“I think that might be better than having streaming eyes and a running nose.”
As if his answer were somewhat unexpected, she gave a little chuckle.
He poured some more brandy into her glass, filled his own and then sat down in a chair beside her, facing the fire.
“This is certainly more comfortable than braving the elements,” he said, “which I find decidedly hostile.”
He knew as he spoke that she was surprised.
Then after a moment she said a little hesitatingly,
“You – cannot force me to – return with you!”
“I admit it might be rather difficult,” the Duke replied, “unless, and you have put the thought into my head, I make you so drunk that I can carry you back unconscious.”
She laughed and it was a pretty sound.
“I think that would be too sensational and would certainly cause a remarkable deal of gossip!”
She chuckled again before she said,
“‘Duke Captures Runaway Heiress And Carries Her Unconscious Across His Saddle To Be Reunited With Her Weeping Mother!”
She glanced at the Duke to see the result of her mockery and then asked,
“I don’t suppose that Mama was weeping?”
“No, only extremely worried about what the Queen would say if she learned of your behaviour.”
“The Queen? What has the Queen to do with it?”
“It was Her Majesty who suggested that I should marry you,” the Duke said quietly.
Aldora stared at him in silence.
Then she exclaimed,
“I can hardly believe that Mama really asked the Queen to find me a husband!”
“That would not be altogether extraordinary since you are her Godchild.”
He was silent for some seconds before he added,
“Actually, you merely fitted in with the plans that she has for me.”
“For you?” Aldora repeated curiously.
“She is thinking of appointing me Viceroy of India!”
Again there was silence and Aldora stared at him in obvious astonishment before she said,
“I cannot see that that has anything to do with me.”
“A Viceroy is expected to be married.”
“And you will be Viceroy of India?”
“Only if you consent to marry me. Otherwise Her Majesty will appoint somebody else in my place.”
“I don’t believe it! You are just making this up!”
“I swear to you it is the truth, at least it is what your mother told me, and what I had intended to tell you tonight, if only you had listened.”
Aldora drew in her breath and then she cried,
“I have never heard of anything so monstrous that Mama should aspire to my being the wife of the Viceroy! She would not understand what it meant!”
“Your mother is an extremely intelligent woman, as everybody is aware,” the Duke said, “so I don’t think it particularly surprising that she should be ambitious for you.”
“No, that is true,” Aldora conceded. “She managed to get a Prince for Mary and a rich Earl for Phoebe, but I should not have thought that she had the imagination to think of the Viceroy for me!”
“I think we can attribute that idea entirely to the Queen.”
The Duke poured himself a little more brandy and thought that it had taken away the chill of his damp clothes.
It had also swept away some of the irritation he felt at having to drag himself out of bed and chase this ridiculous young woman in a storm that was still raging over-dramatically outside.
“I am just wondering,” Aldora said reflectively, “whether Mama has been very very clever or whether it is Fate that you should be offered the position of Viceroy with me thrown in as part of the package.”
Because the Duke thought once again that she was being rude, he merely replied dryly,
“I should have thought after all this talk of your powers of perception or ‘Eye’, as you like to call it, you would know the answer to that!”
“It is very difficult to be clairvoyant about oneself,” Aldora answered, “but where India is concerned, that is something very different.”
“Why?”
“Because it is the one place I have always wanted to go, the one place where everything that has inspired me and everything I have found interesting, has originated.”
She spoke in a dreamy voice that was quite different from the usually aggressive way in which she addressed him.
The Duke then asked quietly,
“Are you referring to the religions of India? To Buddhism, for example?”
“Of course,” Aldora replied. “Buddhism and the Vedas, the secret writings that are hidden away in Temples and Palaces and in the hearts of those strange unpredictable people whom their conquerors do not begin to understand.”
“That is a little sweeping,” the Duke persisted. “I think a great number of people have tried to understand such secrets and have partially succeeded.”
“That is what Papa thought,” Aldora said, “but most people who have visited India, the Statesmen who talk about it and those like Lord Northbrook who govern it have not the slightest idea of what the Indians themselves think and believe and the Gods they have worshipped since the beginning of time.”
She spoke so passionately that the Duke turned his head and looked at her in surprise.
“I have always told myself,” Aldora went on, as if she was speaking to somebody else rather than the man sitting beside her, “that one day I would go to India and that is why I am studying Urdu and some of the other languages and finding them completely enthralling.”
The Duke understood now the conversation he had been so surprised to overhear between her and the Ambassador.
Yet for a moment he could hardly credit it that she was not putting on an act to impress him.
There was silence.
Then after a moment he said,
“If what you tell me is true, here is your opportunity perhaps sent by Fate or by your Karma for you to see India as no other woman of your age is ever likely to do.”
“In your – company!”
The implication in her voice was very obvious.
“As you say, in my company,” the Duke agreed.
As he took another sip of brandy, he said,
“Because for the moment we are sitting in a kind of ‘no-man’s land’ and there is, through sheer force of circumstances a kind of Armistice between us, perhaps you will tell me why you dislike me to the extent that you are prepared to run away from everything that is safe and familiar, to what, if you stop and think it over, must be a very frightening future.”
“I can manage on my own,” Aldora replied defiantly.
“I doubt it,” the Duke said, “but I don’t want to argue with you. I just want to understand your reasons for attempting to live a life that to any other woman would seem terrifyingly dangerous.”
“That is something that I have no intention of telling you.”
“I could understand that, if we were still sitting comfortably in your home,” the Duke said. “But because there is nobody here to interrupt us or overhear what we might say, surely you could stretch a point and pander to my curiosity?”
“You will not like what I tell you!”
“That is a risk I am prepared to take.”
“Very well,” Aldora said.
She took another sip from her glass as if she felt it gave her courage.
Then after a pause she said,
“I will tell you first about myself.”
“I am anxious to learn everything,” the Duke said, “however unpleasant!”
He thought that she smiled as if she had made him apprehensive of what he might learn.
Then she began,
“Mama has always been extremely ambitious for my sisters and me socially. But Papa was different.”
There was a note in her voice that told the Duke that her father had meant very much more to her
than her mother did.
Not wishing to interrupt, but rather to prompt her, he remarked,
“I gather you were very fond of your father.”
“I loved him,” Aldora said simply. “It was Papa who, because he was disappointed that I was not a boy, taught me to think, to learn and to know that knowledge is the only thing that is never disappointing.”
The Duke now began to understand how everybody who spoke about Aldora said how clever she was.
“But Papa is dead,” she went on, “and Mama is determined that I shall hold a brilliant social position like my sisters.”
Her voice sharpened as she said,
“Mary was forced to marry Prince Frederick of Guttenberg even though she loathed the sight of him. He is pompous, stupid and completely convinced that women are inferior creatures to be dominated by men.”
Aldora drew in her breath.
“Mary is utterly miserable and imprisoned in a marriage that she can never escape from.”
“I cannot believe,” the Duke remarked, thinking of how much he had always admired the Marchioness, “that your mother meant that to happen.”
“Of course not,” Aldora agreed, “but Prince Frederick proposed and how could she refuse when Mary would be a ruling Princess, even though Guttenberg is a small, unpleasant backward State under the heel of Prussia?”
The Duke had no answer to this and he merely waited until Aldora continued,
“Phoebe was in love with a young man she had known all her life. He was a country Squire, but he was not good enough for Mama. My sister was told to marry the extremely wealthy Earl of Fenwick who possessed huge estates and held a title that had been conferred on his ancestor in the thirteenth century.”
Again there was a note of almost painful bitterness in Aldora’s voice as she added,
“He is a hopeless drunkard, but not so drunk as to be incapable of knocking Phoebe about and using the most appalling language to her.”
The Duke stared at Aldora as if he could hardly believe what she was saying.
He was seeing in his mind’s eye at Buckingham Palace a year ago the white drawn face of the Princess Frederick of Guttenberg and remembering how he had thought at the time that she looked ill and unhappy.
He had heard tales of the Earl of Fenwick’s behaviour and of how he had been blackballed from several Clubs.
But it was still hard for him to believe that the Marchioness had really forced her daughters to accept such undesirable husbands.
And yet he knew if he was honest that in the Social world in which he moved few girls had any choice as to whom they married.
When they emerged from the schoolroom, it was accepted that the sooner their parents arranged for them to be taken up the aisle the better.
It was also taken for granted that the greater the matrimonial catch, the more admirable the maternal instinct had been.
“I can only say,” he said aloud, “that your sisters have been very unfortunate and I can understand that you have no wish to emulate them.”
Aldora made a little movement with her head as though she acknowledged that he was accepting what she had told him.
Then she said,
“And now, as you are so keen to know the truth, I will tell you why I have no intention of marrying you.”
“I am listening,” the Duke replied gravely.
“You may have forgotten her, but three years ago Lady Lawson came to stay at Berkhampton House after she had been ill.”
The Duke was suddenly rigid.
He recognised the name – of course he did! And there was no need for Aldora to have stressed the words, ‘after she had been ill’.
Eleanor Lawson had, after he had left her, cried herself into a state that the doctors could only describe as one of nervous frustration.
It was, of course, something that he had never meant to happen and he admitted to himself soon after he had become entangled with Eleanor that he had made a grave mistake.
She was very beautiful and at twenty-five years of age she had attained polish and poise and due to her husband’s importance she glittered in the Social world like an evening star.
Lord Lawson was a Gentleman-in-Waiting to the Queen, a man of dignity and considerable presence besides being wealthy and in his time an extremely distinguished soldier.
He had married when he was over fifty a young girl with no experience of life, but whose beauty was undeniable and by whom, like many old men before him, he was completely captivated.
Although her parents were of indisputable lineage, they were poor and they had been delighted when Eleanor was swept off her feet.
She was married before she had the least idea of what it would entail or what living with a husband almost old enough to be her grandfather would be like.
At first her position, the beautiful clothes she could now afford and the presents that her husband gave her made her feel as if she was living in a fairy story.
Then, as Lord Lawson, very set in his ways, expected his wife to be obedient to his every wish and conform to his old-fashioned and unbending ideas, Eleanor became restive.
It did not take her long to realise the power of her beauty and, as most men were interested in that only, they had no idea how little intelligence or common sense she had.
The Duke was not Eleanor’s first lover, but he was unfortunately the one she fell in love with. And she did this not simply in the way that other beauties loved him – admiringly, adoring and for them wholeheartedly.
For Eleanor it was a traumatic experience that swept her into the sky and she ceased to think of anything or care about anything but her love.
It was all-consuming and was, the Duke found, frightening in its intensity.
As usual he had never expected to become so involved or indeed to hurt anybody until he realised too late how over-emotional she was, almost to the point of insanity.
He pleaded with her to show discretion, to be affectionate towards her husband and above all not to parade her emotions in public.
He might have been talking to a stone wall.
Eleanor enveloped him, clung to him, suffocated him with her love, until he knew that there was only one thing to do, and that was to cut her completely out of his life.
He had to do something to forestall a scandal that would rock Society, upset the Court and inevitably destroy her.
He had thought her beautiful, which she undoubtedly was, but long before he made love to her she had thrown herself into his arms and more or less forced him to become her lover.
When he left her, making it quite clear that for both their sakes they must separate, she had been just as unrestrained at losing him as she had been in showing her affection before he was ready for it.
He learned that her unhappiness had made her ill.
While he was genuinely sorry, he had been instrumental in causing it and to have written to her or sent her flowers would only have prolonged the agony.
He could only withdraw completely, taking care that he did not meet her by chance at any party, and avoiding mutual friends who might misguidedly have tried to bring them together again.
He had heard that Eleanor had retired to the country, but what he had not learned was that it was to Berkhampton House.
“She told me,” Aldora was saying, “how much she had loved you and how cruel you had been in saying that you would not see her anymore. She cried and cried!”
The pain in Aldora’s voice was very obvious and the Duke thought that only an unstable woman like Eleanor would have confided in a girl of fifteen.
He knew that at that age, knowing nothing about love personally, she would have been very vulnerable and an older woman’s unhappiness would affect her deeply.
“I tried to help her,” Aldora murmured, “but she only cried and said you had taken her heart from her and all she wanted to do was to – die!”
The Duke’s lips tightened.
Eleanor had not died. In fact she had returned
to her husband and he happened to know that she had subsequently had several love affairs.
She had certainly not been as dramatic about them as she had where he was concerned, and none of her lovers had lasted for long.
The last time the Duke had heard of her she was in Paris behaving somewhat blatantly with a French Marquis who, according to the Duke’s informant, had covered her with diamonds that even rivalled those of the Parisian courtesans.
He was tempted to defend himself by telling Aldora all this, but he felt that she would not believe him and might only hate him all the more.
“When I listened to Lady Lawson,” she was saying, “I swore that I would never let that happen to me! But of course, I never anticipated for one moment that Mama would choose – you as my – husband!”
The Duke was silent for a moment.
Then he suggested,
“Perhaps a Yogi, if you consulted one, would tell you that it is Fate. Our lives are eternally intermingled and if we hurt someone that is a debt which we carry with us to our next existence and which eventually must be paid.”
He knew as he spoke, looking at the fire as he did so, that Aldora had turned to stare at him, her eyes very wide, an expression of surprise in them.
Then she asked,
“Why should – you think that? Why should you say such – things?”
“Because I suppose it is the only explanation I can offer,” the Duke replied.
Almost as if he had frightened her, Aldora rose from her chair and walked across the room to the door.
For a moment the Duke wondered if she was going to run away from him as she had done from Berkhampton House.
Then, as she stood in the open doorway, she said,
“The rain has stopped and the sky is clearing.”
“In which case,” the Duke replied, “we can be on our way.”
Aldora closed the door.
He stood with his back to the fire facing her as she came towards him and he knew before she spoke that she was asking him a question.
She reached him and then tipped back her head to look up at him.
There was a long pause.
“Very well,” she said at length. “You have found me and I will come back with you. But I do not intend to marry you and I am sure that we can find some way by which you can become the Viceroy of India without me.”
The Storms Of Love Page 8
