“Paul Sevarin,” she whispered with great determination. “I shall change completely in France, and when I come home, you are going to marry me.”
* * *
As the packet they had boarded at Portsmouth pitched and rocked across the choppy Channel, Whitney stood at the rail, her gaze fastened on the receding English coastline. The wind caught at the wide rim of her bonnet, tugging it free to dangle from its ribbons, whipping her hair against her cheek. She stared at her homeland, conjuring a vision of how it would be when she again crossed this Channel. Of course, news of her return would be announced in the papers: “Miss Whitney Stone,” they would proclaim, “lately the belle of Paris, returns this week to her native England.” A faint smile touched Whitney’s lips . . . The belle of Paris . . .
She pushed her unruly hair off her face, stuffing it into the crown of her childish bonnet, and resolutely turned her back on England.
The Channel seemed to smooth out as she marched across the deck to stare in the direction of France. And her future.
FRANCE
1816–1820
3
* * *
Situated behind wrought-iron gates, Lord and Lady Gilbert’s Parisian home was imposing without being austere. Huge bow windows admitted light to the spacious rooms; pastels lent an air of sunny elegance to everything from parlors to second-floor bedrooms. “And these are your rooms, darling,” Anne said as she opened the door to a suite carpeted in pale blue.
Whitney stood mesmerized on the threshold, her gaze roving longingly over the magnificent white satin coverlet on the bed splashed with flowers of lavender, pink, and blue. A dainty settee was covered in matching fabric. Delicate porcelain vases were filled with flowers in the same hues of lavender and pink. Ruefully, Whitney turned to her aunt. “I’d feel ever so much better, Aunt Anne, if you could find another room for me, something not quite so, well, fragile. Anyone at home,” Whitney explained to Anne’s amazed expression, “could tell you that I’ve only to walk by something delicate to send it crashing to the floor.”
Anne turned to the servant beside her who was shouldering Whitney’s heavy trunk. “In here,” Anne said with a firm nod of her head toward the wonderful room.
“Don’t say you weren’t forewarned,” sighed Whitney, removing her bonnet and settling herself gingerly on the flowered settee. Paris, she decided, was going to be heavenly.
* * *
The parade of visitors began promptly at half past eleven, three days later, with the arrival of Anne’s personal dressmaker, accompanied by three smiling seamstresses who talked endlessly about styles and fabrics and measured and remeasured Whitney.
Thirty minutes after they departed, Whitney found herself marching back and forth with a book on her head before the critical stare of the plump woman whom Aunt Anne was entrusting with the formidable task of teaching Whitney something called “social graces.”
“I am atrociously clumsy, Madame Froussard,” Whitney explained with an embarrassed flush as the book plummeted to the floor for the third time.
“But no!” Madame Froussard contradicted, shaking her elaborately coiffed silver hair. “Mademoiselle Stone has a natural grace and excellent posture. But Mademoiselle must learn not to walk as if she were in a race.”
By the dancing instructor who arrived on the heels of Madame Froussard’s departure, Whitney was whirled around the room in time to an imaginary waltz and judged, “Not at all hopeless—with practice.”
By the French tutor who appeared at tea time, she was pronounced, “Fit to instruct me, Lady Gilbert.”
* * *
For some months, Madame Froussard visited for two hours, five times each week, instructing Whitney in the social graces. Under her relentless, exacting tutelage, Whitney worked diligently to learn anything which might eventually help her win favor in Paul’s eyes.
“Exactly what are you learning from Madame Froussard?” inquired Uncle Edward as they dined one evening.
A sheepish look crept across Whitney’s face. “She is teaching me to stroll not gallop.” She waited, half expecting her uncle to say that was a nonsensical waste of time, but instead he smiled approvingly. Whitney smiled back, feeling unaccountably happy. “Do you know,” she teased, “I once believed that all one needed to walk properly were two sound limbs!”
From that night on, Whitney’s laughing anecdotes about her day’s endeavors became a delightful ritual at each evening meal. “Did you ever observe, Uncle,” she asked him gaily one night, “that there is an art to turning around in a court dress with a train?”
“Mine never gave me any trouble,” he joked.
“Done incorrectly,” Whitney informed him with mock solemnity, “one is likely to find oneself wrapped in a train that has just become a tourniquet.”
A month later she slid into her chair and fluttered a silken fan, eyeing her uncle with a speculative sparkle over the slats. “Are you over-warm, my dear?” Edward asked her, already into the spirit of the inevitable fun.
“A fan is not really for cooling oneself,” Whitney advised him, batting her long eyelashes with an exaggerated coquetry that made Anne burst out laughing. “A fan is for flirting. It is also for keeping one’s hands gracefully occupied. And for slapping the arm of a gentleman who is too forward.”
The laughter vanished from Edward’s face. “What gentleman has become too forward?” he demanded tersely.
“Why, no one has. I don’t know any gentlemen yet,” Whitney replied.
Anne watched the two of them, her smile filled with joy, for Whitney now occupied the place in Edward’s heart, and hers, that would have been their own daughter’s.
* * *
One evening the following May, the month before Whitney’s official debut into society, Edward produced three opera tickets. Tossing them with artificial casualness in front of Whitney, he suggested that—if her schedule permitted—she might enjoy accompanying her aunt and himself to the Embassy’s private box.
A year ago, Whitney would have whirled around in a rapturous circle, but she had changed now, so in
stead she beamed at her uncle and said, “I would like that above anything, Uncle Edward.”
In silence she sat while Clarissa, who had been her maid since childhood, brushed her hair and swept it upward, smoothing it into curls at the crown. Her new white frock with ice-blue velvet ribbons at the high waistline and frilled hemline was gently lowered over her head. A matching ice-blue satin cloak completed her ensemble. Whitney stood before her mirror, staring at herself with shining eyes. Tentatively, she dropped into a deep throne room curtsy, her head bowed to the perfect angle. “May I present Miss Whitney Stone,” she murmured gravely. “The belle of Paris.”
A fine, chilly mist descended, making the Paris streets gleam in the moonlight. Whitney snuggled deeper into the folds of her satin cloak, loving the feel of it against her chin, while she looked out the window at the teaming mass of humanity scurrying along the wide, rain-swept boulevards.
Outside the theatre crowds milled about in gay defiance of the dampness. Handsome gentlemen in satin coats and tight-fitting breeches bowed and nodded to ladies who glittered with jewels. Stepping from the coach, Whitney gazed in wonderment at the unbelievably gorgeous ladies who stood, poised and confident, talking to their escorts. They were, she decided then and there, the most beautiful women in the world, and she instantly dismissed any future hope of ever really being “the belle of Paris.” But she did so with very little regret, for there was a wonderful exhilaration in simply being here among them.
As the trio made their way into the theatre, only Anne observed the younger gentlemen whose idle glances flickered past Whitney, then returned for another, longer look. Whitney’s beauty was a blossoming thing, a vividness of features and coloring that promised much more to come. There was a radiance about her that sprang from her lively spirit and zest for life, a regalness and poise in her bearing that came from clashing head-on for so many years with adversity.