The Last Waltz

By Debra Milligan

The LAST WALTZ is the northern French war novel that grew out of THE DAWN. This novel is a love story between a Frenchwoman and a British Army captain during the last months of World War II in Europe.

The town of Saint-Hubert, France is the setting for this tale of Sophia Dolliver Charpentier and Charles MacNeill Granville. They meet in Bastogne during the summer of 1944, fall in love, and wed. In September, Charles, Captain Granville of the British Army, leaves his wife to return to active duty.

The weeks and months that follow are ones of immense uncertainty for Sophia. Pregnant with the child of her beloved, she is largely alone in her house, une maison de maître, Maison Charpentier. Her life, and the life of her unborn child, become endangered by the sudden arrival of a former amour who is, as usual, up to no good.

Her neighbor down the lane is Monsieur Cubré, a Great War veteran with a sorrowful but ennobling past. As the winter of 1944 approaches, this man faces those somber shadows of his past in order to be of assistance to Sophia.

The final military operations of World War II transpire, placing the life of Captain Granville in jeopardy. Sophia must fight her fears as she places faith in the future, in her unborn baby, and in the will of God.

Combat in the northern European theater of operations accelerates toward the final but unexpected battle: The Nazi offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge was the desperate and horrific surprise attack on the Allies by Adolf Hitler in the Ardennes. Sophia does not know if her beloved husband will return to her, but she does know that faith is vital in bringing life to the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Debra Milligan
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005981600

Debra Milligan

Debra Milligan is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is fluent in French and has varied interests in the fine arts, architecture, history of all kinds, music, horses, hounds, the Golden Age of Hollywood, quilting, fashion, and gardening.

Book preview

The Last Waltz

By

Debra Milligan

Copyright 2022 Debra Milligan

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your very own copy.

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

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Dedication

For Roy,

who taught me

the last waltz

will last forever.

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Chapter 1

Sophia wondered why Armand had come to her, how he could possibly remember her after all of those years, and all of those women who had followed in her wake. She then realized that if there was one thing that Armand Huvé could remember, it was the women-in-love who had populated his life. There’d been one too many of them to forget, but he wanted to forget all of them, except Sophia. She’d been such a loving trusting fool.

Sophia asked the obvious: Why do you come to me, Armand, after all of these years? I should think, indeed I do think, that I am as nothing to you.

Do you not know how much I have loved you?!

Armand, Sophia said with a sad sigh, You never really wanted me.

I wanted you then. I want you still.

Sophia looked with unmuted suspicion at this man. He was still the dapper gent, well-dressed beyond even his own wealthy means. He was still handsome, in a roguish way, although his angular face was somewhat swollen with dissipation from drinking too much expensive champagne, and smoking one too many fine cigars. Something, however, had changed drastically within the man. There was an air of solemn desperation, a hungry sort of despair that dared not mention its name.

Sophia decided it best to be frank with Armand. It would be more efficient. Either he would charge out of the door or slap her, but the response would be mercifully brief.

Armand, you never wanted me. You never even felt desire for me. It took me a few years to accept this truth, but now it is a matter of fact in my mind: I was but a pawn in your chess game of lovers and romances that were never really real.

I have come to you to offer you my heart. Armand held out his arms to her.

Sophia stared at his blue-black wool gabardine suit. His tailor in London was the finest in the world. She almost smiled.

His heart, she thought. She wondered where he’d found it. She’d unfailingly tried to find it but always came up empty.

You are such a child, Armand. You want only what you cannot have. I do not know how you have learned of my marriage, but once you knew you could not have me, it was then that you felt the love of your life had left you.

I was not even aware of your betrothal.

You still lie expertly, Armand. I shall, however, risk telling you the truth. In reality, I gave my love to you, freely, without reserve. You took that love and ran to another woman, to give that love to her. Time and time again, I gave my love to you, and then you ran away from me to give that love to another woman, and another woman, and how many other women, I cannot say, and I would not say. I do not care to say. It is comforting for me to know that so many lovelorn women received my love.

No other woman has replaced you!

Sophia nodded in agreement. No other woman could. She glanced at the door, hoping to signal an exit. Armand sat down in a chair.

For five years you were gone from me. Now you have returned. What do you want from me?

I wish to give you the love you deserve. Armand began to cry. You deserved so much more from me. I have never stopped thinking of you. I think only of you.

Sophia softly laughed. You, who never thought of me at all, now thinks only of me.

Sophia looked at this man with calm but dismissive eyes. You sit there and cry for me! Why now? Why cry now? You never shed a tear for me before. You never shed a tear for any woman before. Or for any man. You think only of yourself, Armand. I believe even your tears are rehearsed.

But I do love you, Sophia.

Is it not a little late, Armand? Sophia knew this love for her did not exist, but she felt compelled to play this game, yet another game, with this man who played at life, and at love, like a grand game, un grand jeu.

He bowed his head and sobbed, But I have changed.

Sophia gently laughed. Do not pity yourself, you fool. Remember only that I loved you. Sophia spoke now to herself, softly, as if to convince herself of this truth: I loved you.

With tears in her eyes, Sophia recalled her months and months of waiting for the day when Armand would truly love her. She wondered, yet again, why she’d loved him, loved him in the face of his casual cruelty over that love, that glorious love that she gave to him. The one, the only, saving grace of that love was that she’d not permitted him into her bed. He’d not been able to seduce her into making love to a heartless man. Perhaps she had always sensed there was no love to make with this man. Armand could not love. Armand Huvé had to pretend to love a woman from a distance, a very great distance.

Sophia looked upon this man. She suddenly thought him a pitiful creature. Please leave, Armand. Our time was over long ago. It was my time far more than our time. Please, leave, and do not take your time in leaving. And, please, do not come back.

Armand then came to her and attempted to kiss her, to seduce her with his tender words that now were laced with the chill of treachery. Sophia assaulted him with one knee and one fist. With her other arm, she protected the roundness of her womb that still did not reveal publicly her pregnancy.

Armand fell to the ground. With fierce eyes and fast motion, he stood up but backed away from Sophia. Breathlessly, he watched her. His eyes were filled with desire and disgust.

Sophia was unable to restrain her fury.

You want only what you cannot have: the ambassador’s wife, the doctor’s wife, the wife of whomever you must prove yourself superior to! I was nobody’s wife. Therefore I had no value to you.

Sophia smirked, Now I am the wife of a wonderful, loving man. And here you are, attempting to plunder his wealth. You are a fool. A craven fool. A spoiled boy, spoiled rotten until you stink.

I will report you and that English engineer to the Germans!

Sophia suddenly realized that Armand Huvé was a German spy. He knew quite well of her betrothal. Armand was a liar to the very end. She reached inside of the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a pistol. Aiming it at Armand, she said, You will not speak a word to the Germans.

She firmly squeezed the trigger and shot Armand in the stomach. It was a lousy aim and a poor shot, both of which meant an agonizing death for Armand Huvé. He fell to the bare wood floor, bleeding. An hour later, he died. Sophia had not stayed in the room with him. She decided that he would die alone, with his soulless conscience. She’d left him there, alone, on the bare wood floor. Her heart no longer wished to see him, alive or dying or dead. When she entered the room after an hour had elapsed, she knew that this man had gone from his hell on earth to the hell where he would remain, in perpetuity.

There was a hideous pool of blood on the wooden floor.

I must clean this mess, she thought quickly.

She did not cry. She felt queer about not being able to weep for this man, or even over him.

Sophia sighed nervously. She fearfully said a prayer for her own soul, that the Lord would forgive her this fatal deed, and her lack of remorse over it. She was not sure the firing of the pistol was completely an act of miséricorde. She’d shot the man to protect herself, her unborn child, her husband, the villagers; but she’d also felt revulsion, and horror, at the reality of this man whom she had once believed she’d loved. The shot had been fired too quickly for this woman to fully understand the motives that had rushed in upon her and compelled her to kill this wretched man.

In her abject silence, she felt touched by the grace of her Seigneur. She hoarsely whispered, All is done, now. I am forgiven. The savagery of this cruel man vanished, like the darkness at dawn.

That night, by the light of a full moon, Sophia dragged the body of this dead man to the furthest reach of the apple orchard.

She stared at his face, realizing how ghoulish this deed was, and realizing that she nonetheless needed to do it. She had to bury her dead properly or he would haunt her days and nights for the rest of her life.

She prayed, and then she wept.

With focused intensity, her eyes poured over the face of this man. She remembered when her eyes poured over his elegant yet roguish face with adoration and desire, the desire to love and to be loved. Her eyes now looked at him with a mixture of sadness and fearful contentment. Mentally, she wrote her emotional epitaph of this man:

Armand Huvé, elegant, depraved Frenchman. A handsome rogue, unable to give any pure emotion to anyone. Painfully self-destructive beneath his accomplished façade, an exterior that fooled almost everyone.

That façade had certainly fooled Sophia Charpentier. His great sense of panache and accomplishment concealed his wantonly willful lusts. Somewhere along the way, the panache and the accomplishment had faded. It was only with his lusts that he had died.

Slowly, she turned away from the corpse of Armand Huvé. That night she would sleep, knowing that she had begun to exorcise the ghost of this sordid man. That next morning, just before the dawn, she buried him. Her heart requested a prayer of forgiveness for herself: her tense lips uttered a prayer for the soul of the deceased, a soul she knew had gone straight to Hell.

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Chapter 2

It is difficult to say why a man turns his heart away from one woman and turns it toward another. He might say, It just happened. And yet, there is always that flickering moment of choice when a man looks away from the woman he had once loved, and he begins to love another.

The moments are fleeting, perhaps not even remembered by the man, or perceived by the woman whom he chooses to love instead of the other. A man rarely can see the path ahead that leads to an amour of such passion that words are of no utility, or even of consequence. He takes that first step, and, for him, there is no turning back to that former love who became a permanent part of his past.

Of such passion is poetry written; of such desire is heartbreak born; of such aspiration is life lived, fully and forever.

She was not someone he’d known well, if at all when first he became enamoured of her. The facts of her life were mysteries to him, but the desires of her heart, and the desire of his heart, were not. She’d been a stranger to him one minute. The next, she was his future, the love of a lifetime, a union possessed of the love that would never die, for either of them. This unexpected twist of fate became the love between Sophia Dolliver Charpentier and Charles MacNeill Granville.

During the early summer of 1939, this English engineer of twenty-five years had become engaged to marry a woman, five years his junior, from Sheffield. The Phoney War was being taken more seriously by this structural engineer than by this young lady from a comfortably wealthy family; but, even with his apprehensions, Charles had not been able to conceive of the horrors into which his beloved island nation would be drawn, and nearly destroyed. Inconceivable and unspeakable evil cannot decently be envisioned by the godly, the good, the loving, the kind.

These two young people were among the millions of Brits who populated that category during June of 1939. These two young people believed they’d fallen in love during that month when innocence wore a more charming expression than ever before. Perhaps they’d wished the future pass them by;