and speaking in monosyllabic grunts. Sam’s ruminations were quite visible. He was, Bushell realized, very likely to come up with four when he added two and two. What would happen then would be ... interesting - one way or another. Bushell was cutting a small, spicy pork link in half when Stanley let out a low, soft whistle. Being more inclined to meet difficulties head-on than to wait for them to come to him, Bushell asked, “Are you planning a second career as a steam locomotive, Sam?”