With This Kiss

the lakeshore and served tea.
    And then he seduced his wife under the shade of the willow.
    Afterward, Grace lay on the grass, her head on Colin’s leg, and watched the late afternoon sun cast shadows of thin spears over his dark limbs and her pale ones. In her opinion, it wasn’t possible to be any happier than this.
    That was before supper.
    Colin put aside his plate after they finished Mrs. Busbee’s pie. Then he took out a sheaf of paper.
    “What is that?” Grace asked, made tipsy by the combination of an excellent wine and too much sun.
    “A letter,” he said. He looked up at her, his eyes glittering over the sheet. “Years ago, I received just such a letter.”
    She took a closer look and burst into laughter. “That’s the one I sent you after Lily cut the fingers off my gloves.”
    “Your very first,” he said, smoothing it on the table. “As you can probably see, it’s been read two or three hundred times, Grace.”
    The laughter died in her throat.
    “I never had the time or the courage to write you a proper response, though I might have jotted down a line or two. This afternoon I wrote you the letter I should have sent, had I been braver and you a bit older. God help me, I remember that week far too clearly.”
    He began to read.
    Dearest Grace,
    I’m sorry about your gloves. I would love to buy you some more, but as a lowly midshipman, I’m not allowed to leave the ship when it docks. This last week was rather horrible for me, too, but for different reasons. We encountered a ship full of slavers. I think that we probably could have avoided an actual battle by boarding it in an orderly manner, but Captain Persticle is eager to sink ships. You see, the navy gives you a prize if you defeat an enemy ship. We did sink it, after a battle that seemed hours long, but turned out only to take forty minutes. Unfortunately, the quartermaster, Mr. Heath, who has two little boys at home, was caught by a bullet fired by one of our own sailors. And the slaves… the slavers threw them all overboard.
    He took a drink of wine. Grace took a deep breath and held out her glass; he refilled it for her. She sipped wine that smelled like flowers, while Colin’s steady voice told the story of how Mr. Heath died, and what he had said about his children the day before.
    He paused, looked at her. “Are you all right?”
    “Yes.” Grace was holding his left hand tightly. “I am so glad to know of Mr. Heath, Colin. And to hear of his children. And those poor African people. It is important .”
    He didn’t say anything, just nodded, but his voice lost a bit of its impassiveness. Her letter had been one sheet; his was five sheets.
    The next day he worked with Daedalus all morning and then, in the afternoon, he wrote a letter to Mr. Heath’s wife and children. After that, he found Grace’s next letter, and answered it. His was more than eight pages long, and much of it was difficult to hear. Grace cried, because Colin did not (but should, in her opinion).
    The next night he did, though. Just a tear, but she thought it was a priceless tear. He told her, in that letter, what it was like to kill someone. The man had jerked upward as the bullet hit him, and then collapsed, falling to the ground, one leg twisted underneath him, staring at the sky. He had written about what it was like to know that someone—some mother’s son, no matter how despicable—was dead by your own hand.
    And he wrote about the ordinary moments when he would think he saw the man walking across the deck, shoulders hunched, walking somewhere fast, as if he had a place to be. A person to meet.
    That night Colin didn’t dream of blood.
    A fortnight or so later, Grace woke in the night and propped herself on an elbow, looking at Colin’s face by moonlight. It was shadowed and hollowed by all that had happened to him.
    As she watched, a smile shaped his lips. “Come here,” he murmured, pulling her down onto his chest.
    The letters were helping, and so was she; she knew that truth deep in her bones. Death stood on one side, and she on the other. Every time they made love, every morning he spent taming Daedalus, every afternoon he spent writing, every evening when he read aloud another letter, every time he teased her or asked her a question about one of her paintings, she dragged him farther onto her side.
    The side with life in it, not death.
    She came out of that kiss a little breathless. Sometimes they just looked at each other and that was