They all turned and stared, and her father’s face tightened into lines of impatience and annoyance. “To France,” he replied abruptly. “To live with your aunt and uncle, who are going to try to make a lady out of you.”
Carefully avoiding meeting anyone’s eyes, lest she break down then and there, Whitney slid into her chair at the table. “Have you informed my aunt and uncle of the risk they are taking?” she asked, concentrating all her strength on preventing her father from seeing what he had just done to her heart. She looked coldly at her aunt and uncle’s guilty, embarrassed faces. “Father may have neglected to mention you’re risking disgrace by welcoming me into your home. As he will tell you, I’ve a hideous disposition, I’m rag-mannered, and I haven’t a trace of polite conversation.”
Her aunt was watching her with naked pity, but her father’s expression was stony. “Oh Papa,” she whispered brokenly, “do you really despise me this much? Do you hate me so much that you have to send me out of your sight?” Her eyes swimming with unshed tears, Whitney stood up. “If you . . . will excuse me . . . I’m not very hungry this evening.”
“How could you!” Anne cried when she left, rising from her own chair and glaring furiously at Martin Stone. “You are the most heartless, unfeeling—it will be a pleasure to remove that child from your clutches. How she has survived this long is a testimony to her strength. I’m sure I could never have done so well.”
“You refine too much upon her words, Madam,” Martin said icily. “I assure you that what has her looking so distraught is not the prospect of being parted from me. I have merely put a premature end to her plans to continue making a fool of herself over Paul Sevarin.”
2
* * *
The news that Martin Stone’s daughter was being packed off to France poste haste spread through the countryside like a fire through dry brush. In a sleepy rural area where the gentry were usually aloof and reserved, Whitney Stone had again provided everyone with a delicious morsel of excitement.
On the cobbled streets of the village and in households wealthy and poor, females of all ages gathered to savor this latest piece of gossip. With great relish and at greater length, they discussed every scandalous escapade of Whitney’s scandal-ridden life, beginning with the toad she let loose in church one Sunday when she was eight years old, to the time this past summer when she fell out of a tree while spying on Paul Sevarin, seated beneath it with a young lady.
Only when those events had been recalled in detail, did they allow themselves to conjecture over Martin Stone’s reason for finally sending her off to France.
In general, they felt that the outrageous child had probably pushed her poor, beleaguered father too far when she appeared in men’s trousers. Because she had so many other shortcomings, there was some disagreement over exactly what had driven her father to take such sudden action, but if there was anything they all agreed upon, it was that Paul Sevarin would be vastly relieved to have the girl out from under his feet.
During the next three days, Martin Stone’s neighbors arrived at his house in droves, ostensibly to visit with Lord and Lady Gilbert and to bid Whitney goodbye. On the evening before their departure for France, Anne Gilbert was seated in the salon, enduring one of these social calls by three ladies and their daughters. Her smile was more formal than friendly as she listened with ill-concealed annoyance to these women who professed to be well-wishers and yet took a morbid delight in recounting to her Whitney’s many youthful transgressions. Under the pretense of friendly concern, they made it clear that, in their collective opinion, Whitney was going to disgrace herself in Paris, destroy Anne’s sanity, and very likely ruin Edward’s diplomatic career.
She stood when they were finally ready to leave, and bade them a curt good-bye; then she sank into a chair, her eyes bright with angry determination. By constantly criticizing his daughter in front of other people, Martin Stone had made his own child a target for village ridicule. All Anne really needed to do was whisk Whitney away from these narrow-minded spiteful neighbors of hers and let her bloom in Paris, where the social atmosphere wasn’t so stifling.
In the doorway of the salon, the butler cleared his throat. “Mr. Sevarin is here, my lady.”
“Show him in, please,” Anne said, carefully hiding her surprised pleasure that the object of Whitney’s childish adoration had come to say good-bye to her. Anne’s pleasure faded, however, when Mr. Sevarin walked into the salon accompanied by a stunningly lovely little blonde. Since everyone for fifteen miles seemed to know that Whitney worshiped him, Anne had no doubt that Paul Sevarin knew it too, and she thought it very callous of him to bring a young woman with him when he had come to say good-bye to a girl who adored him.
She watched him cross the room toward her, longing to find something about him to criticize, but there was nothing. Paul Sevarin was tall and handsome, with the easy charm of a wealthy, well-bred country gentleman. “Good evening, Mr. Sevarin,” she said with cool formality. “Whitney is in the garden.”
As if he guessed the reason for her reserve, Paul’s blue eyes lit with a smile as he returned her greeting. “I know that,” he said, “but I was hoping you might visit with Elizabeth while I say good-bye to Whitney.”
In spite of herself, Anne was mollified. “I would be delighted.”
* * *
Whitney stared morosely at the shadowy rosebushes. Her aunt was in the salon, undoubtedly being regaled with more stories of her niece’s past, and dire predictions for her future. Emily had left for London with her parents, and Paul . . . Paul hadn’t even come to say good-bye. Not that she’d really expected him to; he was probably with his friends, toasting her departure.
As if she’d conjured him up, his deep, masculine voice sounded from the darkness behind her. “Hello, pretty girl.”
Whitney lurched around. He was standing only inches away with one shoulder casually propped against a tree. In the moonlight his snowy shirt and neckcloth gleamed against the almost invisible darkness of his jacket. “I understand you’re leaving us,” he said quietly.
Mutely, Whitney nodded. She was trying to commit to memory the exact shade of his blond hair and every contour of his handsome, moonlit face. “Will you miss me?” she blurted.
“Of course I will,” he chuckled. “Things are going to be very dull without you, young lady.”
“Yes, I imagine so,” Whitney whispered, dropping her eyes. “With me gone, who else will fall out of trees to ruin your picnic, or break your leg, or . . .”
Paul interrupted her string of self-recriminations. “No one.”
Whitney lifted her candid gaze to his. “Will you wait for me?”
“I will be here when you return, if that’s what you mean,” he replied evasively.
“But you know it isn’t!” Whitney persisted in desperation. “What I mean is, could you possibly not marry anyone else until I—” Whitney trailed off in embarrassment. Why, she wondered, did she always go on this way with him? Why couldn’t she be cool and flirtatious as the older girls were?
“Whitney,” Paul was saying firmly, “you will go away and forget my name. Some day, you’ll wonder why you ever asked me to wait for you.”
“I’m already wondering that,” she admitted miserably.
Sighing with irritation and compassion, Paul gently touched her chin, forcing her to look at him. “I’ll be here,” he said with a reluctant grin, “waiting impatiently to see how you’ve grown up.”
Mesmerized, Whitney gazed up into his recklessly handsome, smiling face—and then she committed the final, the ultimate, mistake: Impulsively, she leaned up on her toes, flung her arms around him, and planted an urgent kiss just to the side of Paul’s mouth. Swearing under his breath, he pulled her arms down and forcibly moved her away. Tears of self-loathing filled Whitney’s eyes. “I’m so sorry, Paul. I—I never should have done that.”
“No,” he agreed, “you shouldn’t have.” He reached into his pocket, angrily pulled out a small box, and
slapped it unceremoniously into her hand. “I brought you a farewell gift.”
Whitney’s spirits soared dizzyingly. “You did?” Her fingers shook as she snapped the lid up and gazed in rapturous wonder at the small cameo pendant dangling from a slender gold chain. “Oh, Paul,” she whispered, her eyes shining, “it’s the most beautiful, most splendid—I shall treasure it forever.”
“It’s a memento,” he said carefully. “Nothing more.”
Whitney scarcely heard him as she reverently touched the pendant. “Did you choose it for me yourself?”
Paul frowned in indecision. He’d gone to the village this morning to choose a tastefully expensive little trinket for Elizabeth. While he was there, the proprietor had laughingly remarked that with Miss Stone leaving for France, Paul must be in a mood to celebrate his freedom. As a matter of fact, Paul was. So, on an impulse, he asked the proprietor to choose something suitable for a fifteen-year-old. Until Whitney opened the box a moment ago, Paul had no idea what was in it. But what was the point of telling Whitney that? With luck, her aunt and uncle would be able to find some unsuspecting Frenchman who would marry her—preferably a docile man who wouldn’t complain when Whitney ran roughshod over him. Out of reflex, Paul started to reach for her, to urge her to make the most of her opportunities in France. Instead he kept his hands at his sides. “I chose it myself—as a gift from one friend to another,” he said finally.
“But I don’t want to be just your friend,” Whitney burst out, then she caught herself. “Being your friend will be fine . . . for now,” she sighed.
“In that case,” he said, his expression turning humorous, “I suppose it would be perfectly proper for two friends to exchange a farewell kiss.”
With a dazzling smile of joyous amazement, Whitney squeezed her eyes closed and puckered her lips, but his mouth only brushed her cheek. When she opened her eyes, he was striding from the garden.
“Paul Sevarin,” she whispered with great determination. “I shall change completely in France, and when I come home, you are going to marry me.”
* * *
As the packet they had boarded at Portsmouth pitched and rocked across the choppy Channel, Whitney stood at the rail, her gaze fastened on the receding English coastline. The wind caught at the wide rim of her bonnet, tugging it free to dangle from its ribbons, whipping her hair against her cheek. She stared at her homeland, conjuring a vision of how it would be when she again crossed this Channel. Of course, news of her return would be announced in the papers: “Miss Whitney Stone,” they would proclaim, “lately the belle of Paris, returns this week to her native England.” A faint smile touched Whitney’s lips . . . The belle of Paris . . .
She pushed her unruly hair off her face, stuffing it into the crown of her childish bonnet, and resolutely turned her back on England.
The Channel seemed to smooth out as she marched across the deck to stare in the direction of France. And her future.
FRANCE
1816–1820
3
* * *
Situated behind wrought-iron gates, Lord and Lady Gilbert’s Parisian home was imposing without being austere. Huge bow windows admitted light to the spacious rooms; pastels lent an air of sunny elegance to everything from parlors to second-floor bedrooms. “And these are your rooms, darling,” Anne said as she opened the door to a suite carpeted in pale blue.
Whitney stood mesmerized on the threshold, her gaze roving longingly over the magnificent white satin coverlet on the bed splashed with flowers of lavender, pink, and blue. A dainty settee was covered in matching fabric. Delicate porcelain vases were filled with flowers in the same hues of lavender and pink. Ruefully, Whitney turned to her aunt. “I’d feel ever so much better, Aunt Anne, if you could find another room for me, something not quite so, well, fragile. Anyone at home,” Whitney explained to Anne’s amazed expression, “could tell you that I’ve only to walk by something delicate to send it crashing to the floor.”
Anne turned to the servant beside her who was shouldering Whitney’s heavy trunk. “In here,” Anne said with a firm nod of her head toward the wonderful room.
“Don’t say you weren’t forewarned,” sighed Whitney, removing her bonnet and settling herself gingerly on the flowered settee. Paris, she decided, was going to be heavenly.
* * *
The parade of visitors began promptly at half past eleven, three days later, with the arrival of Anne’s personal dressmaker, accompanied by three smiling seamstresses who talked endlessly about styles and fabrics and measured and remeasured Whitney.
Thirty minutes after they departed, Whitney found herself marching back and forth with a book on her head before the critical stare of the plump woman whom Aunt Anne was entrusting with the formidable task of teaching Whitney something called “social graces.”
“I am atrociously clumsy, Madame Froussard,” Whitney explained with an embarrassed flush as the book plummeted to the floor for the third time.
“But no!” Madame Froussard contradicted, shaking her elaborately coiffed silver hair. “Mademoiselle Stone has a natural grace and excellent posture. But Mademoiselle must learn not to walk as if she were in a race.”
By the dancing instructor who arrived on the heels of Madame Froussard’s departure, Whitney was whirled around the room in time to an imaginary waltz and judged, “Not at all hopeless—with practice.”
By the French tutor who appeared at tea time, she was pronounced, “Fit to instruct me, Lady Gilbert.”
* * *
For some months, Madame Froussard visited for two hours, five times each week, instructing Whitney in the social graces. Under her relentless, exacting tutelage, Whitney worked diligently to learn anything which might eventually help her win favor in Paul’s eyes.
“Exactly what are you learning from Madame Froussard?” inquired Uncle Edward as they dined one evening.
A sheepish look crept across Whitney’s face. “She is teaching me to stroll not gallop.” She waited, half expecting her uncle to say that was a nonsensical waste of time, but instead he smiled approvingly. Whitney smiled back, feeling unaccountably happy. “Do you know,” she teased, “I once believed that all one needed to walk properly were two sound limbs!”
From that night on, Whitney’s laughing anecdotes about her day’s endeavors became a delightful ritual at each evening meal. “Did you ever observe, Uncle,” she asked him gaily one night, “that there is an art to turning around in a court dress with a train?”
“Mine never gave me any trouble,” he joked.
“Done incorrectly,” Whitney informed him with mock solemnity, “one is likely to find oneself wrapped in a train that has just become a tourniquet.”
A month later she slid into her chair and fluttered a silken fan, eyeing her uncle with a speculative sparkle over the slats. “Are you over-warm, my dear?” Edward asked her, already into the spirit of the inevitable fun.
“A fan is not really for cooling oneself,” Whitney advised him, batting her long eyelashes with an exaggerated coquetry that made Anne burst out laughing. “A fan is for flirting. It is also for keeping one’s hands gracefully occupied. And for slapping the arm of a gentleman who is too forward.”
The laughter vanished from Edward’s face. “What gentleman has become too forward?” he demanded tersely.
“Why, no one has. I don’t know any gentlemen yet,” Whitney replied.
Anne watched the two of them, her smile filled with joy, for Whitney now occupied the place in Edward’s heart, and hers, that would have been their own daughter’s.
* * *
One evening the following May, the month before Whitney’s official debut into society, Edward produced three opera tickets. Tossing them with artificial casualness in front of Whitney, he suggested that—if her schedule permitted—she might enjoy accompanying her aunt and himself to the Embassy’s private box.
A year ago, Whitney would have whirled around in a rapturous circle, but she had changed now, so in
stead she beamed at her uncle and said, “I would like that above anything, Uncle Edward.”
In silence she sat while Clarissa, who had been her maid since childhood, brushed her hair and swept it upward, smoothing it into curls at the crown. Her new white frock with ice-blue velvet ribbons at the high waistline and frilled hemline was gently lowered over her head. A matching ice-blue satin cloak completed her ensemble. Whitney stood before her mirror, staring at herself with shining eyes. Tentatively, she dropped into a deep throne room curtsy, her head bowed to the perfect angle. “May I present Miss Whitney Stone,” she murmured gravely. “The belle of Paris.”
A fine, chilly mist descended, making the Paris streets gleam in the moonlight. Whitney snuggled deeper into the folds of her satin cloak, loving the feel of it against her chin, while she looked out the window at the teaming mass of humanity scurrying along the wide, rain-swept boulevards.
Outside the theatre crowds milled about in gay defiance of the dampness. Handsome gentlemen in satin coats and tight-fitting breeches bowed and nodded to ladies who glittered with jewels. Stepping from the coach, Whitney gazed in wonderment at the unbelievably gorgeous ladies who stood, poised and confident, talking to their escorts. They were, she decided then and there, the most beautiful women in the world, and she instantly dismissed any future hope of ever really being “the belle of Paris.” But she did so with very little regret, for there was a wonderful exhilaration in simply being here among them.
As the trio made their way into the theatre, only Anne observed the younger gentlemen whose idle glances flickered past Whitney, then returned for another, longer look. Whitney’s beauty was a blossoming thing, a vividness of features and coloring that promised much more to come. There was a radiance about her that sprang from her lively spirit and zest for life, a regalness and poise in her bearing that came from clashing head-on for so many years with adversity.