The next few days confused her. He treated her with deference in public, but in private he tormented her with his lovemaking. He abandoned tenderness for conquest and kept her poised on the brink of fulfillment for so long that her pleasure crossed the boundary into pain. During the last week of April, he announced that they were going on a trip but wouldn’t tell her where.
He drove the 1933 Hispano-Suiza from his antique car collection with utter concentration. She was glad to be spared the effort of making conversation. Out the window, the land near Paris gradually gave way to the bare, chalky hillsides of Champagne. She couldn’t make herself relax. She was nearly four months pregnant, and the effort of deceiving him was sapping her strength. She pretended to have menstrual periods that never came, secretly adjusted the buttons on the waists of her new skirts, and plotted to keep her naked body away from the light. She did everything she could to postpone the time when she’d be forced to tell him about the baby.
As the vineyards turned lavender in the lengthening afternoon shadows, they reached Burgundy. Their inn had a red-tiled roof and charming pots of geraniums in the windows, but she was too tired to enjoy the simple, well-cooked meal that was set before them.
The next day Alexi drove her out into the Burgundian countryside. They ate a silent picnic lunch on a hilltop covered with wildflowers, dining on a potée filled with fresh chervil, tarragon, and chives that Alexi had purchased in the neighboring village. They ate it with bread crusted in poppy seeds, a runny Saint Nectaire cheese, and a raw young country wine. Belinda picked at her food, then tied her cardigan around her shoulders and walked along the hilltop to escape Alexi’s oppressive silence.
“Enjoying the view, my sweet?” She hadn’t heard him come up behind her, and she jumped as he put his hands on her shoulders.
“It’s pretty.”
“Are you enjoying being with your husband?”
She curled her fingers over the knot she’d made in the sweater. “I always enjoy being with you.”
“Especially in bed, n’est-ce pas?” He didn’t wait for her answer but pointed out a vineyard and told her which grapes it produced. He began to seem like the Alexi who had shown her the sights of Paris, and she gradually relaxed.
“Over there, chérie. Do you see that collection of gray stone buildings? That is the Couvent de l’Annonciation. The nuns there run one of the best schools in France.”
Belinda was more interested in the vineyards.
“Some of the finest families in Europe send their children to the nuns to be educated,” he went on. “The sisters even take babies, although the male children are sent to the brothers near Langres when they are five.”
Belinda was shocked. “Why would a rich family send away its babies?”
“It is necessary if the daughter is unmarried and a proper husband cannot be found. The sisters keep the babies until a discreet adoption can take place.”
The talk of babies was making her nervous, and she tried to change the subject, but Alexi wasn’t ready to be distracted. “The sisters take good care of them,” he said. “They’re not abandoned to spend their days in cribs. They have the best food and attention.”
“I can’t imagine a mother turning over her baby to someone else’s care.” She untied her sweater and slipped it on. “Let’s go. I’m getting cold.”
“You can’t imagine it because you still think like the bourgeoisie,” he said without moving. “You will have to think differently now that you are my wife. Now that you are a Savagar.”
Her hands closed involuntarily over her abdomen, and she turned slowly. “I don’t understand. Why are you telling me this?”
“So you know what will happen to your bastard child. As soon as it’s born, it will go to the sisters at the Couvent de l’Annonciation to be raised.”
“You know,” she whispered.
“Of course I know.”
The sun drained from the day as all her nightmares sprang to life.
“Your belly is swollen,” he said, his voice laden with contempt, “and the veins of your breasts show through your skin. The night I looked at you standing in our bedroom in that black nightgown…It was as if someone had ripped the blinders from my eyes. How long did you think you could deceive me?”
“No!” Suddenly it was all more than she could bear, and she did what she’d sworn she never would. “No! The baby’s not a bastard! It’s your baby! It’s your—”
He slapped her hard across the face. “Do not humiliate yourself with lies that you know I will never believe!” She tried to pull away from him, but he held her tight. “How you must have been laughing at me that day at the Polo Lounge. You trapped me into marriage just as if I were a schoolboy. You made a fool of me!”
She began to cry. “I know I should have told you. But you wouldn’t have helped me, and I didn’t know what else to do. I’ll go away. After our divorce. You’ll never have to see me again.”
“Our divorce? Oh no, ma petite. There will be no divorce. Did you not understand what I was telling you about the Couvent de l’Annonciation? Did you not understand that you are the one who has been trapped?”
Fear gripped her as she remembered what he’d said. “No! I’ll never let you take away my baby.” Her baby. Flynn’s baby! She had to make her dreams come true. She’d start her life again in California. She and a little boy, as handsome as his father, or a little girl, more beautiful than any child born.
The expression on his face turned fierce, and all the foolish dream castles she’d built crumbled. “There will be no divorce,” he said. “If you try to run away, you will never have a sou from me. You are not good at surviving without other people’s money, are you, Belinda?”
“You can’t take my baby away!”
“I can do anything I want.” His voice grew deadly quiet. “You do not know French law, my dear. Your bastard child will be legally mine. In this country, the father has complete authority over his children. And, I warn you, if you ever tell anyone of your foolishness, I will ruin you. Do you understand me? You will be left with nothing.”
“Alexi, don’t do this to me,” she whimpered.
But he was already walking away from her.
They drove silently back to Paris. As Alexi pulled the Hispano-Suiza through the gate and into the drive, Belinda looked up at the house she had grown to hate. It loomed over her, like a great, gray tombstone. She fumbled blindly for the door handle and jumped from the car.
Alexi was at her side almost immediately. “Enter the house with dignity, Belinda, for your own sake.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Why did you marry me?”
He gazed at her, the seconds ticking away like lost promises. His mouth tightened with bitterness. “Because I loved you.”
She stared at him, and a lock of hair whipped her cheek. “I’ll hate you forever for this.” She pulled away and ran blindly down the drive toward the Rue de la Bienfaisance, her misery stark against the sunny beauty of the spring afternoon.
She fled into the leafy shadows near the gate where the old chestnut trees hung heavy with white blossoms. Petals dripped onto the pavement and lay in great snowy drifts at the curb. As she turned onto the street, a gust of wind from a passing car swept up the fallen petals from the sidewalk and enveloped her in a cloud of white. Alexi stood unmoving and watched. Belinda, captured for one heartbreaking beat of time in a swirling cloud of chestnut blossoms.
It was a moment he would remember for the rest of his life. Belinda in blossoms—silly and shallow, agonizingly young. Heartbroken.
Belinda’s Baby
Chapter 6
The man cracked an ugly black whip over his head, and the younger girls squealed. Even the older students, who had just last night agreed they were much too sophisticated to be frightened by the fouettard, felt their throats go dry. He was ferociously ugly, with a filthy, matted beard and a long, dirt-stained robe. Every December 4 the fouettard singled out the very worst girl at the Couvent de l
’Annonciation to receive his bundle of birch twigs.
For once the convent’s dining room was free of its customary morning chatter, delivered in as many as five different languages. The girls pressed more closely together, and delicious quivers of fear shot through their stomachs.
Please, Blessed Mother, don’t let it be me. Their prayers came more from habit than any real fear since they already knew whom he would chose.
She stood slightly apart from them, near a plastic Christmas wreath that hung alongside construction paper snowflakes and a poster of Mick Jagger the sisters hadn’t yet spotted. Even though she was dressed in the same white blouse, blue plaid skirt, and dark kneesocks as her classmates, she looked different from the rest. Although she was only fourteen, she towered over all of them. She had huge hands, paddleboat feet, and a face too big for her body. An unruly ponytail contained the streaky blond hair that fell well past her shoulders. Her pale hair contrasted with a set of thick, dark eyebrows that almost met in the middle and looked as if they’d been painted on her face with a blunt-tipped marking pen. Her mouth, complete with a full set of silver braces, spread across the bottom of her face. Her arms and legs were long and ungainly, all pointy elbows and knobby knees, one of which bore a scab and the dirty outline of a Band-Aid. While the other girls wore slim Swiss wristwatches, she wore a man’s chronometer, the black leather strap fitting her so loosely that the face of the watch hung to the side of her bony adolescent wrist.
It wasn’t only her size that set her apart, but also the way she stood, her chin thrust forward, her funny green eyes glaring defiantly at anything she didn’t like—in this case the fouettard. Her rebellious expression dared him to touch her with the whip. No one but Fleur Savagar could have managed that look.
By that winter of 1970, the more progressive areas of France had outlawed the fouettard, the wicked “whipper” who threatened to give badly behaved French schoolchildren birch sticks instead of presents for Christmas. But at the Couvent de l’Annonciation changes weren’t made lightly, and the sisters hoped the shameful notoriety of being singled out as the worst-behaved girl at the couvent would breed reform. Unfortunately it hadn’t worked out that way.
For the second time the fouettard cracked his whip, and for the second time Fleur Savagar refused to move, even though she had good reason to be worried. In January she’d stolen the keys to the mother superior’s old Citroën. After bragging to everyone that she knew how to drive, she’d run the car straight through the toolshed. In March she’d broken her arm doing bareback acrobatics on the couvent’s bedraggled pony, then stubbornly refused to tell anyone she’d hurt herself until the nuns had spotted her badly swollen arm. An unfortunate incident with fireworks had led to the destruction of the garage roof, but that was a mild transgression compared to the unforgettable day all the couvent’s six-year-olds had disappeared.
The fouettard pulled the hated handful of birch twigs from an old gunnysack and let his eyes slide over the girls before they finally came to rest on Fleur. With a baleful stare, he placed the twigs at the toes of her scuffed brown oxfords. Sister Marguerite, who found the custom barbaric, looked away, but the other nuns clucked their tongues and shook their heads. They tried so hard with Fleur, but she was like quicksilver running through their disciplined days—changeable, impulsive, aching for her life to begin. They secretly loved her the best because she’d been with them the longest and because it was impossible not to love her. But they worried about what would happen when she was no longer under their firm control.
They watched for signs of remorse as she picked up the twigs. Hélas! Her head came up, and she flashed them a mischievous grin before she clamped the twigs into the crook of her arm like a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. All the girls giggled as she blew kisses and made mock bows.
As soon as Fleur was certain everybody understood how little she cared about the stupid fouettard and his stupid twigs, she slipped out the side door, grabbed her old wool coat from the row of hooks in the hallway, and raced outside. The morning was cold, and her breath formed a frosty cloud as she raced across the hard-packed earth away from the gray stone buildings. In her coat pocket, she found her beloved blue New York Yankees hat. It pulled at the rubber band on her ponytail, but she didn’t care. Belinda had bought the hat for her last summer.
Fleur could only see her mother twice a year—during the Christmas holidays and for a month in August. In exactly fourteen days they’d be together in Antibes, where they spent every Christmas. Fleur had been marking off the days on her calendar since last August. She loved being with Belinda more than anything in the world. Her mother never scolded her for talking too loud, or upsetting a glass of milk, or even for swearing. Belinda loved her more than anybody in the whole world.
Fleur had never seen her father. He’d brought her to the couvent when she was only one week old and never come back. She’d never seen the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance where all of them lived without her—her mother, her father, her grandmother…and her brother, Michel. It wasn’t her fault, her mother said.
Fleur gave a shrill whistle as she reached the fence that marked the edge of the couvent property. Before she got her braces, she’d whistled a lot better. Before she got her braces, she hadn’t believed anything could make her uglier. Now she knew she’d been wrong.
The chestnut whickered as he came up to the edge of the fence and stuck his head over the post to nuzzle her shoulder. He was a Selle Français, a French saddle horse owned by the neighboring vintner, and Fleur thought he was the most beautiful creature in the world. She’d give anything to ride him, but the nuns wouldn’t let her, even though the vintner had given his permission. She wanted to disobey them and ride him anyway, but she was afraid they’d punish her by telling Belinda not to come.
Fleur planned to be a great horsewoman someday, despite her current status as the clumsiest girl at the couvent. She tripped over her big feet a dozen times a day, sending serving platters crashing to the floor, flower vases wobbling off tabletops, and the nuns scurrying into the nursery to safeguard whatever baby she might have taken it into her head to cuddle. Only when it came to sports did she forget her self-consciousness over her big feet, towering height, and oversized hands. She could run faster, swim farther, and score more goals at field hockey than anyone else. She was as good as a boy, and being as good as a boy was important to her. Fathers liked boys, and maybe if she was the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest, just like a boy, her father would let her come home.
The days before the Christmas holiday dragged endlessly until the afternoon arrived for her mother to pick her up. Fleur was packed hours in advance, and as she waited, the nuns passed through the chilly front hallway one by one.
“Do not forget, Fleur, to keep a sweater with you. Even in the South, it can be cool in December.”
“Yes, Sister Dominique.”
“Remember that you’re not in Châtillon-sur-Seine where you know everyone. You mustn’t talk to strangers.”
“Yes, Sister Marguerite.”
“Promise me you’ll go to Mass every day.”
She crossed her fingers in the folds of her skirt. “I promise, Sister Thérèse.”
Fleur’s heart burst with pride when her beautiful mother finally swept into their midst. She looked like a bird of paradise descending into a flock of chimney swifts. Beneath a snow-white mink coat, Belinda wore a yellow silk top over indigo trousers belted at the waist with braided orange vinyl. Platinum and Lucite bangles clicked at her wrists, and matching disks swung from her ears. Everything about her was colorfully mod, stylish, and expensive.
At thirty-three, Belinda had become a costly gem, cut to perfection by Alexi Savagar and polished by the luxuries of the Faubourg St.-Honoré. She was thinner, more prone to small, quick gestures, but the eyes that drank in her daughter’s face had not changed at all. They were the same innocent hyacinth-blue as they’d been the day she’d met Errol Flynn.
Fleur bounded acro
ss the hallway like a Saint Bernard pup and threw herself in her mother’s arms. Belinda took a small step backward to steady herself. “Let’s hurry,” she whispered into Fleur’s ear.
Fleur waved a hasty good-bye to the nuns, grabbed her mother’s hand, and pulled her toward the door before the sisters could bombard Belinda with an account of Fleur’s latest misdeeds. Not that Belinda paid any attention. “Those old bats,” she’d said to Fleur the last time. “You have a wild, free spirit, and I don’t want them to change one thing about you.’”
Fleur loved when her mother talked like that. Belinda said wildness was in Fleur’s blood.
A silver Lamborghini stood at the bottom of the front steps. As Fleur slid into the passenger seat, she gulped in the sweet, familiar scent of her mother’s Shalimar.
“Hello, baby.”
She slipped into Belinda’s arms with a small sob and cuddled into the mink, the Shalimar, and everything that was her mother. She was too old to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. It felt so good to be Belinda’s baby again.
Belinda and Fleur loved the Côte d’Azur. The day after they arrived, they drove from their pink stucco hotel near Antibes into Monaco along the famous Corniche du Littoral, the serpentine road that twisted around the cliffs of the coastline. “You wouldn’t get carsick if you’d look straight ahead instead of out the sides,” Belinda said, just as she’d said the year before.
“But then I’d miss too many things.”
They stopped first at the market at the foot of Monte Carlo’s palace hill. Fleur’s stomach quickly recovered, and she bounded from one food stall to another pointing at everything that caught her eye. The weather was warm, and she wore khaki camp shorts, her favorite T-shirt, which said, “Draft beer, not students,” and a new pair of Jesus sandals Belinda had bought her the day before. Belinda wasn’t like the nuns about clothes. “Wear what makes you happy, baby,” she said. “Develop your own style. There’s plenty of time for high fashion later.”