“Well, anyway,” she said brightly, “the war’s over, and it seems I’m French.”

“Personally, I’d have said you were English.”

But being French sounded more of an adventure to her.

“No,” she declared, “I’m French. Good-bye, Mr. Fox. Do I owe you a fee for this consultation?”

“I’d settle for an armistice,” he answered with the hint of a smile.

After she’d gone, he sat at his desk for a while. Then he laughed. He wondered whether to tell Marc that he’d met his daughter. He supposed that would be a breach of confidentiality. Could he tell Marie about it? No, he thought. Better not. Her family wouldn’t like it.

Chapter Twenty-one

•  1920  •

Marie Fox had certainly not expected to become a widow when she did. But in the spring of 1919 she’d lost her husband, James.

The great influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919—the Spanish flu, as it was called—did not enter the popular imagination of the age. Yet it killed more people than even the Black Death nearly six centuries before. In Britain, a quarter million people died; in France, nearly half a million; in Canada, fifty thousand; and in India seventeen million. Around the world, of those who caught the flu, between ten and twenty percent died. The death toll was especially high among the young and fit. Not only was it a human tragedy, but a huge statistical event. In the United States, as a result of the flu, life expectancy fell by ten years.

But there were plenty of deaths among the middle-aged as well.

The flu came in great waves. In England there had been two waves in 1918 and a third in March 1919. It was the third that carried off James Fox.

He became sick one afternoon. That night the aches and fever of flu began. All through the next day he grew worse, and during the night it seemed he was developing pneumonia. The following afternoon, as Marie watched, he began to turn a strange, pale shade of blue. And not an hour after teatime, she heard the rattle in his breath, and he left her.

Marie was holding his hand when he died. Despite her protests, Marie wouldn’t let their daughter, Claire, into the room. “Those are the doctor’s orders, and it’s what your father would want.” Marie was lucky not to catch the flu herself. Claire did not catch it either.

For the rest of that year she and Claire remained in London.