TWENTY-THREE

BEATRICE

Paris

June 1915

“I’d like you to meet him,” I told Emily. “With your keen eye and cool judgment, you’ll advise me of your decision on the matter: Is Maxime Furlaud to be taken into our hearts? Are we to fan the flame—or stamp it out?”

I said all this lightly, to prevent causing alarm, but Emily’s shock could not have been more complete. “Beatrice, you’re a married woman!”

“For the time being,” I said, keeping my eyes on the stack of invoices we’d accumulated on Lafayette Fund business.

“For the time being?” Emily’s tone forced me to look up.

I took a deep, fortifying breath. “You should know that I’ve asked Mr. Chanler for a divorce.” Emily stared, uncomprehending, shaken as only someone in love for the first time can be to realize that not all love lasts. And I sighed. “That look on your face is precisely why I didn’t tell you before now.” Also why I didn’t explain that Willie apparently planned to fight me. “Divorce isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

Emily folded her arms, plainly unwilling to accept that view. “What about your boys?”

“Nothing need change for them. Billy and Ashley still have a mother and a father—insofar as Willie is capable of being a father, anyway.”

Emily shook her head. “Divorce may not change their daily lives, but trust me when I say it will change them. What they’ll read about you in the gossip sheets—” She stopped herself, perhaps remembering the barrels of ink spilled when her parents divorced. “Don’t tell me you aren’t worried.”

She made such a very good point that I had no choice but to glare.

“I’m only concerned for you,” she added.

“And I’m concerned about your trip north,” I replied, for on the heels of her betrothal she’d been invited to visit her future mother-in-law at the castle of Motte-aux-bois. “It’s not so far from the trenches.”

Emily eyed me shrewdly. “If you’re so concerned, you should join me, especially if it will forestall the folly of a luncheon with a French officer.”

“Not a luncheon,” I protested. “Only tea. Nothing untoward ever happens over tea.” I knew this because Captain Furlaud and I had been to tea every afternoon for a week since his return to Paris on some military errand. He’d been the perfect gentleman, picking me up from the hospital, or from my work with Clara Simon and Marie-Louise LeVerrier to help find housing for refugees.

Captain Furlaud and I had exchanged not so much as a kiss, and yet our conversations were emotionally intimate. This I didn’t share with Emily, because I knew she’d tell me that if I didn’t go with her to meet her mother-in-law, I should at least go with the Chapmans to Switzerland to visit my husband and attempt a reconciliation. I admit, I’d considered it, but Willie hadn’t answered my cable of condolence regarding Freddy Vanderbilt’s death, and I had no wish to playact the devoted wife while he was getting in fighting trim.

Besides, Captain Furlaud had proved to be quite a restorative presence after long hours dedicated to war relief work. So, within a half hour of seeing Emily off at the train station, I was again at the Franco-American restaurant, sipping tea with the earnest blue-eyed French officer, who asked, “What does it mean when President Wilson says Americans are too proud to fight?”

It means Wilson is a craven jackass, I wanted to say, but I worried he’d disapprove of such language. “It means he’s not going to avenge the sinking of the Lusitania. To hear a real American leader who actually cares about his murdered countrymen, listen to Theodore Roosevelt.” The former president had been outraged by Wilson’s meek response, saying we couldn’t meet the kaiser’s policy of blood-and-iron with Wilson’s milk-and-water. There are worse things than war, Roosevelt had also said, invoking the image of drowning American men, women, and helpless babies.

“Wilson can’t hold out much longer,” I said, nursing my third cup of tea. “He’ll be dragged into this war eventually, so he might as well start getting prepared for it now.”

“You speak so confidently and knowledgeably about world affairs,” Furlaud said with an admiring smile. “Can I ask where you were educated?”

“The school of hard knocks.”

He laughed. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.” Most people assumed I learned from Willie, and there was some truth to that, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I’d taken an interest in political causes before we met. If anything, it was a mutual interest that brought us together, but I didn’t want to say any of that to Furlaud.

“So you’re self-taught?” he asked.

“In fine American tradition,” I replied, remembering the charity school for impoverished children where I first learned my letters. I was lucky to have been able to learn when so many other children were sent to work in factories . . .

The captain’s smile faded. “What you said when we first met, that you were a poor girl born on the wrong side of the blanket. Was that true?”

Heat seared down my neck—I’d have never admitted something like that in daylight to a person I could meet again. It would be easy enough to deny it now. Wise to do so, even. Still, for some reason, looking into his calm blue eyes, I found that I couldn’t lie. Maybe it was because I was still seeing flashes of Minnie in every refugee child on the streets of Paris.

I lowered my gaze into the swirling depths of my teacup. “My father, well—I’m not entirely sure who he was. I grew up in Boston calling the butcher my mother and I lived with Papa. He took me for lemon ices and carried me on his shoulders to better see all the Revolutionary statues on Boston Common. I loved him dearly. Then one day he suddenly dropped dead of a disease that might’ve been cured if he’d had more money . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Furlaud said. “That’s terrible.”

“It was made worse by the fact that we weren’t even allowed at his funeral.”

“Why not?”

I cleared my throat. “Because he had a wife in another town.”

Furlaud’s eyebrow inched up; then he forced it back into place.

“I hadn’t known,” I explained, my voice thick with dredged-up grief. “It came as a terrible shock. To lose my papa, then our home, then his name, then to learn that I wasn’t even his blood . . . Ma confessed that my real father was a man I never met, and that I had half brothers by yet another man.”

“I see,” replied Furlaud, eyes filling with pity.

But remember that pity has a half-life, Minnie used to say. So don’t cry. Nobody puts a coin in your cup unless you make them smile.

I forced a shaky laugh. “Here I thought I was the bastard brat of a Boston butcher, but I wasn’t even that!”

He didn’t seem fooled by my bravado, and put a hand on mine.

It encouraged me to go on.

“It seems that my mother had married young, and her husband died of cholera—a disease easily prevented with clean water. She found herself widowed with two boys to support; she left them with their grandparents and thereafter did what she must . . . which is how I came along.”

Furlaud was intent on me, letting his tea go cold. “How old were you when the butcher died and you found all this out?”

“He died four days after my eighth birthday,” I said.

He winced. “So young . . .”

“Old enough to learn that life can change with a snap of the fingers. One moment I was a poor but well-fed child living over a butcher’s shop, with the occasional opportunity for dance lessons. The next moment I was a cold and hungry urchin in the frozen streets of Boston’s Chinatown. I didn’t know how long we’d survive; lots of people didn’t. So I found a way to sing and dance for my supper . . . and in one way or another I’ve been singing and dancing for my supper ever since.”

I didn’t want to tell him more. I wasn’t even sure why I’d told him this much. Perhaps he understood, because he squeezed my hand and said, “What a remarkable story it must be. The one about how a girl in those circumstances became you. I hope you’ll tell it to me sometime.”

“I just might,” I said softly. But not today. I’d already said more than I wanted to, so I tried to shake off the gloom. “Now, Captain Furlaud, tell me something about you. Something cheerful.”

“Only if you call me Max.”

“All right, Max. If you could choose any city in which to live, which would it be?”

“New York,” he said without hesitation, which seemed akin to heresy for a Frenchman.

I loved New York because it was frenetic and pulsing with life—all-American zest—but Paris . . . why, there was no finer city on earth, and I told him so. “One can’t turn a corner in Paris without seeing something older than my whole country or discovering some enchanting piece of art, fashion, or cuisine.”

“Speaking of cuisine, in the past week I’ve drunk enough tea with you to swamp a battleship—now I have an appetite. I wonder if you might let me take you to—”

“A chocolatier?” I asked, ducking the invitation to dinner again. “I thought you were a patriot, sir. Chocolate is too important to the war effort to spare; it doesn’t spoil, it’s easy to ship in large quantities, and it’s dense nourishment for the troops!”

Max was good-natured about my taunting. “Well, then, where will you let me take you? I have only Sunday before I return to duty, and I’d like to spend the day together.”

I wanted that too. He wasn’t like any of the men I’d been attracted to before—he had money, but he wasn’t a charismatic star of the stage, not a witty luminary of the social set, or a brooding artist, or a mad adventurer. He spoke of soldiering as a duty, without any relish. His manner was entirely frank, which I found to be a perplexing intoxicant. Perhaps after years of marriage to a complicated man, the straightforward Captain Maxime Furlaud was just the antidote I needed.

Where could we go together? It’d have to be somewhere innocent. “Notre-Dame.”

“I begin to suspect you are a secret Catholic.”

“No, but I am forming a secret passion.”

He eyed me with transparent hope. “A passion for . . .”

“Gargoyles. They’re brilliantly conceived, providing diversion for both water and evil spirits.”

He grinned. “I hope to be equally brilliant in providing diversion for you.”

On Sunday he took me to Mass at Notre-Dame. From there, we went to the Church of Saint-Séverin, not so interesting outside but remarkably beautiful inside. From there we visited the old Greek Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, and I felt full of grace by evening, having passed nearly all my day in the houses of God. I cannot say the spirit descended on me. I was too pagan for that, but I wished to be touched by sanctity at least! Better to fend off the less than saintly urges I was beginning to entertain about the captain as we strolled the streets discussing literature, history, politics, and more personal subjects.

Max told me how, in his youth, he’d yearned to escape the family vineyards. He said he’d founded a bank as much to live in a modern, more cultured world as to make money. “You see, I’m a provincial at heart, but I admire sophisticated marvels. That is why I find you so appealing, madame.”

I nearly twirled at this compliment. “I thought it was my new hat.”

“That too is a showstopper,” he said, leaning one shoulder in a doorway. “Will you write to me at the front?”

I pretended to hesitate. “I’m told the censors read everything.”

“Do you have such intimate sentiments to express that you worry about prying eyes? If so, I think you should confide all your secrets now.”

I had only one secret I wished to confide. “If you’re trying to charm me, you should know that it’s working. I’m charmed.”

His expression lightened. “Charmed enough to come inside? This is my house. Come up and I’ll make you an omelette.”

I sputtered a laugh at this tempting offer, but when he opened the door and swept his arm in invitation, I stood there like a wide-eyed ingenue. “Madame,” he said with soft reassurance, “my intentions are honorable.”

I wasn’t sure mine were, but I went with him anyway.

Our first kiss was over a plate of eggs, served with bacon and stale trench cake. A tender first kiss, my side of it curious, his nearly reverent. And I realized I’d never been kissed like that before. I’d been kissed roughly by predatory men. I’d been kissed by Willie in heated passion. But I’d never been kissed by anyone in complete adoration.

I lit from within, musing that it was strange to feel a moment of pure joy in the midst of a war.

After that kiss, we couldn’t stop smiling, until Max said, “You’ve rescued me, Beatrice . . .”

Now he looked so serious I had to jest, “From the Huns? Not yet, but I’m trying.”

He remained earnest as his thumb caressed my lower lip. “You’ve rescued me from the despair of this war. You give me hope. I never thought to be caught up in something like this.”

I didn’t ask precisely what this was. A diversion, a wartime romance—or something even more serious? Whatever it was seemed quite outside of the present, but we did linger a little in the future. “When this is over,” he said, “I don’t want to make cognac.”

“Why should you?”

“Because my forefathers have been making cognac for generations. I cannot sell the family business to outsiders. I couldn’t do that to my sister.”

“Why not sell to her?”

“Sell it to a woman? She doesn’t have money.”

“Make her a loan. Why not?”

He smiled as he considered it. “What a brilliant creature you are . . . I’d like to write to you when I’m at the front. I’ll send letters by way of a friend and tell you of my deep affection for a lady named Marthe so the censors cannot gossip.”

I grinned and nodded my agreement. “Do me a favor and try not to get shot, won’t you?”

Then I planted a kiss on his lips. I’d never initiated a kiss before. With Willie, I’d never had to. I’d never even wondered whether or not I was the kind of girl who liked to kiss first, but now I wanted to find out, and all it took was a man who made me feel admired and adored.

I could get used to this, I thought, not wanting to worry about where it might lead.