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“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.
