The Price of Deception (16 page)

Strangely, Jacquelyn’s admission flooded her with a
sense of freedom. She had in essence dispelled her parents’
expectations and her husband’s disappointments in a morning bath.
Jacquelyn Spencer-Holland no longer needed to be a proper lady. She
could be anything she wanted! No longer did she need to be a
failure of a wife and mother. In fact, she could be as good or evil
as she wished to be. Other women were vindictive, so why couldn’t
she embrace those qualities? Any woman spurned by a man she adores
has the right to react as she chooses.

Jacquelyn leaned her head back against the rim of the
tub and looked up at the ceiling once more. Her heart welled with
emotions that she sought to suppress and damn to hell.

Yes, she adored Robert, from the
day she met him during a dinner party. He had looked at her with
his blues eyes, and she drowned without resistance in the ounce of
affection he gave her. Surely, their entire courtship had been
feigned merely to marry for her dowry, good breeding, and
family.

Jacquelyn’s heart ached for him,
but no more. Her calling would be whatever she chose, and if it led
her down a path of perdition, so be it. She could be weak and
broken, or strong and determined. Jacquelyn decided to choose the
latter version from hence forward.

“Hand me a towel, Dorcas.”

She stood to her feet and took it from her maid’s
hand.

“Ready my clothes for the day,” she instructed. “I
have an urge to shop.”

Chapter Thirteen

Robert settled into his room at the Hotel de Louvre.
He rented a small suite on the upper floor and spent a few days
biding his time. Now that Philippe had left the country for a few
months, he only had one goal—to see Suzette.

Shortly after his arrival in Paris, he hired a hansom
cab and drove past Suzette’s residence multiple times like an
obsessed lover. It surprised him to find an upper class dwelling in
a nice area of Paris. The discovery convinced him that he had done
the right thing to invest in Philippe’s defunct business. In doing
so, he ensured that Suzette and his son would continue to live in
some semblance of comfort.

Now that he had discovered her whereabouts, a large
obstacle loomed before him. How could he regain entrance back into
her life? He had no intention of being audacious by knocking on the
door. When their reunion occurred, it had to be on his terms and in
a private setting.

Robert had no idea how to produce such a state of
affairs, so he instructed Giles to hire a private carriage and
discreetly observe her comings and goings. Perhaps he could
ascertain if she routinely left the estate, with or without child,
on a recurring errand or walk. He hoped for some patterned routine
that he could innocently use to cross her path.

Giles maintained a long, boring vigil from a carriage
window parked a few houses away. After the passage of eight days,
he finally reported that Suzette did undertake a regular outing. It
appeared that on Monday and Thursday, at 10 o’clock in the morning,
she took a cab to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. There she would
proceed to the ossuary where the bones of exhumed bodies were kept
and would keep vigil and leave a bouquet of lilies. When Robert
heard of her practice, immediately he knew the purpose behind
it—she visited her deceased father.

“Thank you, Giles, for your keen and diligent
observation. It’s very helpful, though you must have been terribly
bored watching for days on end.”

“You are quite welcome, Duke. I should add that she
spends quite a bit of time at the cemetery.” Giles paused for a
moment and added in reflection, “It is a rather sad location, don’t
you think? So many bones—so many bodies dumped into one pit. They
are poor souls indeed with an unusual resting place, I think. How
can a person properly honor a deceased love one when they cannot
visit an individual’s grave?”

“I have no idea, Giles. It is a strange practice.”
Robert felt saddened over the grief that Suzette still carried for
her deceased father. “At least we bury our dead underneath the
earth in solitary graves in England rather than desecrating bodies
and dumping them into heaps of bones. The French are strange in
their burial practices, I will admit that.”

“Will there be anything else?”

Robert looked at Giles. He had been remarkably
trustworthy in this situation, in spite of his unusual request to
follow the woman he had taken to England with him years ago. Though
he never spoke of their affair to his personal assistant, Giles
knew of his ways with women. However, to his credit, he always held
that knowledge discreetly.

“No, I don’t think so. Just have a carriage ready for
me Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. I’ll instruct the driver to follow
her at a respectable distance.”

Robert struggled with strong emotions over his
imminent return into Suzette’s life. When he thought of what lay
ahead, he felt tormented rather than hopeful over the future. How
would she react to seeing him once again? Would she spurn him or
embrace him?

Just the thought of looking into her eyes, touching
her skin, and smelling the fragrance of her body, drove him to
thoughts of folly. The days could not pass quickly enough. He
pulled out his pocket watch and counted the hours until the next
visit to her father’s remains.

* * * *

Suzette struggled with loneliness after Philippe
departed for the West Indies. Time dragged onward in his absence,
and she found little satisfaction being alone.

Philippe had hired a butler, as he promised, bringing
a male presence into the home. Monsieur Leroy seemed to be a
godsend. A middle-aged man, prematurely graying, and very tall, he
emanated an air of confidence that calmed all the women in the
household.

After her return from England, Suzette had on
occasion returned to the common gravesite that held her father’s
decaying corpse. As it approached the fifth year of his death, she
happened to discover upon her weekly visit that the site had been
excavated. The remains of the decomposed bodies, which now only
represented bags of bones, had been relocated to the ossuary that
literally housed a million others.

Though her mother’s grave remained as it had been in
the respectable plot of perpetuity, her father had been thrown into
a pit to mingle among the boney torsos and limbs of others. It so
grieved her, that she felt compelled to visit the ossuary to pay
her respect and leave flowers. Occasionally, she would visit her
mother’s grave, though she felt little attachment having lost her
at an early age. Suzette’s father, on the other hand, had been her
world for a long time. She continued to struggle with the immense
void his death created in her life.

Suzette made a practice of pouring out her soul each
time she came to the stone monument. It gave her a sense of strange
comfort to think that her father could hear her speak to him of her
hopes, dreams, and disappointments.

She had acknowledged her weaknesses of succumbing to
the temptation of the brothel, after his unexpected death, and
relayed to him her transgressions with Robert. A strange sense of
peace filled her spirit during similar confessionals. Suzette found
them to be therapeutic and healing in their own way, especially
when mingled with prayer.

When Friday arrived, she felt a deep-seated need to
speak to her father of her fears and loneliness. Though little
Robert seemed to be taking the entire matter of Philippe’s absence
in stride, Suzette, on the other hand, was not. Her thoughts were
still plagued with Robert and whether he suspected the boy to be
his son. Though she had been assured that he had left for England
and his townhouse remained closed, she could not shake off a sense
of foreboding that followed her like a menacing cloud.

“I wish to wear my dark blue hat and knit shawl
today.” She watched in the mirror as her chambermaid, Rachel,
combed out her long hair and pin it up in the latest style.

“It’s a gloomy day outside, Madame. You should take
your parasol in case it rains.”

“Yes, it is gloomy outside isn’t it?”

“Do you think you should forgo your visit due to the
inclement weather?” her maid suggested with concern.

“It can’t be any gloomier than that hole they have
thrown the bones of my father into,” Suzette remarked in sadness.
“I so abhor the place. Have you ever seen it?”

“No, Madame, I have not. Is it horrifying?”

“Horrifying isn’t the word I’d use to describe it.
No, it’s more disturbing. There are carved figures all around the
entrance. Two naked lovers stand at the doorway with their backs to
onlookers, while they look into the dark abyss of death. Other
figures in agony and ecstasy are carved alongside the doorway. I
can barely look at their faces, but I’m often intrigued over the
man and woman walking together into eternity—even if eternity’s
resting place is not the most pleasant of places to lay one’s
bones.”

“Oh, my,” her maid gasped. “How terribly romantic—in
a strange sort of way, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose.” Suzette took assessment of her
appearance one last time in the mirror. “I should be going. Help me
pin my hat on and grab my shawl. You can let Monsieur Leroy know
that I shall return within a few hours after my weekly visit to
father.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she replied, with a quick curtsy.
Suzette encircled her shoulders with the blue knit wrap, picked up
her parasol, and headed downstairs. Before leaving, she retrieved
her bouquet of cut lilies taken from her garden an hour earlier.
Carefully, she tied the bunch with a ribbon and wrapped the stems
in paper to keep them from drying out.

She climbed into the hansom cab after giving the
driver orders to take her to the cemetery only a few miles away.
Upon arrival, she somberly proceeded past the display of ornate
gravesites and sculptures.

Père Lachaise portrayed a picture of beauty amongst
grief. Its multiple crypts, gravestones, and carved figures of the
dead and angels from heaven were extraordinarily bizarre. The dark
and gloomy day shrouded the scene in a sorrowful aura. Puffy gray
clouds swirled overhead, and a chilly breeze rustled the leaves of
the trees.

After a few minutes of wandering through the pathways
of the dead, she arrived before the ossuary and stopped. Each time
she looked at the dark entrance that led to the pit below that
housed her father, her chest tightened in anguish.

The dreaded reality that his flesh had rotted away to
skeletal remains tormented her with grief. His skin, hair, and
organs were decomposed and now dust. Suzette rubbed her cold hands
together, while she pondered her own mortality and the harsh
reality of life and death. The struggles of humans seemed so unfair
to her, only to be rewarded at the end of life with a cold, lonely
grave.

Certainly, there must be something beyond this
pit—a Heaven or Hell to welcome or damn our spirits
, she
thought to herself. Suzette shuddered.

“Oh, Papa,” she muttered, “I do so miss you.”

She walked to the base of the ossuary and placed the
lilies on the ground. Other bouquets rested against the stone
entrance. Suzette stepped back and stood quietly. She inhaled the
residue fragrance of the flowers nearby. The wind swirled around
her feet, and an urge to speak her woes poured forth from her
lips.

“Papa, I miss Philippe. It’s hard not having him to
turn to when I feel lonely and need to talk, but you know how he
is. He’s such an intense man, I often wonder whether he hears or
understands me at all. Philippe has never been intimately involved
or interested in my feelings like Robert had once been.”

A chill grasped Suzette’s body when she felt a few
scattered drops of rain splash upon her cheeks.

“Robert looks more and more like his father every
day, Papa. I’m so proud of him. He’s such a good boy, though he
does have a bit of a temper. I suppose he’ll grow out of it.”

Suzette chuckled when she recalled the blocks he had
scattered across the room in a frustrated tizzy when they wouldn’t
do his bidding.

“I still worry about him and whether he will ever
know his real father. Part of me wishes that one day he could know
the truth; but if he does, he’ll know what a terrible person I had
become. I don’t want him to think of me as a whore. I’m not a
whore, I’m his mother. I loved the man who gave him to me. When I
think of him, I still feel love.”

Suzette paused for a moment listening to the leaves
rustle in the trees where she stood. She wondered if it was the
spirit of her father passing by to let her know he heard her
words.

“I’m afraid, Papa, one day Robert will find me. What
will I do? I don’t . . .”

“Suzette.”

Her discourse abruptly halted. She stood rigid like
one of the stone statues of the cemetery.

Perhaps an apparition knows my weakness and has
come to torment me,
she thought.
Surely, the voice did not
belong to Robert!

“Suzette.”

The unmistakable and recognizable velvet-toned voice
spoke her name again. The blood drained from her face, and she felt
a weakness flow through her legs. She quickly spun around to face
her tormenter, hoping it was nothing more than a mere ghost.

Suzette’s hand flew to her mouth in bewilderment. She
gasped at the sight of Robert Holland, who stood only a few feet
away.

“Oh, my God,” she cried aloud, in soulful anguish.
“Robert what—what are you doing here?”

Chapter Fourteen

Robert had prepared for Monday morning as best he
could, though he tossed and turned without a wink of sleep the
night before. He knew that his heart still clung to the memory of
Suzette, but he didn’t realize how tenaciously those recollections
of their past affair had woven themselves into every fiber of his
soul. For five years, he had nursed his regrets and kept alive his
desires for one woman. Although now she belonged to another, today
he would claim his right to be in her presence.