There had been much talk about this affair, but Jules had deliberately tuned it out. “That war memorial again. Why is everyone making such a fuss about it?”
“Oh, many reasons, Highness. It’s the first to be built away from the battlefields. It’s the first to be paid for by subscriptions from all the participating nations of the war. It’s a symbol of reconciliation and peace, and a recognition that no one country can be blamed for it—that there were no villains, only victims. The dedication ceremony is going to be an international event.”
“Send Mayor Clément my regrets, Hudson. You know how I feel about taking part in anything that even subtly links my family to the war. Is there anything else?”
She sipped the Vienna coffee he handed her, smiling to herself.
“Nothing that can’t wait. You look happy this morning, Highness.”
She watched him for a moment. He was certainly the strangest butler who’d ever been in her service. While always maintaining the proper decorum—his butler’s sense of propriety insisted on calling her “Highness,” though she’d told him her family’s titles had been rescinded after the war—he, at the same time, managed to convey a subtle familiarity and a concern for her well-being that was almost personal. Having grown up in the Habsburg palaces in Austria in an atmosphere of staid formality and strictly enforced protocol, Jules found this quality of his to be refreshing. She’d also long since grown accustomed to the fact that he was much too physically striking to be a butler—tall, well-built, with wavy dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a strong matinee-idol jaw. She was so accustomed to him by now that she didn’t notice his appearance any more than she took note of the furniture in her house. But her friends found it to be a grand joke. Trust Jules, they laughed, to have a butler who looks like Francis X. Bushman!
They didn’t know the secret sorrow he bore, one he’d shared with her a year ago when he’d happened into her service in such an unexpected way. She’d just left the dreary fogs of London and taken up residence on the sun-bathed South of France. She’d been swimming alone, off the beach at nearby Villefranche, when she suddenly found herself being carried off by a riptide. She was a strong swimmer and was certain she could fight her way back to shore, but instead she found herself weakening and being hurtled out to sea. Her frantic efforts to keep afloat were exhausting her strength. She knew she should scream for help, but her Habsburg pride—the disinclination to make a spectacle of herself—kept her silent long enough to be sucked below the surface before she could utter a sound. She knew then that she’d hesitated too long.
But suddenly, just as her lungs were bursting and she realized through her panic that she was going to die, she’d felt firm hands pull her up and carry her out of the reach of the deadly current. “You needn’t worry,” he’d told her, as if reading her mind. “No one else saw you.” Quietly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss, he’d helped her to the shore, away from the crowded center of the beach where she could recover in privacy.
Falling to her knees in the sand, gasping for breath, she’d looked up at him—a muscular man gleaming like a sun God—asking, “Who are you?”
“I’m Hudson, Ma’am.”
“No…what are you? To be able to swim like that? A sailor? An Olympic swimmer?”
He’d chuckled. “Hardly, Ma’am. I’m just a humble visitor to this part of the world, accustomed to swimming the Thames each morning. Actually, I’m in service. Between engagements at the moment, I’m afraid. In fact, if you happen to know of any good families in the area looking for a butler, I have excellent references.”
She’d eyed him skeptically. “You are a butler?”
Stiffly, with a hint of injured pride, he’d told her, “My family has been in service for three generations.”
“You’ll have to forgive me—Hudson, was it? I didn’t mean to sound as if I were mocking you. But I’m very much afraid, Hudson, despite your references, that you’re much too, shall we say…arresting a man for your desired post. The husbands I know would feel most uncomfortable having a butler in their employ who might upset the equilibrium of the ladies of the household. But then, surely you’ve had this trouble before?”
He’d looked at her for a moment in a most un-butler-like way, an acute sort of look as if carefully deciding upon his next words. Then, lowering his lashes, he’d said gravely, “Should it be necessary, I could put their minds at ease on that score. I was wounded in the war in a manner that would make any question of a dalliance impossible.”
Jules’s heart broke for him. There was something almost noble in the dignity with which he’d spoken, in the careful tone meant to hide his pain.
“I, too, have a war wound,” she’d told him. “Except that mine isn’t physical. It’s in my soul. So we’re really rather alike, aren’t we?”
“I suppose we all of us carry wounds or scars of some sort. All of us who lived through the war.”
“I suppose we do. That’s why Gertrude Stein calls us the ‘Lost Generation.’ Because we’re so lost inside, and then try to cover it up by chasing bright and mindless gaiety to dispel the gloom.”
“Yes,” he’d agreed. “Because of course, one soon tires of being lost and wants to find his way to something—more.”
She’d felt a bond with him that she’d never felt with any servant, not even the governess who’d cared for her as a child. So she’d confessed to him something she would never have told anyone else. “As it happens, I have need of a butler. I’ve only just reopened my house. But to be perfectly honest, I’m in a rather fragile state at the moment. I feel the need for someone who might—” She stopped, uncertain how to put it.
“Take care of you?”
She’d nodded mutely because by saying the words, he’d brought the taste of tears to the back of her throat.
“I should consider it a privilege and a pleasure,” he’d told her solemnly. “They say when you save a life, that life belongs to you, in a fashion. From this day forth, I shall endeavor to care for and protect my lady to the best of my ability.”
He’d reminded her of a knight of Camelot pledging his fealty to the queen. Since then, he’d become indispensable to her, handling everything she threw at him with the same quiet unflappable assurance, no questions asked. But over time, he’d become more than her butler. While always keeping his place and maintaining the proper decorum, he’d become her advisor, her confessor, her friend. The one person to whom she could tell even her most embarrassing secrets, confident that he’d carry them to his grave.
But she hadn’t told him anything of her scheme to employ the Panther. He would have gone to any lengths to talk her out of such insanity. But now that it was a fait accompli, she was bursting to tell him. He could do nothing about it now, and he was the only one she could trust with such an explosive confidence.
And yet…would it be insensitive to do so? Poor Hudson, to never experience what she had last night. She’d never realized before how dreadful it must be for him, living like a eunuch. She wondered if he’d been able to turn off his desire for women simply because his body could no longer function. She’d never thought about it before. But that was because, before last night, she’d been a sort of eunuch herself.
Still, he knew the one thing about her that she couldn’t tell her new modern friends, so cynical and urbane. He knew that after nights in their company, she’d come back home and read romantic poetry late into the night, escaping into fictional worlds where men and women loved desperately and often tragically. Where they found lives not of rote and routine, but of high adventure. They’d even made a game of it. The next morning, she would tell Hudson what had happened to the heroine in her poetry as if it had happened to her.
He always seemed to enjoy