The Secret Lover (3 page)

It was the perfect opportunity for escape.

Sophie continued walking right past her ball and the fishpond, headed in no particular direction except away from all those who claimed to know what was best for her. Her mind was consumed with the indecision and confusion that had come over her the moment Honorine had mentioned London.

She desperately wanted to see England again, but she just as desperately dreaded the prospect. It hadn't been so long that she couldn't recall, rather vividly, thank you, how people had looked at her those last few weeks in London, morbid curiosity and censure so plainly evident in their expressions. The
ton
fed like wolves on scandals such as hers, devouring it until there was nothing left but a few details to pick over.

How well the scandal had held up to the test of time? Did they truly remember? Could she go to London and risk bringing dishonor to her family once again?

But she missed her home
! In spite of her attempts to convince herself otherwise over the years, deep down she yearned for her home like a child for an absent mother. There were days she longed to walk on English soil, to smell the salt air of the sea, to see the tall, stately trees surrounding Kettering House, the splendor of St. James Square, the endless green lawns of Hyde Park.

There was so
much
she missed! Simple things, really, such as speaking her native tongue, or the roses that bloomed beneath the sitting room window at Kettering House, or the way her Aunt Violet snored when she napped after luncheon. And Tinley, the family butler, who had died last fall after more than forty years in their service. She had never even bid him farewell.

So much she missed, yet so much she feared, she thought morosely as she reached the old fountain on the east lawn, that she did not know quite what to do with herself.

Sophie paused, looked behind her. Louis and Honorine were still arguing. As she watched them, she was suddenly struck with the monumental realization that she had
never
really known what to do with herself. For eight and twenty years now, it seemed as if she had been searching for her place in this world, and instead of growing stronger, she was less certain of who she was or where she belonged each passing year.

Sir William, the scandal, her exile… all of it had created the chaos deep within her, until she no longer knew
who
Sophie Dane was. Or wanted to be.

Certainly nothing pointed to that more painfully than her infatuation with William Stanwood.

How long ago that seemed now.

She had been searching then, too. She had never really fit in with the
ton
, and Sir William had paid her kind attention at a point in time it was clear she would have no true suitors. Her infatuation had been instant, her relief that someone had noticed her overpowering. She had been naively blind to his motives, blind to her own wealth, which he had so blatantly coveted. Blind to it all—she, Sophie Elise Dane, the youngest sister of the powerful and influential Earl of Kettering, had eloped with the bastard, had run away when he beat her, and then had sought the unmentionable, positively shameful, parliamentary divorce.

Oh yes, the most scandalous of scandals, a slap to the face of the
ton
and everything it stood for. She had eloped with a known blackguard, had endured his beatings, had risked the consequences of her escape, then had allowed her brother to drag her name through the high-profile mud of the
ton
in pursuit of a parliamentary divorce. It was the only way in which she could be completely free of Stanwood and protect what little of her inheritance he had not squandered.

The whole, sordid scandal had cost her family standing and had made her a pariah among the English aristocracy.

She had been sent to France, effectively banished from the
ton's
sight.

She could still remember the awful coach ride along the rutted path to Château la Claire, the axle groaning beneath the weight of all her worldly belongings. The weight of her life. It was unspoken but nonetheless understood between her and her family that she would not return to England and her disgrace, but would remain in France, where she hoped the scandal would not taint her.

With a restless sigh, Sophie trailed her fingers along the edge of the fountain pool, her mind returning to a time in her life that she had managed to bury in the dark recesses of her heart. But now a shiver crept up her spine as the memories edged into light.

She turned her face upward, to the sun, and let its delicious warmth seep into her skin.

Those first wretched days of her arrival were thankfully a blur now. She could recall little more than her incessant crying, the inability to eat anything, and the fitful, recurring dreams in which William threatened her and chased her until she lay breathless in her bed.

In those first weeks she had wanted to escape forever the enormity of what she had done, to sleep for all eternity so that she might forget his betrayal and the sickening feeling each time he raised his fist against her.

She had wanted to die, a thousand times over she had wanted to die for being duped so egregiously and having caused her family such grief and irreparable notoriety.

But Eugenie had been frightened by her lethargy, and after weeks of watching her drift from one nightmare to another, she had finally dragged her from her bed, admonishing her to raise herself up and learn from her mistakes, not drown in her despair of them. Eugenie had pushed Sophie to Dieppe, had forced her to find a charitable cause on which to focus her thoughts and actions. Anything was better than the misery she was putting them both through.

It was no accident that Eugenie had pushed her to work with the ladies of the
Eglise St. Jacques
, who twice weekly carried food and medicine to Dieppe's poor. She had resisted at first, but in the course of those calls, Sophie met women and children who suffered from poverty and despair far greater than anything she had ever endured. Gradually, she began to understand that these women and children could not escape the poverty or the surroundings poverty bound them to, and that it was only by virtue of her aristocratic birth that she had managed to escape her despair.

By the following spring, Sophie was collecting used clothing and sundries for the poor.

That was when she met Honorine.

Oh, she remembered her first encounter with Honorine, all right. It wasn't something a body could easily forget.

She smiled, recalling the day that she had been shown into the drawing room of one benefactress in Dieppe. The woman's guest stood as Sophie entered, wearing a gown of bright orange and yellow and the most outrageous hat Sophie had ever seen. It was covered with feathers and lace and was a most atrocious shade of blue. Startled beyond her senses, Sophie was nonetheless instantly struck by Honorine's good looks and even more so by her winsome smile.

Honorine had listened politely as her friend explained who Sophie was, but she had seemed almost bored with the woman's charitable proclivities. Sophie had left with a pair of faded silk slippers, curiously amused by Madame Fortier.

Over the next several days, she forgot about Honorine, but one bright morning as she and the sisters of
Eglise St. Jacques
prepared their daily packages, Honorine swept into the small narthex carrying a hatbox in each hand. Behind her were two men—who Sophie later learned were the ever-present Roland and Fabrice—each carrying several precariously balanced hatboxes. She had brought, she explained half in English, half in French, bonnets from her Parisian milliner for the women Sophie served.

Her smile impossibly broad, Honorine had eagerly removed the lid from one hatbox… and withdrew another god-awful bonnet in an appalling shade of purple, adorned with yellow silk flowers under the brim and edged along the bottom with what looked to be pink hydrangeas.
Pink
hydrangeas
. The men removed the lids of all the hatboxes, displaying bonnets that were identical, with the exception of the many wild combinations of atrocious colors.

It was Madame Fortier's intent, Sophie understood, to offer the bonnets to Dieppe's poor women.

She had tried to explain that the poor were hardly in a position to wear such colorful bonnets.

"
Pourquoi
?" Honorine had insisted.

"Well, because they aren't!" Sophie had responded, flustered.

Honorine shrugged and fidgeted with a long green ribbon dangling from a yellow bonnet. "
Les femmes
, they all want for fine bonnets!" she said. "They will want them, of course they will want them!"

Oui
, the women of Dieppe
did
want them.

Much to Sophie's great surprise, women from all walks pounced on the bonnets with glee, and soon it was not an uncommon sight to see bonnets of mind-boggling hues bobbing along the crowded streets of Dieppe.

Honorine kept coming to the church. She and Sophie forged a fast friendship that summer, so strong that by the end of that summer, Honorine had convinced Sophie that she would make her a wonderful companion.

Not that it was particularly hard to convince her—after what she had been through in England, the talk of travel and adventure in exotic places had excited her. The moment Honorine saw that Sophie was seriously considering her offer, she took the liberty of speaking to Louis Renault.

Naturally, Louis was reluctant—he knew Madame Fortier by reputation, and her odd appearance did not exactly inspire his confidence. But Eugenie thought the idea a splendid one and exactly what Sophie needed.

Moreover, she was amused by Honorine's uncommon manner and impressed with her impeccable credentials, a fact that she pointed out with great verve to Louis. Honorine's husband had been a member of one of the oldest and most revered French families, one of the few names among the aristocracy to have escaped the carnage of the last century.

Monsieur Fortier had been quite a lot older than Honorine, had lived an austere life, his wife a dutiful shadow of himself. But when he died, Honorine had emerged like a butterfly, colorful and free. It was a well-known fact that Honorine Fortier now did as she pleased, society be damned.

And that pleased Eugenie enormously.

It frightened Louis tremendously.

He had, at first, valiantly resisted the suggestion that Sophie trot off to lands unknown with a woman who thought nothing of wearing bright pink, puce, and red in the morning. But as he had never been able to deny Eugenie a blasted thing, he was soon convincing Julian that companion to Madame Honorine Fortier was indeed a worthy occupation.

With Julian's eventual consent—another surprise, seeing as how her brother had always been so bloody strict and protective of her—Honorine did not waste a moment, and very soon thereafter, whisked Sophie off to Italy in search of olive oil, which she maintained would keep her skin looking as smooth and firm as a girl of twenty years.

In Venice, Honorine set up an elaborate house, but it wasn't long before Sophie understood that while Honorine provided the house, her true method of survival was to live off the kindness of gentlemen. Which left Sophie, Fabrice, and Roland in search of the basic necessities of life.

Sophie quickly took up cooking as her primary hobby.

Fabrice and Roland eagerly served as her guinea pigs, enthusiastically trying her many dishes, embellishing their praise when they thought something delicious, but making no effort to soften the blow when they disliked the food. By some miracle, Sophie actually developed quite a knack for cooking, and before too long, she was routinely preparing dishes that had both Frenchmen swooning.

In the midst of her learning to prepare sumptuous dishes, a fawning gentleman from Portugal captured Honorine's fancy, and one morning, over poached eggs and fresh tomatoes, she announced they were to Lisbon. There was no time to protest or offer an opinion of any sort, as they left the very next afternoon. Their belongings trailed a few days behind them.

In Lisbon, they had scarcely settled into a household when Honorine lost interest in Marcelo in favor of the very dashing Ernesto, the Spanish diplomat. Within a matter of weeks, they had up and left for Spain and Ernesto. When Ernesto turned out to be quite married, it was on to Vienna, then Rome, then Brussels, and from there to the remote city of Stockholm, where Honorine was determined to rest in the city where the sun never set. But Alrik, a Swedish prince with a passion for Frenchwomen, saw to it that she did not rest at all.

It took Balder, a Norwegian aristocrat in the Swedish court to rid Honorine of the pesky Alrik. So captivated by her Nordic prince was she that Honorine next whisked her entourage to Christiania, Norway.

Even now, on the banks of the placid river that ran below Château la Claire, it was exhausting just
thinking
of it all. With a small shake of her head, Sophie continued walking through the daisy-dotted grass that covered the riverbanks.

In spite of the helter-skelter way of her life, Sophie had learned a lot from Honorine in the last seven years. Not that she couldn't be terribly exasperating at times, and her penchant for indoor picnics and evening dances was enough to put a person in Bedlam. That, and her incessant remarks about Sophie's love life—or lack of one. "These pantaloons!" she had exclaimed one day as she rummaged through the clean clothes a maid had brought to Sophie's rooms. "They are very old! Ah, but this matters very little, as no one shall see them,
non
?"

Or her penchant for tapping Sophie just above her left breast. "
Le coeur

, it will dry to a peanut with no
l'amour
!"

Yes, well, Sophie had long ago resigned herself to her fate, and she really didn't need Honorine reminding her how empty she was.

But in spite of that, Sophie adored Honorine immensely for her unconquerable attitude toward life. She admired the fact that Honorine was a woman of independent means who marched to the beat of her own drummer. The woman simply did not care a whit for what French society thought of her, much less the inhabitants of the world at large, and least of all, her whimpering son, Pierre, who was among her greatest critics. As she often recited to Pierre, she had but one life to live, and she would be damned if she wouldn't live it very well indeed.