by way of greeting, after only three rings of the telephone.
“How did you know it was me?”
“You’re the only one who knows this number.”
I fiddled with the cord and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, flushed with heat, halfway to sunstroke. “The arm’s just fine. Stitches came out all right.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Any nerve damage?”
“They didn’t say. What does nerve damage feel like?”
“You would know, believe me.”
I turned away from the mirror and looked out the window instead, the empty street outside. “Are you busy?”
“Immensely.”
“So if I packed a picnic basket and rowed myself over to Hog Island, you’d bustle me and my picnic right back?”
“That depends. Can you row?”
“Not really.”
“Then I suppose I’d better jump straight in the launch and pick you up from the harbor. Half an hour?”
The rush of blood in my veins was like electricity. I dropped the curtain and spun back to the mirror, and I was surprised to see that my face was no more than normal, a little sparkly around the eyes, pink around the cheeks, despite the thunderous pulse in my ears that just about knocked me flat.
“Done,” I said.
The launch, he said. What he meant was Axel Wenner-Gren’s motorboat, a long, beautiful blade made of polished wood, slicing the water in two. The tall man at the wheel wore a white shirt, khaki trousers, and no hat, and the wind flattened his bright hair against his skull. He pulled right up to the dock as if he owned it and tossed me a rope, which I wound around the nearest bollard. He jumped across the gap with a nimbleness that surprised me.
“How’s the leg?” I asked.
“Rather better. Is that your picnic basket?”
“It’s not much, I guess.”
“Never mind. I’ve got plenty of supplies at home.”
Thorpe pitched the basket in the stern, unwound the rope, and held out his hand. I grabbed the fingers. “Steady as she goes,” he said, passing me over, and while I was expecting some difference between shore and ship, the uneasiness of the deck alarmed me. Thorpe followed with the rope and took the wheel.
“Off we go,” he said cheerfully.
We landed on the eastern end of Hog Island, the private half, where Shangri-La sat at a graceful remove from the public landing that led to Paradise Beach. I had never been there, myself. Had not encountered Wenner-Gren since that Government House party in July, because of the blacklist, remember, the U.S. blacklist that kept him from the Bahamas. Why, just last month, the duke—reluctantly, it must be said—had signed an order impounding all Wenner-Gren’s commercial assets here, his bank and his dredging company and the Paradise Beach and Transportation Company, among others. So Wenner-Gren was not in residence, and the legendary entertainments at Shangri-La had come to a stop.
“Only a few caretakers left,” said Thorpe, leading me down the road, “and yours truly, of course. It’s rather ghostly, in fact.”
“But you’ve got all this to yourself!” I waved my arm at the cocoanut palms, the sea grapes, the glimpses of pure, liquid turquoise between the foliage.
“Still, it does get lonely, from time to time.”
In the course of our conversation, the road had begun to straighten, and the cocoanut palms to form orderly queues on either edge. I raised my hand against the sun and saw, about two hundred yards distant, a circular drive, a stone fountain—dry, I thought—and a large, shuttered building in the familiar colonial style.
“Lonely,” I said. “So what do you do when you’re lonely, Benedict Thorpe?”
He stopped and turned. “I work.”
“Oh, of course. You work.”
“It’s true.”
“No lady visitors?”
“No visitors at all.”
We stared at each other. Some birds twittered, the ocean stirred nearby. I returned my hand to my brow and peered back at the cottage. “Do you know what I think?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I think I want to see all your botany collections with my own two eyes.”
The cottage was larger than I expected, but I suppose my expectations were to blame. Of course a man as wealthy as Axel Wenner-Gren wouldn’t put up his guests in some quaint, measly, tumbledown beach shack! Thorpe led me past the main house, down a wide, tended path surrounded by tropical plants—palms, bougainvillea, sea grapes, you name it—until the fronds parted and there it stood, made of white clapboard, in that bungalow style of the British colonies: enormous, low-hanging roof, porches all around, view right down the beach to the wide Atlantic.
“Be it ever so humble,” I said.
“I’m afraid it’s not well-suited to visitors. Collections