“Fresh from the kettle, sweetheart,” Clara replied, turning with me, her hand reaching out, her fingers lightly brushing my bruised knuckles, feeling the steady, rhythmic sixty-cycle pulse beating strong in my wrist:
“The Admiral likes three drops of clover honey.”
“Just like his sister.”
Inside the living room, the atmosphere was a cathedral of manufactured patrician comfort.
Sitting in my favorite high-backed leather wing chair by the brick fireplace—the chair my grandfather had built in nineteen-seventy-eight—was Vice Admiral Arthur Sterling (Retired).
At seventy-two years old, Arthur looked like an iron statue that had been polished with fine oil and dressed in bespoke English tweed.
He wore a dark charcoal three-piece suit of heavy Yorkshire wool, an unbuttoned waistcoat displaying an antique gold pocket watch chain, and a pristine white spread-collar shirt with mother-of-pearl collar stays. His silver hair was combed back with military precision from a high, aristocratic brow; his skin was tanned from forty years of yachting off Bar Harbor; and his eyes were two unblinking, terrifying discs of pale arctic ice.
