“You are leaving?” These words cut their way out of me; what I really meant to ask was: Are you leaving me? It was my greatest fear. To be abandoned as a wife—as my mother had been abandoned—would open a deeper wound than could ever be healed.
Gilbert must have known it, for his gaze softened. “I will send for you and the children as soon as I can show myself to be a decent man.”
TWENTY-THREE
BEATRICE
Paris
June 1915
“I’d like you to meet him,” I told Emily. “With your keen eye and cool judgment, you’ll advise me of your decision on the matter: Is Maxime Furlaud to be taken into our hearts? Are we to fan the flame—or stamp it out?”
I said all this lightly, to prevent causing alarm, but Emily’s shock could not have been more complete. “Beatrice, you’re a married woman!”
“For the time being,” I said, keeping my eyes on the stack of invoices we’d accumulated on Lafayette Fund business.
“For the time being?” Emily’s tone forced me to look up.
I took a deep, fortifying breath. “You should know that I’ve asked Mr. Chanler for a divorce.” Emily stared, uncomprehending, shaken as only someone in love for the first time can be to realize that not all love lasts. And I sighed. “That look on your face is precisely why I didn’t tell you before now.” Also why I didn’t explain that Willie apparently planned to fight me. “Divorce isn’t the worst thing in the world.”
Emily folded her arms, plainly unwilling to accept that view. “What about your boys?”
“Nothing need change for them. Billy and Ashley still have a mother and a father—insofar as Willie is capable of being a father, anyway.”
Emily shook her head. “Divorce may not change their daily lives, but trust me when I say it will change them. What they’ll read about you in the gossip sheets—” She stopped herself, perhaps remembering the barrels of ink spilled when her parents divorced. “Don’t tell me you aren’t worried.”
She made such a very good point that I had no choice but to glare.
“I’m only concerned for you,” she added.
“And I’m concerned about your trip north,” I replied, for on the heels of her betrothal she’d been invited to visit her future mother-in-law at the castle of Motte-aux-bois. “It’s not so far from the trenches.”
Emily eyed me shrewdly. “If you’re so concerned, you should join me, especially if it will forestall the folly of a luncheon with a French officer.”
“Not a luncheon,” I protested. “Only tea. Nothing untoward ever happens over tea.” I knew this because Captain Furlaud and I had been to tea every afternoon for a week since his return to Paris on some military errand. He’d been the perfect gentleman, picking me up from the hospital, or from my work with Clara Simon and Marie-Louise LeVerrier to help find housing for refugees.
Captain Furlaud and I had exchanged not so much as a kiss, and yet our conversations were emotionally intimate. This I didn’t share with Emily, because I knew she’d tell me that if I didn’t go with her to meet her mother-in-law, I should at least go with the Chapmans to Switzerland to visit my husband and attempt a reconciliation. I admit, I’d considered it, but Willie hadn’t answered my cable of condolence regarding Freddy Vanderbilt’s death, and I had no wish to playact the devoted wife while he was getting in fighting trim.
Besides, Captain Furlaud had proved to be quite a restorative presence after long hours dedicated to war relief work. So, within a half hour of seeing Emily off at the train station, I was again at the Franco-American restaurant, sipping tea with the earnest blue-eyed French officer, who asked, “What does it mean when President Wilson says Americans are too proud to fight?”
It means Wilson is a craven jackass, I wanted to say, but I worried he’d disapprove of such language. “It means he’s not going to avenge the sinking of the Lusitania. To hear a real American leader who actually cares about his murdered countrymen, listen to Theodore Roosevelt.” The former president had been outraged by Wilson’s meek response, saying we couldn’t meet the kaiser’s policy of blood-and-iron with Wilson’s milk-and-water. There are worse things than war, Roosevelt had also said, invoking the image of drowning American men, women, and helpless babies.
“Wilson can’t hold out much longer,” I said, nursing my third cup of tea. “He’ll be dragged into this war eventually, so he might as well start getting prepared for it now.”