“You would not let your daughter starve.”
“Indeed not,” Aurora said coolly. “I will provide her with gowns, two servants, and a pleasant place to live, but that is all. You, Mr. Bennett, will have nothing from me. I doubt that you could possibly keep your true face from Giana for very long. She will grow up, you know.”
“And your grandchildren, Mrs. Van Cleve? Will they also suffer from your ridiculous dislike of me? Your daughter is a very responsive girl, ma’am. I only hope that I can keep her from falling into my bed until we are safely wed. I would expect a son or daughter very shortly thereafter, I assure you.”
Aurora felt a flash of fury that he had the gall to flaunt Giana’s loose behavior in front of her, smirking all the while.
“You will have to find another chicken for the plucking, Mr. Bennett,” she said only.
Randall rose gracefully to his feet. “Dear lady, that is hardly a complimentary analogy. Believe me, ma’am, there is no other woman I want.”
She chanced to look him straight in the eye in an unguarded instant and recoiled from the cold ruthlessness she sensed in him. It occurred to her that such a man would not hesitate to remove anyone he thought in his way. She could not help herself, and took a step back. She said slowly, hating to so demean herself, “Mr. Bennett, I will give you ten thousand pounds to leave my daughter alone.”
“Ah, my dear Mrs. Van Cleve, you finally admit to yourself that I have won. Surely if I were the fortune hunter you believe me to be, I would not be so stupid as to accept such a paltry sum when one day soon I could enjoy all the benefits of having you for a mother-in-law.”
“On the contrary, sir, I believe you to be quite stupid. I will not see you again, Mr. Bennett. I bid you good day.”
“Good day, dear lady,” he said, bowing, and strolled from the room, whistling under his breath.
His confidence shook her. I should have Lanson beat him to a bloody pulp. On the heels of that pleasing thought, she envisioned Giana rushing to him, and cursing her, never forgiving her.
“Giana, my love, how very charming you look. The rose silk is very becoming.”
“Thank you, Mama,” Giana said, eyeing her. “Did you wish to speak to me?”
“Yes, child, I did.” Aurora gathered her thoughts together. “I talked to Randall Bennett today, at my office in the city.”
“I know, he told me.”
Aurora sagged where she stood. She had hoped to tell Giana before Bennett did.
Giana continued, her voice contemptuous, “I don’t need your gowns, your servants, or even a place you would so graciously provide me to live, Mama. I will have Randall, and he is all that I will ever want. Neither of us care if you disinherit me. He told me that you offered him money never to see me again. He was dreadfully upset that you could treat him so badly. Oh, Mama, don’t you see that Randall and I love each other? How could you, Mama?”
Aurora lost her calm and whirled on her daughter. “Yes, Giana, I did offer him ten thousand pounds, but he informed me it was a paltry sum he would not consider since he thinks he will eventually own everything that is ours.” She paused a moment, looking hopefully into her daughter’s face, but she saw only a wall of absolute distrust.
“For God’s sake, Giana, why do you think I met with him without your knowledge? I will tell you. I know I have rarely been so sure of anything, that Randall Bennett is the lowest kind of man, a fortune hunter. I love you. How can you imagine that I will sit by and let that immoral creature do as he wishes with you?”
“You love me, Mama? When did you decide that, pray tell? It has certainly been a recent discovery for you, since I have been out of your sight and mind nearly all my life. Why, Mama? Have you decided that you want me in your business and find Randall Bennett a nuisance?”
“Listen to me, Giana. It is true that I want you to join me in our business. I believe you are well-suited to it. I believe you would find satisfaction being your own woman, in charge of your own life. That in no way discounts a husband. It only discounts scum like Randall Bennett.”
“I doubt that you have ever been in love, Mama. You do not know what it is like to know that a man loves you in return, wants to cherish you, wants to make you the very center of his life.”
“What you are spouting is romantic drivel. No, I have never been in love, as you phrase it. Perhaps I am not the kind of person to ever become so involved. But, Giana, Randall Bennett will give you none of the things you want. You must believe me.”
Georgiana drew herself up to her full height. “And you must believe me, Mama. I do not want a life alone. I want marriage and a family. I want Randall Bennett.”
Aurora said suddenly, beyond constraint, “What would you think if I were to die after your marriage?”
“Mama, I don’t understand you. Wait, what do you mean? What in God’s name are you implying?”
“You know what I am saying, Giana. He merely taunted me when I informed him that you would not inherit until you were thirty years old. I sensed in him an utter ruthlessness against anything or anyone who stands in the way of his gaining our wealth.”
Giana rushed away from her mother, toward the door to her bedchamber. She clutched the knob and whirled about. “You are willing to say anything to ruin my life. Even accuse the man I love of planning to murder you. Dear God, do you hate me so much that you wish to destroy me?”
Aurora raised her hand in silent supplication, but Giana did not wait for a reply. She rushed from the room, her sobs ringing in Aurora’s ears. Aurora stared blindly about Giana’s frilly, feminine bedchamber. It is over now, she thought, and I have lost.
“Aurora. Cara. Behold, I am here not three days after I received your message in Paris.”
Aurora leapt to her feet. “Daniele,” she said, and flung open the doors of the library. She threw herself into his arms, ignoring Lanson’s startled face.
Daniele adjusted his eyes to the dim light in the library. “By all that’s holy, Aurora, what is this? Have you finally consented to lend me the thirty thousand pounds I need?”
Aurora drew back and smiled up at Daniele Cippolo, her business associate in Rome, and a longtime friend. If anyone could help her, it would be Daniele. Only he, she had thought as she penned her letter to him, was cunning enough to devise a means to foil Randall Bennett.
“I need your help, Daniele,” she said without preamble. “Would you care for a glass of sherry?”
Daniele nodded and followed her graceful figure to the sideboard with his eyes. “If you did not request my visit to London, cara, to lend me money, you must indeed have a problem of infinite complexity.” As she handed him his glass, he said, “There are shadows beneath your lovely eyes, Aurora. I cannot believe that the famous Aurora Van Cleve is betwixt and between.”
“You phrase it so nicely, Daniele.” As he sipped at his sherry, Aurora took a restless turn about the room. “I do have a problem for which there seems to be no solution. It is Giana.”
“Little Giana?” He struck his hand to his forehead. “How the years fly by. The girl is home from her fancy seminary in Switzerland?”
“Yes, she is, for a long three weeks now. Home and determined to marry a miserable bounder, a fortune hunter. She is all of seventeen years old,” she added in a bitter voice.
“I had hoped that you would present me with a problem worthy of my abilities, Aurora.” Daniele shrugged. “Truss the fellow up in a sack and send him off to India in one of your ships.”
“The idea did occur to me, but it won’t serve in this case.” She gazed up at her longtime friend, feeling herself grow more steady and confident. Daniele had always had a calming influence on her, despite his occasional lapses into grand hyperbole. His clear gray eyes, set deep beneath bushy gray brows, were either serene or glinting with suppressed excitement. He was brilliant, a financial wizard, unlike his poor brother who had killed himself several years before. Once, some five years before, she had considered him as a lover, and, to
her chagrin and subsequent amusement, it had been he who had refused. “One never mixes business with delight, cara,” he had told her. “You are too valuable to waste time in an old man’s bed.” Thus it was that she told him everything, omitting nothing. She could see the intricacy of his thoughts as he inserted questions here and there.
“So that is how everything now sits,” she said. “I have scarce spoken to Giana, since she accused me two days ago of ruining her life.”
Daniele shifted slightly in his chair, and readjusted his exquisite pearl-gray waistcoat over his narrow chest. He was quiet for a long time, for such a long time that Aurora could not stay seated. She bounded to her feet and began pacing, clasping her hands in front of her.
“Stop playing Lady Macbeth, cara. It would appear that your Giana has forgotten that she is Aurora Van Cleve’s daughter.”
“How could she be so stupidly foolish and naive?” Aurora said, disregarding him and resuming her frantic pacing. “How can I make her realize that she will be nothing but a pet possession—and that for only a short time. How can I make her understand that to really experience life, she must be in charge of her own destiny and not hand herself over lock, stock, and body to a husband, particularly a husband like Randall Bennett?”
“Calm yourself, Aurora,” Daniele said. “Not all men, you know, are like Morton Van Cleve—cold and rapacious.”
“Oh, I know that,” she said, whirling about to face him. “But still, the temptation is well-nigh impossible to withstand, even for the best of men. After all, in our just and proud land, a woman is naught but a brood mare, raised to view herself as an addle-headed, worthless—oh, I don’t know, Daniele. I know that I’m not making much sense, but it is so angering that my own daughter would willingly wish to imprison herself, to stay a child, and never know anything of the world, the real world, the world that men possess.”
“Your world, cara.”
“Yes, my world. I was nothing but an empty husk until Morton died. God, the freedom, the knowledge that what I say and what I think mean something.”
“Have you said this to Giana?”
“Oh yes, but she merely stares at me like I’m some kind of oddity. She cannot see beyond her nose or hear anything but Randall Bennett’s charming soliloquies. She is too young to begin to understand how very arid her life could be, and our fortune hunter has smothered her in romantic illusion.”
Daniele said quietly, “Most women could not conceive of the world as you experience it, Aurora.”
“That is because their brains have been rotted by the time they are twenty.”
“Perhaps,” he said. He added thoughtfully, “I trust that you did not accuse the man of having designs on your life in front of Giana. Surely he would not go that far, cara.”
Aurora drew a ragged breath. “Yes, I did tell her that he was, I thought, utterly ruthless. Would he remove me, her mother, were I to continue to thwart him?” She shrugged her shoulders angrily. “I do not know, Daniele. At the time I did think he was capable of such a thing. Now, well—it does seem rather melodramatic.”
Daniele waved a dismissing hand, and rose abruptly to pace thoughtfully along the path she had trod. “It was wise of you to send for me, cara. Si, I can see that this problem requires an unusual solution to resolve itself appropriately.” He paused a moment, and asked her quietly, “Is Giana truly your daughter, Aurora? Are you certain that she would not be quite happy with a husband to master her, and her belly filled yearly with child?”
“I refuse to believe that. I see the intelligence in her eyes, Daniele, and flashes of pride, that is, when she is not acting the giddy chit. If Randall Bennett were not the cad I know him to be, I would allow her to lie in the bed of her own making. But, hear me, Daniele, I would be the most despicable of women were I to allow my daughter to wed him.”
“It is a problem of the most profound sort,” Daniele said. “I must ponder, cara. I beg you to stop wearing a hole in your Axminster carpet.”
Aurora obligingly sat down on the sofa, and watched his brow pucker and his gray eyes narrow in thought. She was beginning to believe that this problem was beyond even Daniele’s cunning, when he suddenly smiled and slapped his hands to his thighs.
“A very original solution, Aurora, and most daring,” he said modestly. “Are you a prude, cara?”
“A prude?” she repeated, cocking her head at him. “I do not believe so, Daniele. Why do you ask?”
“Because, my dear,” he said slowly, “our solution to Giana’s infatuation is not one a mother would readily accept.”
“Explain yourself, Daniele.”
“I will, cara, but first you must agree not to interrupt me until I have finished.”
She nodded, unconsciously leaning toward him.
He paused a moment, his eyes gentle upon her face. “You know, Aurora, before I tell you of my plan, it seems to me that you must yourself face the truth. It is not only Randall Bennett who distresses you, it is any man who would take Giana to wife.”
“Of course it is,” she said, drawing a deep breath. “At least until she is a woman grown, and has the sense and perspective to wed a man who would accept her for what she is, a man who would be content, if she wished it, to let her control her own money, to direct her own affairs.”
“Such a man would be a rare find.”
She nodded, sadly.
“Then what Giana needs, and quickly, is a strong dose of life, and from a vantage point that would leave no doubts in her mind. I would imagine that ladies in Rome are not at all different from your English ladies. And men, well, they are universally the same, are they not?”
At her nod, he said, “Well, then, I shall proceed.”
He did, at great length, much to Aurora’s astonishment.
“It all sounds so fantastic, so—”
“Immoral?”
“No, not really that. Risky. Giana is so very young. Such an experience as you paint would catapult her into a world that I myself have never seen, only guessed at.”
He smiled, and gently mocked her. “Do you wish to be a pupil also, cara?”
“I must think, Daniele,” she said, disregarding his words. “Were I to allow you to let her meet such people, surely I would be a most unnatural mother.”
“Now it is your own morality that eats at you, your concern at how you would view yourself. It would appear, Aurora, that you have little choice. You are wise enough, I think, to know what is best for your daughter, and how to deal with yourself and your own feelings.”
“I can scarce envision such a burden.”
“You will think about it, cara. Yes, you will think about it.”
Aurora arose earlier the next morning than was her usual habit. When she emerged from her bedchamber, she saw Giana’s maid, Daisy, clutching an envelope to her breast. Another assignation with Randall Bennett, of that she was certain. That, or Giana was prepared to elope with him. It was the sight of that envelope that decided her. She was on the point of marching into Giana’s bedchamber, when she drew up, shaking her head. No, this would be a formal agreement between them; it would be conducted in the library.
“You wished to see me, Mother?” Giana stood in the doorway, hesitant to enter, Aurora knew, certain of another confrontation.
“Yes, Giana,” she said as pleasantly as she could. “Do come in and sit down, my dear. I believe it is time we came to an agreement.” How lovely she looks this morning, she thought, watching her graceful figure as she hesitantly seated herself on the edge of a papier-mâché chair. Lovely save for her sullen, pouting mouth.
“An agreement?”
“Today is the first of June. I will consent to your marriage to Randall Bennett on the first day of September if you will return to Rome with your Uncle Daniele and stay the summer with him.”
Aurora could see the distrust in her daughter’s eyes, the questions leaping about in her mind.
“When I say consent, Giana, I mean it. You will have as fine a we
dding as you wish, with my full support and agreement. Randall Bennett, as my son-in-law, will be able, if he wishes, to enter the business.”
“You think, Mother, that I will forget the only man I will ever love over the space of three short months?”
“No, Giana, that is not what I think.” Aurora looked down at her hands, and saw her knuckles were white from clutching her chair back. She supposed it was Giana’s scoffing voice that decided her irrevocably. “I have tried to tell you, Giana, that women, for the most part, lose all their choices once they wed, lose their freedom, and become only what their husbands wish them to be. No, don’t interrupt me yet. I am not speaking specifically of Randall Bennett, though I have no doubt that he would, once you were his wife and his property, treat you no differently. You would be trotted out on social occasions to be seen and admired as his possession, then quickly retired to your children and to the endless society of other women exactly like you. The most important decisions you would ever make would be what to have Cook serve for dinner, not the wines, certainly, for that is a man’s domain. You would decide which nanny you wished for your girl children and would have a choice of dressmakers. Your husband, you would find, would soon take a mistress. He would conduct his affairs discreetly only if he felt any liking for you at all.”
Giana could not help herself, and cried angrily, “Enough, Mother. Randall would not be like that, he loves me. He would cherish me, protect me, always. Never would he leave me to take a mistress.”
“Very well, Giana, that is what you believe. Are you prepared to spend the three months with your Uncle Daniele in order to gain my support? It is really a very short period of time.”
Three months without Randall. It seemed like an eternity. Giana gazed suspiciously at her mother, not understanding why Aurora could be so foolish as to think she would cease to love Randall, even if Aurora sent her to faraway China. She was tempted to tell her mother that she cared not a whit for her permission, when she remembered Randall’s saddened voice. “Oh, my little Giana, if only you—we—could persuade your mother to approve of our love and marriage. Life for us would be so much more pleasant. It distressed me, my darling, that you would be torn between your mother and me.”
Evening Star Page 4
