Victor lowered his head, and his mask of soldierly bravado finally slipped, his voice thickening. “I’ve been real cut up about the death of my friend Kohn. Died in my arms. I was wondering if you could see to it that my letter gets to the family?”
“Oh, Victor, I’m so sorry about your friend. Of course, I’ll see to it.”
He blinked away gathering tears. “Jewish fellow. Brilliant. I’d have liked to show you a picture of him, but Uncle Willie’s camera came four days too late. Now I’ve been taking photographs of all my friends, just in case.”
Just in case . . .
We hated to part with Victor that day. We made certain to take his picture. Just in case. And I was struck again by the impermanence of life, despairing of all the hours already run out.
* * *
—
“I was only gone one day!” I cried upon returning to Paris.
“It isn’t my fault.” Emily stood by the tall windows of our suite, sunlight glinting off her new ring.
“Then whose fault is it that you’re engaged?”
“Oh, please don’t be cross,” Emily said, beaming as a spring breeze wafted the white curtains around her like a wedding veil. “Not when I’m so happy! I wasn’t expecting a proposal—it came quite out of the blue. If you’d been there in that hospital ward where he dropped to one knee . . . you’d know I couldn’t do anything but accept.”
Had she taken leave of her senses? I could understand Lieutenant LaGrange. A young soldier facing death might throw caution to the wind. But Emily had always seemed to be an eminently sensible young woman. As I stood dumbstruck, she said, “You told me every girl deserves a grand romance in Paris . . .”
“Yes, well!” I unpinned my hat in a fit of temper. “You’ve rather skipped over the romance and gone straight to matrimony, haven’t you?”
Emily’s dreamy smile fell away. “Oh, dear, you are cross. I thought you liked Lieutenant LaGrange!”
“I did. I do. Of course I do. It’s just—I despise to be made the voice of reason. This is all so very sudden. Does your father know?”
“Not yet. I have to tell him in person. I have to convince him. Please don’t make me convince you too.”
I sat on the edge of my bed. “You’re certain this is the man you want . . .”
Emily’s eyes burned with conviction. “Amaury is the only man I’ve ever wanted.”
That’s what I thought about Willie, and look where it got me. “Again, I protest this is very topsy-turvy. If one of us was to get into mischief in the twenty-four hours we were apart, it ought to have been me.”
She laughed, throwing herself down next to me on the bed to show off the ring. A family heirloom.
“Well, it’s beautiful,” I said. “And I wish you every happiness.” I was delighted for her. Truly I was. And yet, a melancholy stole over me, because here she was at the eager start of a marriage, while I felt trapped in mine. Perhaps that’s why, after a celebratory dinner during which I made her tell me every detail of the romantic proposal, I stole down to the concierge’s desk to use the telephone.
Captain Furlaud’s voice crackled on the other end of the line. “You changed your mind.”
And I replied with a grin, “A woman’s prerogative.”
TWENTY-TWO
ADRIENNE
Paris
July 1782
Who was Lafayette’s lover?
Stabbing my needle into my embroidery, I could not stop wondering. From the moment my husband returned from America, the whole nation flung laurels—and ladies—into his lap. I remembered an incident at an opera performed at the Salle du Palais-Royal. Our gilded box with its ornate carved cherubs had the best view of the stage, where we saw unveiled a statue of my husband in the place the Greek hero Achilles ought to have been. While the crowd cheered and the chorus sang about how no beautiful woman could or should resist a hero, the soprano draped my husband’s statue in laurel and offered him a flirtatious wave, as if volunteering to become his mistress.
I had easily endured this because she was an actress, but then the crowd’s eyes turned, unmistakably, expectantly, toward one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Some chanted that she should offer the hero a kiss. Fortunately—as he would do again under more perilous circumstances—Gilbert played to the audience and decency, kissing her hand. Still, half the bedroom doors in Paris lay open to my husband, and now I knew he had walked through at least one of them . . .