The Forget-Me-Not Sonata Read online

  Born in England in 1970, Santa Montefiore grew up in Hamp shire. She is married to historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore. They live with their two children, Lily and Sasha, in London. Visit her at www.santamontefiore.co.uk and sign up for her newsletter.

  Praise for The Forget-Me-Not Sonata:

  ‘Santa Montefiore has proved herself a talented novelist’ She

  ‘The kind of book you can’t wait to get back to’ Tatler

  Praise for Santa Montefiore:

  ‘Santa Montefiore is the new Rosamunde Pilcher’ Daily Mail

  ‘A superb storyteller of love and death in romantic places in fascinating times – her passionate novels are already bestsellers across Europe and I can see why. Her plots are sensual, sensitive and complex, her characters are unforgettable life forces, her love stories are desperate yet uplifting – and one laughs as much as one cries’ Plum Sykes, Vogue

  ‘A gripping romance . . . it is as believable as the writing is beautiful’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Anyone who likes Joanne Harris or Mary Wesley will love Montefiore’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘One of our personal favourites and bestselling authors, sweeping stories of love and families spanning continents and decades’ The Times

  ‘The novel displays all Montefiore’s hallmarks: glamorous scene-setting, memorable characters, and as always deliciously large helpings of yearning love and surging passion’ Wendy Holden, Sunday Express

  ‘Engaging and charming’ Penny Vincenzi

  Also by Santa Montefiore

  The Secrets of the Lighthouse

  The Summer House

  The House By The Sea

  The Affair

  The Italian Matchmaker

  The French Gardener

  Sea of Lost Love

  The Gypsy Madonna

  Last Voyage of the Valentina

  The Swallow and the Hummingbird

  The Butterfly Box

  Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre Company

  This paperback edition first published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Santa Montefiore, 2003

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Santa Montefiore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-47113-208-7

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-47113-209-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  To Lily Bathsheba

  Contents

  The Legend of the Forget-Me-Not

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART THREE

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgements

  FIND OUT MORE ABOUT SANTA MONTEFIORE

  Secrets of the Lighthouse

  The Summer House

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook

  The Legend of the Forget-Me-Not

  In Austrian legend, a man and his betrothed were walking hand in hand along the bank of the Danube River the night before their wedding. As the young woman looked into the water, she saw a lovely blue flower being washed away by the current. So sad was she that such a beautiful flower should be lost, that her lover heroically leaped into the river to save it for her. However, the river ran mighty and wild and as he was swept to his death, he threw the flower onto the bank and cried, ‘Forget me not, I will love you for ever.’

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  England

  Autumn 1984

  The sky was almost too enchanting for a day such as this. An October sky that blessed the countryside below it with a dazzling golden radiance as if the autumn trees and neatly ploughed fields had been set alight by God Himself to mark this great day of passing. Brazen strokes of flamingo pink and blood red slashed the heavens in a bid to render them as impressive as possible while the dying sun descended slowly like lava, melting into the evening mists on the horizon. Nature was triumphant, but the humble soul of Cecil Forrester seemed quite undeserving.

  Grace was the only one of Cecil Forrester’s daughters who didn’t cry at his funeral.

  Alicia cried. She cried with the same sense of drama that characterized every other aspect of her life, as if she were permanently on a stage, her beautiful face always in the spotlight. She cried glittering tears and sighed long-drawn-out sobs that caused her black-gloved hands to tremble as she dabbed at her cheeks with an embroidered hanky. She was careful enough not to allow her display of grief to contort her features, expressing her emotions in the pretty quiver of her lips and in the gentle tilt of her head, enticingly obscured behind delicate black veiling attached to the brim of her hat. Leonora cried too, quietly. Not for the father she had lost, but for the father she had never had. The man in the coffin might just as well have been a stranger to her, a distant uncle perhaps or an old school teacher. He had never allowed her more intimacy than that. She looked across at her younger sister who watched impassively as the coffin was lowered into the tidy hole in the ground and wondered why she showed no emotions when out of the three of them she had the most cause to grieve.

  Grace was more than ten years younger than her twin sisters. Unlike her siblings who had been sent away to be educated in England at the tender age of ten, Grace had grown up in the leafy English suburb of Hurlingham in Buenos Aires. But it wasn’t due to the age gap that they felt they barely knew her, or the many years of separation that had forged an insurmountable wall between them, but because Grace was different. As elusive as the garden fairies of their childhood, she was not of this world. Alicia said her ethereal nature was due to the fact that their mother had held onto her and spoiled her having suffered so much after they had been sent away, leaving her alone and adrift. But Leonora didn’t agree. Grace was just made that way. Their mother had been right not to be parted from her. Grace would have wi
lted like a wild prairie flower in the cold English schoolrooms where she had sobbed tears of homesickness onto hard pillows.

  Grace watched the coffin with little emotion as it was lowered into the ground against the exaggerated sobs and sniffs of her sister who had increased the volume for dramatic effect. It seemed all the more tempting to play the role on such a spectacular evening, beneath such a magnificent sky. Grace didn’t judge her. She just watched with serenity knowing that her father wasn’t in the coffin as everyone else thought. She knew because she had seen his spirit leave his body at the moment of his death. He had smiled at her, as if to say, ‘So you were right all along, Grace.’ Then accompanied by his deceased mother and favourite uncle Errol he had floated off into the other dimension leaving nothing behind but a wilted carcass. She was tired of telling them the truth. After all, they’d find out in the end when it was their turn to go. She shifted her eyes to her mother, who stood beside her with her soft face betraying a mixture of regret and relief and linked her fingers through hers. Audrey squeezed her daughter’s hand with gratitude. Although Grace was now a young woman she had a purity and innocence that gave the impression that she was still a child. To Audrey she always would be.

  To Audrey Grace was special. From the moment she was born in the hospital of The Little Company of Mary in Buenos Aires, Audrey knew she was different from her other children. Alicia had screamed her way into the world with characteristic impatience and Leonora had followed submissively in her wake, trembling in the face of such uncertainty. But Grace was different. She had slipped out of her mother’s small body without any fuss, like a contented angel, and blinked up at her with a knowing smile that played upon her pink lips with a confidence that took the doctor so much by surprise his face flushed before the blood drained away altogether, leaving him ashen with fright. But Audrey wasn’t surprised. Grace was celestial and Audrey loved her with an intensity that almost suffocated her. She held the tiny baby against her chest and gazed adoringly into her translucent face; surely the face of an angel.

  To Audrey Grace was a blessing bestowed upon her by a compassionate God. Her hair was a wild halo of untameable blonde curls and her eyes were like a deep green river that held all the mysteries of the world in their depths. She enchanted people and frightened them at the same time for she seemed to look right through them, as if she knew them better than they knew themselves. But she frightened no one as much as she frightened her own father, who did his best to avoid contact with this creature who was as foreign to him as a being from another universe. She possessed none of his qualities or physical features and was impervious to the force of his will and the might of his temper. She just smiled with amusement as if she understood his nature and the reasons he constantly fought against it. He had never understood her, at least not until the end. After all their differences he had suddenly smiled in the same way that she smiled, knowingly, almost smugly and embraced her with love. Then he had died, leaving an uncharacteristic grin on his face that had never been there in life.

  Audrey released her daughter’s hand and stepped forward, holding her silver head high with a dignity that had supported her through many tumultuous years, and dropped a single white lily into the grave. She whispered a hasty prayer then raised her eyes to the shrinking sun that descended behind the trees casting long black shadows over the churchyard. It was at that moment that her thoughts lost their focus and drifted nostalgically back to a time when love had blossomed with the jacaranda trees. Now she was old she would never love again – not in the way she had loved in her youth. Age had robbed her of such innocent expectations. Before the dark grave of her husband Audrey finally succumbed to the might of her memories and watched them rise up in her mind like ghosts. They shook themselves free of their bonds and suddenly she was a young girl again and her dreams were all shiny and new and full of promise.

  Chapter 1

  The English Colony of Hurlingham

  Buenos Aires 1946

  ‘Audrey, come quick!’ Isla hissed, grabbing her sixteen-year-old sister by the arm and tugging her out of her deckchair. ‘Aunt Hilda and Aunt Edna are having tea with Mummy. Apparently, Emma Townsend has been discovered in the arms of an Argentine. You have to come and listen. It’s a hoot!’ Audrey closed her novel and followed her sister up the lawn to the clubhouse.

  The December sun blazed ferociously down upon this little corner of England that resisted with all its might integration with those nationalities that had come before and fused into a nation. Like a fragile raft on the Spanish sea the English flew the flag and flaunted their prestige with pride. Yet the heady scents of eucalyptus and gardenia danced on the air with the aromas of tea and cakes in an easy tango and the murmur of clipped English voices and tennis echoed through the grounds against the thunder of Argentine ponies and the chatter of the gauchos who looked after them. The two cultures rode alongside each other like two horses, barely aware that they were in fact pulling the same carriage.

  Audrey and Isla had grown up in this very British corner of Argentina situated in an elegant suburb outside the city of Buenos Aires. Centred around the Hurlingham Club where roast beef and steak and kidney pie were served in the panelled dining room beneath austere portraits of the King and Queen, the Colony was large and influential and life was as good as the cricket. Palatial houses were neatly placed behind tall yew hedges and English country gardens and joined together by dirt roads that led out onto the flat land of the pampa. The sisters would compete in gymkhanas, play tennis and swim and tease the neighbouring ostrich by throwing golf balls into his pen and watching in amusement as he ate them. They would ride out across the vast expanse of pampa and chase the prairie hares through the long grasses. Then as the sun went down and the clicking of the crickets rose above the snorting of ponies to herald the dying of the day, they would picnic with their mother and cousins in the shade of the eucalyptus trees. They were languorous, innocent times untroubled by the pressures of the adult world. Those pressures awaited their coming of age, but until then the intrigues and scandals, passed about the community in hushed voices over scones and cucumber sandwiches, were a great source of amusement, especially for Isla who longed to be old enough to create ripples such as those.

  When Audrey and Isla wandered into the Club they became aware at once of the faces that withdrew from their cups of china tea and scones to watch the two sisters weave their way gracefully through the tables. They were used to the attention but while Audrey lowered her eyes shyly Isla held her chin high and surveyed the tables down the pretty slope of her imperious nose. Their mother told them it was because their father was a Chairman of Industry and a very important man, but Isla knew it had more to do with their thick corkscrew hair that reached down to their waists and glistened like sundried hay and their crystalline green eyes.

  Isla was born fifteen months after Audrey and was the more striking. Wilful and mischievous, she was blessed with skin the colour of pale honey and lips that curled into a witty grin, which never failed to charm people even when she had done little to deserve their affection. She was smaller than her sister but appeared taller due to the joyous bounce in her step and the large overdose of confidence that enabled her to walk with her back straight and her shoulders broad. She relished attention and had adopted a flowing way of moving her hands when she talked, like the Latins, which never failed to catch people’s eyes and admiration. Audrey was more classically beautiful. She had a long, sensitive face and pale alabaster skin which blushed easily and eyes that betrayed a wistfulness inspired by the romantic novels she read and the music she listened to. She was a dreamy child, content to sit for hours on the deckchairs in the grounds of the Club imagining the world beyond the insular one she belonged to, where men were passionate and unrestrained and where they danced with their lovers beneath the stars amid the thick scent of jasmine in the cobbled streets of Palermo. She longed to fall in love, but her mother told her she was too young to be wasting her thoughts on romance. ‘
There will be plenty of time for love, my darling, when you come of age.’ Then she would laugh at her daughter’s dreaming, ‘You read too many novels, real life isn’t a bit like that.’ But Audrey knew instinctively that her mother was wrong. She knew love as if she had already lived it in another life and with an aching nostalgia her spirit yearned for it.

  ‘Ah, my lovely nieces!’ Aunt Edna exclaimed when she saw the two girls approach. Then she leant over to her sister and hissed, ‘Rose, they get prettier every day, it won’t be long before the young men start courting. You’ll have to watch that Isla though, she’s got a naughty glint in her eye, to be sure.’ Aunt Edna was a widow and childless but with typical British stoicism she managed to smother the tragedies in her life with a healthy sense of humour and satisfy her nagging maternal instincts by embracing her nephews and nieces as her own. Aunt Hilda stiffened and watched Audrey and Isla with resentment, for her four daughters were thin and plain with sallow skin and insipid characters. She wished she had had four sons instead, that way the odds on a good marriage would have been more favourable.

  ‘Come and sit down, girls,’ Aunt Edna continued, tapping the chair beside her with a fleshy hand made heavy with jewellery. ‘We were just saying . . .’

  ‘Pas devant les enfants,’ Rose interjected warily, pouring herself another cup of tea.

  ‘Oh, do tell, Mummy,’ Isla pleaded, pulling a face at Aunt Edna who winked back. If she didn’t tell them now she would later.

  ‘There’s no harm in relating this tale, Rose,’ she said to her sister. ‘Don’t you agree, Hilda, it’s all part of their education?’ Hilda pursed her dry lips and fiddled with the string of pearls that hung about her scraggy neck.

  ‘Prevention is better than cure,’ she replied in a tight voice, for Aunt Hilda barely opened her mouth when she spoke. ‘I don’t see the harm in it, Rose.’