The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women)
Read The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) Online
Authors: Stella Knightley
Also by Stella Knightley
The Girl Behind The Mask
The Girl Behind The Curtain (September 2013)
About the author
Stella Knightley is the author of twenty-six novels published under other names.
The Girl Behind The Fan
is the second of three books in the
Hidden Women
series, which blends the daring stories of historical women of note with an erotically-charged contemporary love affair which will delight the fans of
Fifty Shades
. Stella grew up in the west of England and now lives in London. You can follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/StellaKnightley.
The Girl Behind The Fan
Stella Knightley
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Stella Knightley 2013
The right of Stella Knightley to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781444777062
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
To Helen Cutler and Emma Lloyd, who encouraged me to think this just might work . . .
Contents
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’.