Duchess, page 14
No, she wouldn’t fall for him, not again. Because if this failed, her heart just might be the only thing that remained to call her own.
“I’m ready,” she said and met his eye, giving him her starlet smile, something printable as the press caught it.
“Very good,” he said. “Smile and be brilliant.”
Then he opened the door into the gala of her last chance.
Chapter 7
Clearly, Rolfe saw something in her that she didn’t, because this role he’d supposedly written for her didn’t suit Rosie in the least.
A servant girl? From England? The script had her dressed in a dowdy uniform, buttoned up, austere and boring for the first twenty pages. Nothing of a hint of bombshell.
Not until her character escaped England for Belgium then Paris and became a courier in the underground resistance did Bridget become interesting, and even then she was tough and stubborn, not seductive and beautiful.
Certainly Rolfe didn’t see Rosie as dowdy and boring?
But perhaps he did, because after that night on his arm at the Coconut Grove, and the interminable three-week trip to Paris, he’d all but abandoned her.
As if, after his initial words to woo her, he’d gotten what he’d come for.
Maybe he did pity her, his former professed love morphing into something of tragedy. Frankly, she understood that much more than his forgiveness.
Still, despite his forgiveness, or his pity, he seemed almost annoyed by her attempts to lure him into convivial conversation. She’d tried on the plane to delight him with a story of Rooney and his attempts to turn her into a jungle woman. He’d listened with what seemed a faux smile. Even as they ate together, he wouldn’t look at her, preferring to stare out the window at the ocean.
Maybe he simply worried over the movie. It seemed that signing her had been his first step, instead of the last. He still had to scout locations, cast the remaining parts, meet with the director to approve the set, makeup, and costumes, and a thousand other details. No wonder he seemed tense. She should have asked more questions before her desperation made her sign away her life for a year or more.
Now, as if to confirm her growing feeling of abandonment, Rolfe had simply plunked her in this Paris apartment, her script in hand, and disappeared.
He’d also set her up with a dialogue coach, a French woman by the name of Nellie who fussed about Rosie’s pronunciation of the British servant’s dialect and made her walk the hall, chin up, like she might actually have to serve tea. Nellie reminded her of a thinner, more French version of her mother, but apparently Nellie Thoreau had worked with the actors from the French stage, possibly even Sarah Bernhardt, in her final days.
That made Rosie sit up and listen, take the woman’s coaching to heart.
The scent of roses from the flower market on the street below made it all the way into the open window of her sixth-floor penthouse apartment, perfuming her sitting room as she lounged on the chaise, her script in a scattered mess around her. She’d begun a fresh read-through, highlighting her scenes, playing them out, before casting the pages to the floor in disgust.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t play the part, but rather, it just didn’t suit her. She refused to be the woman destroyed by a broken heart. Even on the silver screen.
The street noise of the busy heart of Paris, at Chatelet, drifted inside, along with the coo of the pigeons on her balcony. The filmy gauze curtain fluttered in the wind, as if beckoning her to the streets below, to the nearby Garden de Tuileries, the Louvre. Rolfe must be mocking her because he picked an apartment directly facing the grand architecture of the Theatre Musicale from one bedroom balcony and the Hotel de Ville and Theatre Populaire from the other.
Paris conjured too many memories: Dash and the way he’d twisted her heart into a knot back in the day when she gave it away too easily. Lilly and the scare she gave Rosie the day she followed a Frenchman through Paris. Her mother, weeping in quiet darkness as she surrendered to the futility of the search for Jack, Rosie’s brother. The epic funeral of Sarah Bernhardt, masses filling the streets, igniting Rosie’s dream of the stage, stardom, the longing for applause.
“We won’t be here long,” Rolfe had said as they ate dinner two nights ago, when he’d taken her out to a café along the Champs-Elysees. So little had changed in twelve years: the flower vendors still parked on the corners selling roses, carnations, and lilies; Peugeots and Mercedes clogging the streets along with horse and carriage; newspaper boys in berets shouting the headlines as they paced the sidewalks. She should pick up a Paris Chronicle, see if Uncle Oliver still listed his name on the masthead as owner.
“I just have to scout a location for the final sequence of scenes,” Rolfe said.
“And then to London?”
“Actually, then to Manchester. We’ll be shooting at Woolshire Castle.”
“Where Bridget works as a servant.”
“And meets Jardin, the man she believes she loves.”
“This is the man Master Colin kills, or so she believes, also.” She’d read the script through once, but, “I don’t understand why you make her wait so long before she realizes that her employer is trying to protect her? Don’t you think it would help for her to know that Jardin was using her to obtain military secrets from her employer?”
“She has to learn to trust Colin, despite this lie she believes about him. I want her to fall in love with him despite herself.”
“Do you really think that is realistic?”
He’d stared at her then, something entering his eyes, then swallowed and turned away, watching the traffic along the street. “Maybe only in the movies,” he said quietly.
Only in the movies, indeed. How did he expect her to convincingly play a woman who falls in love with her betrayer? Instead she wanted to shake Bridget by the shoulders. Don’t give away your heart!
Now, Rosie picked up her script, flipping through the pages to the epic scene where the man she loves dies, poisoned. She sank down on the red velvet divan and tried to see the scene like Nellie said, to hear the sounds of the wind in the barn, to taste the anticipation as she went in search of the man she loved.
INT: CASTLE BARN – NIGHT
The manicured paddocks of the estate horses. Clean but eerie in the darkness
JARDIN lays in a stall, in the darkness moaning, sweating. The horses are still, glassy eyes watching him.
BRIDGET enters, searching for JARDIN. We see her delight at their clandestine meeting turn to panic as she hears moaning. She betrays horror and confusion as she finds JARDIN hiding in the stall.
BRIDGET
(horrified)
What is the matter with you? I was waiting, where were you?
JARDIN
(coughing)
I’m so sorry, Bridget. I wasn’t clever enough.
BRIDGET
I don’t understand. (clawing at his clothing to find a wound.)
Are you hurt? I’ll get help.
JARDIN
(catching her hand)
Shh. It’s too late.
(He presses her hand to his mouth then coughs).
BRIDGET
Are you ill?
JARDIN
Poisoned, I fear. Your master is a sly one.
BRIDGET
(disbelieving his words)
Master Colin did this to you? Why?
JARDIN
(Jardin doubles over in pain, moaning.)
Leave me, Bridget—
BRIDGET
Never—
JARDIN
(Jardin pushes her away)
Leave! Please, leave! Go!
BRIDGET
(Bridget arises, panic on her face in the dim light of her lamp. Backs away.)
I’ll never forgive him. Never!
“It’s just awful.”
Rosie tossed the pages across the room. She got up, walked over to the carved marble fireplace.
“That’s something a writer never wants to see.”
She turned and startled at Rolfe in the doorway, his eyes on her, just enough wound in them for her to taste shame. “I came by to remind you of dinner tonight, but perhaps I should stay in my hotel room, rewriting my script.” He put the lilies on the table then began to pick up the pages.
In the afternoon light, with him dressed in a double-breasted linen suit, a fedora, he looked almost pedestrian, especially when he took off his hat, set it on the table, and followed with his jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt above the elbows. Then he sat on the divan, staring at the papers. Frowning.
“I’m sorry I threw them. If I had known you were standing there, I would have—”
“Lied to me?” He didn’t smile, and she longed for the humor to appear in his eyes, but perhaps that had died over the ocean as well.
She folded her arms. A job. Her last chance. She swallowed. “If you want the truth, here it is. The critics are going to eat us alive, and we’ll be laughed out of every theater across America.”
His lips tightened in a grim line.
She couldn’t surrender to compassion, not when their careers hinged on this script. Or, at least her career. He’d always be a duke, she supposed. “Listen, I’ve read hundreds of scripts over the past five years.” She sat on one of the Louix IVX chairs. “If you must know, the romance—it’s not believable. If you want me to play this role, this one you supposedly wrote for me, you have to write a convincing romance, not one built in the mind of a man.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Pardon me?”
“Rolfe, you’ve written this story from the man’s perspective. It’s simply too easy. First, you break her heart, and then—” She got up, and searched through the pages on the floor, finding the right one. “You have her accepting Colin’s word for the fact he’s been protecting her and having her declare her love.”
He shook his head. “I know you don’t believe that she can fall in love with Colin after what she thinks he’s done, but—”
“It’s not just that. Let’s start with her reactions to Jardin’s death. Do you think she’d truly believe that Colin, her master, would do this? Even if she loved Jardin, she’d have some disbelief that Colin would want to destroy her life. Even if Colin is a terrible man.”
“Which he’s not,” Rolfe said.
“Exactly. He’s her benefactor. He rescued her when her mother died, took her into his castle to live. Yes, she became a servant, but he treated her kindly, taught her to read and write. Almost as if she might be a daughter. She wouldn’t believe that he would hurt her. In fact, she might blame herself before she blamed him.”
Rolfe was staring at her. “Why?”
“She might tell herself that she should have never fallen in love, that if she had been stronger, then Jardin would have never been killed.”
Rolfe frowned at her. “But that’s absurd. It wasn’t her fault Jardin was working for the Germans. It wasn’t her fault that he got in over his head.”
“She doesn’t know that. All she knows is that Jardin died and that he blames Colin. She might blame Colin eventually, but she’ll look at herself first and figure out what she did wrong.” She lifted a shoulder, came over to sit beside him. Sitting this close, she smelled his cologne lifting off him, the brush of his strong arm against her. The memory of being in his embrace rose too easily, and she shoved it away. “And then, there’s this part. When Colin comes to her at the end and confesses that he loves her, by this time, she’s so alone she can’t possibly believe that he’s been there all this time, protecting her.”
He seemed nonplussed by her presence next to him. “But she’s seen glimpses of him. Times when he was driving away, or across a French café.”
“She did?” She leaned over and paged through his script. “I didn’t see that.”
He looked crestfallen, for the first time, as if her words might actually mean something to him. It stirred something inside her. “Colin needs to understand the process she has to go through to understand that he loves her. See, for a man, a romance is about conquering the obstacles between himself and wooing the woman. It’s about a journey to win the woman’s heart. But for a woman, a romance is about accepting the truth that he loves her. Bridget accepts this too easily.”
She wasn’t sure where that came from, but it felt right. It took years for her to believe Guthrie loved her, and as for Dashielle, she’d been right about him, hadn’t she? “The truth is, after all she’s gone through, she might not accept it at all.”
Rolfe was staring at the pages. “Indeed.” He sighed, put the script on the table. “So how would you write it?”
She considered him a moment. “Really?”
He reached over to where her lemonade sat on the table next to the divan. “I’m listening.” He took a sip of the lemonade, made a face. “I don’t know how you stand it so tart.”
“I like it tart, it helps my voice. At least that’s what Nellie says.”
He put it away. “So, Fitzgerald, rewrite the scene for me.”
Was that a touch of humor? She got up, walked away from him, glanced back, hoping for a grin.
She got something enigmatic but enough to suggest he might not be kidding.
“Okay, I’m Bridget, who, having just been rescued from the clutches of the Germans, returns to her home in the Paris countryside. She is packing, ready to run again, when Colin appears on her doorstep. He’s dressed in the attire of a German general, the same attire he used to spring her from the prison.”
Rolfe rose. “He has had enough of her risking her life and wants to convince her to escape with him, back home to England.”
“But she’s found purpose in what she’s doing, especially after her losses. It’s the only life she has.”
“But she has so much more.” He shook his head. “She just can’t see it.”
“Maybe, but Colin will have to convince her of that,” she said.
He straightened, jutted his chin.
“What are you doing?”
“Becoming a German general. I’m trying to pretend my bones have stiffened.”
“Colin is regal, not stiff.”
“Austere?”
“Untouchable, maybe. Especially for Bridget.”
“Oh.” He undid his suspenders, slouched.
And then, finally, smiled.
The effect of it took her breath away. As if she’d been parched for so long, the first gulp of water could undo her. She stared at him, nearly drinking in his smile and hating herself for her weakness.
How had she become that desperate? Moreover, how would she spend a year with this man and not want to be in his arms?
“Rolfe,” she said and tried to frown.
“I’m trying to relax.”
She rolled her eyes but found herself smiling back. Maybe they could be friends. Maybe this could work. She just had to keep a grip on her goals. Her heart. What she really wanted.
“Okay, starting at the top of the scene.” She looked up quickly, her words taken from the script. “They already questioned me.”
He stared at her, as if caught off guard. She handed him the script, pointed to his line. He read the words. “I know. I was there.”
“How about a little more emotion?”
He cleared his throat. Met her eyes. “I know.” He swallowed, his expression twitching as if he’d seen something terrible, something that had broken his heart. “I was there.”
It seemed, suddenly, in that moment, painfully real. She closed her eyes and saw herself in a rustic French home, before a cold hearth, shoving her worldly possessions into a burlap bag, lost, afraid.
Overwhelmed.
Afraid she might throw herself at anyone who would help her, yet fighting for the courage to stand alone. Wishing that she could rewind time. If she had, would she have saved Jardin? Maybe run into the arms of Colin?
Warned herself that love would cost her everything. And more?
Maybe she could play this role. “What do you mean, you were there?” she said, her voice soft, horrified.
She opened her eyes as Colin took a step toward her. She saw him in a German uniform, his dark hair slicked black, gleaming, blue eyes on her, paralyzing her.
“I was watching as you defied them. Your courage. Even the fear that I see now in your eyes. But you don’t have to be afraid of me, Bridget.” He lowered the script. “I am the one who freed you.”
She stood there for a beat, staring up at him.
He waited then checked the script. “Your line is, ‘It was you? I can’t believe it.’”
I can’t believe it. It sounded right, but the words felt suddenly too easy. Not enough…truth. She shook her head. “Why would you do that?”
He stared at her, glanced at the script.
“I’m improvising,” she said.
“But it says that you throw yourself into my arms.”
She considered it, acting out that moment, stepping into his arms, winding her own around his neck. “No. It’s not realistic. I am too hurt, too jaded. I’m not simply going to accept that you would love me after everything—”
“But that’s what I wrote.” He actually looked confused.
She stepped close, looked at the script. “See, here you have her breaking down. But she’s not that weak. I think she pushes him away. What if she asks him where he’s been all this time? What if she picks up something and throws it—” She reached for a crystal vase, and he raised an eyebrow.
“Rosie—”
“She’s angry, Rolfe. She’s angry that he let her go through this, that he didn’t tell her the truth. She’s angry that she wasn’t rescued in the beginning.”
“But she didn’t want to be rescued then. She wouldn’t let him.”
“And she’s not ready to be rescued now.” She put the vase down. “Not by him. Not with what she’s done, the sacrifices she’s made. She will push him away, tell him to leave her alone.”
He stared at her frowning, shaking his head. “But why? I don’t understand.”
