Before the end of the festivities, we slipped away to a romantic spot where water spilled over jagged rocks into a calm pool. Gilbert did not chastise me for my forwardness with the trade minister, but embraced me in the glow of illuminated Greek statuary. “I begin to despise fame,” Gilbert whispered, lips at my nape. “To think I must sneak away for a tryst with my own wife . . .”
I laughed, disbelieving he despised fame even for a moment, but neither did I discourage him. After so many years of painful separation, I wanted to compensate for every absence with pleasure, to balance every privation with indulgence. And privacy was an indulgence now.
“Do you think we are grown enough now to have our own house?” he asked. “Nothing too grand. If not beautiful, then gracious. Something with a place to study and entertain, with room for the servants and children. If you are agreeable, I would like to make our family a little larger . . .”
“Oh, would you?” I gave up trying to smother both my smile and a secret. “As it happens, we may expect another by year’s end.”
“I cannot believe it!” Excitedly, he turned me in his arms. “Or perhaps I do not wish to believe it, so I still have an excuse to ravish you.”
I tittered like a coquette. “Fortunately, a husband needs no excuse.”
What he did to me in love that night made everything else we had ever done seem like child’s play. The mastery of his mouth—the way he used it to taunt and tease—was like nothing I had experienced. His devotion to my rapture was such that I could not catch my breath, and did not want to. Like a wanton, I gave myself over to him fully. It was only in the aftermath, as the candles guttered and the fever dissipated, that my pleasure ebbed away to agony.
Because I knew.
Somehow I knew he had learned this from some other woman . . .
TWENTY-ONE
BEATRICE
Paris
May 8, 1915
It wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning yet, and guests at the St. James were shouting angrily in the courtyard. Was it too much to ask that news—especially bad news—awaited a civilized hour after coffee and breakfast? Clutching my traveling bag, I asked, “What in the blue blazes is happening?”
Thanks to my moonlit stranger, we’d finally heard from my nephew at the front. Victor had twenty-four hours’ leave in Amiens—no more, no less—so we’d come down early to catch the first train, only to find everyone waving newspapers. “They’ve sunk the Lusitania,” Jack snarled. “Just yesterday afternoon.”
My God. We might’ve been on that steamer and at the bottom of the ocean now. Gulping at how near we’d come to death, I remembered that my husband’s business partner had booked passage on that ship. “Is there news of Mr. Vanderbilt?”
Biting his cigar, Jack shook his head. “Missing and presumed dead.”
My eyes misted as I considered this loss so close to home, and how many others might also be at the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile Emily’s cheeks went pink with patriotic outrage. “This is as good as a declaration of war! The Germans knew perfectly well there were American civilians on that ship.”
My God, Freddy Vanderbilt’s poor wife. I needed to send a word of sympathy. What about Willie? As furious as I was with him, I knew he’d grieve. “I should try to send some cables—some words of condolence.”
“There’s no time.” Jack tapped his watch. “Not if we mean to catch the train. We can’t miss our only chance to see Victor.”
“I’ll send the cables for you,” Emily said, setting her bag down under the plaque commemorating the spot where Marie Antoinette was said to have greeted Lafayette upon his victorious return from America. “I’ll stay behind and take care of it. Just write down what you’d like to say.”
I was grateful beyond words. Mrs. Chapman, however, fretted, “You’re a sweet girl, Miss Sloane, but it isn’t right to leave a young lady behind in Paris to her own devices.”
“Oh, Miss Sloane of all people can be trusted to stay out of mischief for twenty-four hours,” I said. In any case, Emily had made up her mind, and after a few hastily scribbled lines, we were off.
Khaki-clad Tommies crowded every car of our train to Amiens. Once known as the Venice of the North, it was now a veritable encampment of the British Army, who had commandeered hotels and directed a fleet of hospital ambulances to ferry wounded from the front lines. It was, in some ways, even more hellish than when I had passed through last autumn. Rubble heaped in the street in front of a row of what we assumed must have been lovely houses once—now they were faceless chasms of brick in collapse, splinters of lumber jutting out like broken bones. Amid this rubble, soldiers coughed and wheezed into ragged handkerchiefs, victims of the new and terrible chemical warfare.