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For the second time the fouettard cracked his whip, and for the second time Fleur Savagar refused to move, even though she had good reason to be worried. In January she’d stolen the keys to the mother superior’s old Citroën. After bragging to everyone that she knew how to drive, she’d run the car straight through the toolshed. In March she’d broken her arm doing bareback acrobatics on the couvent’s bedraggled pony, then stubbornly refused to tell anyone she’d hurt herself until the nuns had spotted her badly swollen arm. An unfortunate incident with fireworks had led to the destruction of the garage roof, but that was a mild transgression compared to the unforgettable day all the couvent’s six-year-olds had disappeared.
The fouettard pulled the hated handful of birch twigs from an old gunnysack and let his eyes slide over the girls before they finally came to rest on Fleur. With a baleful stare, he placed the twigs at the toes of her scuffed brown oxfords. Sister Marguerite, who found the custom barbaric, looked away, but the other nuns clucked their tongues and shook their heads. They tried so hard with Fleur, but she was like quicksilver running through their disciplined days—changeable, impulsive, aching for her life to begin. They secretly loved her the best because she’d been with them the longest and because it was impossible not to love her. But they worried about what would happen when she was no longer under their firm control.
They watched for signs of remorse as she picked up the twigs. Hélas! Her head came up, and she flashed them a mischievous grin before she clamped the twigs into the crook of her arm like a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. All the girls giggled as she blew kisses and made mock bows.
As soon as Fleur was certain everybody understood how little she cared about the stupid fouettard and his stupid twigs, she slipped out the side door, grabbed her old wool coat from the row of hooks in the hallway, and raced outside. The morning was cold, and her breath formed a frosty cloud as she raced across the hard-packed earth away from the gray stone buildings. In her coat pocket, she found her beloved blue New York Yankees hat. It pulled at the rubber band on her ponytail, but she didn’t care. Belinda had bought the hat for her last summer.
Fleur could only see her mother twice a year—during the Christmas holidays and for a month in August. In exactly fourteen days they’d be together in Antibes, where they spent every Christmas. Fleur had been marking off the days on her calendar since last August. She loved being with Belinda more than anything in the world. Her mother never scolded her for talking too loud, or upsetting a glass of milk, or even for swearing. Belinda loved her more than anybody in the whole world.
Fleur had never seen her father. He’d brought her to the couvent when she was only one week old and never come back. She’d never seen the house on the Rue de la Bienfaisance where all of them lived without her—her mother, her father, her grandmother…and her brother, Michel. It wasn’t her fault, her mother said.
Fleur gave a shrill whistle as she reached the fence that marked the edge of the couvent property. Before she got her braces, she’d whistled a lot better. Before she got her braces, she hadn’t believed anything could make her uglier. Now she knew she’d been wrong.
The chestnut whickered as he came up to the edge of the fence and stuck his head over the post to nuzzle her shoulder. He was a Selle Français, a French saddle horse owned by the neighboring vintner, and Fleur thought he was the most beautiful creature in the world. She’d give anything to ride him, but the nuns wouldn’t let her, even though the vintner had given his permission. She wanted to disobey them and ride him anyway, but she was afraid they’d punish her by telling Belinda not to come.
Fleur planned to be a great horsewoman someday, despite her current status as the clumsiest girl at the couvent. She tripped over her big feet a dozen times a day, sending serving platters crashing to the floor, flower vases wobbling off tabletops, and the nuns scurrying into the nursery to safeguard whatever baby she might have taken it into her head to cuddle. Only when it came to sports did she forget her self-consciousness over her big feet, towering height, and oversized hands. She could run faster, swim farther, and score more goals at field hockey than anyone else. She was as good as a boy, and being as good as a boy was important to her. Fathers liked boys, and maybe if she was the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest, just like a boy, her father would let her come home.
The days before the Christmas holiday dragged endlessly until the afternoon arrived for her mother to pick her up. Fleur was packed hours in advance, and as she waited, the nuns passed through the chilly front hallway one by one.
“Do not forget, Fleur, to keep a sweater with you. Even in the South, it can be cool in December.”
“Yes, Sister Dominique.”
“Remember that you’re not in Châtillon-sur-Seine where you know everyone. You mustn’t talk to strangers.”
“Yes, Sister Marguerite.”
“Promise me you’ll go to Mass every day.”
She crossed her fingers in the folds of her skirt. “I promise, Sister Thérèse.”
Fleur’s heart burst with pride when her beautiful mother finally swept into their midst. She looked like a bird of paradise descending into a flock of chimney swifts. Beneath a snow-white mink coat, Belinda wore a yellow silk top over indigo trousers belted at the waist with braided orange vinyl. Platinum and Lucite bangles clicked at her wrists, and matching disks swung from her ears. Everything about her was colorfully mod, stylish, and expensive.
At thirty-three, Belinda had become a costly gem, cut to perfection by Alexi Savagar and polished by the luxuries of the Faubourg St.-Honoré. She was thinner, more prone to small, quick gestures, but the eyes that drank in her daughter’s face had not changed at all. They were the same innocent hyacinth-blue as they’d been the day she’d met Errol Flynn.
Fleur bounded acro
ss the hallway like a Saint Bernard pup and threw herself in her mother’s arms. Belinda took a small step backward to steady herself. “Let’s hurry,” she whispered into Fleur’s ear.
Fleur waved a hasty good-bye to the nuns, grabbed her mother’s hand, and pulled her toward the door before the sisters could bombard Belinda with an account of Fleur’s latest misdeeds. Not that Belinda paid any attention. “Those old bats,” she’d said to Fleur the last time. “You have a wild, free spirit, and I don’t want them to change one thing about you.’”
Fleur loved when her mother talked like that. Belinda said wildness was in Fleur’s blood.
A silver Lamborghini stood at the bottom of the front steps. As Fleur slid into the passenger seat, she gulped in the sweet, familiar scent of her mother’s Shalimar.
“Hello, baby.”
She slipped into Belinda’s arms with a small sob and cuddled into the mink, the Shalimar, and everything that was her mother. She was too old to cry, but she couldn’t help herself. It felt so good to be Belinda’s baby again.
Belinda and Fleur loved the Côte d’Azur. The day after they arrived, they drove from their pink stucco hotel near Antibes into Monaco along the famous Corniche du Littoral, the serpentine road that twisted around the cliffs of the coastline. “You wouldn’t get carsick if you’d look straight ahead instead of out the sides,” Belinda said, just as she’d said the year before.
“But then I’d miss too many things.”
They stopped first at the market at the foot of Monte Carlo’s palace hill. Fleur’s stomach quickly recovered, and she bounded from one food stall to another pointing at everything that caught her eye. The weather was warm, and she wore khaki camp shorts, her favorite T-shirt, which said, “Draft beer, not students,” and a new pair of Jesus sandals Belinda had bought her the day before. Belinda wasn’t like the nuns about clothes. “Wear what makes you happy, baby,” she said. “Develop your own style. There’s plenty of time for high fashion later.”
Belinda was wearing Pucci.
After Fleur made her selections for lunch, she dragged her mother up the steep path from the Monte Carlo market to the palace, eating a ham and poppy seed roll as she walked. Fleur spoke four languages, but she was proudest of her English, which was flawlessly American. She’d learned it from the American students who attended the couvent—daughters of diplomats, bankers, and the bureau chiefs of the American newspapers. By adopting their slang and their attitudes, she’d gradually stopped thinking of herself as French.
