Overseas
Beatriz Williams
Overseas
Overseas
BEATRIZ WILLIAMS
G. P. Putnam’s Sons / New York
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © 2011 by Beatriz Williams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Beatriz.
Overseas / Beatriz Williams.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-58490-3
1. Women in finance—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.
2. World War, 1939–1945—France—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.I55643O94 2012 2011047248
813’.6—dc22
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Book design by Meighan Cavanaugh
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
To my husband and children,
without whom the rest means nothing.
Table of Contents
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Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Amiens, March 1916
The rain beat steadily through the night and into the meager dawn.
My raincoat had wilted long ago, and still the bitter spray leapt up against my hands from the nearby cobblestones, drummed out the minutes as the congregation chanted matins in the cathedral across the square.
In some distant corner of my mind, I must have recognized the discomfort. The rest of me hardly noticed. I only huddled there on a wooden bench, under the scanty shelter of a green-striped café awning, and studied the cathedral’s west front with trancelike devotion. Inside that soaring space, Captain the Honorable Julian Laurence Spencer Ashford stood with his fellow British Army officers, reciting the psalms and the responses, bowing his head to his Lord. Soon he would rise to his feet and walk through a sandbag-framed door into the dismal wet square between us.
What would I say to him?
A surge of rainfall struck the awning above me and rolled along the cobbles in a wave, flinging itself against the cathedral towers; in that instant, the first low clangs of the bell tolled out across the square to signal the end of services.
I stood up, my heart striking madly against my chest. A few figures began to emerge from the doorway, shrouded by the downpour and the muted light of the early morning hour, and for a second or two I hesitated. I imagined our meeting, and my limbs went slack under a fresh burst of self-doubt.
But then a new and more horrible idea flashed across my brain.
What if I missed him?
I plunged in panic from under the awning and hurried across the square. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t thought I could possibly let his familiar figure slip by me, and yet as the bodies appeared, one by one, I realized the British officers all looked alike. All of them dressed in identical khaki trench coats, all wore the same peaked caps, all sported puttees and dark leather shoes. They were like images from a history book, from a war movie. They didn’t look anything like the man I knew.
But Julian was there. He had to be. On this day, in this town, in this cathedral, he had attended morning services with another officer and walked back to his billet near the train station. It was a historical fact. I anchored myself to that thought: it gave me courage. I scanned the shifting bodies in front of me, bore down determinedly on a man in khaki and stopped him.
“Excuse me,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Excuse me, can you tell me if Captain Julian Ashford attended services this morning?”
He looked astonished, as if a medieval king had leapt off the cathedral façade to address him.
“Please,” I said. “It’s really important. I have a message for him, an urgent message.”
“Yes, he was there,” the man said at last. He turned to the doorway. “He was sitting up front; he should be out directly.” He looked back at me and opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something more, but hurried away instead.
I stood there, letting the chill rain roll down my body, clenching my fists rhythmically against my coat, waiting. A few French officers came out, and then a cluster of nurses; townspeople, all women; a lone British officer, not Julian. He stopped, consulted his watch, stepped aside.
Into the void walked a tall familiar figure.
Julian. He looked exactly as I remembered, and yet so alien. His luminous face, his broad capable shoulders, the little smile curling the corner of his full mouth, the glance upward into the weeping clouds, the hand reaching up to settle his cap more snugly on his forehead: I knew all those details intimately. I had last seen them only a week ago. But it was all enclosed in his uniform, martial and colorless and nothing like the modern clothes in which my memory dressed him. My brain seemed to split apart, unable to process the two images together.
I realized he was walking away, together with two other officers. “Julian!” I called, but the word came out in a croak; I could hardly hear it myself. “Captain Ashford!” I cried, more loudly. “Captain Ashford!”
He turned at that, searching through the crowd for my voice, brow creased in confusion. His companions turned too, inspecting the faces around them, but Julian found me first, picked me out effortlessly from the shifting throng. He cocked his head and watched me approach, not moving an inch, sizing me up, his skin gleaming with rain in the hazy glow of a n
earby arc lamp.
He didn’t know me at all.
I’d told myself to expect that, but the sight of his puzzled face still shocked me. It didn’t show the smallest bit of recognition. I was a stranger to him.
“Captain Ashford.” I tried to ignore the sting of his indifference, tried to ignore his beauty, his magnetism, and the shattering love I felt for him. “Do you have a moment?”
He opened his mouth to say something in reply, some demand for more information, but at the last instant his expression shifted from suspicion to concern. “Madam,” he said, “are you quite all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, but even as the words left my lips, I realized the blood was draining from my face, that my ears were starting to ring and my knees to buckle under me. Don’t faint, I thought urgently, don’t faint, but already I was pitching forward.
Directly into his astonished arms.
1.
New York City, December 2007
On the morning I first met Julian Ashford, I woke up panting, roused by the excruciating intensity of a dream I could not fully remember.
At the time, with no reason to believe in anything but the concrete and linear, I put it down to anxiety. I often had nightmares before major business meetings, assuming I was lucky enough to catch any sleep at all. They weren’t particularly imaginative. I’d be running late in the morning and find myself stuck in slow motion, as if my arms and legs were made of wire; or else struggling to perform the lead role in a play I’d never rehearsed. Naked, of course.
But this dream was different. It had been submerged not in anxiety, but in a form of panic, so painful it was almost pleasurable. I’d been talking with a person—no, a man. Someone I cared about deeply; someone who cared about me. I’d been trying to explain something important to him, something vital, but he couldn’t understand me.
I squeezed my eyes shut, struggling for details, the quick thrust of my heartbeat banging violently into my eardrums. Who was he? Not my father, not a friend or colleague. No one I could identify. The sense of him was already fading, leaving me abandoned, shipwrecked.
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling for a moment, and then I threw off the duvet. I showered and dressed and fled to work, but the foreboding persisted, like a vise around my brain, even as I burst free from the subway stop on Broadway and Wall Street and swept up the towering sunlit phallus of the Sterling Bates headquarters, where Alicia Boxer awaited me on the twenty-fifth floor.
An early riser, Alicia; it was her only virtue.
“I mean, what the fuck, Kate?” she demanded, by way of acknowledging my arrival. “Where the fuck did these revenue numbers come from? Nineteen percent in year five?”
She sat at the far end of the bank’s best conference room, surrounded by wainscoting and bamboo shades and peaceful low-voltage incandescent light: an elegant contrast to the Modern American Cubicle theme on the Capital Markets floor downstairs, where I was currently on rotation. The presentation books for today’s meeting lay stacked in front of her on the mahogany table; her venti holiday-red Starbucks cup perched dangerously close to them, scenting the room with vanilla latte.
I eased into the empty chair at her right and summoned my still-reeling wits. “I think you and Charlie discussed the revenue figures Friday night? Before you left for the weekend?” I lifted the end of each sentence to make it sound like a question. You don’t do confrontational with Alicia, not if you don’t want to land a pension fund in International Falls, Minnesota, for your next assignment.
She raised her eyes and glared at me anyway. She had a round babylike face, so completely at odds with her personality it might have been a private joke between her and God. Pretty, in its way, particularly the arresting blue of her heavy-lidded eyes, but her current haircut—short and wispy, aiming presumably for a pixie effect—made that plump florid face look like Tinkerbell undergoing a severe allergic reaction.
Not that my opinion counted for anything. According to Charlie, she was sleeping with Paul Banner, head of Capital Markets and my current boss.
“Hmm. Did you forget your makeup today, Kate?” she asked.
On any other morning, this kind of comment—so typically Alicia, tossing her petty kindling atop the impotent inner rage of her subordinates—would have infuriated me. Today, I could hardly be bothered to shrug. “Your e-mail said to hurry in. And Charlie and I were up late last night, finishing the presentation.”
She tried again. “Do you have, like, some powder in your purse? I could loan you some mascara. This is kind of an important pitch, you know.” She tapped the stack of presentations. “Southfield Associates is a twenty-billion-dollar fund. A lead steer.”
“I’ve got lip gloss.”
“Good. You’re not going to find yourself in a room with Julian Laurence again anytime soon. You want to give the right impression.”
“Yeah, well, back to the revenue numbers. I had some questions about them myself last night, but Charlie said…”
“Charlie is full of shit. You should know that. Year five revenue growth shouldn’t be less than twenty-three, twenty-four. ChemoDerma is a growth company, Kate. Do you know how much skin serum they sold last year?”
I knew to the last dollar, but the question was obviously rhetorical. “A lot,” I said, “but the patent expires…”
“Fuck the patent. I want you to redo the spreadsheet with a revenue growth number of twenty-five percent in years four and five. Print out a dozen copies and replace the page in all the books.” She rose from her chair.
“But it’s not just that page. A couple of charts refer to these projections…”
“Replace them all.”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. “Um, isn’t Southfield supposed to be here by eleven? And Banner has us pre-meeting at ten forty-five.”
She ran her tongue along the ridge of her upper lip. “Come on, Kate. Where’s that can-do spirit we hired you for? Just find an intern.”
She picked up her latte and left the room.
“THANKS FOR SHOWING UP,” I growled at Charlie, as he staggered through the conference room door two hours later. I was leaning over my laptop, flipping through the last few slides of the presentation and hoping I hadn’t missed any references to the new revenue projections.
“Sorry, dude. My BlackBerry fell under the bed. Did you get them all done?” He nodded at the plasma screen on the wall, which was hooked up to my computer.
“Barely.” I clicked back to the title slide and straightened. My back and neck were stiff with tension; I lifted one hand to rub the hardened muscle at the top of my spine.
“You rock.” He set two cups on the table. “Peace offering. Peppermint mocha, extra hot, right?”
I looked at the cup. “Thanks,” I said, and picked it up, bathing my nose in delicate mint-chocolate steam. The tension eased fractionally. “So where’s Banner?”
“He’s not here yet?”
“Of course not.” The door opened and the intern wobbled in under a stack of presentations. I jumped up and snatched one, flipping to the pages I’d changed. All there. “Thanks, buddy,” I said.
“No problem. Just mention me to Banner.”
“Yep, sure.” I thumped the books on the table, dismissing him, but he didn’t leave immediately. He hesitated, hovering between the table and the door; I glanced back just in time to see him turn away with a shaming shake of his head.
I called after him. “Wait. I’m so sorry. What was your name again?”
“Doyle. David Doyle.”
“I’ll rave, I promise,” I told him, flashing a smile.
“Yo, that was awesome,” Charlie said, laughing, as David Doyle bolted out the door. “You slayed him.”
“Hardly. So where did Banner go?” I repeated. “It’s ten minutes to eleven.”
“Oh, probably doing the meet-and-greet with Alicia. No way Banner’s going to give up any face time with Julian fucking Laurence.”
“Yeah, well,
he should be more worried about the actual presentation.”
Charlie crashed confidently into a chair and began to swivel. “Kate, nobody around here has even met Laurence. Never takes sales calls. Never reads Street research.”
“Just the usual jerk, probably. You know these hedge-fund guys.” I got up and went to the monitor on the wall, adjusting the display.
“Kate, Laurence is not just some hedgie. He’s the hedgie. Grew Southfield from zero to twenty in, like, seven years. The dude has mythic fucking alpha. The real deal.”
I heard the rhythmic squeak of Charlie’s office chair, swiveling back and forth, and smiled into the TV monitor. He was a good-looking guy, Charlie. Not that I really noticed anymore, having seen him just about every day of my life for the past two and a half years, often for twenty-four hours straight, sometimes sloppy drunk, and once with horrifyingly explosive stomach flu (his, not mine). Good-looking in a bland way, with regular preppy features and straight thick brown hair, which he wore slicked back like some kind of Gordon Gekko mini-me.
“So what does that make him?” I turned around just in time to catch Charlie checking out my pencil-skirted derrière. “Not just any old jerk, but the jerk?”
“Come on, Kate.” He pulled a stress ball out of his pocket and began squeezing it with his left hand. “He’s a living legend. Timed the post-nine-eleven bounce-back to fucking perfection, made some leveraged bets on financial stocks. Risky shit, but it paid off. They unloaded all of it right at the top. Right at the top, dude. Nerves of fucking steel. The guy’s a billionaire now.” Charlie shook his head. His eyes shone with awe. “Not even thirty-five, and he’s cleared the wall. The whole fucking ballpark.”
“Impressive.”
“Oh, come on. Look at you, all stressing out. Strap on a pair of balls, for once.” He switched the ball to his right hand and rolled it around his palm, grinning slyly. “You’re a smart girl.”
“Thanks.” I clicked again to the first of the revised slides and frowned. Twenty-five percent. We were going to get slaughtered.
