Page 101 of Two Wars and a Wedding

The baroness looked up and her face froze. Or perhaps that was just all the makeup, layers of it, beautifully applied to create a perfect mask rather than a face. “Miss Hayes.”

I’ve changed my mind; give him back; I want him back.

The baroness stepped forward, ever so slightly, so that she was between the baby and Betsy. Shielding him.

Betsy felt something inside her crumble.

“Here.” Betsy yanked the ribbon from around her neck, the ribbon with Charles’s coin, thrusting it at the baroness. “Here. This is for Charles’s son.”

The bright gold of the coin had been dulled by her rubbing it, by grease, by grime, by the touch of her fingers.

“Please. It belonged to Charles. He called it his luck. He said an ancestor had an angel coin just like it—it helped save him from the guillotine. I don’t remember the whole story, but I’m sure one of his family must know.”

The baroness took it up gingerly by the end of the ribbon, the grubby, frayed, decidedly dirty ribbon, letting the coin dangle in the air between them. “You tried to give this to me before.”

“Not to you. To the baby.”

Betsy wasn’t sure why but it was suddenly desperately important that he have it, that he have something of her and Charles, Charles’s coin, worn next to her heart. She might not have loved Charles as she should but she’d carried his token, and it was only right his son should have it, this last relic of whatever it was that had been between them.

“Charles would have wanted him to have it. He only gave it to me because he didn’t have a son to carry it for him.”

Somewhere, under all that paint and powder, an expression of pain crossed the baroness’s face. But only for a moment.

“Now he has.” The baroness closed her hand around the coin and gave a sharp nod. “I will make sure he has it once he is old enough to understand.”

Betsy grasped the baroness’s hand, the hand holding the coin. “You’ll tell him—you’ll tell him the story of it? You’ll tell him—you’ll tell him it was his father’s?”

The baroness looked at Betsy for a long moment. “In his home, at Carmagnac,” she said slowly, “his father’s portrait hangs on the wall. He will sleep in the nursery that was once his father’s and rock on the horse that was once his father’s and fight battles with the soldiers that were once his father’s. His father will be everywhere with him, in the library, in the stables, in the memories of his servants. Does that content you?”

Betsy jerked her chin up and down in a nod.

Tears were rolling down Betsy’s cheeks, making damp splotches on her gown. There was a time when she would rather have died than disgrace herself in front of the baroness, but it didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was that Charles’s son was going to Charles’s home, to be raised as Charles would have wanted.

Without Betsy.

It was best for him, it was. And the baroness—oh, she didn’t like Betsy, and Betsy didn’t like her, but she was, Betsy knew, being kind. In her own strange way, she was being kind. She didn’t have to tell Betsy any of this. She didn’t have to talk to Betsy at all. That hadn’t been part of their agreement. It was, in fact, directly counter to their agreement. But she was being kind. Betsy clung to that kindness.

Let him know he is loved, Betsy wanted to say, but maybe that wasn’t a gift. Betsy’s love was something to be avoided at all costs. She was no one to him now, just the vessel who had borne him. He’d be safer with the elegant propriety of his adoptive mother, his adoptive mother who had known this other Charles, the Charles who had lived in those stables and those woods. And the nurse, the nurse looked kind. She looked like the sort who would get down on her knees and shake rattles and pull wooden toys and make animal noises.

He would be cared for, he would be loved, he would have a family and a home and a name.

Monsieur le Baron de Robecourt.

Betsy took a step back, trying very hard not to look at that little bundle cradled in the nurse’s arms.

Not such a little bundle anymore. He was round-cheeked and chubby-armed and lifting his little head to look around with those big, dark eyes.

He was four months old, and in those four months he had known only the baroness as his mother. The baroness was his mother.

“Godspeed,” Betsy said politely, as though they were strangers at a party, as though she weren’t wearing her nightdress in the middle of a courtyard, with tears sticking her eyelashes together and clogging her throat.

“And you,” said the baroness graciously. “I trust we will never meet again.”

Behind her, the baby caught sight of Betsy and smiled a wide, toothless grin.

Betsy turned and stumbled back into the hotel, not seeing anything, not seeing anything except that happy, chubby face. Smiling at her as he left her.

“Come now.” It was one of the nurses, Betsy could never remember which was which—they all looked the same in their uniforms—putting an arm around her and leading her gently toward the stairs. “Let’s get that mud cleaned off your feet.”