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“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.”
“And then what happened?” Sapphire asked, although she could guess.
“They married in secret the following summer,” Lucia said solemnly. “And they sealed their love—”
“With a night of passionate lovemaking,” Angelique injected.
“And Edward gave his new wife, Sophie, as a token of his love, one of the largest, most beautiful sapphires in all of England. A sapphire that had once belonged to the great Queen Elizabeth.”
