“Emmie! Have you seen Minerva?” It was Florence, coming down the path, shielding her eyes from the sun.
“She went that way,” said Emmie, pointing, and turned back to Captain DeWitt, who was looking quite uncomfortable and more than a little embarrassed. “Was that—are you—did you just propose to me?”
“No!” He winced. “Possibly. Could we say I’m proposing to propose? I can’t propose to you like this. I’m holding a coffeepot.”
“It’s a very nice coffeepot,” said Emmie.
Captain DeWitt grimaced at the item in question. “Never mind the coffeepot. That’s the least of it. If something happens—when something happens—I don’t want you tied to a man with no legs. Or no face. It would be one thing to be killed outright, but . . . you were there at the hospital at Neuilly. You know what the odds are.”
“You know that wouldn’t matter to me.” Everything felt very unreal. Any moment now, she’d find she wasn’t here at all, on the path with Captain DeWitt, but on her cot in the barrack, with Florence shaking her awake. Emmie squinted up at Captain DeWitt, trying to read his expression. Tentatively, she said, “But . . . you can’t really want to propose. Or propose to propose.”
Captain DeWitt looked down at her, his expression very serious. “Are you going to tell me we hardly know each other? I’ve known people for years I haven’t known nearly so well as I’ve known you in six months.”
“It’s closer to seven, actually. Not that I’ve been counting,” Emmie added hastily.
“I don’t want to deceive you—I’m really rather dull when I’m not in a uniform.” His lips quirked in a crooked smile. “I used to collect stamps when I was a boy, not because they were valuable, but because I liked thinking about where they’d come from and where they might go. But the truth is, I probably won’t go much of anywhere. I’d thought of it once, of roaming the world and going to the edges of the map, where the sea serpents stand sentinel. But I like my home too much, and my family.”
He’d written to her about them all. About his sister at Somerville College, his little brother at Harrow, about the model village they were building for their biscuit factory workers, or had been, before the war.
“It’s a good thing to like one’s family,” said Emmie seriously. She loved her brothers, but she wasn’t sure that anyone in her family liked each other terribly much. “I used to do the same—not with stamps, but with maps. I used to steal the atlases from my father’s library and imagine myself away, anywhere but where I was.”
“Would a small village in Durham be far away enough for you? If it helps,” he said diffidently, “we have turrets and gargoyles. My grandfather built a faux medieval monstrosity, complete with leaded windows and a priest’s hole. We even have a secret passage—though I’m not sure it precisely counts as secret when everyone knows exactly where it goes.”
There was nothing Emmie would like better. Wandering through a not-so-secret passageway with—and there was the problem.
“Do you realize, I still don’t know your first name?”
“What’s in a name?” Captain DeWitt caught himself. “Never mind, Romeo isn’t an example we want to be following.”
“That was Juliet.” Emmie looked up at him, remembering a long-ago conversation in a Salvation Army canteen, what felt like roughly a decade ago. “You did promise not to descend to Shakespeare.”
“I did, didn’t I?” He looked at her in a way that made the world around them fade into nothing. No chickens, no trucks, no colonel waiting for coffee. There was nothing in the world but the two of them, here, on this scrap of duckwalk in the midst of the spring mud. “It’s Fitzwilliam. My friends call me Will.”
“That’s not nearly so bad as Algernon,” said Emmie softly, unable to look away.
“I’m glad it passes muster. You wouldn’t mind seeing it on your stationery, then? At some point,” Captain DeWitt added, “my father will shuffle off this mortal coil and you’d be lumbered with a lady in front of your name—but hopefully not for quite some time. He’s a good old stick and I rather like him. I think you would too.”
Emmie hated to say it. She hated to even think it. But someone had to. “Haven’t you stopped to think . . . we’re in the midst of a war zone. There aren’t any other women within miles. You might change your mind when you get home. You might decide you’d rather not be saddled with—with an overgrown do-gooder with buck teeth. And an American,” she added as an afterthought.