The Rocks of Valpre
Ethel May Dell
Adventure Romance
Published 1913
Synopsis
The Rocks of Valpré follows Christine Wyndham, a sheltered English girl whose childhood holiday in France becomes the emotional axis of her life. While exploring the rugged coastline of Valpré, she befriends Bernard de Courcy, a brave but impulsive young French soldier. Their innocent companionship is shattered when Bernard is falsely accused of treason after being manipulated by the villainous Captain Rodolphe. Christine’s naïve attempt to help Bernard inadvertently worsens his situation, and he is sentenced to harsh imprisonment. The trauma of this event scars her deeply. Years later, Christine marries Trevor Mordaunt, a reserved, honorable Englishman who senses that she carries a buried sorrow. Their marriage is tender but shadowed by Christine’s unspoken past. When Bernard escapes from prison and re-enters her life, the emotional fault lines crack open: Christine is torn between loyalty to her husband and the haunting bond of her youth.
Novel Excerpt
The wind caught her red-brown hair and blew it out like a cloak behind her. It was still damp, for she had been bathing, and when the wind had passed it settled again in long, gleaming ripples upon her shoulders. She pushed it away from her face with an impatient hand.
“Cinders,” she said, “if you don’t come soon I shall go and find the
Knight of the Magic Cave all by myself.”
But even this threat did not move the enthusiastic Cinders. All that could be seen of him was a pair of sturdy hind-legs firmly planted amid a whirl of sand. Quite plainly it was nothing to him what steps his young mistress might see fit to take to relieve her boredom.
“All right!” said Chris, springing to her feet with a flourish of her towel. “Then good-bye!”
She shook the hair back from her face, slipped her bare feet into sandals, slung the towel across her shoulders, and turned her face to the cliffs.
They frowned above the rock-strewn beach to a height of two hundred feet, tunnelled here and there by the sea, scored here and there by springs, rising mass upon mass, in some places almost perpendicular, in others overhanging.
They possessed an immense fascination for Chris Wyndham, these cliffs. There was a species of dreadful romance about them that attracted even while it awed her. She longed to explore them, and yet deep in the most private recesses of her soul she was half-afraid. So many terrible stories were told of this particular corner of the rocky coast. So many ships were wrecked, so many lives were lost, so many hopes were quenched forever between the cliffs and the sea.
But these facts did not prevent her weaving romances about those wonderful caves.