Chapter Two
Alain shouted in wild delight as he gave his horse, Gallia, his head, the two of them flying free together over the open fields outside London. He’d left his friends far behind, winning their impromptu race as he usually did, jumping ditches and fences as easily as snapping his fingers.
Yet winning a race was not the point, never the point, even with his best friends.
Just being free for a few precious moments was the point, forgetting everything but the cold snap of the wind, the open spaces all around, the laughter that couldn’t be held back.
He had a small space where he was just Alain, just whatever he wanted to be, whatever he felt in his heart.
No ancient titles, no expectations, no always-watching eyes, gloomy rooms crowded with ghosts that lingered over every hour, never loosening their icy grip.
They held him and his sisters tight, no matter how they wished to be free.
Alain had always had a longing to travel, to prove himself, to make his own fortune. Be his own man, see what he could do. Now any chance to fulfill those burning dreams seemed further away than ever.
Here, outdoors, the old past, the old expectations.
were gone, lost in a blast of light and fresh air and speed.
He could never outrun it, never completely lose being a d’Alency, but he could lose sight of it for a time, hide from it, pretend there was something else out there. Pretend there was freedom.
He felt the tightening of Gallia’s powerful, sleek muscles beneath him, the split-second anticipation, and they were airborne. Sailing up, up, up into the wind and soaring over a fence. Alain shouted again with the joy, and imagined he could fly up, dream-like, into the clouds themselves.
They landed, light as one of those very clouds, and he tugged at the reins to turn them onto a different path, carefully slowing their headlong dash. Gallia tossed his head, his raven-dark mane rippling, as if he too felt the glory of flight.
Gallia was a horse who loved his freedom, who didn’t like taking orders—much like Alain himself.
It was what had drawn Alain to him that day at Tattersalls, the way he’d looked into Gallia’s liquid-brown eyes and seen a fellow wild spirit.
It was why the price for him had been actually one Alain, with his pockets to let, could afford.
It took a while to persuade Gallia to follow some direction, but now they could move as one.
He sensed the lightest touch to his reins, the lightest press, and trusted enough to follow Alain’s lead.
As they moved into the dappled shade of the tree-lined path, everything turned to a shimmering stillness around them like a fairy-wood. He remembered what he’d told Sandrine Jaubert at the ball, that he was always in control of any runaway carriage.
He laughed to think of her now, of the way she saw tiny things around them like flower petals, shades of green, how unexpected she was.
His parents told him he must go to the comtesse’s ball, no matter how much he would rather go to play at cards at one of the small, secret clubs tucked behind Mayfair.
They told him he must meet certain young ladies, with an emphasis on Mademoiselle Jaubert.
‘The family’s lineage is—plein de regret,’ his mother had murmured as his father mentioned Sandrine Jaubert. ‘In France, it would never have been considered.’
‘Yet they have prospered in this English world of ours,’ his father said sternly, pausing to cough into his handkerchief. ‘The d’Alencys have always been of a practical turn of mind, ma chère. We must be even more so now.’
Alain’s sister, Catherine, had secretly rolled her eyes, making Alain want to laugh, but they had both stayed silent.
What use had arguing with his quiet, elegant, implacable parents ever been?
The Comte and Comtesse d’Alency were always scrupulously correct, perfectly mannered, and utterly immovable.
If they said he must attend his godmother’s ball and meet certain young ladies, he had to do so.
But he could be perfectly correct as well, do what they asked, and not go a step further.
He knew what they intended next, had always intended since he had toddled around their modest new London rooms, far from the family chateau.
An advantageous marriage. The d’Alencys, unlike the Jauberts, had not prospered in England after fleeing bloodshed and mayhem in France, leaving everything behind but their lives and their fine name.
But Alain had his own ideas, his own image of the future.
He longed to travel more, seek out adventures, meet new people, build his own fortune, make a small home one day with someone he loved.
Soon he would have to make some decisive turn.
In the meantime, a few dull parties, a few pleasantries to pretty young ladies, could do no harm.
His parents had indeed been through many horrors in life, and he wanted to make them happy if he could. For now.
But he hadn’t been expecting Sandrine Jaubert.
He’d never met the Jauberts. Though they lived in similar worlds—namely the French emigre world of London—Alain’s mother preferred to keep to her own small circle of old friends.
Aristocrats who lived in the memories, preserving the old ways as much as they could.
It was only of late, when it had become clear how very unsustainable things were really becoming, that Alain’s father, the comte, stated they must expand their sphere to French businessmen, or, horrors, even English ones.
Hence the Jauberts and their extensive textile holdings.
His mother’s friend, his own godmother, Madame Fleurieu, who had escaped France with her own portable wealth and built it into havens for fellow emigres, suggested a ball.
She would find young ladies of fine dowry and respectable, though not high-born, families, and thus enable Alain to meet them in festive and informal settings.
Examine them, though the words went unspoken.
Just like a horse sale, but not nearly as much fun.
‘It will be easy, Celeste, you will see,’ Madame Fleurieu had murmured soothingly to Alain’s mother when the comtesse began to weep softly.
‘Alain is so handsome, so charming, he will not have the tiniest trouble finding a wife who will be quite enthralled with him. She will be easy to mould into the proper sort of wife, and soon you will have grandchildren to carry on the d’Alency name!
As well as the means to live as your name deserves. ’
As if to emphasise her point, a chunk of crumbling plaster fell from the drawing room ceiling to crash on the faded carpet. His mother wept even harder.
So Alain had an image of Sandrine in his mind, fair or not. Plain, awkward, silent, grateful, steered by her own parents.
And it was true that at first she was not the most socially assured young lady he’d ever met.
At first, she seemed so painfully shy she could barely look at him.
She trembled as if she stood in a cold windstorm when he took her hand.
Yet she was certainly not plain. Her soft, chestnut curls set off a peachy-fresh skin that went from pearly-pale to sun-touched red with a blush that surged and ebbed as if to reveal every thought.
Small and slim, with a high, small, ivory decolletage framed in beaded white lace, pearls glowing in her hair and at her throat, she looked like a wood sprite, a fluttering nature-creature.
He half expected her to sprout gossamer wings and flutter up out of the ballroom.
He was fascinated against his will. She was really almost too expressive, too exposed, with those blushes and tremblings, and he had the most powerful urge to warn her to be more careful.
To keep her emotions well-hidden from the talons and tearing teeth of Society before they tore her wood-sprite heart away.
To keep the core of herself hidden from everyone, as he did.
Then she looked up at him, and he found himself staring into a pair of glowing, jewel-green eyes that went right to the centre of everything.
He knew then that she possessed some deep strength, one that probably even she didn’t know about.
He started to dare to hope. If she could see him, the real him, perhaps she could understand.
Could know. Maybe they could help each other.
His hope they might be friends, that she could understand, relate, only grew as they talked amid the green serenity of the conservatory.
Her light humour, her artistic spirit, it drew him in.
When she looked at him, she really looked.
She seemed to glimpse what he hoped to be, not his name or his face or the romance of his family’s tragedy.
She had her own passion, he could tell; a passion for art. It was a part of her, that colour and light. Maybe she, too, longed for freedom, to pursue that art without the expectations of family hanging over her. Maybe she would understand if he told her of his dreams.
He came to a small clearing, just before the path left the wood and turned towards the road back to London.
Alain paused there to wait for his friends.
He tilted back his head to stare with a dawning sense of wonder at the way the buttery-yellow sunlight filtered through the late-summer leaves, turning their tips gold.
He’d never noticed such things before, dapples of light and shadow, colours and line.
It had to be from seeing the lush greenery of the conservatory through Sandrine’s eyes, hearing her speak of the beautiful world that lay just beyond everyday notice.