Fortunately Madame Simon is still behind the gleaming walnut expanse of her large desk, a stylish pleated turban on her head and a gold pendant dangling from her neckline as she organizes folders.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be in the office,” I say, keeping my distance.
“I want to get our staff’s paperwork ready for the new law.” She means the one that will soon require every French person to carry an identity card. “How can I help you, mademoiselle?”
I see my own file in the stack and absently thumb through it. “I visited Madame Pinton and came into contact with a little girl—she was coughing, feverish, and I noticed a lesion.”
Madame Simon looks up sharply, because although she’s not a doctor, she’s a well-respected expert in public health. “A lesion or a rash?”
She’s worried about measles, which by some miracle I’ve never had, so I’m not immune. “A lesion. I think.”
“Well, Dr. Anglade is going to say Better safe than sorry. You’ll have to take a week off and go into quarantine. I’ll ask Madame LeVerrier to take over your classes and have meals sent up for you. Let us know if you get so much as a sniffle.”
“Okay.”
I’m about to put down my file and go when Madame Simon asks, “What about the child? Has she been seen by a physician?”
“The village doctor in Paulhaguet . . .” I begin, intending to explain, but my words trail off when I see something in my paperwork that makes the world drop beneath my feet.
“Is something wrong?” Madame Simon asks.
Yes, something is wrong. Something so wrong that my knees—and my voice—actually wobble. “Where did this file come from?”
Madame Simon tilts her head. “I pulled it from the record cabinets. Why?”
“I have a birth record,” I say, my eyes focusing on the one thing that absolutely shouldn’t be on that page.
My mother’s name.
TEN
BEATRICE
New York City
February 1915
My nephew had been shot.
We learned of it in a letter Victor wrote after the fact, in which he assured us his wound was minor. The bullet passed clean through. Still, the incident terrified his parents, and the strain was evident at rehearsals in the Della Robbia Room, where Miss Sloane attempted to herd a hundred children in hoopskirts and powdered wigs into some semblance of order.
My brother-in-law and playwright was a highly emotional man in the best of circumstances—sensitive to light and sound—and I worried his patience might snap when my seven-year-old son Ashley whooped around his table with a toy tomahawk. “Watch my war dance, Uncle Jack!”
“How did I ever let you talk me into this?” Jack groused at me.
“Oh, come now, my dearest,” said his wife, Elizabeth, giving me a conspiratorial smile. “You jumped at the chance.”
Of all my husband’s quarrelsome siblings, his eldest sister, Elizabeth, was my favorite. Having walked with a limp since childhood, she had the air of a tragic heroine from a bygone era who swooned over brooding Victorian poets. Certainly she’d swooned for Jack Chapman—a man who took brooding to a masochistic art form, having once mutilated his own arm to punish himself for committing violence upon another man in jealousy. Long-suffering Elizabeth was patient with her husband’s eccentricities, and with mine. She’d been the first to accept me, even when her pearl-clutching sisters exploded in a fit of pique.
For shame, Willie, you’ve lost your wits!
—to take a chorus girl for a bride. We’ll never live it down.
—to thumb your nose at the world by marrying a scandalous woman!
Elizabeth convinced the family that Willie and I were a match made in heaven, and I felt a twinge of regret to have disappointed her. And a little guilt too, over having let my nephew enlist. Jack and Elizabeth had made peace with Victor having signed up to fight, but a thread of tension had pulled between us, and Jack’s dark gaze was tortured with anxiety. “We want to get Victor out of the trenches,” he said, quite suddenly.
“Out?” I understood; as a mother, of course I did. But Victor wasn’t a child and had pledged himself to fight. I feared there was no way out but victory, death, or desertion.
“We hope something can be done,” my sister-in-law explained. “He’s meant to be more than cannon fodder.”
Influential as my husband’s family might be, I thought the Chapmans quite naive about their influence over the matter, until my sister-in-law said, “Willie has a plan.”