Then, when he looked tired, she would insist on reading to him and on several occasions when she had done so he had fallen asleep.
She now went below to his cabin because she had discovered that, while there were books in the Saloon, all the volumes that were most interesting were in his own cabin.
She was looking along the shelves, wondering what would be likely to stimulate their minds better than any of the others when Hobson came into the cabin.
“I hope His Grace is not doing too much,” she said, “and if he intends, as seems likely, to return tomorrow, I think that’s too soon.”
“Your Ladyship’s right,” Hobson said, “but His Grace has made up his mind and you might as well try to drain the sea as get him to change it!”
There was silence as Aldora took out a book and then put it back again.
“If you asks me,” Hobson went on, “a wound in his arm or not, the rest has done him good and better than anything else has been his getting’ away from all them as battens on him in one way or another.”
He spoke violently and, as Aldora turned her face to look up at him in surprise, Hobson said,
“There’s always gentlemen askin’ him for money and women as never leaves him alone and they be the worst!”
Aldora felt that this was not a conversation she should be having with the Duke’s personal servant and, picking out two books from the case, she stood up holding them in her arms.
“Your Ladyship’s been the best thing that’s happened to His Grace for a long time,” Hobson went on as if he was following his own train of thought.
“What do you mean by that?” Aldora asked curiously.
“You’ve looked after him as if you were his mother, you’ve kept him amused and not clung to him like a leech, which every other lady he’s had near him has done till I’m ready to believe they were tryin’ to suck the life-blood out of him!”
Aldora looked at Hobson with surprise.
She knew, because he loved the Duke and deeply resented his being imposed on, that he was speaking with a sincerity that came from his heart.
“Surely they cannot be as bad as that?” Aldora commented.
“You don’t know the half of it, my Lady,” Hobson said darkly, “and they be at me day and night to help ’em.”
“To help them?” Aldora asked incredulously.
“It’s ‘dear Hobson, could you remind His Grace it’s my birthday on Thursday?’ and, ‘Hobson, I must see him alone. Let me know when there’s nobody with him!’”
Hobson made a sound that was one of disgust before he added,
“But the worst ones are those who want me to tell His Grace how much they’re sufferin’.”
Aldora felt that she should not be listening, but she did not want to walk away and seem unsympathetic.
“There was one of ’em,” Hobson was ruminating, “who took the cake, she did! Lady Ludlow – no, Lady Lawson, that was her name! ‘Tell His Grace,’ she says to me, ‘that I’m goin’ to kill myself and when I’m dead he’ll be sorry!’”
Intent on what he was telling her, Hobson did not realise that Aldora had stiffened as he spoke.
Then she said in a voice that did not sound like her own,
“I-I cannot believe that any – lady would say that to you!”
“You’d be surprised what they do say!” Hobson answered. “That Lady Lawson sent me round the bend! As I says to her, ‘them as says they’re goin’ to kill themselves, my Lady, never does!’ And she didn’t!”
“She must have – been very – unhappy!” Aldora said in a hesitating voice.
Hobson laughed derisively.
“Wallowing in her grief, that’s what she was, until the next man comes along! I sees her lady’s maid about a month ago and she tells me her Ladyship’s now threatenin’ to kill herself over some Frenchy gentleman she took up with!”
Because she felt that she could bear no more Aldora said quickly,
“I think His Grace is waiting for me,” and hurried from the cabin.
She went along the corridor, but she did not immediately go out on deck.
Instead she stood in the Saloon, feeling that she must get her breath and adjust her mind to what she had just heard.
How could Lady Lawson have said such things to a servant and the Duke’s servant at that?
How could anybody who called herself a lady be so vulgar as to discuss her love affairs and her emotions with somebody who was not her equal?
It seemed inconceivable and, when she remembered how violently she had hated the Duke for inflicting such suffering, she thought for the first time that perhaps he was not as guilty as she had thought him to be.
With an effort she forced herself to go out on deck and sit down in a chair beside him.
She put the books down and sat silent until the Duke asked,
“What is troubling you?”
“How do you know I am troubled?”
He smiled.
“Shall I say I am using my instinct? Or perhaps, because we have been alone together for the last few days, I have become aware of your vibrations.”
“So you believe people send out – vibrations like – waves of light!” Aldora murmured.
“Of course,” the Duke replied, “and your vibrations, may I say, Aldora, are very strong, very positive, but not as violent as they were when we first met.”
He gave a short laugh before he added,
“The first night at dinner I could feel your hatred coming from you down the whole length of the dinner table and I thought then that it was something I had never experienced before.”
There was a little silence before Aldora said,
“Papa said that hatred is like a boomerang and if you are not – careful it – swings back and hits the person who – sent it out.”
“Exactly!” the Duke agreed. “And I like to think, although I may be wrong, Aldora, that you do not hate me as actively as you did.”
“I do not – hate you at – all!” Aldora replied, almost as if she were compelled to do so.
“Good!” the Duke said. “So when we leave each other tomorrow, it will be with feelings of goodwill.”
“T-Tomorrow?”
It was somehow hard to ask the question.
“What I have planned, and I feel sure that you will think it is a sensible suggestion,” the Duke said, “is that we will move into Chichester Harbour very early tomorrow morning, in fact at dawn.”
Aldora was listening intently, but she also had the feeling that she was holding her breath.
“Hanson, my groom, will bring your horse to the quay and he will also bring Caesar.”
“For you?” Aldora asked.
The Duke shook his head.
“No, that would be a mistake. You and Hanon will ride off immediately.”
“I thought that you did not like anybody riding Caesar but yourself.”
“Hanson has ridden him before and you need have no worries that anything will happen on the journey.”
Aldora was silent as the Duke continued,
“Hanson will leave Caesar in your mother’s stable and order my phaeton and team to come to the Harbour immediately so that I can drive back in comfort later in the day.”
He paused before he said,
“Naturally we must avoid anybody at your house realising that you and I have ridden back together, so I suggest that when you are half a mile from home you let him go ahead.”
He hesitated before he continued,
“Then ride up alone in an undisturbed manner, as if you had just returned from where you have been staying, with a story that will convince your mother that she need not have worried about you unnecessarily.”
Aldora had the strange feeling that the Duke was settling her whole life for her, giving her no say in it and that he did not intend to listen to any arguments.
“I will arrive about five or six o’clock in the afternoon,” he said, “and I will hope that your mother will permit
me to stay the night before I leave for London early next morning.”
There was a long pause after the Duke had finished speaking.
Then Aldora said in what seemed even to her a very small voice,
“You – seem to have it – all planned – out.”
“Of course,” he replied, “and I cannot believe that you will be able to think of a better arrangement for us both.”
“No – no – of course not!”
“Good!” he said. “We will therefore enjoy the sunshine and, as I suspect that you wish to read the books you have brought out with you, I will close my eyes and think happy thoughts that you believe are conducive to sleep.”
He shut his eyes as he spoke and Aldora looking at him longed to ask him what he was thinking about.
Then she thought that it would seem too personal and certainly too inquisitive.
He looked very handsome and, although he seemed somewhat thinner and certainly paler than before he had been wounded, she felt it added to rather than detracted from his good looks.
His eyes were closed and she went on gazing at him, thinking that perhaps never again would she have four days of being able to talk to a man in the same way that she had been talking to the Duke.
She knew that her mother would have thought it thoroughly reprehensibly and, doubtless the Dowagers who sat on the dais at balls watching their daughters with the eye of a hawk, would be scandalised.
What was more, the fact of her nursing the Duke, sponging him down when he was half-naked and sleeping on the sofa in his cabin would mean that to protect her good name she would be forced to marry him immediately.
‘Nobody must ever know,’ she told herself.
She knew that the Duke was right in taking every precaution so that his absence from the races and hers could not be connected.
‘Mama would force me to marry him,’ she told herself.
Then she began to wonder if that would be quite so horrifying as it had seemed when she learned that the Queen had suggested that the Duke should marry her Goddaughter and take her to India with him.
When Aldora thought of India, it seemed like a golden enchanted land that contained not only the hidden knowledge that she sought but also the happiness that she was somehow certain she would never find anywhere else.
It suddenly struck her that, although the Duke had told her that he had been there, he had deliberately shut the door on her curiosity about the land that enthralled her and this presumably was because she had refused to become his wife.
Now the sands of time were running out.
Tomorrow she would leave him and it was only at parties and balls that she was likely to see him again.
Even if he came to stay with her mother, which she thought unlikely, they would never be able to talk seriously or have any time alone together, as they had been able to do while he was in bed on the yacht.
‘There is so much more I want to know,’ Aldora thought wistfully.
She knew that above all things it was India that interested her the most, but from which he seemed deliberately to have excluded her.
She thought now that she had been very stupid, once they had come together again in the dirty inn, in not pretending that after all she was considering what the Queen had suggested.
In which case he would have told her so much of what she wanted to learn before they finally parted.
Then she had the strange feeling that because the Duke was perceptive or rather, as he said, he used his intuition, he would have known that she was acting a lie and would despise her more than he did already.
As she thought of this, it suddenly struck Aldora that she had been so busy hating the Duke that she had not questioned what his feelings might be about her.
He had made it very clear what he thought of her when she had made a hideous face at him in the drive and he had been extremely angry at her rudeness and the offensive manner in which she had spoken to him.
Then after she had saved his life and they were together on the yacht, he had been very different.
As she sat by his bedside reading or talking to him or even silent when he was half-asleep, she had felt that there was a friendship between them that was different from anything she had ever known before.
He had relied on her, she thought, and knew that it was because she was thinking of him as a small boy who had been hurt that it had been impossible to go on hating him.
Now, since her eyes had been opened by Hobson, she knew that what she now felt about him was very different from the condemnation and disgust she had felt ever since Lady Lawson had confided in her.
She felt as if suddenly she had grown up and was aware that the beauty with tears streaming down her lovely face, crying out in anguish, was in fact unbalanced.
And, now that she could think about it dispassionately, she realised that Lady Lawson had gloried in her misery.
It was a situation Aldora had never encountered before in her life and she had therefore been deeply moved by Lady Lawson’s protestations of undying love and her repeated cries of how she wanted to die.
Aldora’s brain told her now that Lady Lawson had been over-dramatic, over-emotional, and very very unstable.
But, at fifteen years of age, she had felt, as she dramatically expressed it to herself, that her heart bled for the unhappy beauty and her dislike for the Duke had grown as she thought of how much unhappiness he had caused.
Now once again she could hear the scorn in Hobson’s voice and felt humiliated that she had been deceived into becoming over-emotional as the servant had been sensible enough not to be.
She looked again at the Duke and realised that he was exactly like the hero in a novel and it was understandable that women, even if they were married, should fall in love with him.
Who else of all the men, young, old or distinguished, who had come to Berkhampton House was so tall, so good-looking and had such a presence about them?
This was due, Aldora knew now, not only to his rank and his wealth but to a brain which would have been admired by her father and was, as the Queen had realised, exactly what was wanted in one of the most important positions in the world.
‘He is unique!’ Aldora told herself and understood now what Hobson had meant when he said that women would fasten onto him like leeches and it was almost impossible for him to avoid them.
They must have sat silent for over an hour before Hobson brought the Duke some nourishing broth that had been specially made by the chef to strengthen him and which he insisted he should drink.
“It’ll do Your Grace good,” Hobson said.
“I would rather have a glass of champagne!”
“Your Grace shall have that before luncheon,” Hobson promised, taking away the empty cup that had contained the broth.
Aldora laughed.
“It is just like being back in the nursery,” she said, “and there is nothing you can do about it!”
“I am extremely grateful for his devotion, but just occasionally I would like to be allowed to decide a thing for myself,” the Duke remarked.
“I expect if the truth was known, you would dislike it if you had to,” Aldora said. “And don’t forget that the ordinary everyday comforts allow your brain to occupy itself with matters on a higher plane altogether.”
“Such as?”
“Horses, of course,” Aldora replied mockingly. “Politics and your search for perfection.”
“Which I suppose I shall never find,” the Duke replied, “and why should I, when none of us are perfect?”
“You surprise me,” Aldora teased. “I thought that you were completely satisfied with yourself as you are!”
“I wish that was true,” the Duke answered. “At the same time it would be a great mistake for any of us to achieve too quickly everything we wanted in life. We should look at the stars and struggle towards them.”
There was a little silence before Aldora said,
“What you are saying is that we only dev
elop ourselves fully when whatever we are striving to attain is still out of reach.”
“Of course,” the Duke agreed. “And that is why a challenge is always a gift from the Gods.”
There was silence.
Aldora knew that he was thinking of India and what a challenge it would have been, if he could have accepted the post as Viceroy.
She opened her mouth to speak, but as she did so Hobson came out on deck to tell them that luncheon was ready.
The Duke seemed rather sleepy during the rest of the day.
It was only when they dined together early, because he insisted that she had a long day ahead of her tomorrow, that they talked of some of the countries he had visited.
Aldora found herself absorbed in the history of the Arabs and the strange characteristics of the Turks.
When dinner was over Hobson, who had been serving it with the help of two other Stewards, said,
“Your Grace shouldn’t be late to bed. You mustn’t forget you’ve got a long drive ahead of you tomorrow and doubtless her Ladyship will have a party when you arrive, which you’ll find tirin’ after havin’ had only one person to talk to at a time.”
He went from the cabin before the Duke could answer and Aldora laughed.
“I am sure that you will miss Hobson when you go back to London.”
“He will be coming back with me,” the Duke replied. “He is always with me, as a matter of fact.”
He thought that Aldora looked surprised and explained,
“I only sent him ahead to get everything ready for me on the yacht, as I intended to spend a few days on her when the races were over.”
“Then Hobson is always with you.”
“He is a terrible trial at times. Equally I could not do without him,” the Duke said simply.
“I can understand that and I know he will prevent you from doing silly things that might hurt your arm.”
“I wonder if he will be as clever at keeping me under control as you have been?” the Duke said reflectively.
As he spoke, they heard the anchor being let down and knew that the yacht was in a sheltered cove where it would stay until just before dawn tomorrow morning.
“I suppose I should go to bed,” he sighed. “As Hobson has said, I will have a long day tomorrow. So I hope, Aldora, you will understand if I say ‘goodbye’ to you now rather than in the morning.”
The Storms Of Love Page 12
