She must have caught some manner of a flu-ish ague, which was horribly unfair, to be sick on her first trip abroad with her husband. But she was, and all she could do was hunker through it.
Her appetite waned. The sight of food, no matter how elegantly plated, left her queasy; the odors of sautéed meats and rich sauces were enough to make her leave the table. All she could bear to consume was freshly baked bread and softened cheese—which, happily, Paris had in abundance. She gorged on long crispy sleeves of baguettes, sometimes still warm from the oven, their crusts crackling at her touch, tender white insides ready to be devoured. She’d tear into them with her bare hands （if nobody watched）， smear them with salted butter and goat cheese, a touch of jam, fig or pear or green tomato.
In all her life, she had never tasted bread so fine.
She drank tea by the gallons until she grew tired of it and switched to water and dry white wine . . . which France also offered in abundance.
“I wish you would try the turbot,” Jack said one night, their last night before they were to depart for the Riviera, and then North Africa. He gazed at her from across the restaurant table, ignoring the anxious waiter and the other patrons （ogling, because in a rising babble of languages, one after another they’d realized with whom they dined） and the constant churn of noise from outside, all the motorcars and coaches and people hurrying past the windows with their collars turned up.
The rain struck the panes in slender clear daggers, always falling.
“Just one bite,” he said, setting down his knife and fork, touching his napkin to his lips. Nestled in its little green glass bowl on the table, the flame of a candle bent and trembled.
The turbot lay slick and unpleasant on her plate, drowning in capers and congealing butter. In her mind, she imagined lifting the fork, flaking apart its flesh, and nearly at once her throat closed with nausea.
Jack reached out his hand to her. She smiled at him tightly, their fingers meshed. Along with her diamond engagement ring, along with the other sparkling rings she wore to make him happy, they wore matching wedding bands, plain gold, unadorned.
Madeleine looked from the rings to his face, trying to find the words to placate him. She hated worrying him. Tonight he looked nearly as haggard as she felt. He looked nearly . . . vulnerable, which was a word she had never once associated with John Jacob Astor before. Yes, vulnerable—because of her—and that pained her.
Yet in the end, all she could offer was, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
The next morning, figuring the math, she finally understood why.
She hadn’t caught a cold.
February 1912
Alexandria, Egypt
The wet weather followed them all the blessed way, from Paris to the coast. The steamer they’d booked in Villefranche had navigated the rain and waves without undue effort, but instead of the limpid beryl sea Madeleine had been hoping to see, for days the Mediterranean remained a cheerless, opaque froth.
As they churned toward the harbor of the fabled city, Alexandria loomed gray before her: drab gray sky, drab gray sand. Gray, dull little houses that resembled nothing more than the massive gray stones stacked in blocks along the shore, slathered in seaweed and foam. Blackened, skinny masts from the myriad boats dotting the water bobbed up and down, up and down, stabbing at the clouds.
In the near distance rose the replica Pharos, that lost ancient wonder of a lost ancient world, now nothing more than a shadowy smear of a lighthouse, shrunk small behind the lens of her porthole glass.
Standing there in her cabin, looking out at it all, Madeleine exhaled a slow, sad breath.
“There, there,” murmured her maid, as she fastened the clasp of Madeleine’s necklace. “It cannot rain forever, madame.”
“Can’t it?”
“It won’t,” said the woman. “You’ll see.”
Rosalie Bidois, a firmly proper lady’s maid taken on back in New York, was the most optimistic Frenchwoman Madeleine had ever met.
She hoped that Rosalie was right, that the rain would soon stop, that the clouds would scatter to the four corners of the earth to reveal a benevolent blue sky.
She turned and caught a glimpse of herself in the wardrobe mirror, a girl washed to gray like everything else, her hair pulled back, her dress and hat darkly sensible. Only her earrings showed any color, Burmese rubies that dangled like fat drops of blood from her lobes.
Her gaze strayed downward. She turned sideways in the glass and ran her hands over her front, trying to feel the tiny lump of her baby beneath her corset.
“Your coat, madame.”