Free The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard Page B

There was weariness in her looks and sadness in her eyes.
    ‘Call me Corinne,’ she said softly.
    ‘In that case, you’d better call me Max. I’m only James to my family.’
    ‘Max it is. The name suits you. Henry said you flew in the war.’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Do you miss it?’
    ‘The war? Or the flying?’
    ‘Both. Or either.’
    ‘I haven’t flown a plane since I was shot down in April of ’seventeen. That’s nearly two years. I missed it dreadfully at first. Now … it’s not so bad.’
    ‘And you’ll be flying again soon, won’t you?’
    ‘Ah. Pa told you about that, did he?’
    She did not answer. But Sir Henry had told her everything, of course. Max felt strangely certain of that. He was damned if he would embarrass himself or Corinne Dombreux by asking her to admit she and his father – her senior by at least thirty years – hadbeen lovers. She had said she loved him and that was enough. Nor was it hard to understand what might have attracted Sir Henry to her. She had an air of mystery and a hint of fragility likely to attract many men – including Max, come to that.
    ‘You speak very good English, Corinne. I’d hardly know you were French.’
    ‘My mother was English. And I went to school there. Both my parents wanted me to be the perfect English lady.’
    ‘You say that as if you disappointed them.’
    ‘Living here, as I do, isn’t what they had in mind for me. It’s not what I had in mind for myself.’
    ‘How did it come about?’
    ‘I married the wrong man, Max. I am the widow of the infamous Pierre Dombreux.’
    ‘I’ve never heard of him.’
    ‘I wish no one had.’
    ‘What did he do to earn his infamy?’
    ‘He betrayed his country … so they say.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘He was a diplomat, like Henry. My parents were very pleased when I married him. So was I. I loved him. I thought he loved me. He was posted to the embassy in St Petersburg. I went with him.’
    ‘And that’s where you met my father?’
    ‘Yes. There was nothing between us at first, except friendship, which flourished despite the difference in our ages. And a friendship is what it would have remained if Pierre had been faithful to me. But he was not. And he did little to hide it. Henry was a source of strength when I most needed it. He was the only friend I had in the whole of St Petersburg – Petrograd, as it was by then. When Pierre learnt of our closeness – which was entirely innocent at that point, though precious to me nonetheless – he sent me home to Paris in disgrace.
    ‘My parents believed every lie he told them. They disowned me. This was in the autumn of 1917, just before the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The war was going badly. I had our apartment to live in, but no money. I found work as a seamstress. It was hard. I received a second schooling: in what the world is like for a womanwith no place in society. And there was worse to come. In March last year, when the Bolsheviks made peace with Germany, Pierre was accused of prompting them to do so by revealing secret plans the French government had supposedly approved for Japan to seize Vladivostok.
    ‘The first I knew of it was when the papers named him as a traitor. He had gone missing, it was reported. A few days later, I had a telegram from the embassy in Petrograd. His body had been pulled out of the Griboedov canal. He’d been shot through the head.’
    ‘Good God. That must have been a terrible shock for you.’
    ‘I’m not asking for sympathy.’ There was a flash of anger in her eyes. Her pride in herself had been dented by misfortune. But it had not been destroyed.
    ‘I’ll be sure not to offer any.’
    Corinne frowned at him. ‘You’re a lot like your father, you know.’
    ‘My mother’s forever complaining of how
un
like him I am.’
    ‘Henry always said she misunderstood him.’
    ‘They’d grown apart, Corinne. You must know that.’
    ‘Yes. Of course. I can only speak of the Henry I knew. We wrote to each other