“It’s summer, darling,” I reminded him. “Besides, I’ve always loved France. The quaint bistros. The orchards and vineyards made a splendid romantic playground for us, don’t you remember?”
It seemed important to maintain a steady flow of chatter and remind him of happier days. To remind myself that I was still his wife. Because if I was no longer that, then who would I be?
Ours, after all, had been a love match.
I’d been onstage playing in San Toy when I noticed Willie in the front row. Those intense dark eyes. That boyish face. His gleaming devil-may-care smile. I’d danced that night just for him.
He’d come back the next night. And the next. But despite having the swagger of the big game hunter he was, it took Willie five performances before he worked up the nerve to introduce himself backstage. Then I couldn’t get rid of him. Not that I’d wanted to. Remembering it now made my heart squeeze so painfully beneath my lace shirtwaist, it was difficult to breathe, and I did not think it was the pinch of my whalebone corset. The truth was, I had loved William Astor Chanler. I had loved him for himself and not his money, and I loved him still.
The trouble was that at the moment, I no longer wished for him to know it.
I turned, pretending interest in the newspaper, which was opened to an article about the recent assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his poor wife, for whom I felt enormously sorry. What, after all, had she done to deserve it but marry above her station? Waving at the headlines, Willie said, “That’s another reason you shouldn’t have come.”
I narrowed my eyes in alarm. “Why—you didn’t have something to do with it, did you?”
He actually grinned. “I’m a sharpshooter, Beatrice, but even my aim’s not so good that I can shoot an archduke in Sarajevo from a hospital bed in Paris.”
It really wasn’t such an outlandish thing for me to have asked. After all, many men fancy themselves to be of world consequence, but my husband actually was. Willie had been funding, arming, and even riding into battle alongside freedom fighters of various nations before I’d ever met him. Like his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Willie had fought heroically in the Spanish-American War. He’d also tried to overthrow a dictatorship in Venezuela, and had personally led cavalry troops in the Italo-Turkish War. He lived by the philosophy that Americans ought to help those who wanted a say in their own governments. When you have a philosophy like that, you’ve got to put up or shut up. That’s what he told me when he invited Sun Yat-sen onto our yacht for a chat about overthrowing the Qing dynasty.
Since then, I’d simply come to accept as a matter of course that if a revolution broke out in the world somewhere, Willie might be involved. Now, with mounting anxiety, I said, “I noticed that you didn’t actually answer my question. Even if you didn’t shoot the archduke yourself . . .”
My husband looked amused. “I had nothing to do with it. I don’t even wish I did. It was a damned fool thing to do, one that could cause a war between Austria and Serbia.”
His tone carried the additional implication that I had been a damned fool for coming to Europe under such circumstances. In my defense, I said, “Well, I couldn’t have known someone would be assassinated when I boarded the ship, and I’ll be sure not to visit Austria or Serbia until this blows over.”
“The danger is wider than that region,” Willie said, and I knew that once he started lecturing there was no stopping him. “We’re all dancing on a delicate spiderweb of alliances these days. Tug one thread and it could unravel. If either Germany or Russia intervenes, the fight could spread across Europe.”
Willie was always thinking ten moves ahead on the international chessboard with a brilliance that bordered on paranoia. It helped him relive his glory days as a congressman and a Rough Rider. Made him forget that he was now nearing fifty and that his glory days were over. In fact, I was beginning to suspect the mystery about his leg was just a ruse to keep anybody from realizing he was getting old.
Perhaps he had tripped over a curb like an ordinary mortal and it was to put me off the scent that he finally said, “It isn’t anything serious with the girl, you know . . .”
“Oh, well then, I feel so much better!”
In response to my sarcasm, Willie smoothed his bedsheet. “I have vices, but I’m not a fool.”
Neither was I. Unlike his famously loony brothers, Willie didn’t have a weakness for women, but I doubted he’d been celibate in the years we’d lived apart. Until now, I simply hadn’t wanted to know . . .