“But you do, Jake,” she said gently.

Time seemed to stop for Jake. “What do you mean?” he said at last.

“Look over there, just at the French window to the terrace,” Jacqueline said.

The girl’s hair was long, the white dress very simple. For a heart-stopping moment, it might have been her mother.

“You wouldn’t kid a guy,” he whispered.

“No, Jake, that would be too cruel. She was conceived that one night in Saigon, and born in Paris in nineteen-seventy. Her name is Marie and she is halfway through her first year at Oxford.”

Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the girl. “Did the general know?”

“He assumed she was his, or so I thought, until the end, when the doctors told him just how bad his heart was.”

“And?”

“It seems that while he was in the hospital in Vietnam after being found up-country, that someone sent him a letter. It told him that his wife had been seen with an American officer, who had not left her suite until four o’clock in the morning.”

“But who-?”

“A member of staff, we think. The maliciousness of it! Sometimes I despair of human beings. But he had known, all that time, my dear Jean. Before he died, he signed a declaration under the provisions of the Code Napoléon, stating that he was Marie’s titular father. It was to preserve her position and title legally.”

“And she doesn’t know?”

“No, and I don’t want her to, and neither do you, Jake. You’re a good man, an honorable man, but a politician. The great American public doesn’t take kindly to politicians who have illegitimate daughters.”

“But it wasn’t like that. Dammit, everyone thought your husband was dead.”

“Jake, listen to me. You could be President one day, everybody says that, but not with this sort of scandal hanging over you. And what about Marie? Isn’t it better if she just lives with her memory of her father, the general? No, if Marie isn’t told, that leaves only two people in the world who know – you and me. Are we agreed?”