Sussex Drive: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

Bear– and BAFTA -winning foreign film, among others), as his stepfather. The relationship had fostered the best in each of them. Which made it all themore damaging that René was hoping to pack his bags in a few weeks and disappear to Europe. She’d been aghast when he dropped the news on her last night.
    Lise stepped further into the clearing and doused herself with Deet, showering her strong legs and ankles, her tank top and arms, and rubbing the poison around her delicate stalk of neck, down her back.
    They’d only been married five years. She’d been a high-ranking children’s charity fundraiser, the star of
oui
Care, and with her inheritance could afford the job. She also produced
oui
Care’s “program” on the NGO Channel, with healthy ad buys from cash-fat corporations looking to bolster their philanthropic profile. She met René, the middle child and sole son of a Liberal MP and former minister, on location in Freetown, Sierra Leone—and he’d told her about exchanging his Grit
rouge
heritage for the peripatetic career of a rogue thespian. When Lise had hired him as celebrity guest empathizer for her infomercial about child soldier reconciliations, she witnessed his gently sure touch with traumatized kids. She fell hard. She wanted that in the life of her own fatherless AfriCree boy.
Et pour elle aussi
.
    They’d been shocked by the offer of this Excellencies post, although she’d had hints (from corporate sponsors) that the RCMP had been digging for detritus about her parents and her past. The Mounties had even flown to tiny St. Bertrand, the African nation her now-deceased parents had fled for flusher Canadian pastures (and tax credits for textile factory owners), to interrogate the former head nun at herprivate school. Despite her many trips to that continent, Lise had successfully avoided dropping in on
le vieux pays
, even though her older sister, Solange, had repatriated, marrying a doctor and settling in the capital, Jolie Ville. Lise supposed she considered herself estranged from her past, even as her public and now political profile had been built upon it. Her viceregal coat of arms prominently featured St. Bertrand’s smoking volcano; twin egrets flew away with broken slave chains falling from their wings. Canada, or Quebec, was represented by a fleur-de-lis pennant stuffed in the beak of a Canada goose.
    The invitation to Lise had been extended by the pre-Greg prime minister, a Liberal, for complicated reasons that included Quebec. She and René both knew that Canada had been complicit in the removal of the first democratically elected president of St. Bertrand, Jean-Louis Raymond, a regime change brought to the country by Bush. French-speaking military from Bushy-tailed allies including Canada had been helpful in this covert operation, although the Canadian media hadn’t covered it. It was clear that the then PM could kill two birds with one stone by appointing a St. Bertrand expat and Québécois African to the highest title in the country. The First Nations blood connection was a bonus.
    René had argued vociferously, almost recycling his performance as Louis Riel, that they had to be
inside
the system, ultimately, to change things. “If you don’t have a seat
à la table, alors, tu es au menu.”
He’d gone on to vent about theexample of his father. “ ‘We must be the change you want to see,’ was what he always said.”
    “Gandhi was the one who said that.”
    “So they were both right,” René said, undeterred. “For you to have any power—and prestige is power—to implement change, say, for Africa,
et moi pour le Québec
, this position is what we need.”
    But she’d not really wanted to become the Governor General and Commander-in-Chief.
    When the last woman to hold the office had taken a circumpolar tour (because the site beneath the melting Arctic Ocean, claimed by
tout le monde
, potentially housed the biggest oil reserve on Earth) at the request of Foreign Affairs