Sapphire

Dismissing the frog, Sapphire raised her chin a notch and strode over to the two women whose heads were bowed as they gossiped. “Excuse me, ladies, but I couldn’t help but overhear that last of your exchange,” she said, looking one directly in the eyes and then the other.

“How rude of you to listen to a conversation you were not invited to be a part of. Have you no manners whatsoever, young lady?” Lady Carlisle demanded. At least Lady Morrow had the decency to avert her gaze in embarrassment.

Sapphire took a step closer to the countess, her eyes flashing with anger. “You speak of manners? My mother always taught me that if one has nothing nice to say, one should not speak at all.”

“What did she know?” Lady Carlisle hissed. “She was a common trollop!”

Stunned by the countess’s comment, Sapphire stared, eyes wide. “My mother was no such thing!”

Lady Carlisle moved closer to Sapphire. “Your mother was nothing but a New Orleans whore, the same as your precious aunt. That is how your father found her!”

“How dare you!” Sapphire shouted.

“Sapphire.” Aunt Lucia appeared at her side, laying her hand gently on her arm. “Please—your father’s guests…”

Sapphire pulled her arm away. “No! Did you…did you hear what she just said about my mother? What she accused you of being?”

“Ask Lady Morrow,” Lady Carlisle said as she drew herself up in her gray flowered gown, her hideous headdress with its bird bobbing as if it were pecking a hole in her head. “Her cousin’s brother knew them in New Orleans. He and Armand were business associates.”

“Edith, that will be quite enough,” Aunt Lucia said sharply.

“It’s not true! It’s a lie! Aunt Lucia, tell them, tell them my mother was not—” But when Sapphire looked at her aunt, she realized something was amiss. Did these women know something she didn’t? “Non,” she whispered in shock.

“Sapphire, ma petite…” Aunt Lucia reached for her hand.

Suddenly the whole garden seemed to spin around Sapphire, the bright torches, the heavy scent of jasmine, the sound of the countess’s sour voices. “It’s not true. None of it is true. It’s all lies!”

“Sapphire, this is complicated,” Lucia said calmly. “Let us go inside and—”

“No!” Sapphire cried, pulling away, her heart pounding in her throat. With tears filling her eyes, she rushed off the patio and ran into the jungle.

2

Sapphire ran wildly, tears streaming down her cheeks as she shoved her way through the underbrush, taking the shortcut to the stables in the humid darkness.

“It’s not true,” she shouted over and over again. “It’s not true! My mother was not a whore!” And yet she knew in her heart of hearts that it was true; the look on Aunt Lucia’s face spoke the truth. Her mother, her beloved Mama, her father’s Sophie, had been a common woman of the streets—a prostitute. And somewhere deep inside, Sapphire realized she had always known her mother kept a terrible secret. There was a sadness Mama could never put aside, not even with the love of her daughter and devoted husband.

“But how could you do it, Mama?” Sapphire whispered as she slowed to a walk. She was panting so hard that her chest ached and her stomach turned queasy. “How could you have died not telling me the truth?” she demanded of her mother, looking up into the starlit sky, calling to her somewhere above.

But of course there was no response, neither from the heavens nor from her mother, who had been dead for nearly a year. A year…yet it seemed as though they had just buried her mother in the lovely place she and Papa had chosen. Her illness had been swift—a sudden loss of weight, blurry vision, thirst and light-headedness. A physician had been called, but he was unable to cure the strange disease he had called the sugar sickness, and she died three weeks later.…Her beloved Mama was dead and now these people were saying such awful things about her!

Sapphire immediately felt a sense of comfort as she approached her father’s vast stables. The stables had always been a place of refuge when she was sad or hurt or angry. Here, alone with the horses, she found she could lose herself in grooming and caring for them, or simply standing in their presence. Riding through the pounding surf, she’d always found a sense of release and freedom that she had seemed to crave more and more in the past year.

Ahead, she saw the dim glow of a lantern in the tack room and she felt her heart flutter. Had Maurice come, hoping she could slip away from her father’s dinner party for a few minutes? Her steps quickened, her heart beating in anticipation as she slipped in the door. Hearing nothing, she walked quietly down the worn cobblestone center aisle, setting her feet on the paving blocks that had been carried here from the shores of France as ballast on a merchant vessel decades ago, listening to the familiar sounds of the horses shifting in their stalls, the contented chuff and the occasional whinny.

A sliver of light came from the doorway that had been left open a crack, and her heart swelled with anticipation. Her beloved was here! “Maurice?” Sapphire whispered, walking slowly toward the light.

Then she heard a sound, a female voice, and she hesitated. “Angelique?” What on earth was her sister doing at the barn? Taking a horse to meet Jacques?

“Sapphire?” Angelique called from behind the door. “I thought you were in the garden with—”

“Oh, Angel.” Sapphire rushed for the door and flung it open. “You’re not going to believe—” She clasped the door tightly with her hand and stared.

Angelique pulled herself from a man’s embrace.

“Maurice!” Sapphire’s heart fell as her world came crashing down around her.

“S-Sapphire, mon amour.”

“No!” She grabbed a pitchfork from where it rested in the corner of the tack room.

“This is not how it looks, ma chère.” Maurice walked toward her, his arms open.

“Not how it looks?” Sapphire shouted.

“Sapphire, please,” Angelique protested.

Angelique was wearing a simple A-line dress that fell to just past her knees, a dress similar to those worn by the native women. It was what she always wore when she sneaked out of the house to meet men.

“Do not get in my way!” Sapphire threatened Angelique as she took a step closer to Maurice, jabbing the tines of the pitchfork in the air. “You said you loved me! You said you wanted to marry me!” Her voice caught in her throat as a rage swept over her. “You said we would make beautiful babies together!”

“I do wish to marry you, mon amour. I do love you. It is only that—”

“What?” she demanded. “It is only what? You love me, but you kiss my sister?” Her last words came out of her mouth ragged and forlorn.

“Sapphire—” Angelique interrupted, reaching for her.

“Not now,” she snapped, thrusting the pitchfork at Maurice again. “I’m going to run my true love through his black heart,” she hissed, lunging toward him.

Maurice threw himself against the wall and slowly began to inch his way toward the door, his palms pressed to the wall. “Sapphire, s’il vous plait, let me explain. This has nothing to do with you and me. What you and I have is true love—”

“True love!” Sapphire laughed bitterly. “Get out of here,” she ordered, spitting at him.

Maurice ran out the door, and by the time Sapphire turned the corner, he was halfway through the barn.

“Never come back,” she called after him. “Not ever, do you hear me?”

She stood there for a moment staring into the darkness as the barn door slammed shut, then, leaving the pitchfork outside against the wall, she turned back to the tack room.

“How could you?” she whispered, her gaze settling on Angelique. She tucked a stray tendril of damp hair behind her ear. “You knew I loved him.”

“I’m sorry,” Angelique said, looking at the ground.

“You’re sorry? You have betrayed me and that’s all you have to say to me?”

Angelique turned to her, lifting her eyes to meet Sapphire’s. “You don’t want to hear anything else I have to say right now.”

“Yes, I do,” Sapphire challenged, taking a step closer. “I think I have a right to hear what you have to say, considering the circumstances.”

“I’m sorry I let him kiss me, but he doesn’t love you,” she said softly.

“What do you mean?” Sapphire stared at her. “Of course Maurice loves me!”

“No he doesn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t have kissed me.”

“Don’t say that!”

“Sapphire, listen to me. Maurice loves your father’s land, not you. He loves what he thinks you can do to further his situation. He has an older brother, you know. Younger sons do not inherit a father’s plantation, and the family is in debt. If Maurice cannot find a rich wife, he will be forced to find a position in trade.”

Sapphire tucked her hands behind her back and leaned against the wall. “It’s not true. It can’t be.”

“Sapphire, this isn’t the first time he’s tried. Even the first night we met last autumn at the ball, he tried to get me to meet him in the forest after everyone had gone home.”

Sapphire shook her head in disbelief, trying to think back. “But we danced every dance together that night. He said I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and that he had fallen in love with me the moment he laid eyes upon me.”

Angelique nodded. “You probably are the most beautiful woman he ever met, but he is not a loyal man. You deserve better.”

“You’re confusing things! You were kissing him. What about Jacques?” Sapphire asked. “I thought you liked him.”

“Ah, Jacques. I do like him, but he has no intention of marrying me. Not that I would have him.” Angelique ran her finger along the edge of a rough-hewn table scattered with brushes and combs for grooming. “Since I am half native, no respectable man will ever have me, no matter how many beautiful gowns Armand Fabergine buys for me or how many tutors he brings to teach me Latin and literature.”

“That’s not true,” Sapphire said quietly.

“It is true and you know it. That’s why Mama left her money to me when she died and not to you. It was so that I would not have to marry. She did it because she knew you would inherit Papa’s land and fortune. She did it so I could take care of myself.” Angelique took a step toward Sapphire. “Do you want to hear Maurice’s plan?”

“What?” Sapphire whispered, tears welling in her eyes.

“He knew Papa would never agree to allow him to marry you. His plan was to seduce you, and when you became pregnant, Papa would be forced to allow you to marry him to save your honor.”

Sapphire did not want to believe Angel’s words. But Angelique never lied. Not even when they were children and were faced with punishment if they did not confess to some trick they had played on the servants or when they had sneaked away from their governess to swim naked in the ocean with the village children.

“You shouldn’t have done this, Angel.”

“I am what I am, and if you expect more, I will only break your heart over and over again.” Her eyes, now filled with tears, searched Sapphire’s. “Can you forgive me, my sister?”

Sapphire looked away, focusing on the pale light glowing from an oil lamp that hung from a wrought-iron hook protruding from the wall.

They had been the best of friends—sisters—since the day they met. Sapphire had sneaked out of the house one day, abandoning her music tutor to hike in the jungle. On the beach she had encountered two big, ugly stray dogs that had trapped a small, barefoot native girl against a tree. Sapphire had driven the dogs off with a large branch and taken the little girl home with her to have Sophie bandage the girl’s cut knee. They had discovered that Angelique came from a nearby village and that she was recently orphaned. Her mother had died of a fever and her father—well, she didn’t know who her father was—but one had only to look at the face of the eight-year-old to tell that a Frenchman had fathered her. Perhaps Sophie had suspected it might be her husband who had sired her. That very day, Sophie Fabergine had welcomed the orphan into her home and from that time, raised her as if she were a daughter.

Sapphire looked up. “I’m still angry with you, Angel,” she whispered.

Angelique threw her arms around Sapphire and hugged her. “Of course you are. I deserve it and I would expect no less of you.” She walked to the far wall, stood on her tiptoes and turned down the lamp, enclosing them in darkness. “Now come on. Let’s go home.”

Sapphire was not entirely surprised when she entered her bedchamber to find her father and aunt waiting for her. Angelique took one look at their faces and backed up. “I’ll go to my room.”

“Non, Angelique.” Armand spoke from a woven beachwood chair under one of the open windows. If he noticed Angelique was not in her ball gown, he gave no indication, nor did he make mention of the fact that Sapphire’s hair was tangled and hanging loose, her gown tattered.

“What I have to say affects you as well as Sapphire,” he sighed. “Come in and close the door behind you. You two ladies have shared enough with our guests today, do you not think?”

“What is it that cannot wait?” Sapphire demanded. She knew Aunt Lucia must have told her father what the women had said in the garden about Sapphire’s mother. She had a hundred questions for her father but she just wasn’t ready to ask them yet. “I’m tired, Papa.” She approached her chifforobe, pretending she was about to begin undressing. “It would be better if we talked tomorrow.”

“Non,” Armand said sharply, startling all three women. “Tonight, young lady, you will not have your way! I will speak to you now, fille, and you, out of respect for your father, will listen. I should have had this talk with you—your mother and I should have—years ago, but we cannot change that now. Our guests have remedied that, haven’t they.” He hesitated. “All we can do is go on from here. Now sit down on the bed.” He raised his hand in Angelique’s direction. “You, as well, Angel. I warn you, I will not be handled by the three of you. Not tonight.”

Astonished by her father’s demeanor, Sapphire did as she was told and silently walked to the bed to sit beside Aunt Lucia. Angelique sat on the older woman’s other side.

“Let me first say that I am sorry, Sapphire, that all has come about in the way that it has. I must say that I did not always agree with your mother’s choices, but they were hers to make,” he said. “I know you understand that Lord Carlisle came to finalize a business agreement with me, but he also came to meet you so that I might finalize my plans to send you to London—”

“London!” Sapphire jumped off the bed. “I am not going to London!”

Armand rose from his chair. “I told you to sit, fille, and you will sit!”

Under her father’s angry gaze, she leaned against the bed but did not sit. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited stubbornly.

“In my grief over the loss of your mother, I have allowed you to run wild.”

“Papa, I have not—”

“Do not interrupt me again!”

Sapphire pressed her lips together in silence, but she felt as if she could leap out of her skin. Had her father lost his mind? Go to London? What could possibly be there for her?

“I have allowed you to run too freely,” Armand continued, beginning to pace in the large, airy bedchamber. “Since your mother’s death, I have allowed you, against my better judgment, to cease your lessons, to run about the island, unsupervised, to meet with men in private that you should not—”

“Papa, Maurice and I—” This time, he only had to give Sapphire a look and she was silent.

“You will go to London with Lord and Lady Carlisle and Lucia has agreed to go as your chaperone.”

“But what about me? What am I to do?” Angelique rose, suddenly as upset as Sapphire, obviously for a different reason. “Can’t I go to London, as well?”

“Well, I suppose you may,” Armand said, taken by surprise. “I wasn’t certain you would want to, my dear. To leave your home village, to—”

“Of course I want to go!” Angelique clasped her hands together excitedly. “Oh, Papa, you don’t know how much I’ve always wanted to go to London.”

Sapphire glared at Angelique, unable to let go of her anger toward her yet. “I thought you wanted to go to New York. No, wait, that was last week. Where was it you wanted to go this week? Athens? Paris? Or was it Brussels?” Sapphire mused.

“I want to go to all those places,” Angelique responded, nonplussed. “But most of all, right now, London. Oh, thank you, Papa!”

Sapphire turned to look at her father again. Her mother used to say that Angelique was always so easy to please, unlike Sapphire. Nothing was ever good enough for Sapphire, nothing was ever entirely agreeable—unless it was her idea. “I don’t want to go to London, Papa.” She looked down. It was hard for her to give in. She glanced up at him again, her arms still crossed over her chest. “If this is about Maurice—”

“This is not about that loathsome boy!” Armand said abruptly, turning on his heels to look at her. “Sapphire, you don’t understand. You don’t know who you are.”

“Oh, we’re back to that again, are we?” She moved away from the bed. “I’m still nothing but a child to you, still unable, in your eyes, to make my own decisions, unable to decide for myself what is best for me?” She took a step toward him. “Well, you’re mistaken. I know precisely who I am and what I want out of life. I am Sapphire Lucia Fabergine, daughter of Sophie and Armand Fabergine, and I want nothing more than—”

“You are not my daughter,” Armand said, looking her in the eye.

Sapphire’s throat constricted and her knees went weak. “What?” she managed to say.

“Sapphire, come sit beside me,” Lucia said calmly, trying to take her hand and lead her to the bed.

“No.” Sapphire pulled her arm from her aunt. First this terrible thing about her mother—and now this? She stared at her father. “Is my entire life a lie? Has anyone ever told the truth in this house? Papa, what are you saying?”

Armand’s lower lip trembled. It was obvious he was in pain, not just emotionally, but physically, as well. “Please,” she said quietly, reaching out to take his arm. “Sit and tell me what you have to tell me.” Surprisingly, he allowed her to lead him back to the chair.

“It is true,” he said when he was seated while Sapphire sat on a footstool at his feet. “I am not your father, but you must believe me when I tell you that you are the child of my heart. You must know that, Sapphire, before I go any further.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she stared out the open windows into the dark jungle. Lucia came to stand behind her and pushed a white handkerchief into her hand.

“I’m listening,” Sapphire said, watching the filmy gauze drapes fluttering around her bedposts. A giant green moth had found its way into the room and now fluttered about the lamp, lured by the beauty of the dancing yellow flame, perhaps to its own death. I am like that moth, Sapphire thought. I know that what I am about to hear will destroy me, but I cannot resist knowing the truth.

“I met your mother and Lucia in New Orleans.”

“He was as handsome a man as either of us had ever seen,” Lucia offered, looking to Armand with a smile. “But from the first night he had eyes for no one but your mother.”

“But she was a prostitute,” Sapphire heard herself say, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “That’s how you met her. That’s what Lady Carlisle was talking about, wasn’t it? That’s what Mama was always trying to hide from me. It was her secret.”

Armand folded his hands together and was quiet for a moment. “Oui,” he said finally. “I met your mother in a bordello in New Orleans. We fell in love and I asked her to marry me, though she had given birth to another man’s child without the benefit of a wedding ring. She agreed to marry me and came here to Orchid Manor, bringing Lucia as her companion.”

“And that’s it? You’re telling me that I’m merely the product of some chance encounter between a stranger and a…a night-blooming flower?”

Armand studied his daughter’s face and thought to himself that she had always been so strong, stronger than him or Sophie. Her eyes were red but she did not cry. It had been like that always, even when she was a child; the time she had fallen from her horse when she was seven and had broken her arm, she had not cried. Nor had she cried the hundreds of times she’d skinned her knees or elbows, either. She was strong, his Sapphire, stronger than anyone he’d ever known.

Armand sat back in the chair, crossing one leg over the other. “Listen before you make judgments. Do you not wish to know why your mother was in that place?”

“Do I?” she asked, setting her jaw.

“It doesn’t matter,” Angelique declared, sliding off the bed and coming to stand beside Lucia. “She is Sapphire, and she is as good as anyone on this island. Women do what they must to survive—isn’t that right, Aunt Lucia?” she asked. “Tell her.”

Lucia looked into Angelique’s dark eyes. “It is why I found myself in Madame Dulane’s in New Orleans. I was a common street whore in London and was given the opportunity to travel to America with a kind benefactor. When he grew bored with me, I took to the occupation I knew—but this time, instead of working the streets, I found a place where I would have a bed and food.”

Sapphire felt her head spinning. It was all so much to digest that she didn’t know which question to ask first. Aunt Lucia and her mother selling their bodies to men? Her sweet, quiet, gentle mother, a whore? It was an impossible thought, and yet the look on her father’s and aunt’s faces revealed the truth.

“Did you really meet my mother in New Orleans, or was she also a London whore?”

“I did meet her in New Orleans,” Lucia answered calmly, “but she, too, sailed from London, though not of her own choosing.”

“Not of her own choosing?”

“Sapphire, it will do you no good to be angry with your mother now. She did what she thought was best at the time,” Armand said. “She thought you should not know the truth of your birth until you were older. Then she became ill so suddenly and there was no time…”

The room was silent. Angelique had returned to sit on the bed. Sapphire stared out the window for a moment and then turned back to her father. “So whose daughter am I, if not yours?”

Lucia rested her hand on Armand’s arm and murmured something. He looked at her and nodded. Lucia waited until he had taken a seat in the beachwood chair again and then she spoke, opening her arms as if introducing a performance or work of art. “I have had to piece much of this story together because your mother was not easily forthcoming in her tale, but this is the best I can tell you. There was a young girl in Devonshire,” she said, adapting the tone of a storyteller. “Her name was Sophie and she was a strikingly beautiful woman with auburn hair and a smile that caught the eye of every man in the county, I would suspect.”

Sapphire turned to look at Lucia, unable to resist being drawn in.

“She was a farmer’s daughter who could read and write and who yearned to see the world, at least the world beyond the hills of her little English village. Then one day, the summer she was seventeen, a handsome young man stopped at the local inn to eat.”

“It’s like one of your romance stories,” Angelique said softly. “Or maybe a fairy tale.”

“He was an earl’s son,” Lucia continued. “A viscount in his own right and his name was Edward. It was a meeting completely by chance, though some might say by fate.” She walked to the window, the silk of her bright, multicolored dressing gown flowing behind her. “Had Sophie not been leaving the tavern, having delivered her father’s fresh vegetables at the very moment that his lordship entered the tavern, they would never have met.”

Lucia paused, and then went on. “He fell in love with her at first sight, and she him. And even though they knew their love could never be, for they were not of the same social class, he couldn’t stop himself from riding to the village regularly to see her, and she could not stop herself from sneaking away from the farm to be with him.”