LITMIR.BIZ

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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.”

      Sapphire heard her father move in his chair and turned to see him produce a small, worn wooden chest. “This is your mother’s casket,” he said quietly, opening it and removing a black velvet bag. “And this—” he carefully removed an object from it “—is the gift she saved for you.”

      Sapphire gasped in awe at the sight of the stunning sapphire that was as large as a walnut, sparkling bright in the lamplight. “For me?” she whispered as she stepped forward to take it from his hand. It was cool in her palm, yet it seemed to radiate a warmth that surprised her.

      Armand closed the lid on the box. “Inside are also letters from your father to your mother. Love letters, I would assume.” He shook his head, suddenly seeming sad. “I never read them, not even after her death. She had never offered to allow me to read them.”

      “They’re for me?” Sapphire asked.

      He nodded.

      “And then what happened?” Sapphire asked again. “Please tell me, Aunt Lucia.”

      “Well, the couple spent a magical night together and then parted, he to travel to London to tell his family of his marriage and she to her father’s cottage to inform him of her good fortune.” She turned from the window, folding her hands together. “But Edward’s father, the Earl of Wessex, was not pleased his son had married a country girl, a girl without title or wealth.”

      Sapphire hung her head. “The family would not accept the marriage.”

      “Indeed not. According to your mother, the Earl of Wessex was very angry because he had already chosen a bride for his son, a bride from a family with great affluence and a proper lineage,” Lucia said, lifting her forefinger that sported a wide, spiraled gold ring. “And so he sent a representative to Sophie to say that his son had made a mistake and wanted to have the marriage annulled.”

      “But Sophie knew it couldn’t be true,” Sapphire said, almost feeling her mother’s pain in her own chest.

      Angelique met Sapphire’s gaze, seeming to feel her pain, as well.

      “Sophie knew.” Lucia nodded solemnly. “And when the young Sophie could not be persuaded to sign the annulment —not even for money—and when she to threatened to go to London herself and find her beloved Edward, Lord Wessex began to fear the country girl. So…he had her kidnapped.”

      “Poor Mama,” Sapphire sighed. She could not imagine that such a thing happened to her soft-spoken, timid mother. “Please go on,” she whispered after a moment of silence.

      “So…” Lucia took a breath. “Sophie found herself in the hold of a ship for the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, abandoned on the docks of New Orleans. Lord Wessex had so feared the country girl who had stolen his son’s heart that he sent her all the way to America.”

      “I cannot believe it,” Angelique murmured.

      Sapphire closed her eyes, remembering her mother before she had become ill and hollow-cheeked, and then she tried to imagine what Sophie must have looked like when she was eighteen.

      “Sophie was without money or food or a place to live, and by then she knew she was carrying a child.”

      “Edward’s baby,” Sapphire said, still finding it all so hard to believe.

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