Soufriere St LuciaAt almost sixty years old, Beatrice de Rock was a formidable woman. At the best of times, she resembled her auspicious surname; at the worst of times, she had a temper that reduced even the most officious person to a humbled wreck. She stood surveying the remains of her new, but crumbling house near Soufriere in southern St Lucia. A little over five feet six tall and weighing nearly fifteen stone, Beatrice was a successful, second-generation American French clothes designer. Unfortunately, the sudden death of her mild mannered artist husband, Bernard de Rock, had coincided with the collapse of French fashion in America and her collections had gone out of fashion with a vengeance. She regarded it as fate.
Left alone at the age of fifty-eight, with a bankrupt business, she
