The Girl Behind The Fan

Book 0: Hidden Women

by Stella Knightley

Genres: Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Erotic & Steamy Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

Hurt and confused by the sudden end of her strange love affair with Venetian millionaire Marco Donato, Sarah Thomson takes her bruised heart to Paris, where she tries to forget her yearning for Marco by throwing herself into a new project: a study of the life of notorious nineteenth-century courtesan, Augustine Levert, whose sensual charms parted many a man from his fortune. It is while she is in France that Sarah meets her ex-boyfriend Steven, who is hoping for a reconciliation. They rekindle their psychologically and sexually tortured relationship, but when her life begins to parallel Augustine's story, Sarah realises she will never erase Marco from her heart. Faced with a choice between safety and overwhelming passion, will both women make the right decision?

Release date: June 20, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Chapter 1

Paris, December 6th, 1846

There was a full house that evening at the Salle Favart of the Opéra Comique. The gilded auditorium brought to mind an aviary, filled as it was with the very best of Parisian society, looking like a charm of hummingbirds and chattering like a murder of crows. That evening’s performance was to be the premier of Berlioz’s new Damnation of Faust, but with moments left until the lights were dimmed and the curtain raised on the composer’s self-styled ‘legende dramatique’, the audience awaited the beginning of an altogether more interesting display.

Suddenly a murmur went up and all eyes were trained on a hitherto empty box to the right of the stage. Ladies and gentlemen both were transfixed as a footman helped a slender young woman to her seat. The woman was dressed in the most opulent fashion, in a deep-red silk dress that complemented her hair, so dark and glossy it was almost black. An Indian shawl fine as a cobweb slipped from her daringly bare shoulders. Her long neck was wound with a triple string of pearls fastened with a solid gold clasp studded with diamonds. Two more diamonds as big as quail’s eggs glittered at her ears. She was alone. Her companion – the owner of the booth – was absent for the evening, but everyone knew who he was and, by extrapolation, they knew the beautiful young woman’s profession. But how confident she seemed. How comfortable in her fine clothes and fancy jewels. How arrogant, some of the other women whispered.

‘I’d be arrogant too, if I was wearing those pearls,’ said the mistress of the young Prince Napoleon.

The girl sitting alone in the best box in the house was Augustine du Vert, born plain Augustine Levert in a fishing village in Brittany some twenty-three years earlier. The owner of the box was the Duc De Rocambeau, forty years her senior and wealthier than all the other men in the opera house put together. Augustine was his mistress.

She played the moment well. Augustine knew how to position herself to best effect. Picking up her opera glasses, she leaned forward over the velvet-covered barrier on the pretense of examining the stage, while in reality she was setting out her fine décolletage like a shopfront, the better to show the women her pearls and the men the fleshy assets that had captured the heart of one of the city’s wealthiest aristocrats. The women hissed at her brazenness. The men knew better than to say anything at all. Still, they gawped when they thought they would not be noticed and, when Augustine put a hand to her delicate white throat, more than half the room sighed with her.

Augustine du Vert held the audience so captivated that the first few bars of the opera went almost unheard. For the next two hours, some people paid no attention to poor Faust whatsoever, as they wondered instead what devilish sort of deal Augustine had struck to earn her earrings. When the curtain came down, Augustine applauded the artists and then, while the audience was still clapping, she got to her feet and looked around her as though she too deserved their congratulations. She cast her gaze around the stalls, taking in her friends, her rivals and those who disapproved of her all with the same steady smile. Until, that is, her eyes fell on a box almost opposite her own, and the young man inside it and the pretty blonde woman by his side . . . The young man looked back at her. He held Augustine’s gaze with an angry stare that spoke of his impotent fury.

Augustine steadied herself with one hand on the rail. With the other hand she brought out her Spanish-lace fan and quickly covered her face. Never had she seen such hatred as she saw in those beloved brown eyes that evening. Never had she felt quite so despised. He hated her. The man who once claimed she meant more to him than anything in the world had glared at her as though he wanted her dead. Augustine’s exit from the theatre was far less composed than her arrival. She picked up her skirts and half ran from the lobby to collapse, coughing hard, into the arms of her driver. Thank goodness the Duc had given her a carriage, with heavy velvet drapes at the windows for warmth and privacy.

As the Duc’s horses hurried Augustine back to her new home near the Champs Elysées, her only comfort was to know that there can never be true hatred without there first having been love.

Chapter 2

Paris, June, last year

The Friday afternoon Eurostar from London St Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord had the atmosphere of a party on rails. In my carriage alone there were two lively gangs: one of stags, one of hens, heading over to France to help their friends bid goodbye to the single life in style. They were starting early; passing around plastic tumblers filled with champagne (the girls) and vodka mixed with Red Bull (the boys) before the train even left the station. By the time the train manager announced that we were entering the Channel Tunnel, the two groups had become thoroughly intermingled and no one would have been in the least bit surprised if another marriage two or three years hence was the result.

Though the hens offered me a swig from their champagne bottle, I kept myself to myself. I settled into my seat by the window and got out my laptop, opening it like a shield. I had plenty of work to do. But it was hard to concentrate, though not because of the revellers. I had quite a bit on my mind.

I was in the process of putting the final polish to a doctoral thesis I had begun some three years earlier. My subject was Luciana Giordano, an eighteenth-century Venetian noblewoman whom I had discovered to be the real author of a notorious anonymous erotic novel called The Lover’s Lessons. My research had taken me to Italy, of course, and there began a whole other story.

At the beginning of the year, I had spent almost two months in Venice, studying Luciana’s personal papers in the library of the Palazzo Donato, a spectacular private house on the city’s Grand Canal. I had expected to find confirmation of the erotic novel’s authorship there and I did. It turned out that the novel had much in common with Luciana’s diary and letters. They were definitely by the same hand. I had not, however, expected to find myself embroiled in my own curious epistolary love affair with the private library’s owner, Marco Donato, playboy heir to a vast shipping fortune. Rich, intelligent and handsome as any male model in the photographs I found of him online, Marco Donato was every woman’s dream of a lover, which made it all the more exciting that he seemed to be interested in me. Me! A Great British bluestocking.

Thinking about my time in Venice with four months’ and several thousand miles’ distance behind me, half of me wondered whether I had imagined the increasingly flirtatious emails and messages between me and Donato that had culminated with – I blushed to remember it – me agreeing to have virtual sex at the library desk, using a vibrator he had left there for me to find, while he sent instructions to my laptop. After that – and before that, actually – I had pushed hard for a face-to-face meeting but none ever came, despite his promises. He always seemed to be busy elsewhere. ‘Away on business’.

All this time later, I still oscillated between shame and embarrassment – convincing myself that Marco had got what he wanted when I stripped off and played with myself for his distant pleasure – and anger mixed with sadness. You see, I also had reason to think that Marco’s reluctance to meet me face to face was less about his having got everything he wanted without having to meet me than about his being afraid of my rejection if he did. There were aspects to the way things ended between us that quite simply didn’t add up.

I didn’t get to the bottom of it while I was in Venice. Perhaps I never would. I had not heard from Marco in all the time I’d been back in London. In any case, I had plenty of other business to grapple with. I had a thesis to edit and I was on my way to Paris to begin a new job. I’d been commissioned to complete some research for the producers of a historical movie. It was an exciting assignment that I hoped might lead to more interesting work in the film industry. That’s why I needed to get my thesis polished and sent off before too long.

While the stags and hens partied on, I turned my attention back to the glowing laptop in front of me. Having read her personal diaries so closely, I had grown to love my subject Luciana, but that evening, with so much change right ahead of me, reading the diary passages I had translated back in Venice couldn’t help but make me melancholy. When Luciana talked about the Venetian courtyard garden of her lesbian lover’s house, for example, I could picture it only too clearly, because that house was the Palazzo Donato, where I had spent so much time. And when I thought of the Palazzo Donato, I couldn’t help but think of Marco. Or at least the image of him that still lived in my heart. An image based on old photographs and encouraging words blinking on a screen.

Closing my laptop again, I gazed out of the window at the vast flat expanse of Northern France, speeding by at 175 mph. But I wasn’t really seeing the farmland and the pretty provincial church spires that punctuated the endless fields of green. My mind’s eye saw only the courtyard garden in Venice. I was remembering plucking a single white rose on my very first trip there and how that petty theft had led Marco to tease me into telling him how I lost my virginity. A rose in exchange for a defloration.

I told Marco Donato more about myself than I had ever told anyone. Over those weeks when we wrote to each other – sometimes dozens of emails a day – we shared our childhood joys and pains. I shared my hopes for the future. My deepest fantasies.

And though we had never met in the flesh, I felt as though Marco knew my body intimately. Long before we had cybersex together, he had infiltrated my dreams. I’d stared at photographs of him for long enough to be able to imagine him well. And in my dreams, Marco was my ideal lover. He was dominant but always careful and tender. Sometimes he asked me to do things I wasn’t sure I wanted to do, but I always found that I enjoyed myself when Marco took control. I liked to imagine the strong grip of his hands round my wrists or my ankles, holding me in place as he forced me to take my pleasure, teasing me with his soft lips and his warm tongue on my nipples or my clitoris until I could take it no longer and begged him to enter me while my entire body vibrated with desire. When I imagined him inside me, it was as though fireworks had been lit in my head. I couldn’t get enough of him. I would grab his buttocks with my hands and try to force the pace. I wanted to feel him flood me with his passion. I wanted to see him be as swept away by the moment as I was. I wanted him to give in to me and buck and thrash with an energy he could not conquer. I wanted him to be mine.

I had never had such strange dreams or such strong orgasms as I did when I thought about Marco. But of course it never came to anything more than that strange moment in the library. And now he was gone. He had retreated back into his private world, leaving me wanting more and without a hope of getting it. You can see why he had perhaps turned me slightly insane.

 

Soon the train was pulling in to the Gare du Nord. I got up quickly, grabbing my bag and heading for the door before the drunken stags and hens could start blocking the corridor. I was among the first off the train, walking quickly up the long platform and racing for the taxi rank. Compared to the bright new station at St Pancras, the Gare du Nord seemed old-fashioned and even slightly sinister. There was no one there to meet me as there had been in Venice, when Nick Marsden, my university colleague, came to take me to my flat in the city’s Dorsoduro area. This time I had just an address on a scrap of paper and the promise that the concierge would be there to give me a key. Providing I turned up in good time, that is; I’d been warned that the concierge wouldn’t hang around on my account.

Reaching the front of the taxi queue, I showed the driver the street name. He nodded curtly and plugged the details into his satnav before resuming a conversation on his mobile phone. There was none of the friendly banter that was standard with the water-taxi drivers of Venice. Neither was there anything like Venice’s astonishing beauty to look at on the way. We drove through streets that were far from the picture-book fantasy of Paris to a grey-looking square in the second arrondissement. Standing in front of my new building with my luggage, I wondered for a moment whether I should have stayed in London.

What kind of adventure would Paris turn out to be?

Chapter 3

Paris, 1838

No girl had a more wonderful childhood than Augustine Levert. The only child of doting parents, she made it to the age of seven without considering for a moment that the world was run for anyone’s pleasure but her own. The Levert family lived in a small hamlet near the sea in southern Brittany. Augustine’s father Jean was a fisherman. Her mother Marie, a seamstress. Marie and Jean were childhood sweethearts, desperately in love with each other and utterly enthralled by the one small girl who was the result of their passionate attachment.

But good fortune was not to stay long with la famille Levert. Two weeks after Augustine’s seventh birthday, her father went to sea and did not come back. An unexpected storm had taken six vessels with almost all hands. One of only two survivors explained that Augustine’s father died trying to rescue his brother, so Augustine lost an uncle as well. Every family in the region was affected. The entire village was in mourning for months. Theirs was a close-knit community and people were always keen to help each other, but, like a sudden war, this storm had taken too many of the men. Poverty came hot on the heels of grief and soon everyone had to look out for him or herself again.

Marie Levert had not really worked since her marriage. In those short years of bliss, the real world had changed greatly. There was no work to be had in the village. Her elderly mother could not feed two more mouths for any length of time. There was nothing to be done: Marie and her daughter would have to go to Paris.

 

Augustine detested Paris. She had grown up knowing the freedom of village life and the refreshing breath of the sea. In Brittany, the Leverts lived in a cottage. In Paris, they lived in a single room: a stuffy chambre de bonne – or maid’s room – on the top floor of a big house. Marie had already lost her sunny smile when she lost her husband, and living in Paris seemed to leach the very colour from her skin. Seeing her mother so sad made Augustine determined that one day they would leave this wretched city and go home. She hated to have to live in a hovel with no view.

Neither did Augustine enjoy her new school. The city children teased her for her country accent and her unsophisticated manners. But it was more than that. The other girls were jealous. Augustine was as beautiful as an angel. Her brown hair was as glossy as the mane of a thoroughbred horse. Her skin was as smooth and even-toned as a porcelain doll’s face. Her eyes were a bright summer sky-blue, intelligent and alert. Even as a child, she aroused the envy of grown women, who spent hours at their toilette to impersonate Augustine’s natural glow.

Five years after leaving Brittany, however, Augustine was beginning to feel like a real Parisienne. She had the accent. She knew the slang. She knew the places to avoid. She didn’t talk much about Brittany any more. The only trace of that life that remained in their new existence was an oil painting of a fishing boat on calm seas. Augustine’s father had painted it as a courting gift for Marie. It hung above the bed mother and daughter now had to share.

‘If he hadn’t been a fisherman, he could have been a great artist,’ Marie often mused. ‘If he hadn’t been a fisherman then perhaps he wouldn’t be dead!’

Marie could have married again. She had her offers and there was no doubt that it would have made her life easier, but one of the things Augustine admired most about her mother was her fidelity to Jean Levert’s memory. Theirs had been a love truly worthy of the word ‘toujours’, which was engraved on the inside of the wedding ring that Marie would never take off.

Marie Levert often talked with pleasure about the day she and Jean would be reunited in a better place, but when she finally made the journey to Heaven, she would find the way there long and arduous. She died of consumption, over a series of many painful months. Her anguished coughing became more familiar to Augustine than her voice. When Marie finally died, Augustine was relieved. At least now she could remember the mother who had laughed and played, not the mother who only coughed and sobbed.

But now Augustine was an orphan. She had no one to turn to in the world and nothing to her name except the little seascape and the sewing skills she had learned from her mother. Well, perhaps that wasn’t the entire sum of her assets; but her most significant blessing, her beauty, was not to be without its downside.

The orphaned Augustine’s plight raised pity in the heart of her landlord, Monsieur Laurent Griff. Though he could not afford to let the young girl pay no rent, he was able to help find her a job with his brother, Claude, who had a garment atelier nearby. Augustine was good at sewing; she could make stitches as small and neat as a spider’s. Moreover, she was diligent. She was neat and polite. She was always on time. She kept her mother’s small-town ways in that respect. It was important, Marie had always told her, to make the very best impression. You never knew who might be watching.

Unfortunately for Augustine, the person watching her most closely at the atelier was Delphine Griff, daughter of the proprietor. Delphine had seemed friendly enough at first, but that soon changed.

Claude Griff was a little too effusive with his praise for Augustine’s sewing. Delphine – who considered herself to be the best seamstress in Paris – found it hard to believe her father had been moved to such loud admiration by Augustine’s embroidery alone. She got it into her head that her father had fallen in love with the teenager from Brittany. She told her mother. An argument ensued and Augustine found herself out of a job.

It got worse. Monsieur Laurent Griff’s wife put pressure on him to ensure that not only did Augustine lose her job, she also lost her lodgings. It would not have been seemly for them to continue to house the girl who had tried to wreck his brother Claude’s marriage. They had to stand by their family. The girl would be fine on her own, said Madame Griff. She clearly had an aptitude for gold-digging.

And so Monsieur Griff informed Augustine, with great regret, that she would have to leave the room she had shared with her dying mother. He was about to offer Augustine a return of her last month’s rent to help her on her way when Madame Griff arrived and insisted on watching Augustine pack her bags.

Not that Augustine had much to take with her. The furniture in the room, like the room itself, was rented. Her mother’s finest clothes – and some of Augustine’s – had already been sold to pay for Marie’s funeral. Augustine had just two dresses, both plain and sober as a nun’s. She had her rosary. She had her hairbrush. She had the small seascape her papa painted all those years ago. She packed these few things into the battered leather bag that had once belonged to her grandfather.

Madame Griff – who was every bit as jealous and fearful of Augustine’s beauty as her sister-in-law had been – put it about that Augustine left the building spewing curses. In fact, Augustine left quickly and quietly, with an undeserved sense of crushing shame. She found it hard to believe that people could be so cruel without provocation and thus assumed that she must be somehow at fault. She thanked Monsieur Griff for all his kindnesses and apologised for causing him trouble. While Madame Griff was busy crowing about the steps she had taken to avenge her sister-in-law, Monsieur Griff found time at last to press a few sous into Augustine’s hand.

News of her eviction had come upon Augustine so unexpectedly that she had not the slightest idea where next to go. She knocked on some doors advertising rooms to rent but was turned away from them all; Madame Griff’s unfair opinion of her had already spread far and wide. After seven or eight knock-backs, Augustine took herself to a café. She counted her money beneath the table and tried to calculate how long she might survive. If she found lodgings, she still had the problem of finding employment. How would she find employment without her last employer’s recommendation? She could hardly go to Claude Griff and ask him for a letter. Not now.

Augustine came to the conclusion that the only possible course of action open to her was to return to the one place she had truly called home. She would go back to Brittany, where people knew her and would think the best. She thought her grandmother was still alive, but if she was not able to take her in, then surely a cousin would. Family was the most important thing in the end. Augustine’s travails were simply God’s way of letting her know that truth. The more she thought about it, the more appealing a return to Brittany seemed.

Augustine finished her modest meal and laid a few coins on the table. It was growing dark. She must make her way to the station at once. She went to ask the café proprietor if he could point her in the right direction. It was while she was asking for the quickest way to the station that one of the café’s other customers lifted her purse. Poor Augustine was quite unaware until she came to buy a ticket.

A weaker-hearted girl might have given up at this point but Augustine was resolute. She would walk to Brittany. She did not care how long it would take. She would beg her way home if she had to.

By midnight, Augustine had found her way as far as the Bois de Boulogne. She spent the night shivering beneath a tree, too scared of what might happen to dare to sleep. In the morning, however, exhaustion overcame her and she could stay awake no longer. She curled up with her bag beneath her head and fell into dreams.

 

Augustine dreamed that a horse was gently prodding at her with its big warm nose. Its breath gave her a welcome blast of warmth in the coldness of the early day. Augustine touched the velvety muzzle. It felt like kindness itself. The horse snorted, warming her with its hay-scented breath.

‘Is she dead?’ came a human voice. High-pitched. Female. Cultivated.

‘I don’t think so,. . .