through the following silence, waiting. This had all been filler. Now, he would tell her what was going on. He tapped his desk a few times. “There’s been an incident.”
Clare nodded.
“An assassination.” He spoke softly now, with the gentleness he always brought to bad news. “Not one of ours. A French parliamentarian, at Versailles this morning.”
“Do I know him?”
Edward shook his head. “I’ve never met him myself.” He ran a hand over his brow, rubbing as though he hoped to smooth it out. “Phff,” he said.
She stood up and touched his knuckles gently, leaving her fingers on his until he stopped rubbing. He caught her hand with his, and pressed the cool skin of her fingers against his forehead.
“Do they know…?” she said. She withdrew her hand and laid it on his shoulder.
“An idea. There have been numerous threats since the French State passed the law officially declaring the Armenian business genocide. Now there’s some talk of making it against the law in France to deny it. A Turkish nationalist group.”
“Oh.” She remembered hearing about the controversy when they first arrived back in Paris; how furious the Turks were that the French, with whom they’d painstakingly cultivated diplomatic relations for centuries, had officially decided to call the death of more than a million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War One by the term “genocide.” The Turks themselves never accepted that this had been a situation of deliberate extinction of the Armenian people, insisting the deaths were a by-product of the war. She recalled a heated discussion at one dinner party, just shortly before Christmas; the British still refrained from using the word, which stance some people had supported and others had considered morally reprehensible.
She sighed. “Dinner tonight?”
He shook his head. “No need to cancel dinner.”
All right, she thought. The guests would be upset, especially the French ones; everyone would be uneasy. Before he returned to the embassy, she and Edward would have to come up with a master plan on how to handle the situation. The correct mood had to be created—sober, respectful—but unbowed.
But they would go on. That was the essential. One had to keep going.
Eight
C lare picked up her and Edward’s dirty lunch plates from the small table in the study and carried them towards the kitchen. She and Edward had spent some time discussing whether to ask Reverend Newsome to lead a prayer for the slain politician when they sat down for dinner. Having decided yes, they had agreed not to allow the assassination to dominate discussion throughout the evening—one of the duties of the Foreign Service was to maintain balance. Then Clare had gone into the kitchen to fetch the lunch Mathilde, before leaving for her break, had quickly fashioned. She must have found her way back into Mathilde’s good graces, because there was a plate of chicken in cream sauce waiting for her also. She and Edward had eaten mostly in silence as Edward went through a briefing he’d brought from the office for a workshop he was attending in the ambassador’s place that afternoon. He’d shuffled the papers into his briefcase and announced he was heading back out.
“There’s a chancery post in Manama coming up,” he’d said as he’d shut the clasp on his bag. “The P.U.S. asked me in passing—I was reading from a French document—this morning whether I still had my Arabic.”
“Bahrain?”
“Bahrain.”
“What did you say?”
“That I figured it was pretty rusty.”
She’d smiled. “I hope you didn’t make any bad jokes about oiling it. How much longer do we have in Paris?”
“We’ve been here more than three years,” he’d said, adding, “there’s also something in Bishkek.”
She wrinkled her brow.
“Kyrgyzstan,” he said. “Between Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Electricity is a bit of a problem, but there are some lovely yurt stays. The
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