“So you changed it to marry Mr. Chanler?”
I nodded. “And to leave behind my past.”
“You say my past as if there is something shameful in it.”
“A divorce,” I admitted, telling him of the actor I married at sixteen.
He dismissed this. “You were a veritable child.”
I didn’t think he’d be as dismissive of the rest, for which I was not much older. “There were also cigarette cards . . .” These were glamorous celebrity photographs, collected by gentlemen. Sometimes wholesome. Sometimes . . . risqué. Now I struck a sultry pose. “For a time, I was the pretty face of Ogden’s Guinea Gold cigarettes, wearing not much more than a straw cowboy hat!”
I said this boldly, but from beneath my lashes, I glanced up to gauge his reaction. Unfortunately, his shadowed expression gave away little. “Mr. Chanler knew of this?”
“Oh, yes. I daresay he was quite the collector in his day . . . though, with so many Minnie Ashley photographs in currency, it seemed wiser to take a new name than to try to buy them up and burn them.”
Wiser to discard my old self like a costume, slip into a new one, and hope everyone would forget . . .
Max took a gulp of the pinard from his canteen, then steepled his hands beneath his chin. At length he shook his head in what seemed like bewilderment. “What Puritans you Americans are to worry about a thing like that . . .”
I blew out a nervous breath, sputtered a relieved laugh.
“Is Beatrice a family name, then?” he asked.
“Oh, no. It’s only . . . well, I’ve never really had a name of my own. I wasn’t entitled to the Ashley surname, or to my natural father’s, and Minnie became a persona upon a stage who would do anything for laughs. So in marrying Willie and starting fresh, I just chose a name of my own. Beatrice.”
He tilted his head as if this were a great curiosity. “It’s an apt name in any case. For me, you’ve been like Dante’s Beatrice, the spirit who leads him from Purgatory to Paradise. Is that where you got it?”
“I plucked it from Much Ado About Nothing.”
He grinned. “Shakespeare’s pleasant-spirited Beatrice?”
Shakespeare’s orphaned Beatrice. The one who scorned conventional love, fearing to give up her freedom. The one wooed by a stubborn, infernal bachelor, who spit at her, I love thee against my will. And to whom she returned much the same sentiment. That was the way of it with Willie and me from the start . . . but to Max, I said, “I liked the posh sound of it.”
“Well, between us, Mrs. Minnie Furlaud will do nicely . . .”
Dear God, no, it wouldn’t. Minnie sang for her supper. Minnie was a climber. I wasn’t that girl anymore. Besides, the atrocity of Minnie and Maxime was not to be borne. “Maybe Minerva,” I said cheekily.
“My battle goddess.” Max laughed, noting our surroundings and my fashionable military-style coat—one I’d chosen because it looked very much like something Lafayette would have worn in his day.
Suddenly, Max’s expression sobered. “When you go to Paris . . . will you see Mr. Chanler?”
I schooled my features carefully. “Yes. I’ve left him alone and sick for too long, and his sons will wish me to check on him. You understand, don’t you?”
He nodded like a man who wasn’t happy about it. Good. A little jealousy was healthy, but like most everything, the point was not to take it to extremes. For better or worse, Willie was a part of my life and always would be. Perhaps Max understood. “He has my best wishes for his good health.”
I think he meant it. Still, I teased, “I don’t suppose you’d like me to convey those wishes.”
Max’s smile turned a little feral. “Actually, I would. At some point, my love, there must be a frank conversation about—”
“You don’t need to say it.” I knew our relationship must be explained to the children, and to my husband.
And I shouldn’t want to put it off any longer.
FIFTY-TWO
BEATRICE
Paris
May 1918
In returning to Paris, my first priority was to meet the crisis of a new wave of child refugees. I helped make a refuge of the old dilapidated seminary complex of the Church of Saint-Sulpice, where Adrienne Lafayette had once been a parishioner. And I felt certain she’d approve, for it was there, with Emily and Clara, that we fed more than two thousand refugees, more than a quarter of them children—mostly orphans—in need of food, clothing, and medical treatment at our makeshift hospital ward.