I certainly had more important things to do than listen to Willie fail to apologize for the hundredth time. Yet when I returned to my town house that night, I found him there, just where I least wanted him to be. Somehow he’d managed, with his crutches, to get to the top of the stairs. Now he sat waiting for me by the fire. “The boys are asleep,” he said.
“I should hope so, given the hour.”
Willie cleared his throat.
You’re just a little banged up, darling, nothing serious . . .
I closed my eyes, reminding myself that though the car was damaged, and Ashley’s toy plane was smashed to pieces, the boys had come away from the crash with nary a scrape. My cuts were minor too. And by some miracle, my husband hadn’t been hurt at all.
I’d have to be an ogre to wish more pain upon the man, which is why I hadn’t told him that it wasn’t just cuts that bled after the accident . . . I’d awakened to cramping, spotting, and a devastating sadness. The doctor later told me that it was impossible to know if I’d been pregnant, but he doubted it very much due to my age, and that in any case, it might be better to avoid pregnancy given my declining health. Thyroid and cardiovascular abnormalities, he said. Something about how unusual such a condition was in a woman of my wealth and status—such ailments sometimes being the product of childhood starvation.
Well, I wasn’t shocked.
He insisted that I get rest or my life might be cut short. But I could sleep when I was dead. As Victor said, We have so short a time to make our lives mean anything. Besides, when you grow up as I did, you don’t expect to live long. Still, something struck me about the diagnosis.
Cardiovascular abnormalities?
Well, I did have a broken heart. I found myself wondering if another child would have brought Willie and me closer together. He was hard on our boys, but a little girl with my blue eyes might have melted him. Now we’d never know. And I couldn’t even bring myself to share with him the pain of it.
Tonight he was clean-shaven, tie neat. His smart appearance was meant to prove he wasn’t drunk. “You’re looking well, Bea,” he said, reaching for my hand as if to examine it for lingering bruises.
I could’ve told him there weren’t any. None of the physical variety. “It’s late, Willie.” My voice was frosty. I didn’t like to be this way. And I didn’t feel like I had a right to be. Yes, he’d crashed the car, but he’d been drunk. What was my excuse? I got into that car with him. I let my children get in that car. Looking at Willie now reminded me of every bad decision I’d ever made in my life—every opportunity I’d wasted or taken for granted.
“I know it’s late . . .” Willie said quietly. “If I could wait until morning to say what I’ve come to say, I would.”
My heart seized as I realized that he might have bad news. “My God, is it Emily?”
“It’s Lafayette’s birthplace. I’m going to buy it for you.”
Having braced for horror, I was entirely unprepared for joy. “What?”
“It’s a castle in the mountains of Auvergne—”
“The castle at Chavaniac is for sale?”
Willie nodded. “I’ve made inquiries. With the war, the descendants can’t maintain it. They’re reluctant to sell to someone outside the family, but they’re looking for a reason to part with it. They’re aware of your work at the Lafayette Fund and—”
“You want to buy me a castle,” I said. “Lafayette’s castle.”
Willie stared at his hands. “It’s no more than you deserve. I know how you grew up. How it left you feeling like you were on the wrong side of the gate, clamoring to get in. When we married, I really did want to fix that for you . . .” He risked a glance at me. “I still do.”
My heart filled with more emotions than I could name. He wasn’t the sort of man who knew how to apologize, but he was making a grand gesture. This was his way. And as far as grand gestures went . . . this was the grandest.
I was an illegitimate child of a bog Irish mother who started with nothing. And though Willie was American royalty, he hadn’t cared about that. He’d given me a new start. He’d helped me support my mother and half brothers—the ones I scarcely knew. He’d given me everything. And now he wanted to make me the fairy-tale princess of a castle.
Not just any castle either. The legacy of the Lafayettes had come to mean a great deal to me, and he wanted to give me a real, tangible connection to it. It was a terribly foolish, expensive, and impractical idea that could not have been better calculated to soften my heart! But what would I do with an old French chateau in the midst of a war? I couldn’t accept.