He shook hands vigorously and walked away. Cazalet turned to Colonel Prosser. “Can I get off now?”
“I don’t see why not, Captain.” Prosser grinned. “But you don’t leave this base until you call in at the quartermaster’s and get fitted with proper rank insignia.”
He parked his jeep outside the Excelsior, went in and ran up the stairs, excited as a schoolboy. He knocked on the door of her suite and she opened it, her face wet with tears, and flung her arms around his neck.
“Oh, Jake, thank God you’re here. I was just leaving. I didn’t know if I’d see you.”
“Leaving? But—but what happened?”
“They’ve found Jean. He’s not dead, Jake! A patrol picked him up in the bush, he’s badly wounded; they flew him down this morning. He’s at Mitchell Military Hospital. Will you take me?”
Jake felt the room spinning around him, but he spoke carefully. “Of course I will. I’ve got my jeep outside. Is there anything you need?”
“No, Jake, just get me there.”
Already, she was slipping away from him, like a boat making for different waters and not his.
At the hospital, he peered through the window in the door of the private room and saw the man who was Captain Comte Jean de Brissac lying there, his head heavily bandaged, Jacqueline at his side with a doctor. They came out together.
Jake said, “How is he?”
It was the doctor who answered. “A bullet creased his skull and he was half-starved when they found him, but he’ll live. You’re both very lucky.”
He walked away, and Jacqueline de Brissac smiled through her tears. “Yes, aren’t we?” Her voice caught. “Oh, God. What do I do?”
He felt incredibly calm, knowing that she needed his strength. The tears were streaming down her face, and he took out his handkerchief and wiped them away gently. “Why, you go to your husband, of course.”
She stood there looking at him, then turned and opened the door into the private room. Cazalet went down the corridor to the main entrance. He stood on the top step and lit a cigarette.
“You know what, Jake, I’m damn proud of you,” he said softly and then he marched very fast toward the car, trying to hold back the tears that were springing to his eyes.
When his time was up, he returned to Harvard and completed his doctorate. He joined his father’s law firm, but politics beckoned inevitably, Congressman first and then he married Alice Beadle when he was thirty-five, a pleasant, decent woman for whom he had a great affection. His father had pushed for it, feeling it was time for children, but there weren’t any. Alice’s health was poor and she developed leukemia, which lasted for years.
Over the years, Jake was aware of Jean de Brissac’s rise to the rank of full general in the French Army. Jacqueline was a memory so distant that what had happened seemed like a dream, and then de Brissac died of a heart attack. There was an obituary in the New York Times, a photo of the general with Jacqueline. On reading it, Cazalet discovered there was only one child, a daughter named Marie. He considered writing but then thought better of it. Jacqueline didn’t need an embarrassing echo of the past. What would be the point?
No, best to leave well enough alone . . .
Once elected Senator and regarded as a coming man, he had to take trips abroad on government business, usually on his own, for Alice simply wasn’t up to it. So it was that in Paris in 1989, on government business, he was once again on his own, except for his faithful aide and private secretary, a one-armed lawyer named Teddy Grant. Amongst other things, there was an invitation to the Presidential Ball. Cazalet was seated at the desk in the sitting room of his suite at the Ritz when Teddy dropped it in front of him.
“You can’t say no, it’s a command performance like the White House or Buckingham Palace, only this is the Élysée Palace.”
“I haven’t the slightest intention of saying no,” Cazalet told him. “And I’d like to point out it says Senator Jacob Cazalet and companion. For tonight, that means you, Teddy, so go find your black tie.”