Chapter 24
My dearest Meg, I began. The pen’s nib made soft scratches as it jotted across the creamy blank page before me. I paused, wishing there were a way to capture everything which had happened since arriving at our beautiful manor by the sea.
Deauville is a dream. Every morning dawns with golden possibility and the promise of adventure and fun.
We’ve visited so many restaurants and shows I can’t keep track of them all.
Every day we take a stroll down the boardwalk and look for seals and porpoises.
Raoul always gets a paper cone of pink pralines and then presents me with a new pair of gloves—a joke from our first summer here.
We visit the racetrack in the afternoons, and I have so much fun choosing which horses to place bets on.
I like to pick the ones with the most unusual names.
Yesterday, I won fifteen francs betting on Perplexe for the first race and Admetus in the third.
Evenings are spent in casinos or nightclubs.
Raoul has been trying to teach me vingt-et-un, but I’m quite hopeless at it.
Chemin de fer and la boule are much more to my liking.
I so wish you were here to enjoy it all with me, Meg. I miss you and I miss your wise counsel.
Raoul has been an absolute gentleman, most of the time.
He makes sure to keep a careful distance between us on our promenades and is quick to share our boxes and tables with other couples, surrounding me in a sea of respectable chaperones.
Our bedrooms are even in separate wings of the house, and there is almost always staff present.
But at night…
Oh, Meg, at night!
When the servants retire and the rooms fill with enough shadows to hide away in, his kisses fall on me like embers, scorching and igniting me in equal measure. His hands roam across my body, learning my curves and which spots will best make me gasp.
We’ve never gone any further than this, I swear to you, Meg, but I know he wants to, and, honestly, I do as well. The voice of reason and propriety, which always has ruled my mind, seems to grow smaller and smaller every night we stay in Deauville.
How I wish you were here. I feel I’m quite out of my depth, in over my head, and whatever other platitudes would best describe this exquisite burning, this yearning ache, this terrible—
I tossed the pen aside and rubbed at one cheek, trying to put my thoughts in order. I reread what I’d already written out and frowned.
I sounded…manic. Blissfully jubilant and without a care in the world. And I was—I truly was—but it seemed too much happiness to compress into a note for Meg. Meg, who was still in Paris. Meg, who was working and striving and earning her way through life, while I…
I glanced around my chamber, wondering exactly what words I would use to define the past few weeks with Raoul.
It was a lovely room, the nicest I’d ever called mine, and situated in one of the corners of the east wing.
Two sets of towering windows flanked a canopied bed and gave breathtaking views to the beach below.
Everything was done up in cheerful yellow florals and tufted green velvet.
I sat at an antique writing desk made of gleamingly polished rosewood.
A matching armoire was on the other side of the room, filled to bursting with an embarrassment of riches.
Everything had been gifted to me by Raoul and was the latest in fashion, made to my exact measurements.
New afternoon dresses dripping with Chantilly lace, parasols trimmed with striped tassels, boots made of leather so soft and fine I was nervous to wear them for fear of scuffing their toes, and evening gowns in every color of the rainbow: Raoul had thought of everything and gave and gave with a zealous generosity that left me reeling.
I looked from the overfilled armoire back to Meg’s letter and abruptly ripped it up.
I couldn’t send that to her. I couldn’t be that person, lording her good fortune and abundant happiness over all.
I would rewrite the whole thing, letting her know we’d arrived and settled in, and I would go out first thing this afternoon and use my winnings from the track to buy her the hat I’d seen in one of the window displays in town.
It had a cluster of silk forget-me-nots in the same shade of blue as Meg’s eyes, and I knew she’d love it.
Before I could pick up the pen and start over, I heard footsteps outside my room and spun round to see Raoul filling the doorway.
“You’re up early,” I observed, noting that the crystal timepiece on my desk read just after nine.
I was surprised to see him looking as fresh as he did.
He’d spent the evening before with a group of friends who were also summering in town—playing cards and downing bottles of Bordeaux as they complimented each other on their very excellent taste in wine.
But Raoul’s smile now was warm and languid, his eyes bright and sharp. “I fell asleep last night musing on how beautiful you must look at sunrise and decided I should force myself into finding out.” He stepped into my chamber, crossing in close to examine me. “I see I was right.”
“The sun rose hours ago,” I teased, then tilted my head to offer my lips to him as he swooped in for a kiss. His fingers gripped the back of the desk chair in a way that had me wishing he’d taken hold of my waist instead.
“Irrelevant.”
His lips murmured over mine with a soft insistence, parting them so that his tongue could slip in, and then—
“Raoul!” I exclaimed, breaking away with a nervous laugh.
I wasn’t opposed to such kisses—I rather quite enjoyed them—but I’d only ever experienced them under the cover of shadows, not when it was broad daylight and any ambitious chambermaid with a dustrag could come traipsing in.
A heated flush crept across my chest just thinking of it.
What was it about this man that made me want to embrace such reckless behavior?
“I want to take you someplace special today,” he announced, straightening and stepping back so that we’d look the picture of propriety should someone walk by the open door.
“Special,” I repeated. “Special how?”
“You’ll see. Will you join me for breakfast?”
“Is that the special thing? Poached eggs and crêpes?”
Raoul laughed. “Do poached eggs sound special to you?”
“If Geneviève is making them, then certainly.”
“There is truth in that. She really is a marvelous cook.” He offered his hand. “Shall we?”
I glanced back at the desk, where Meg’s letter lay in long torn strips, like bits of confetti and streamers. I’d write to her later. After whatever this was. Turning to Raoul, I allowed him to assist me from my chair. “Gladly.”
“So…the pelting rain and lightning. Is that the special thing?” I asked later that morning, and had to shout to be heard over the power of nature’s melee.
Storm clouds had rolled in from the west as we’d dined, but Raoul had been adamant he would not allow them to spoil his grand surprise.
“All is going according to plan,” he insisted.
He’d had the carriage drop us off alongside the Promenade des Planches before ordering the driver to wait in the area for our return.
Gales of wind whipped off the sea, driving rain into our eyes and making it nearly impossible to discern where the gray water ended and the sky began.
“If that’s true, one might worry that this is a terrible plan,” I called out to him, then jumped as thunder rumbled overhead.
Only as we came to the end of the boardwalk did Raoul look uncertain.
His hair was plastered to his face and dripping into his eyes.
We were soaked to the skin. My little parasol had done nothing to protect us from the driving torrent, and as I tried to better position it, a strong gust snatched it from me.
We watched in astonishment as it sailed down the empty beach.
Raoul turned to me, his face suddenly worried. “Perhaps this wasn’t exactly my best idea. I only wanted…” His brow furrowed, and he grabbed my hand with a burst of determination. “No. We’ve come all this way. It’s only a few steps farther.”
“What is?” I asked. It was almost impossible to see him, almost impossible to feel anything but the cold and the rain and the wind.
He pulled me off the boardwalk and into the wet sand.
The heels of my sodden boots immediately sank into the sluice, but he trudged onward, drawing us closer to the rushing tide, until we reached the point where the waves crashed ashore, dousing the sand with their salty fury.
I feared one rogue wave would be enough to snatch us into the sea and turn us into a tale of doomed lovers, a cautionary ghost story to be whispered on stormy nights.
“Raoul, this is madness,” I cried out, realizing that I should have put a stop to this game so many times before now. It had started out as an adventure, something we’d one day laugh over, but the danger was now too present to ignore. “What are we even doing out here?”
Raoul stopped and let out a deep exhalation before he turned to me. Expectation lit his face. “Don’t you know what today is? Don’t you know where we are?”
I couldn’t think of a single thing special about the date. It was nearly the end of August. Raoul’s birthday was later in the year, in November. Mine in April. I glanced up and down the abandoned coast. There was nothing remarkable about this patch of land, nothing I could see, until…
Another wave crashed around us, and then I saw. The years peeled back, and the storm fell away, and I was a girl of sixteen again. Raoul was a young man, shivering before me as he held out the dripping red scarf he’d gallantly rescued from the sea.
“This is where we first met!” I exclaimed.
He nodded encouragingly. “Four years ago today. Christine, I…I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time, but everything needed to be right. When I realized what date it was, it seemed perfect, but now…now I fear I’ve made a muddled mess of everything,” he admitted.
Every bit of breath was knocked from me as he pulled a balled-up scarf from his jacket pocket. It wasn’t my mother’s—the shade wasn’t quite right—but its cheery red was close enough that I knew exactly what he intended to do.
“Oh, Raoul,” I whispered as he knelt on one knee in the sand, heedless of the waves swarming him.
He opened up the scarf to reveal the most dazzling ring I’d ever seen. It had a large cushion-cut diamond at its center, with two smaller but equally brilliant stones flanking it. Even in the stormy gray light, they sparkled with a joyous luster that came from only the very finest of jewels.
“I don’t know what to say,” I gasped.
He only smiled. “Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime.”
Thunder rumbled overhead, and I clutched his hands. “Raoul…”
“Share each day with me, each night, each morning.”
“I will,” I laughed, tugging at him and wishing that I could pull him up out of the surf and the storm, wishing we were somewhere warm and safe and dry together.
But he remained planted, staring up at me with a look of such tender hope illuminating his face. “Say you love me.”
I cupped his cheek, stroking the wet skin with a sweep of my thumb. “You know I do.”
“Then marry me, Christine,” he said, and offered the ring to me.
It was such a Raoul proposal. Simple and pragmatic and straight to the point, easily communicating exactly what he wanted, exactly what I’d hoped to hear. It was perfect.
My heart swelled, and my emotions rose, filling my chest. I’d have given anything for my parents to be here, sharing in this wildly important life moment. I wanted them, especially Father, to see how happy I was.
The wind changed directions, howling with a new pitch that sounded strangely like a violin, and I smiled. Father was here. He was watching. Just as he’d always promised.
I looked down at the man before me, being pummeled by a rainstorm as he waited with such patience, waited with such hope, and I nodded. “Yes.”
Raoul let out a whoop of joy and sprang to his feet, then lifted me up in a twirling embrace.
Our mouths found each other, and I could taste him and the salt and the rain as he slipped the ring onto my finger.
It was heavier than I’d expected and such a strange presence on my hand that I twisted it about, admiring it from all angles.
A bolt of lightning sizzled down from the clouds and struck the nearby pier. The answering thunder cracked so loudly I feared my heart would explode. We clutched each other tightly.
“Let’s return to the carriage,” he shouted, and we raced back up the beach, laughing and breathless and so very ready to begin our new lives together.