Chapter 55 - 52.b Chicago pt2

Joseph sat alone in the rear of the motorcar as it carried him northward through Chicago, one arm resting loosely beside him while his dark eyes followed the city beyond the glass. The window caught enough of his reflection to lay his face over everything outside, pale features and almost unnaturally still eyes floating across brick storefronts, passing streetcars and the broad sides of horse-drawn wagons whenever the light struck at the proper angle. Without the black armour, the helmet and the dark lenses through which most men knew T, there was something almost disconcertingly young about the man reflected there, though stillness aged him in ways wrinkles could not. His expression barely moved as the streets passed behind it, and anyone glancing through the window might have mistaken him for bored or tired when in truth Joseph was paying attention to almost everything.

Chicago was ugly in places, beautiful in others and frequently both at once, the contradiction appearing so naturally that after less than a day Joseph had already begun to suspect the city would consider any attempt to separate the two an insult. Smoke hung between buildings until distant rooftops lost their edges, factory chimneys fed a dirty veil across the sky, and soot had settled into brickwork so thoroughly that some façades appeared to have forgotten their original colour. Yet life persisted beneath the smog with an energy he found unexpectedly pleasant to watch. A horse plodded past pulling a delivery wagon whose driver sat with his coat open despite the chill, reins held loosely in one hand while he ate something wrapped in paper with the other, and another carriage rolled in the opposite direction carrying two women who were talking animatedly enough that one kept moving her gloved hands as she spoke. Men stood outside tobacconists reading newspaper boards, women emerged from grocers with parcels balanced against their hips, and children occupied whatever portions of pavement adults had failed to claim. Two boys chased one another around a lamppost until an older girl caught the smaller by his coat and apparently informed both that they were idiots, after which the chase resumed the moment she released him.

There were flags everywhere once he began noticing them. Some were large enough to cover considerable portions of buildings, others hung from shop windows beside handwritten notices concerning Liberty Bonds, war charities or collections for soldiers overseas, while small service flags appeared behind the glass of private homes, their stars carrying meanings Joseph understood without needing anyone to explain them. Newspaper boards mentioned France, Congress, shipping, casualty figures and baseball within inches of one another, as though the city had decided there was no contradiction in worrying about the Western Front and yesterday's score simultaneously. A woman emerged from a bakery with a loaf tucked beneath one arm while pausing to read a headline about fighting overseas, stared at it for perhaps three seconds and then continued walking because whatever the armies were doing in France had not removed the requirement that somebody provide supper.

Joseph watched her until the motorcar carried her away.

There was something almost incomprehensible in the simplicity of it, not because their lives were truly simple—Joseph knew better than to imagine poverty, grief, hunger, family or work became easy merely because a person had never seen a battlefield—but because so many of the things occupying their thoughts could still belong entirely to ordinary life. The woman leaving the grocer might be wondering whether she had enough flour for supper. The boy running along the pavement might be worried about whatever punishment awaited him when his mother discovered the state of his trousers. A clerk hurrying across the street with his hat clutched against the wind might be thinking about arriving late to work, while the young couple walking close beside one another beneath the buildings could afford to be concerned with each other and nothing larger for at least the next few minutes.

Joseph found himself wondering what that felt like.

Not peace exactly. He knew better than to confuse civilian life with peace simply because artillery was absent. There were families in these streets who had already received telegrams, women whose husbands were overseas, mothers who went to bed calculating the days since the last letter from a son, immigrants whose relatives might be fighting beneath another flag entirely, and men working twelve hours around machinery that could remove a hand as efficiently as any shell. The war had crossed the Atlantic in money, uniforms, shortages, troop trains, posters and empty chairs even if the German guns had not.

But there were things these people did not know.

Joseph's reflection remained motionless against the window as a streetcar passed in the opposite direction, its windows momentarily filling his view with seated passengers before the city returned beyond it. The children did not know what it meant to hear artillery passing overhead and recognise from sound alone that it was travelling toward somebody. The women walking with shopping baskets did not know the peculiar silence that sometimes followed a barrage when men stopped speaking because everyone was listening for what might come next. Even many of the men still moving through Chicago in civilian coats, men young enough to wear uniforms but not yet called into them, had never learned the difference between the distant concussion of a shell that belonged to somebody else's section of the line and the descending whistle that made every instinct in the body understand danger before thought had caught up.

Joseph knew that sound.

There were noises a man remembered accurately and others memory altered through repetition, but the whistle of incoming artillery belonged to neither category. It existed somewhere beneath memory, lodged in a place closer to instinct than recollection. The first fraction of a second was recognition, the next was calculation if there was time for calculation, and beneath both came something older that could reduce trained men to animals searching desperately for earth deep enough to hide inside. Sometimes there was time to throw yourself flat, sometimes enough to reach cover, and sometimes the pitch changed in precisely the wrong way and everybody nearby understood that the shell was no longer simply coming down somewhere.

It was coming down here.

Joseph had seen men freeze when they should have moved, good men and experienced men who had crossed open ground under machine-gun fire and returned for wounded friends, only to hear that descending scream on another day and become statues because the body had simply refused the final command. Others ran without knowing where they were running. Some shouted warnings nobody needed because everybody could already hear death falling toward them, while others became perfectly calm in the last second available, their faces taking on an expression Joseph had never been able to describe to anyone who had not seen it. There was nothing poetic about the moment, whatever newspapers might make of it afterward; there was mud, breath, fear and the humiliating knowledge that all the training in the world could not bargain with a piece of metal already falling out of the sky.

Then there were the sounds that gave no time for fear.

A grenade among men was smaller than artillery and somehow more personal. There was no distant gun crew, no long arc through cloud and smoke, no illusion that chance might choose another patch of earth. It landed close enough to see, close enough sometimes to hear against a duckboard or stone, and suddenly the world contracted around a few seconds and a handful of people.

Joseph's eyes followed a woman leading two children across an intersection while the motorcar waited behind a wagon, and for an instant he remembered neither Chicago nor the glass between himself and the street.

He remembered a boy.

Not literally a boy, perhaps. The Army had called him a man and given him a rifle, which apparently settled the matter for official purposes, but Joseph remembered looking at him and thinking that somebody's mother would still recognise the child beneath the uniform. He remembered another soldier who carried photographs of his children and showed them to anybody foolish enough to remain within reach for more than ten minutes, always beginning with the eldest and always ending with the youngest, as though the order possessed ritual importance. He remembered how absurdly quickly decisions could become permanent when something small and metal landed where it should not have landed, how there was sometimes no speech, no grand declaration and certainly no time to decide whether a man wished to become brave.

There was simply the knowledge that somebody had to move, followed by the movement itself.

A man could spend years afterward attempting to explain why one body had gone forward while others recoiled, but the truth was less noble and more terrible than most people wanted. There were moments when there simply wasn't enough time for everyone, and if someone was going to pay for those remaining seconds, a decision had to be made before fear could argue. You did not compose a final thought, did not hear music and did not suddenly understand the meaning of courage. You saw the young one who still wrote his mother twice a week, or the married fellow with three photographs folded into his breast pocket, and sometimes that was enough.

So the younger one could go home to his mother.

So another man might see his children again.

So somebody else's photograph did not become the last thing found in a dead man's pocket.

Joseph blinked once, and Chicago returned completely.

The woman and her children had reached the opposite pavement. One child immediately tried to pull free because something in a shop window had caught his attention, and his mother caught the back of his coat before he escaped. Joseph watched her bend down and say something stern enough to produce a guilty expression, then saw the little boy take her hand again, whatever crime he had contemplated apparently postponed rather than abandoned.

Joseph felt jealousy then, although the emotion carried no resentment.

He envied them their ignorance.

He envied the men who could hear a motor backfire without their bodies answering before their minds did, the children who could whistle while they played without ever having heard a whistle descending through the sky, and the women whose husbands and sons could still walk through the door carrying nothing worse than the day's frustrations. He envied anyone who could smell wet soil without occasionally remembering earth thrown into the air by explosives, or who could see fog gathering across a field without imagining shapes moving through it. Most of all, perhaps, he envied people whose memories remained in the proper order, so that a street was merely a street and a loud noise merely a loud noise rather than a door through which another place could suddenly enter.

Yet beneath the jealousy sat gratitude so closely joined to it that Joseph could not have separated one without damaging the other. He was glad the children did not know, glad the women did not know, and glad even for the young men still wearing civilian coats and arguing about baseball, wages or women, because ignorance of war was not weakness no matter what foolish people occasionally pretended. There was no virtue in knowing what torn bodies smelled like, no wisdom automatically bestowed by watching frightened men die and nothing admirable about learning to sleep while artillery worked somewhere beyond the horizon.

If they could remain ignorant of those things, Joseph hoped they would.

Perhaps that was part of what all of it had been for.

The thought had scarcely settled before traffic ahead slowed, and the motorcar drew alongside several military trucks stopped near the kerb. Joseph's attention shifted immediately. The vehicles were dusty and utilitarian, their canvas coverings rolled or tied back, and young soldiers in olive drab were climbing down from the rear while a noncommissioned officer on the pavement pointed them toward a building farther along the street. One of the boys landed badly, recovered before anybody except his companions could notice and received enough laughter from the others to suggest the incident would follow him for the rest of the day.

Joseph studied them as they passed, and most were young enough that the observation would once have surprised him.

It no longer did.

The war had gradually altered his sense of age until everyone appeared too young for whatever was being demanded of them. These men possessed a particular freshness Joseph recognised immediately, their uniforms not yet having learned their bodies, equipment sitting too carefully arranged and boots looking recently issued. Several carried themselves with the deliberate straightness of men conscious that civilians were watching, and one had plainly shaved that morning with greater care than his face required. Another could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, and when he jumped from the truck he adjusted the strap crossing his chest before looking back to say something to a friend still inside. Whatever answer he received made him laugh, and for a moment he looked so completely untouched by what his uniform might eventually demand of him that Joseph felt his jaw tighten.

He wondered whether the boy had a mother waiting for letters.

Most did.

Perhaps a father who had shaken his hand rather than embraced him because that was what fathers sometimes did when affection became too large to display comfortably, or a sister who had made him promise to bring something home from France, or a girl who had kissed him at a railway station and pretended not to cry until the train moved. Perhaps none of those things. Joseph knew nothing about him, and the ignorance mattered because it stopped the boy from becoming a symbol merely because Joseph had seen too many others wearing the same uniform.

One of the soldiers looked toward the passing motorcar and caught Joseph watching. Their eyes met through the glass for no more than a second. The American saw a large civilian in an expensive dark suit and Joseph saw a boy in a new uniform, and whatever assumptions either might have made about the other remained unspoken as the traffic separated them.

The motorcar began moving again.

Joseph turned his head and continued watching the soldiers through the rear window until the truck disappeared behind a streetcar. "Good luck," he murmured, speaking so quietly that the driver gave no indication of hearing him, then settled back against the seat and looked once more toward the city.

The streets changed gradually as they travelled north. Downtown's greater buildings loosened their hold on the skyline, and residential blocks appeared more frequently between commercial streets, while the density of heavy traffic eased enough for neighbourhood life to become visible in longer glimpses. There were still streetcars on the principal roads and automobiles enough to make crossing an exercise in judgment, but horse-drawn delivery wagons seemed more at home here, and the pavements carried women shopping, children running errands and tradesmen who knew precisely which doorway they were heading toward. Apartment buildings stood beside older houses and small stores, their windows crowded with curtains, plants and occasional faces, while bakeries, grocers, pharmacies and restaurants occupied the corners where foot traffic promised a living.

The driver had understood the destination when Joseph gave it, although Joseph had repeated both Lake View and the Bell and Crown to make certain there was no confusion. Helen had said she taught in Lake View and had spoken of the place with the casual familiarity of someone naming somewhere she genuinely used rather than inventing an invitation she expected never to be accepted.

The Bell and Crown.

Joseph had remembered the name without effort.

He had remembered the way Helen said it too, and that was considerably more irritating.

Nathan had noticed, of course. Nathan noticed nearly everything when noticing it would cause somebody else inconvenience, and the bastard had apparently listened to far more of Joseph's conversation aboard the train than his book had suggested. Joseph had spent the first portion of the motor journey telling himself that he was merely accepting an invitation. A drink, perhaps something to eat, some conversation and then a return to the hotel before nightfall. There was nothing complicated about it, nothing requiring preparation and certainly nothing that should have concerned a man who had walked willingly into circumstances that would have sent most sensible people in the opposite direction.

His right hand moved to his left cuff and adjusted it.

Joseph stopped when he realised what he was doing.

The cuff was already straight.

He looked at it for another second, then lowered his hand to his knee.

A minute later he adjusted the other one.

That irritated him considerably more.

The driver glanced at him through the mirror and then returned his eyes to the road, wisely choosing not to comment on the large, silent Englishman inspecting perfectly acceptable cuffs as though their alignment constituted a matter of national importance.

Joseph looked back through the window.

Helen might not even be there.

The possibility should have relieved him, but it did not. She had given him the name of the place and said that if he found himself with an hour while they were in Chicago, he ought to visit. That was an invitation, certainly, but invitations existed in degrees. Perhaps she had simply been friendly. Perhaps she gave similar suggestions to people regularly. Perhaps Joseph had mistaken ordinary warmth for interest because he had so little recent experience with either.

That thought produced an uncomfortable tightening somewhere beneath his ribs.

Women had not been entirely absent from Joseph's life, but there was a considerable difference between knowing women and allowing one close enough to matter. There had been Emily, and even thinking her name brought with it a private ache he had learned not to examine unless necessary. Apart from her, the years surrounding the war had left little room for anything resembling courtship. Nurses, clerks, widows, soldiers' wives, women behind counters and women encountered through work were people Joseph could speak to without difficulty because the terms of the interaction were understood. He knew how to be polite. He knew how to be useful. He knew how to stand between somebody and danger.

He had considerably less experience sitting across from a woman he found attractive while wondering whether she might find him attractive too.

That was absurd.

Joseph Taylor had walked toward gunfire, entered places sensible men fled and carried weapons through darkness while knowing something on the other side might be waiting for him. He had served beside Nathan Drake long enough that his understanding of what constituted an ordinary threat had become permanently distorted, and there were things he had survived that he suspected even Nathan occasionally considered excessive.

Yet the prospect of walking into a Chicago establishment and discovering Helen Whitmore waiting for him had made him adjust his cuffs twice.

Joseph looked down at them. "Ridiculous," he muttered, and the driver glanced into the mirror.

"Beg pardon?" the man asked, slowing behind a wagon whose driver had decided the middle of the road was an excellent place to conduct business.

"Nothing," Joseph replied, settling his hands deliberately upon his knees.

"All right," the driver said, and with the effortless tact of a man accustomed to carrying strangers he left the matter there.

Joseph tried to approach the problem as he would have approached anything else and discovered almost immediately why that was useless. There was no tactical information worth gathering, no perimeter required checking, no weapon needed loading and no useful advantage could be obtained by entering through another door. He did not even know what outcome he wanted beyond seeing her again.

That last part was at least honest.

He wanted to see Helen.

The admission made the rest simpler.

He remembered her sitting opposite him in the dining car, brown hair arranged neatly despite the journey and brown eyes that seemed to brighten whenever she found something amusing. She had spoken about teaching with the particular mixture of affection and exasperation common to people who genuinely cared about their work, describing older children who believed themselves much more worldly than they were and the strange satisfaction of watching something finally make sense to a student who had spent weeks insisting it never would. She had asked about England, about America through his eyes, about his family and eventually whether anybody waited for him at home.

Joseph had answered no.

Helen had smiled then, not triumphantly and not with pity, but softly enough that he had thought about it more often than he wanted to admit.

"Well, isn't that a shame," she had said.

That could have meant something.

Or nothing.

Joseph had survived too many years by refusing to mistake hope for evidence, and he saw no reason to abandon the principle now simply because the evidence had brown eyes.

The motorcar turned onto another street, its tyres jolting over an uneven patch of road before settling again, and the driver leaned slightly back. "Lake View now," he said, lifting one hand briefly from the wheel to indicate the streets ahead before returning it to the rim. "Your place isn't much farther. Few minutes, maybe, if nobody decides to leave a wagon crossways."

"Thank you," Joseph replied, straightening almost imperceptibly while his eyes moved over the neighbourhood.

Lake View felt different from the central city without becoming quiet. Streetcars still clanged along the larger thoroughfares and automobiles remained common, but the streets seemed to belong more obviously to the people who lived beside them. A grocer stood in his doorway speaking to a woman whose basket rested against one hip, and a delivery boy leaned his bicycle against a post before carrying a parcel into a building. Several men had drawn chairs near the front of a shop and were engaged in an argument requiring much pointing but very little anger, while farther down the block two girls in school clothes walked arm in arm and separated only when one recognised someone across the street.

The place bore the marks of the war without surrendering itself to them. A recruitment notice shared a wall with an advertisement for soap. A shop window displayed a small American flag beside shoes. One house had a service flag hanging behind the front glass, and Joseph deliberately looked away before counting the stars.

Helen lived somewhere among streets like these. She taught nearby, bought food somewhere, knew which streetcar to catch, knew shopkeepers and perhaps recognised children outside school. The idea made her more real than she had been aboard the train. There she had existed temporarily inside the strange suspended world of railway travel, where strangers could meet over dinner, reveal pieces of their lives and then separate at stations hundreds of miles apart. Here she belonged somewhere.

Joseph suddenly became aware that he did not.

His fingers approached his cuff again, and this time he caught himself before touching it. "No," he murmured, earning another brief glance from the driver, who apparently decided his passenger's private disagreements were none of his concern.

Joseph breathed slowly through his nose and forced his hands to remain relaxed upon his thighs. There was nothing to prepare. Helen either wanted to see him or she did not. She would either be there or she would not. If she was interested, perhaps the afternoon would become evening. If she was merely being friendly, Joseph could accept that without embarrassing either of them. If she never appeared at all, he would have a drink, walk through a city he had never seen before and return to Nathan before nightfall.

There were worse outcomes.

There were vastly worse outcomes.

The motorcar slowed, and Joseph's gaze moved forward until he saw the sign before the driver pointed it out.

The Bell and Crown occupied the ground floor of a substantial brick building among a row of shops and businesses, though the name suggested something more English than the establishment itself proved to be. Its broad front windows were neither obscured nor painted over, allowing the late-afternoon light to reach well into the room, and lettering curved neatly across the glass beneath a hanging sign whose painted bell had faded slightly on one side. It looked less like the rough drinking establishments Joseph knew from military districts and more like one of the newer cafés or cabarets Americans seemed fond of, a place offering supper, music and drink under the same roof and respectable enough that a schoolteacher could enter without having to explain herself afterward.

"That's you," the driver said as he brought the motorcar alongside the kerb, then glanced back when Joseph remained seated for a second longer than necessary. "Unless you changed your mind."

"No," Joseph replied, reaching for his money. "I haven't."

His reflection hovered in the window again, superimposed now upon the building Helen had named. Dark suit, white shirt, conservative tie, face still enough that nobody looking at him from outside would have guessed his heart had begun beating slightly harder. He reached for his cuff and deliberately stopped himself halfway there, closed the hand instead and used it to open the door.

"Thank you," Joseph said after paying the driver, and when the man wished him a pleasant evening Joseph stepped onto the pavement without correcting the assumption.

The motorcar pulled away behind him, leaving Joseph alone amid the ordinary noise of Lake View. A streetcar bell sounded somewhere farther down the road, a horse's shoes struck steadily against the street, and from an open shop door came the voice of a woman laughing at something he could not hear. People passed him without interest because to them he was simply another man in a suit standing outside a neighbourhood establishment, and Joseph found that anonymity strangely comforting.

He looked through the Bell and Crown's window.

There were several people inside.

For the first time since France, entering a building made him genuinely nervous.

Joseph stood there another moment, thinking of Nathan's infuriating smile outside the hospital and the promise that he would return before nightfall, then thought instead of Helen across the dining table on the train, quietly telling him where she taught and naming this place as though leaving a door open between them. He still did not know whether she had meant anything by it, whether she would be inside or whether there was anything in his life capable of becoming ordinary again. He did not know whether a man who had learned to measure seconds by shellfire and sacrifice could ever fit comfortably into the sort of life he had spent the journey admiring through glass.

For once, however, Joseph did not need to know before moving.

He crossed the pavement, placed one hand against the door of the Bell and Crown and stepped inside.

Warmth reached him first, followed by tobacco smoke, beer, cooking meat and the sweeter trace of women's perfume whenever somebody passed near enough. The establishment was larger than its frontage suggested, its long polished bar occupying one wall while tables filled much of the floor and a line of booths offered relative privacy beneath shaded electric lamps. Mirrors behind the counter doubled the bottles arranged upon shelves and caught pieces of the room in fragments—hats, uniforms, moving hands, a woman's face appearing between shoulders before disappearing again—while brass fittings shone wherever years of fingers had not dulled them.

The Bell and Crown was plainly making an effort to be more than a saloon. White cloths covered some of the smaller supper tables, waiters carried plates as often as glasses, and women occupied the room openly rather than appearing only as somebody's tolerated companion. A printed card near the entrance advertised supper and music, and farther back several tables had been shifted away from a modest raised platform where four musicians had somehow fitted a piano, cornet, clarinet and drums into a space designed for perhaps half that number.

The music was lively and syncopated, ragtime and the newer jazz influence blending together in a fashion Joseph lacked the vocabulary to separate. A young woman stood near the piano singing into the room without the assistance of anything more complicated than a strong voice and years of practice making it carry. She wore a dark dress brightened by a line of beadwork at the waist and throat, and whenever she turned beneath the electric lamps the beads caught enough light to flash briefly through the tobacco haze. People did not stop talking for her, nor did she appear to expect them to; the music belonged to the room rather than demanding possession of it, slipping beneath conversations, laughter, clinking glasses and the scrape of chairs.

Joseph paused just inside long enough to understand the place before moving farther in, and almost immediately noticed the uniforms.

There were perhaps a dozen soldiers scattered through the room, some sitting with women at tables and others gathered in small groups nearer the bar. Several looked scarcely older than the men Joseph had watched climbing from the trucks earlier, their uniforms still carrying the neatness of recent issue, although one or two wore theirs with enough ease to suggest they had been in service longer. One had his campaign hat resting on the bar and was telling a story to three companions and a young woman at once, embellishing it with enough movement of his hands that somebody had wisely relocated his beer beyond immediate danger.

The room treated the uniforms differently from ordinary clothing. Women noticed them, older men occasionally stopped to say something, and a bartender refused payment for one soldier's first beer after learning he was leaving within the week. There was pride in it, certainly, but something else as well: the expectation that men of the proper age ought to have some answer ready when asked what they were doing for the war.

Joseph became aware of that expectation when several soldiers noticed him.

Their attention might have meant nothing had it ended with the first glance, but a few looked again. One young soldier near the bar allowed his eyes to travel openly over Joseph's civilian suit, taking in his size, age and obvious health before returning to his companions, and something passed between them that produced a quiet remark and another glance.

Joseph knew the word before anyone said it.

Slacker.

The Americans used it freely. He had heard it in New York, read it in newspapers and seen it printed beneath cartoons mocking able-bodied men who allowed somebody else to do the fighting. Men who had exemptions sometimes carried documents partly because strangers could decide they deserved an explanation. Men genuinely avoiding service existed, of course, but so did shipyard workers, factory men, farmers, physicians and others whose absence from uniform had reasons invisible from across a room. War did not improve the human appetite for judgment; it merely provided new things to judge.

Joseph met none of the looks directly. He had spent too much of his life around men attempting to establish themselves through posture to feel threatened by boys who had not yet learned how little posture mattered once somebody began shooting at them.

He crossed to the bar.

"What'll it be?" the bartender asked while drying the inside of a glass with a white cloth, looking Joseph over with considerably less interest than the soldiers had shown him.

"Whiskey," Joseph replied, placing money upon the counter before reconsidering the prospect of spending an unknown amount of time waiting for Helen. "One."

"One whiskey or one whiskey until the lady arrives?" the bartender asked, reaching for a bottle.

Joseph looked at him.

The bartender glanced toward the door and then back to Joseph with the weary wisdom of a man who had watched this particular human ritual thousands of times. "You looked at the door before you looked at me."

"One whiskey," Joseph repeated.

"One whiskey," the bartender agreed, his mouth twitching as he poured and pushed the glass toward him. "We'll negotiate the rest later."

Joseph collected the drink and chose a booth from which he could see both the entrance and most of the room. The choice occurred automatically, and he noticed it only after sitting down. For several seconds he considered moving somewhere less tactically sensible purely to prove that he could, but the thought was ridiculous enough that he remained where he was.

Some habits had earned the right to survive.

For the better part of half an hour Joseph drank very little and watched Chicago enjoy itself.

The Bell and Crown grew steadily busier as working hours ended. Men entered in twos and threes, some still carrying the smell of offices or shops upon their coats, and women arrived either with companions or together, removing gloves and settling at tables where waiters brought coffee, beer, spirits and supper. Plates of sandwiches, roast meat, potatoes, pickles and bread moved between tables, and one harried waiter seemed to spend most of his time preventing customers from rearranging chairs faster than he could restore them.

A group of older men occupied a table near the front with cards spread between their drinks, their game repeatedly interrupted by disputes that appeared to have little relationship to the cards themselves. One accused another of changing the rules, prompting the accused man to demand how rules older than either of them could possibly have changed during the last hand. Nobody left, which suggested the argument was part of the entertainment.

At another table a young soldier sat close to a woman who had both hands wrapped around one of his, speaking earnestly while he listened with the fixed attention of a man trying to memorise her face. Her hat rested beside her and his campaign hat lay atop one knee, while a small envelope protruded from the pocket of her handbag. Neither drank much. Once she laughed and lowered her head, and the soldier smiled as though something painful had briefly become bearable; a few minutes later they were quiet again, her thumb moving repeatedly over the back of his hand.

Sweethearts, Joseph supposed.

Perhaps husband and wife.

It was impossible to tell, but the uncertainty did not matter. He had seen enough railway platforms to understand the shape of a goodbye before the people involved admitted they were saying one.

Elsewhere the room was easier. Two women near the band shared a plate while speaking close enough to hear each other over the music, occasionally turning to watch the singer, while a young man at the neighbouring table had apparently decided one of them was attractive and was engaged in an elaborate campaign to make himself noticed without actually approaching her. Every time she looked toward him, he suddenly became fascinated by his drink. Joseph watched the pattern repeat three times before deciding the woman had noticed exactly what he was doing and was enjoying herself considerably more than he was.

Near the bar the soldiers laughed again, and Joseph caught only fragments at first.

"English..."

"...look at the size of him..."

"...civilian."

He ignored them.

The singer finished one number to generous applause, exchanged a few words with the pianist and began another after barely enough time to drink from the glass left beside her chair. Someone near the front requested a song and received an answer that caused laughter from half the room, though Joseph missed it beneath a waiter asking whether he wanted something to eat.

"Not yet, thank you," Joseph replied, glancing toward the entrance before he could stop himself.

The waiter noticed. "Waiting on somebody, sir?" he asked, collecting an empty glass from the opposite side of the booth.

"Perhaps," Joseph answered, and the man gave him the sympathetic expression of someone who had seen many men discover the uncertainty contained within that word.

"Then I'll come back," the waiter said, sparing him further embarrassment as he moved toward another table.

Joseph looked at his watch.

Twenty-seven minutes.

There had never been an agreed time, and that was important. Helen had not said she would meet him at three, or four, or any other hour. She had told him where she could sometimes be found and suggested he visit if Nathan gave him time in Chicago. For all Joseph knew she remained at the school, had gone home or had made other arrangements because no sensible woman reorganised her life around the possibility that a man she had met aboard a train might appear without warning.

He understood every part of that reasoning.

It did nothing whatsoever to prevent him from looking toward the door again.

The door opened.

Joseph's hand stopped halfway toward his glass.

Helen stepped inside.

She paused just beyond the entrance while the door closed behind her, one gloved hand remaining briefly upon the handle as her eyes adjusted from the afternoon brightness to the warmer interior. She had changed since the train, though not dramatically. Her brown hair had been arranged neatly beneath a small hat that suited the shape of her face, and she wore a well-fitted walking suit in a dark shade softened by a lighter blouse at the throat, practical enough for the city while retaining the deliberate neatness Joseph remembered from the dining car. She was petite enough that several of the men standing nearer the entrance partly blocked her view of the booths, and for a few seconds she looked around without finding him.

Joseph realised he was sitting straighter.

He did not wave.

He considered it.

That seemed worse.

Then Helen saw him.

The change in her expression removed whatever remained of Joseph's concern that her invitation had been purely polite. Surprise came first because she had plainly not been certain he would come, but it lasted only an instant before a gentle smile spread across her face, unmistakably pleased and carrying something very close to relief. She adjusted the handbag hanging from one wrist and made her way through the tables toward him, passing close enough to several soldiers that their conversations faltered.

Joseph noticed that too.

He had already seen some of those men looking at Helen when she entered, and that hardly required great powers of observation. She was a beautiful young woman entering a room populated by young men, many of whom were only weeks or months removed from ordinary civilian lives and now acutely conscious of every attractive woman who passed within sight.

What changed the atmosphere was where she went.

The fair-haired soldier who had been watching Joseph earlier followed Helen's progress toward the booth, and his expression tightened when she stopped beside it.

"Joseph," Helen said, extending one gloved hand as her smile warmed. "You came." There was enough genuine pleasure in the words that Joseph felt something inside him unclench, though little of it reached his face, and he stood immediately, his height becoming considerably more apparent once he rose from the booth.

"You told me where to find you," Joseph replied as he took her offered hand, holding it carefully and only as long as propriety permitted before releasing it and stepping aside so she could sit. "It seemed discourteous not to make use of the information."

"Is that why you came, then? Good manners?" Helen asked as she settled into the booth and placed her handbag beside her, amusement brightening her brown eyes while Joseph resumed his seat opposite.

"No," Joseph answered before he could improve upon it, and the directness of the word made Helen's smile deepen.

Joseph reached for his whiskey and discovered that confronting artillery had required less thought than deciding what to say next. "This is a nice place," he continued, glancing toward the band as the singer moved easily through another number. "You recommended it well."

"That is a very safe change of subject," Helen observed as she removed one glove finger by finger and laid both neatly beside her handbag, sparing him by not pressing the earlier answer despite the amusement she made no attempt to hide. "I wondered whether your employer would actually let you escape. Professor Drake didn't strike me as a man who spends much time idle."

"He doesn't," Joseph replied, watching her settle comfortably against the booth.

"And you?" Helen asked, tilting her head slightly.

"Less than he does."

"Yet here you are," she said, letting her eyes move briefly over the civilian suit before returning to his face.

"He freed me for the afternoon," Joseph replied, and after a moment he added, "Possibly the evening."

"How generous of him," Helen said, and something in the slight emphasis she placed upon evening made Joseph wonder whether he had accidentally offered more information than intended. Her expression remained perfectly composed, however, the sort of composure that allowed a young woman to make an implication while leaving a gentleman every opportunity to pretend he had not heard it.

"Professor Drake considers himself generous," Joseph answered.

"And you disagree?" Helen asked, resting one forearm lightly against the table.

"Frequently."

"Is that safe?"

"No," Joseph replied, and Helen laughed softly enough that he found himself relaxing despite every instinct that had accompanied him through the door.

A waiter approached, and Helen initially asked for coffee before noticing Joseph's glass. "Actually, no," she amended, looking toward the waiter and then Joseph. "What are you drinking?"

"Whiskey," Joseph answered.

Helen considered the glass with mock gravity. "Then I'll have something considerably less determined than that," she told the waiter, who suggested a lighter drink and received her approval before moving away.

"So," Helen continued once they were alone again, folding her bare hands loosely upon the table, "you've seen Chicago."

"Some of it," Joseph replied.

"And what does England think?"

Joseph glanced around the room and then through the front windows toward the moving street beyond. "I like it."

"That quickly?" Helen asked, her eyebrows rising.

"Professor Drake said the same thing."

"Then perhaps it's an English weakness."

"He's not easily impressed by cities."

"Are you?" Helen asked, and Joseph considered the question seriously enough that her amusement grew before he answered.

"Not usually."

"Then I'll take that as a compliment," she said, lifting her chin slightly.

"You should," Joseph replied, and Helen's expression changed by only a fraction.

There it was again, he thought. Something he could almost identify but lacked enough recent experience to trust.

Helen looked briefly toward the band as the cornet climbed above the piano, then returned her attention to him. "What do you like about it?"

Joseph could have said the buildings, the streetcars or the size, but none of those were the reason he had spent so much of the motor journey looking through the window. "People are living," he answered after a moment, his gaze moving past her toward the room. "They seem very good at it."

Helen's smile softened into curiosity. "That's an unusual answer," she said, studying him rather than laughing.

"It wasn't meant to be."

"What did you expect them to be doing?"

Joseph looked toward the table for a second before answering. "Something more complicated."

Helen watched him long enough that he knew she had understood there was more beneath the sentence, but she did not immediately ask him to expose it. That was one of the things he had noticed aboard the train. She possessed enough curiosity to ask questions and enough sensitivity to recognise when a person ought to be allowed to decide whether an answer came next.

Her drink arrived, giving Joseph the opportunity to move the conversation somewhere safer. "How was your mother?" he asked as the waiter placed the glass before her.

"Very well, although disappointed that I couldn't stay longer," Helen replied after thanking the waiter. "She has perfected the art of making a grown daughter feel as though she's abandoning the family every time she leaves New York."

"I know somebody like that," Joseph said, taking another small drink of whiskey.

"Professor Drake?" Helen asked.

"Mrs Hargreaves."

"The woman who tells your employer when to eat?" Helen asked, remembering the description from the train.

"And me," Joseph replied.

"She sounds sensible."

"Don't encourage her."

"I haven't met her."

"That wouldn't stop her," Joseph said, and Helen laughed again before leaning a little closer across the table as the band grew louder.

"You know, you're considerably more talkative than you were on the train," she observed, keeping her voice low enough that the conversation felt more private despite the room around them.

"Am I?" Joseph asked, genuinely uncertain.

"A little."

"That's unfortunate."

"I didn't say I disliked it," Helen replied, lifting her glass immediately afterward rather than holding his gaze in a way that might make the implication too obvious, although the implication remained comfortably between them.

Joseph took a small drink of whiskey.

Across the room, somebody said, "Bet he's English."

Joseph's eyes moved without his head turning.

The soldiers near the bar had grown louder, assisted by drink and by the confidence young men often acquired when surrounded by friends. Four stood together now, though Joseph suspected only two were genuinely interested in him. One was the fair-haired soldier who had watched Helen enter, a broad-shouldered young man with closely cut hair and the flushed cheeks of someone who had been drinking faster than his companions.

"English, French, who cares?" another muttered, the words nearly disappearing beneath the music.

"Not in uniform, is he?"

Joseph returned his attention to Helen.

If she had heard them, she gave no indication.

"Do you teach every day?" he asked, and Helen's expression brightened as she began telling him about the school. She taught older children, which she explained meant spending half her time educating them and the other half convincing them that being nearly grown did not make them authorities on every subject known to civilisation. One boy had recently corrected her pronunciation of a French word despite speaking no French whatsoever, while a girl had become so accomplished at concealing novels beneath her arithmetic book that Helen had allowed the deception to continue for three days simply to discover how long the child believed she could maintain it.

"I confiscated the book yesterday," Helen explained, touching the rim of her glass as though the matter still amused her. "Right at the interesting part."

"That is cruel," Joseph observed, and Helen placed one hand against her chest in mock offence.

"It was educational," she insisted, though the smile undermined her defence.

"What did she learn?"

"That I notice considerably more than they think I do," Helen replied, and Joseph's expression shifted faintly.

"You and Nathan would get along," he said.

"I'm not certain whether that's praise."

"It wasn't."

Helen laughed and settled more comfortably into the booth. "Do you like children?" she asked, and the question surprised Joseph enough that his answer took a moment.

"Yes," he said eventually.

"You hesitated," Helen observed.

"I was deciding whether you meant generally or professionally."

"Professionally?" she repeated, her eyebrows lifting.

"My work occasionally involves protecting people," Joseph explained.

"Children?"

"Sometimes."

"And generally?" Helen asked, her voice softer now.

Joseph looked toward a table near the entrance where a little girl, perhaps six, sat beside her parents with both hands around a glass of milk while staring openly at the singer. Her father was attempting to eat while she asked him something every few seconds, and each time he answered she appeared to develop two additional questions. "Yes," Joseph said, watching her for another moment. "Generally too."

Helen followed his gaze, and when she looked back at him there was something warm in her expression. "You'd be good with them."

"You can't possibly know that."

"I teach them," Helen replied with calm authority. "I'm allowed to make judgments."

"That seems dangerous."

"It's one of the privileges."

Joseph shook his head faintly, but Helen caught the movement at the corner of his mouth.

The conversation continued with an ease he had not expected. They spoke about Chicago, about her four years living there, about the lake and the neighbourhood and which streets Joseph ought to see if Nathan permitted him enough time to behave like a visitor rather than an employee. Helen told him he should see the lake properly before leaving, then suggested several places with the careful phrasing of someone creating opportunities without openly asking for another meeting.

"If you're still here tomorrow, the lake is lovely in the morning," Helen said, tracing one fingertip around the base of her glass while appearing to study it. "Before everybody remembers they've somewhere to be."

Joseph looked at her, and Helen raised her eyes only after a moment, giving him enough time to understand that the sentence had not been entirely about Lake Michigan. "If I'm still here tomorrow," he replied, "perhaps you could show me."

"Perhaps I could," Helen answered, her smile appearing slowly enough that this time even Joseph had no difficulty recognising what it meant.

That one he understood.

The knowledge produced an unexpectedly pleasant warmth in his chest, and Joseph was still deciding whether he should say anything more when the voices from the bar intruded again.

"Look at him," the fair-haired soldier said, no longer making much effort to keep his voice private. "Big son of a bitch like that sitting here drinking while everybody else ships out."

Another soldier answered too quietly for Joseph to catch.

"Heard his accent. Probably came over here to get away from it."

"Maybe he's got a card," one of the others muttered, sounding considerably less enthusiastic about the subject.

"Sure he does. Every slacker's got a reason."

Joseph's fingers remained loose around his glass.

Helen's eyes shifted briefly past him.

She had heard that one.

"Ignore them," Joseph said quietly before she could react, and Helen returned her gaze to him.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she replied, though the set of her mouth suggested otherwise.

"You were thinking about it."

"Perhaps I was."

Joseph's mouth moved slightly. "Dangerous privilege?"

"One of many," Helen replied, and the dryness of it nearly made him smile.

The soldiers returned to their own conversation for several minutes, and Joseph allowed the matter to disappear. He understood what they saw when they looked at him. A large, healthy man of military age, perhaps a few years older than most of them but certainly young enough to serve, sitting comfortably in civilian clothes while American soldiers prepared to cross an ocean. They knew nothing of him. They did not know France, did not know what lay packed in his hotel room, did not know the black armour or the things T had done while wearing it. To them he was simply a man who looked capable of fighting and apparently had not.

Their conclusion was wrong.

That did not make it difficult to understand.

Joseph had been wrong about men with less evidence.

Helen asked him about England, and the conversation shifted again. She wanted to know what he missed, and Joseph surprised himself by answering honestly enough to mention particular foods, familiar weather and the strange comfort of hearing accents from home after spending too long elsewhere. Helen accused him of lying about missing English weather, which forced Joseph to explain that a person could miss something without believing it pleasant.

"Rain," Helen said, leaning her cheek lightly against one hand while watching him. "You crossed the Atlantic and what you miss is rain."

"Not rain specifically."

"Fog?"

"No."

"Grey skies?"

"You're making England sound miserable."

"I haven't been there. I'm working from your description."

Joseph regarded her for a moment. "You would get along with Nathan."

"You've said that already."

"It becomes more concerning each time."

Helen smiled and took another drink. "Have you ever thought about living here?"

The question seemed innocent enough until Joseph noticed how carefully she had asked it. He looked at her for a moment longer than the sentence required. "No," he replied.

Helen lowered her eyes toward her glass. "Never?"

"Never had a reason."

Her gaze returned to his.

Joseph realised what he had said only after the words were already between them.

Helen did not rescue him from them.

Neither did she tease.

Her smile merely softened, and she turned the glass once beneath her fingers before looking toward the musicians as though allowing him the dignity of pretending he had not just said something considerably more intimate than intended.

The singer finished another song to applause, and several couples began occupying the small open portion of floor near the band as the musicians moved into something livelier. Some danced with practiced confidence while others simply held one another and found the rhythm well enough to avoid embarrassment. A soldier dancing with a young woman nearly stepped on her shoe and apologised so extravagantly that she laughed against his shoulder, while an older couple moved with the comfortable economy of people who had been dancing together longer than either cared to count.

Joseph watched them for several seconds, then noticed Helen watching him watching them.

"No," he said.

Helen laughed, lowering her eyes. "I didn't ask."

"You were going to."

"I was thinking."

"Apparently I can tell."

"Perhaps Professor Drake is rubbing off on you."

"That's the most insulting thing you've said all afternoon."

Helen covered her smile with one hand. "Do you dance?"

"No."

"Can't?"

"Don't."

"Those are different answers."

"They lead to the same result."

"For today," Helen replied, and before Joseph could decide whether that constituted a threat or a promise, she glanced toward the bar. "Would you come with me? I'd like another drink, and if I wait for that poor waiter I suspect we'll be here until tomorrow."

Joseph stood immediately. "Of course," he said, moving aside as Helen collected her handbag but left her gloves upon the table to mark the booth.

The room had become busier during their conversation, forcing them to move between chairs and small groups of patrons while the band continued behind them. Helen walked just ahead until two men shifted unexpectedly into her path, at which point Joseph's hand moved automatically near the middle of her back without quite touching, guiding space around her more than guiding Helen herself.

She noticed.

Joseph knew she noticed because she looked back at him with the faintest smile before continuing.

They had almost reached the bar when fingers tapped Joseph twice on the shoulder.

The touch was not hard, merely deliberate, and Joseph stopped while Helen stopped beside him.

He turned his head first and found the fair-haired soldier standing behind him, one companion several feet away wearing the deeply uncomfortable expression of a man who had already advised against whatever was about to happen. Up close the soldier looked even younger than Joseph had thought, perhaps twenty or twenty-one, with enough drink in him to mistake humiliation for courage and enough friends nearby to imagine consequences would remain social.

"You got a problem?" the soldier asked, pitching his voice loudly enough that the men nearest them began noticing, and Joseph turned fully toward him.

The young man's confidence altered almost immediately.

Sitting in the booth, Joseph had appeared large. Standing directly in front of him was different. He rose above the soldier by enough that the boy's chin tilted upward before he could stop himself, while the dark suit concealed only so much of the strength beneath it. Joseph's face remained eerily still, his dark eyes settling upon the young man without anger.

"Excuse me?" Joseph asked, speaking quietly enough that the soldier had to listen.

The young man had already committed himself and lacked either the sobriety or wisdom to retreat. "I said, what are you supposed to be?" he demanded, glancing once toward Helen before returning his attention to Joseph. "Some kind of faggot coward? Big bastard like you sitting around drinking while men are going over there to fight. What, didn't have the balls to serve your country?"

The room immediately around them quieted by degrees, not all at once but through the small contagious silences by which public trouble announced itself. A man at the bar stopped halfway through raising his glass. One of the older card players turned in his chair. The bartender looked up without yet moving, apparently experienced enough to wait until he knew whether he had a quarrel or a fight.

Helen's expression hardened.

Joseph simply looked at the soldier.

He felt no anger.

That surprised him less than it might once have. The boy was not an enemy, not even truly an adversary. He was a frightened young man in a new uniform who had been given enough drink to confuse aggression with certainty, perhaps days or weeks from boarding a ship toward a war he understood mostly through recruiting speeches, newspaper columns, training grounds and stories told by men who had not seen much more than he had.

Joseph almost let it go.

Then the soldier smirked and glanced toward Helen as though expecting her embarrassment to complete whatever victory he imagined he had achieved.

Joseph's large hand moved.

It was not fast enough to resemble an attack, merely decisive. He placed his palm against the back of the soldier's head, fingers spreading into the short hair near the base of his skull, and before the young man understood what was happening Joseph drew him forward until their faces were close enough that nobody else needed to hear what came next.

The soldier stiffened, his hands rising instinctively before stopping when he realised Joseph had not struck him.

Joseph did not squeeze.

He did not need to.

"I've killed more enemy soldiers in one night than you've killed since you joined the Army," Joseph said quietly, every word stripped of pride. There was no boast in his voice and no pleasure in the statement, which made it considerably worse; he spoke about killing the way another man might speak about miles travelled or weight carried, something done rather than something to be admired. "So before you decide a civilian coat tells you what a man's done, learn enough about war to survive yours."

The soldier swallowed, whatever answer he had prepared disappearing as he looked into Joseph's face from only inches away.

"And don't use that word around me again," Joseph continued, his voice remaining almost conversational while his fingers loosened from the back of the young man's head. "Now piss off."

Joseph released him and placed one hand against his shoulder.

The shove was gentle by Joseph's standards.

The soldier nevertheless stumbled backward several steps before catching himself against one of his companions, surprise replacing anger so completely that for a moment he simply stared. Joseph had controlled the movement carefully enough not to knock him down, spill another patron's drink or turn the exchange into a fight, and the restraint itself communicated more than throwing the young man across the room would have done.

One of the soldier's friends caught his arm. "Leave it, Danny," he muttered, pulling him farther back while keeping his own attention on Joseph. "Christ, just leave it."

Danny appeared to consider recovering his pride. He looked toward his friends, toward Helen and finally back at Joseph, perhaps calculating how much dignity remained available if he continued.

Whatever he saw in Joseph's face persuaded him otherwise.

"Come on," his friend repeated, and this time Danny allowed himself to be led away, muttering something Joseph neither heard nor cared to hear.

The room slowly remembered its own business. Conversations resumed in pockets, glasses moved and the band, which had never stopped playing, reclaimed the spaces between voices. The bartender looked at Joseph, then at the retreating soldiers, and apparently decided that because nobody had fallen over and no furniture had broken, the matter required no professional involvement.

Joseph exhaled once.

"That was restrained," Helen said beside him, and when Joseph turned he found her smiling.

Not broadly, and certainly not with the delighted fascination of someone impressed by violence. It was a smaller expression touched by surprise, relief and something warmer, while her eyes moved briefly toward the soldier retreating to his friends before returning to Joseph.

"I didn't hit him," Joseph replied, lowering his voice now that the attention around them was dispersing.

"I noticed," Helen said, and the corners of her mouth lifted slightly.

"He was drunk."

"I noticed that too."

Joseph studied her, suddenly aware that she had heard the entire exchange and, more importantly, the sentence he had spoken into the soldier's ear. "I apologise," he said, his expression tightening almost imperceptibly.

"For what?" Helen asked, her eyebrows rising as she turned more fully toward him.

"The scene."

"You didn't begin it."

"I could have ignored him."

"You did," Helen replied, glancing toward the group of soldiers. "For quite some time."

Joseph followed her gaze. "You heard them earlier."

"I have ears," Helen answered, and when she looked back at him the amusement had faded into something more careful. "And apparently they were very wrong about you."

Joseph's expression became guarded.

Helen noticed that as readily as she seemed to notice everything else.

She did not ask how many men he had killed, did not ask where and did not ask whether what he had told the soldier was literally true. More importantly, she did not tell him he had been brave. Joseph had discovered that people who had not seen war often reached for that word because they meant kindness and had no better one available, but bravery was too small and too clean a word for much of what he remembered.

Instead Helen stepped a little closer, close enough that the movement belonged unmistakably to him rather than simply making room for another patron, and placed her hand gently over his where it rested against the edge of the bar.

Joseph looked down at her fingers.

Helen's hand was small against his.

"You don't have to tell me," she said, and when Joseph lifted his eyes to hers, her expression held none of the curiosity he had expected. "Not today."

Something in his chest tightened again, though differently this time. "Thank you," he replied, and Helen left her hand there for another moment before looking toward the increasingly crowded room.

The band had moved into another lively number, more couples had begun dancing and the soldiers at the opposite end of the bar were now very deliberately looking anywhere except toward Joseph. Danny's friend was saying something to him with the weary irritation of a man explaining that an avoidable humiliation had, in fact, been avoidable.

Helen's thumb moved once against the side of Joseph's hand.

"Would you like to go for a walk?" she asked, keeping the invitation light enough that it could have been nothing more than a desire to escape the noise, although the fact that she had not yet removed her hand made the question considerably less ambiguous. "You said you liked Chicago, and you've seen most of it through windows so far. That hardly seems fair."

Joseph looked at her.

Outside, the afternoon had begun its slow decline toward evening, but enough light remained to give them time before Nathan's imposed deadline. Lake View waited beyond the door and the lake itself lay somewhere to the east, while for once there was no mission attached to any of it. No report needed collecting, no perimeter required securing and nobody had ordered Joseph Taylor to go anywhere.

Helen was simply asking him to walk with her.

"I'd like that," Joseph answered easily, and something in his voice made her smile deepen.

"Good," Helen replied as she slipped her hand from his and returned to the booth long enough to collect her gloves and handbag. When she came back she did not move ahead of him toward the door but stopped beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. "Then come along, Mr Taylor. You've had Professor Drake's opinion of Chicago, a driver's opinion and half an hour to form your own. I think it's time somebody who actually lives here showed you the place."

Joseph reached for the door and held it open, allowing the cooler air of the street to enter around them. "Lead the way, Mrs Whitmore," he said as Helen passed beneath his arm and onto the pavement, and when she glanced back with a smile that made it increasingly difficult to believe her invitation aboard the train had ever been merely polite, Joseph followed her outside.

The city had changed while they were in the Bell and Crown.

It had not become quieter, exactly, but the character of the noise had shifted with the hour. Shopkeepers were beginning to draw things in from pavements, workers were returning home and streetcars carried a different crowd than they had earlier, men standing shoulder to shoulder behind windows with lunch tins or folded newspapers while women carrying parcels found whatever room remained. Lamps had not yet taken possession of the streets, but electric signs and shop lights were beginning to appear beneath the fading daylight, each window acquiring greater warmth as the sky above the buildings cooled.

The sun had dropped far enough west that it entered the streets in long slanting bands wherever the buildings allowed it, turning upper windows briefly gold while leaving the pavement below in blue-grey shadow. Smoke that had seemed merely brown during the afternoon now caught copper and orange at its edges, softening the roofs until the city appeared to dissolve upward into the evening.

Helen waited until Joseph joined her before beginning east.

"You really were going to sit there until I arrived, weren't you?" she asked as they moved together along the pavement, adjusting one glove before beginning the second.

"I had nowhere else to be."

"That's not an answer."

"It was intended to be."

Helen smiled without looking at him. "How long?"

Joseph hesitated.

"Joseph."

"Twenty-seven minutes."

Helen turned her head sharply enough that he knew the precision had betrayed him. "You counted?"

"I looked at my watch."

"More than once?"

Joseph said nothing.

Helen's smile became positively dangerous. "I see."

"There's nothing to see."

"Of course not."

"You didn't give me a time."

"I didn't know whether you'd come."

Joseph looked down toward her as they waited at the kerb for a streetcar to pass. "You hoped I would."

It was Helen's turn to hesitate.

The streetcar clanged past them before she answered, passengers visible through the windows for a moment at a time. "Yes," she admitted when they stepped into the street with several other pedestrians. Her tone was composed, but the colour that touched her cheeks had not been there a moment earlier. "I hoped you would."

Joseph absorbed that quietly.

Helen glanced toward him as they reached the opposite pavement. "You might say something."

"I don't know what."

"That is becoming a habit."

"I was pleased to see you too," Joseph said, and the simplicity of it stopped her teasing more effectively than any clever answer might have done.

Helen looked ahead again, though her smile remained. "That's better."

They walked without hurry.

Joseph had spent most of his adult life moving with destinations, orders or responsibilities attached to every mile, and there was something unexpectedly difficult about deliberately going nowhere quickly. His natural pace was too long for Helen's, so he shortened it without thinking, while she guided them through streets she plainly knew well enough to navigate without conscious attention. She pointed out a bakery whose proprietor, according to her, believed every customer needed to know his political opinions before being permitted to buy bread, then a druggist who extended credit to families more often than was probably wise and complained loudly whenever anyone thanked him for it.

At one corner a group of children recognised Helen.

"Miss Whitmore!" a boy called before apparently remembering that teachers were not supposed to exist outside school, his expression becoming uncertain as his companions turned to stare.

Helen stopped with the patient resignation of a woman accustomed to this phenomenon. "Good evening, Thomas," she said, looking at the boy's untucked shirt and then at the ball tucked under one arm. "I assume your arithmetic is already finished."

Thomas looked immediately guilty.

Joseph watched the entire collapse happen in less than a second.

"Nearly," the boy attempted.

Helen raised one eyebrow.

"Some of it."

"Thomas."

"I'll do it before supper."

"Before supper means before supper, not while your mother is clearing the plates."

"Yes, Miss Whitmore," Thomas replied, then looked toward Joseph with enormous curiosity.

His friends were already doing the same.

Joseph looked back.

"Who's he?" one of the smaller boys asked with the fearless rudeness children possessed before adults trained it out of them.

Helen's cheeks coloured faintly. "Mr Taylor is visiting Chicago."

"From England?" Thomas asked, apparently identifying the accent from two words Joseph had not yet spoken.

"Yes," Joseph answered.

The boys regarded him with renewed interest.

"Did you fight Germans?" another asked.

Helen's expression changed immediately. "William, that is not an appropriate question."

Joseph could have left it there.

Instead he looked at the boy, who had already lowered his head. "Yes," Joseph replied.

William looked up again.

"Did you—"

"William," Helen warned, and this time the boy surrendered.

"Sorry, sir."

"It's all right," Joseph said, and after considering him for another moment he nodded toward the ball. "You'd better finish before Miss Whitmore discovers whether your arithmetic is done."

All three boys looked toward Helen.

She smiled pleasantly.

They ran.

Joseph watched them disappear around the corner. "Terrifying."

"I manage," Helen replied, and there was enough satisfaction in her voice that Joseph looked down at her.

"They're afraid of you."

"They respect me."

"That isn't what I saw."

Helen laughed as they continued east. "Thomas has handed me the same unfinished arithmetic twice this week. Fear may be the only educational method remaining to me."

"Perhaps I should lend you the armour."

"The armour?" Helen repeated, and Joseph realised he had spoken too casually.

He looked ahead.

Helen waited.

Joseph sighed faintly. "Work equipment."

"That sounds mysterious."

"It looks ridiculous in a classroom."

"You haven't seen my classroom."

That answer saved him, and Joseph suspected Helen knew it.

As they walked, the city opened and closed around them in successive little worlds. One block smelled of bread and coffee, another of horses, coal smoke and something frying in fat. They passed a butcher washing down the pavement before his shop and a woman bargaining with a grocer who appeared to enjoy the argument enough that neither was making much progress. Men returning from work carried newspapers beneath their arms, and children were being called indoors from windows above the street, names travelling down through the evening one after another.

Joseph heard German spoken outside one shop and another language he could not identify two doors farther along. American flags appeared frequently enough to be conspicuous, particularly outside businesses whose names sounded European, and he noticed one shopkeeper had placed a printed declaration of loyalty prominently in his window beneath the flag.

Helen followed his gaze. "People notice names now," she said quietly as they continued.

Joseph looked toward her.

"German names especially," she explained, keeping her voice low enough not to carry. "Some families have been here twenty years and suddenly somebody wants to know whether they're American enough."

Joseph looked back toward the shop. "War makes fools busy."

Helen gave him a sideways glance. "That's a very English way of putting it."

"It's a very accurate way."

"I didn't say it wasn't."

They continued walking, and after another block Helen nodded toward a patriotic poster pasted against a wall. "The soldiers in the Bell and Crown weren't unusual either," she said. "Not the drinking part. The rest."

"I know."

"You do?"

"I've seen the word slacker often enough since we arrived."

Helen's mouth tightened slightly. "People are very interested in knowing why a man isn't wearing a uniform. Sometimes more interested than the government."

Joseph glanced toward her. "And what do you think?"

"About men who won't serve?"

"About men who aren't in uniform."

Helen understood the distinction. She took several steps before answering. "I think there are cowards," she said finally, adjusting the strap of her handbag upon her wrist, "and I think there are men working in factories, men with bad lungs, men supporting families, men the Army doesn't want, men waiting for boards to decide what to do with them and probably a dozen other sorts I haven't thought of. I also think shouting at strangers in cafés is a poor method of determining which is which."

Joseph's expression softened slightly. "Sensible."

"I try."

"You didn't seem especially sensible when he insulted me."

Helen looked up at him. "I didn't hit him."

"Neither did I."

"You put one hand on him and moved him about six feet."

"Three."

Helen stared at him.

"Approximately."

Her laughter followed them halfway down the block.

By the time they drew nearer the lake the air had begun changing. Joseph noticed it first as a coolness moving against the streets, cleaner than the warmth held between brick buildings and carrying a faint dampness that reminded him of open water before he could see any. The city remained around them, but its eastern edge announced itself through wind, through widening sky and through the way the evening light suddenly had somewhere unobstructed to go.

Helen noticed him noticing. "You can smell it," she said, turning her face slightly into the breeze.

Joseph drew a deeper breath. "Yes."

"Everybody thinks I'm imagining that."

"They're wrong."

"Good," Helen replied. "I've known you less than two days and you've already become useful."

"High praise."

"Don't become accustomed to it."

They crossed another street and moved toward the older developed portion of Lincoln Park, where the city's hard geometry began surrendering ground to paths, trees and open spaces. The park did not erase Chicago so much as give it room to breathe. Carriages and automobiles still moved along the drives, pedestrians occupied the walks and the distant clang of streetcars remained audible behind them, but grass replaced pavement in broad stretches and leafing trees broke the lines of buildings. Couples walked without obvious destinations, nurses pushed perambulators, children chased one another beneath the watch of mothers who had clearly exhausted the day's supply of warnings, and elderly men occupied benches from which they observed everybody with the proprietary suspicion of people convinced the park had deteriorated since their youth.

The lake appeared gradually between the trees and structures ahead, first as brightness and then as water.

Joseph slowed.

Helen noticed and slowed with him.

Lake Michigan stretched beyond the city with enough breadth that the opposite shore might as well not have existed. The water was dark blue where the evening had begun claiming it and brighter farther out, its surface broken by wind into countless small moving planes of light. The sun was descending behind Chicago rather than into the lake, leaving the eastern horizon cooler and cleaner while the western sky above the city gathered gold, copper and a bruised violet beneath the smoke. Buildings behind them caught the last direct light along their upper windows, and the lake returned that fading brightness in a way the soot-darkened streets never could.

Joseph stood looking at it.

Helen let him.

The wind coming off the water was stronger here, catching the edge of her coat and threatening the brim of her hat until she lifted one hand to secure it. Joseph instinctively shifted to the side from which the wind came, placing his larger body between her and some of it, and Helen noticed without commenting.

"It's bigger than I expected," Joseph said eventually, his eyes remaining upon the water.

Helen smiled. "Everybody says that."

"I knew how large it was."

"Knowing and seeing aren't the same thing."

"No," Joseph agreed. "They're not."

There were people along the shore despite the cooling evening. A father walked with a little girl whose hand disappeared almost entirely inside his, while farther away two boys threw stones and argued over whose had skipped farther. A young couple stood close enough together to require no explanation, and several women walked abreast along the path, skirts moving in the wind while their conversation rose and fell beyond Joseph's ability to distinguish words.

The lake itself seemed indifferent to all of them.

Joseph found that comforting.

He and Helen resumed walking, keeping close enough to the water that the breeze remained constant. Chicago stayed visible behind them through the trees and across the open spaces, its smoke now transformed by sunset into something almost beautiful. Chimneys that had dirtied the afternoon sky became black marks against orange light, and windows began illuminating one after another as offices, apartments and shops turned inward toward evening.

"Better than the motorcar?" Helen asked after several minutes.

Joseph looked toward the water. "Much."

"I told you."

"You did."

"And better than Professor Drake's sightseeing?"

"He interrogated our driver for half an hour."

Helen laughed. "Interrogated?"

"He calls it conversation."

"What did he ask?"

"Where the man lived. How long he'd driven. Whether he had children. What Chicago was like. What people did for entertainment. What they ate. Whether anyone he knew had been ill."

Helen turned her head. "All in half an hour?"

"Approximately."

"Did the poor man survive?"

"He seemed to enjoy it."

"Then perhaps it was conversation."

Joseph gave her a betrayed look. "Don't encourage him."

Helen smiled, and they continued until the crowds thinned slightly.

For a while neither spoke.

The silence between them did not feel awkward now. Joseph discovered that Helen was capable of walking without trying to fill every empty moment, and he appreciated that more than he knew how to say. She occasionally pointed out something worth seeing—a familiar building, a path she preferred, a view that opened unexpectedly toward the water—but otherwise allowed him to look.

Joseph watched a small boy run ahead of his parents and stop near the shore, arms spread as though he personally intended to confront the wind. His mother called him back, and the child obeyed only after his father added something in a deeper voice.

"You were watching from the car too, weren't you?" Helen asked.

Joseph glanced at her.

"You have a particular look when you're thinking," she explained.

"What look?"

"Like you're somewhere else but still listening."

Joseph returned his attention to the lake. "Yes."

Helen waited.

"They don't know," he said eventually.

"Know what?"

Joseph's jaw moved once before he answered. "War."

Helen's expression became quieter.

Joseph kept walking. "Some of the men here will. Some already do. But the children don't. Most of the women don't. A lot of the men don't."

"Is that bad?" Helen asked, and there was no accusation in the question.

"No," Joseph replied immediately. "It's good."

Helen looked toward him.

"It's very good," he continued, speaking more slowly now because the thought was difficult to shape without saying more than he intended. "I was jealous of them in the motorcar. Then I realised I was glad for them."

Helen's hand tightened slightly around the strap of her handbag. "Those can both be true."

Joseph looked at her.

She shrugged one shoulder beneath her coat. "People always want feelings to behave properly. They rarely do."

"Teacher?"

"Woman," Helen corrected, and the dryness of it drew the faintest smile from him.

They reached a quieter portion of the walk where a bench faced the lake, but neither suggested sitting. The sun had sunk farther behind the city now, its remaining light spreading horizontally beneath the smoke so that Chicago seemed rimmed in fire without being consumed by it. Electric lamps began coming alive along the paths, faint at first against the remaining daylight, while farther back the city's windows multiplied into yellow squares.

Joseph stopped again.

Helen stood beside him.

For several seconds he simply watched the water.

"It doesn't look like the sea," he said.

"No?"

"No."

Helen waited for more.

Joseph studied the horizon. "The sea feels like it's going somewhere. This doesn't."

"That's a strange thing to say about water."

"I know."

"What does this feel like?"

Joseph considered it. "Like it intends to stay."

Helen smiled faintly. "Chicago would approve of that answer."

The wind lifted a loose strand of her brown hair from beneath her hat, and she reached to put it back only for the breeze to pull it free again. On the third attempt she gave up with a small sigh, and Joseph watched the strand move against her cheek before realising he had been staring.

Helen noticed.

She did not fix the hair again.

"You've become quiet," she said.

"I've been quiet most of the afternoon."

"Not like this."

Joseph looked back toward the lake. "I'm thinking."

"Should I be worried?"

"Probably not."

"That's very reassuring."

He glanced down at her. "You wanted to know whether I liked Chicago."

"And?"

"I do."

Helen's smile returned. "I'm glad."

Joseph's gaze remained on her for another moment. "I think I understand why you do."

The answer affected her more than the compliment itself might have done. Helen looked away toward the water, and for a few steps the poised young woman who had teased him effortlessly in the Bell and Crown appeared almost shy.

They resumed walking.

A motor horn sounded faintly from the city behind them, followed by the distant clang of a streetcar, but along the water those noises had become background rather than command. The lake wind carried voices away before they could travel far, leaving each group of walkers inside its own small circle of conversation.

Helen moved closer.

Not enough to touch him.

Enough that Joseph noticed.

"May I ask you something?" she said after a while, looking ahead rather than up at him.

"You usually do."

"That's not permission."

Joseph considered that. "Yes."

"Why did you come today?"

He looked at her.

Helen kept her attention upon the path. "And don't tell me because I gave you the address. I know that part."

Joseph was silent long enough that she finally looked up.

He could have found a safe answer. He had spent years learning how to provide answers that were true without revealing anything important, and Nathan had occasionally remarked that Joseph could turn silence into a form of bureaucracy.

Instead he said, "I wanted to see you again."

Helen's steps slowed by a fraction.

Joseph continued before he could decide he had made a mistake. "I didn't know whether you meant anything by giving me the address. I still came."

"I meant something by it," Helen replied, her voice quieter now.

Joseph looked at her.

She met his eyes. "I thought I had been rather obvious."

"Apparently not."

"Joseph, I told a man I'd known for several hours where I teach and where he could find me in Chicago."

"When you say it that way..."

Helen laughed, shaking her head. "How else should I say it?"

"I don't know."

"You really didn't know?"

"I suspected."

"That's better."

"I wasn't certain."

Helen's smile became gentler. "And now?"

Joseph looked at her hand hanging beside her coat.

Then at her.

"More certain."

Helen did not answer immediately.

Her gloved fingers brushed the back of his hand as they walked.

It could have been accidental.

The second time was not.

Joseph looked down.

Helen continued facing forward with such perfect composure that he almost admired the audacity of it.

His hand turned slightly.

Their fingers met.

Neither of them made a ceremony of what followed. Joseph simply closed his hand around hers with extraordinary care, as though something so ordinary required greater control than any weapon he had ever handled, and Helen's fingers settled naturally between his.

They continued walking.

Joseph had seen men die for moments less peaceful than this.

The thought arrived without invitation, and for once he did not allow it to remain. He looked instead at Helen beside him, at the lake beyond her and at Chicago gathering its lights behind them.

For the first time in years, the present seemed sufficient.

Helen gave his hand a small squeeze. "You're thinking again."

"Yes."

"Complicated?"

Joseph looked out over Lake Michigan, then back toward the city where evening had begun in earnest. Somewhere miles behind them Nathan was probably standing beside a hospital bed asking questions nobody else had thought to ask, Mrs Hargreaves remained in New York with Horsley and enough authority to make both men feel supervised across several states, while here in Chicago soldiers were preparing to leave for France, families were sitting down to supper and children were being called home from streets that would look much the same tomorrow.

Joseph looked down at Helen.

"No," he said, and the faint smile that followed surprised even him. "Not this time."

Helen's answering smile remained with him as they turned along the lakefront beneath the first evening lamps, walking slowly enough that neither seemed particularly concerned with how long the return journey might take.