“You speak so confidently and knowledgeably about world affairs,” Furlaud said with an admiring smile. “Can I ask where you were educated?”
“The school of hard knocks.”
He laughed. “I’m serious.”
“So am I.” Most people assumed I learned from Willie, and there was some truth to that, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I’d taken an interest in political causes before we met. If anything, it was a mutual interest that brought us together, but I didn’t want to say any of that to Furlaud.
“So you’re self-taught?” he asked.
“In fine American tradition,” I replied, remembering the charity school for impoverished children where I first learned my letters. I was lucky to have been able to learn when so many other children were sent to work in factories . . .
The captain’s smile faded. “What you said when we first met, that you were a poor girl born on the wrong side of the blanket. Was that true?”
Heat seared down my neck—I’d have never admitted something like that in daylight to a person I could meet again. It would be easy enough to deny it now. Wise to do so, even. Still, for some reason, looking into his calm blue eyes, I found that I couldn’t lie. Maybe it was because I was still seeing flashes of Minnie in every refugee child on the streets of Paris.
I lowered my gaze into the swirling depths of my teacup. “My father, well—I’m not entirely sure who he was. I grew up in Boston calling the butcher my mother and I lived with Papa. He took me for lemon ices and carried me on his shoulders to better see all the Revolutionary statues on Boston Common. I loved him dearly. Then one day he suddenly dropped dead of a disease that might’ve been cured if he’d had more money . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Furlaud said. “That’s terrible.”
“It was made worse by the fact that we weren’t even allowed at his funeral.”
“Why not?”
I cleared my throat. “Because he had a wife in another town.”
Furlaud’s eyebrow inched up; then he forced it back into place.
“I hadn’t known,” I explained, my voice thick with dredged-up grief. “It came as a terrible shock. To lose my papa, then our home, then his name, then to learn that I wasn’t even his blood . . . Ma confessed that my real father was a man I never met, and that I had half brothers by yet another man.”
“I see,” replied Furlaud, eyes filling with pity.
But remember that pity has a half-life, Minnie used to say. So don’t cry. Nobody puts a coin in your cup unless you make them smile.
I forced a shaky laugh. “Here I thought I was the bastard brat of a Boston butcher, but I wasn’t even that!”
He didn’t seem fooled by my bravado, and put a hand on mine.
It encouraged me to go on.
“It seems that my mother had married young, and her husband died of cholera—a disease easily prevented with clean water. She found herself widowed with two boys to support; she left them with their grandparents and thereafter did what she must . . . which is how I came along.”
Furlaud was intent on me, letting his tea go cold. “How old were you when the butcher died and you found all this out?”
“He died four days after my eighth birthday,” I said.
He winced. “So young . . .”
“Old enough to learn that life can change with a snap of the fingers. One moment I was a poor but well-fed child living over a butcher’s shop, with the occasional opportunity for dance lessons. The next moment I was a cold and hungry urchin in the frozen streets of Boston’s Chinatown. I didn’t know how long we’d survive; lots of people didn’t. So I found a way to sing and dance for my supper . . . and in one way or another I’ve been singing and dancing for my supper ever since.”
I didn’t want to tell him more. I wasn’t even sure why I’d told him this much. Perhaps he understood, because he squeezed my hand and said, “What a remarkable story it must be. The one about how a girl in those circumstances became you. I hope you’ll tell it to me sometime.”
“I just might,” I said softly. But not today. I’d already said more than I wanted to, so I tried to shake off the gloom. “Now, Captain Furlaud, tell me something about you. Something cheerful.”
“Only if you call me Max.”
“All right, Max. If you could choose any city in which to live, which would it be?”
“New York,” he said without hesitation, which seemed akin to heresy for a Frenchman.