I didn’t want to teach my children that safety was more important than duty or honor, so we left our boys on that dock, my heart breaking to see them wiping away tears. Only once we were under way did I whirl on Willie. “You frightened them. Worse, I suspect you did it on purpose.” My husband had never made me so angry. “You’re drunk, but that doesn’t excuse you from terrifying our children just to try to force me to stay behind.”
Willie punched a frustrated fist against the crutch that reminded him of his incapacity. “I’d have locked you in a bloody closet if I could have. A father has a right to want to prevent his children from becoming orphans.”
The loss of his parents shaped his life—just as being fatherless had shaped mine. That pain once drew us together, and remembering it should’ve softened me, but I was too angry. “Then maybe you should’ve stayed behind.”
After all, since the amputation of his leg, I was now the more physically capable, though I wasn’t cruel enough to point it out.
“The boys can do without me,” he said. “They can’t do without a mother. Even one so reckless as you.”
“Willie, when we quarrel like this, you make me wonder if our loss at sea would be no great loss at all to our boys or to the world. And you nearly make me wish for oblivion.”
He grimaced, then positioned his crutch on the stairway to the upper deck. “I’m going up to see Forts Hamilton and Lafayette. Good view from up top.”
He’s going to fall, I thought, half wishing it in spite. I didn’t want to be around to pick him up, so I went belowdecks where, like worms, Willie’s words wriggled themselves into my mind and made me feel rotten. Maybe my presence in France wasn’t necessary, but I couldn’t be satisfied at the sidelines anymore, longing for Emily and trying not to pine for Maxime Furlaud. Especially knowing there was something wrong with my ticker, and that there might be fewer years left to me than anyone supposed. Resentful that my husband had made me face this unattractive inner truth, I kept away from him the first dark days of our voyage. Eventually, I found Willie in his stateroom, bathed in sweat and vomiting into a trash bin. “It’s nothing but seasickness,” he rasped.
“Seasickness? That’s rich.” The man who ran gunboats and took our yacht into a storm on our honeymoon had never been seasick a day in his life. Suspicious, I poured a glass of brandy. He refused it, which was the proof I was looking for. I knew things were bad between Willie and the bottle, but a perilous sea voyage was scarcely the time to go sober, and I told him so.
But with Willie, it was all or nothing. “I shouldn’t have frightened the boys. I didn’t mean to. So for you and for them, I’m giving up my life of drink and dissipation. I shall not touch a drop for a year.”
It should’ve made me happy, but I knew why he’d started drinking so heavily in the first place. What else could he take for the pain? “This journey is going to be difficult even without the well-meaning bravado of sobriety . . .”
“Damn you, woman, won’t you let me do anything to prove your happiness means more to me than my own?”
He spit this loving sentiment in my face with such cantankerousness that I didn’t know whether to press a pillow to his face or a kiss to his brow. “Oh, Willie,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of it all. And in that moment, I loved him, hated him, and everything in between.
I didn’t think he’d keep to his resolution not to drink, but for the rest of the trip, his force of will was something to behold. By the time we approached port, he emerged from his stateroom sober but limp as a noodle. “France at last,” I said, hardly believing it possible. It was painful to think that Victor would not be here. That he was forever young and gallant . . . and gone.
“We got past the Boche anyway,” Willie said with grim satisfaction.
“Don’t tempt fate.” The Lusitania, after all, had been sunk within sight of shore.
As it happened, our luck held with regard to submarines. In the matter of hats, I wasn’t so fortunate. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere,” I said, forcing the porters to search every nook and cranny of the steamer for my missing hatbox. I needed my ostrich cartwheel, my peacock tricorne, and my lacy sleeping caps! Surely it was bad luck to go ashore without them. How could I possibly entreat with the descendants of Lafayette to sell me Chavaniac while wearing a pedestrian straw peach basket?
Willie didn’t want to wait. “If we don’t get through customs quickly, we’ll miss the last train to Paris tonight. I’ll pay someone to keep looking for your hats. In the meantime, I imagine you’re eager to see your friends, and I’m rather anxious to meet them myself.”