So Mrs. Macready was Philip’s landlady. Extraordinary. Julia recalled the woman’s warm greeting last week in Chez Mareille, as well as her cool one to Wallace. Who was she, other than a wealthy widow? Julia was in no mood for yet another mystery. It might be rude to ask, but surely a nominal half sister merited some allowances. “She’s more than your landlady, Philip. How do you know her?”
It was rude. Philip coughed.
“I ask because I met her the other evening, when I was out with Wallace. She snubbed him something royal, after he’d greeted her with perfect cordiality. He said it stemmed from some minor slight years ago, something he couldn’t even recall but that she held against him as a grudge. I’m frightfully curious. She seemed quite pleasant to me, and obviously you like her . . .” Julia dipped her head to leave the rest unspoken.
“If she was cool to him, she must have a good reason,” Philip said.
“What kind of reason?”
“It’s not for me to say.” He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and crushed it beneath his shoe. His jaw tightened with the exertion.
This was as close to angry she’d ever seen Philip. Why? “I gather you’ve known her a long time.”
Julia waited, watching squirrels circling the trunk of an elm tree across the street. “We’re friends,” he finally said. “We met years ago, when I was, oh, not more than twenty.”
Julia hoped her eyes reflected the same open patience—not greedy curiosity—that Philip’s had shown an hour ago. If he chose to confide in her, she’d welcome it as the honor it was.
“We were quite close once.” He looked away. “It was torrid, of course, and utterly mad, without any chance of anything. We’re like an old couple now, long since gone separate ways but still good friends. Young love, though.” He shook his head wistfully. “It can eat a man alive.”
It wasn’t so hard, this siblingesque candor, Julia thought. In fact it was quite wonderful. They should confide in each other more often. She imagined someday pushing his wheelchair out into the sunshine, tucking a blanket over his knees, as any fond and devoted younger sister might. It was an oddly cheering picture.
Julia realized he was watching for her reaction. Her thoughts had gone to Gerald, her own impossible early love. Yet while Philip’s affair with Leah Macready had run its course and settled into an intimate friendship, hers with Gerald had been doomed from the start. He’d been just back from the war, alive yet broken, each hour of the carnage ringing unstoppably in his ears. Julia could only watch as the man he might have become had suffered and sickened, until he’d ended his agony with a rope slung over a beam in his parents’ country house. Now she understood they had shared more urgent tenderness than lovers’ passion. That kind of love ought to open into joy and delight, but with Gerald all joy had been smothered beneath the pain.
As Julia spoke of this, in low and fitful starts of sentences, she wondered at her recklessness. Not even Christophine had heard as much. She looked up when Philip touched his finger to her cheek. He dabbed away a spot of moistness and signaled the agent’s approach.
Julia regrouped and swiped both cheeks, embarrassed but grateful, as the agent arrived with a fistful of keys. The empty flat was at the top, he reported between chugs of breath as they climbed. “Best,” murmured Philip. He too lived in the top flat. As they viewed one room after another—a large living room with French doors onto a narrow balcony overlooking the same courtyard treetops as Philip’s library, a formal dining room, a bright modernized kitchen and adjacent maid’s quarters, two small guest rooms, and a larger master bedroom—Julia fought a growing excitement. Christophine could turn one of the small bedrooms into an atelier. The apartment might work, depending on the final room at the back, a semiattic space that the agent called the nursery. It proved to be a large square space four steps up, with a basin and cupboards in one corner. Best of all, a huge skylight flooded the room with light from a north-facing wall.
Philip strode toward the far wall and rapped the plaster. “I believe my flat’s on the other side. If you take it, we can devise a code of sibling thumps.”
Julia’s mind was buzzing too loudly to answer. She asked about the weighty burden of her equipment and any objections to the work she would do there. The agent said the building was solidly constructed and could bear a great deal of weight, but he’d have to ask the owner about concerns regarding her activities.
“I’ll speak with her,” Philip offered. “I may have some influence there.”
Julia could barely contain her thoughts. It would work. It would work well, spectacularly well. Despite the oddness—and potential pitfalls—of living so close to Philip, the apartment was better suited for her purposes than the one she’d originally leased.
A flurry of business talk followed. Yes, the agent could stay another half an hour. Julia nearly ran to go fetch Christophine. She couldn’t remember when she’d last felt so buoyant. Unless Christophine had serious objections—which seemed unlikely—Julia had at last taken her first step toward establishing their new life in New York.
CHAPTER 28
“Have I missed anything? Any excitement while I was gone?”
It would be wrong to say Austen bounded into Philip’s library, but only by degree. He swept into the room in a flurry of chatter and hugs. It was early Saturday evening. Nearly three weeks had passed since he’d scrambled out of this very room to pack for his trip abroad.
Unable to sit still, he paced the room as the excited recap poured out of him: a mixed-up cabin
