His knuckles were bruised and bleeding from the violent way that he had hit Sir Gerald. She pressed her lips against them and, as he looked down at her with a darkness in his eyes, which she would not have understood, she opened the door and slipped away.
*
The Dowager was breakfasting in her room at seven of the clock the following morning when there came a tap at the door.
She looked up with an expression of irritation on her face, because she liked to be alone at breakfast. She had long ago decided that, as her rheumatism was at its worst when she first woke, she would see no one until she was in less pain and felt more genial towards the world in general.
“Come in,” she called grudgingly and was astonished as the door opened to reveal, not one of the senior servants as she had expected, but her grandson, dressed with an elegance that always pleased her eye.
She noticed, however, that he looked tired and there were dark circles under his eyes as if he had been awake all night. This surprised her since she had heard him return home with Clarinda quite early.
“Good morning, Grandmama,” Lord Melburne greeted her.
You are very early, Buck,” the Dowager exclaimed, “I had no idea I was to be honoured by your presence at breakfast!”
“I have already had mine,” Lord Melburne replied, “and I know, Grandmama, that you like to be alone at cockcrow. But I particularly wish to speak with you.”
“It must be a matter of tremendous import to bring you from the comfort of your bed at such an unfashionable hour unless you are going to a mill are departing for the races,” the Dowager commented.
“I am doing neither. We are leaving at about half after ten this morning for Melburne and I thought, ma’am, that you would desire plenty of time to prepare yourself.”
“And you call that plenty of time?” the Dowager smiled. “Why this sudden decision?”
Lord Melburne looked away from her and she realised that he was choosing his words with care.
“Something happened last night that upset Clarinda,” he replied. “She has no wish at the moment to attend any further balls or entertainments. There is a decision to be made and it must be made in the country.”
“I would suppose she has decided to accept one of those lovelorn swains who have been mooning around the house all these past weeks,” the Dowager remarked. “Is it likely to be the Duke?”
Lord Melburne shook his head.
“No, Grandmama, I regret I must disappoint you, but it will not be the Duke.”
“Then I will make no further guesses. I suppose you have some good reason for taking Clarinda away when she is at the height of her success, when she is acclaimed not only as the most beautiful debutante there has been for an age but also the most charming and the best-mannered with, of course, the exception of her extraordinary behaviour yesterday afternoon at Devonshire House.”
“His Grace was somewhat overpowering,” Lord Melburne explained.
“It is such a pity – ” the Dowager began, but a glance at her grandson’s face checked the words before she could utter them.
She had not seen that bleak look in his eyes since the death of his mother whom he had adored. There was that same blue line round his mouth which had made her both then and now long to put her arms round him and hold him close.
“What is amiss, Buck?” she enquired gently.
“I hope,” he said slowly in a voice deliberately devoid of feeling, “I can settle Clarinda’s affairs for her within the next few days and then, Grandmama, I intend to go abroad.”
“Go abroad!” the Dowager repeated, her voice rising. “Why in Heaven’s name should you wish to go abroad?”
“I have a great desire to see Paris again and perhaps Rome.”
“Fustian!” his grandmother exclaimed. “You know I am not likely to be fobbed off by such moonshine! What is the real reason?”
“Don’t be too perceptive, Grandmama,” Lord Melburne pleaded. “Don’t try to probe too deeply. It is just that I have no wish to stay here once Clarinda’s future has been arranged.”
“Well, I hope that indeed you will be able to settle it to her satisfaction,” the Dowager said. “It always distresses me to see someone as pretty as Clarinda so unhappily in love.”
“In love!” Lord Melburne expostulated. “Who said Clarinda was in love?”
“But, of course, she is in love,” the Dowager snapped. “Do you imagine, my dear Buck, that girls who are not in love go around refusing great matrimonial catches like the Duke of Kingston or spend half the night sobbing into their pillows.”
“Clarinda has been crying? I knew she was upset last night – ”
“I have no idea what Clarinda did last night,” the Dowager continued, “but Betty tells me that almost every night her pillow is wet with tears and that she cries uncontrollably when she is alone. Women cry, Buck, when their hearts are aching for a man!”
“But for whom could she be crying?” Lord Melburne asked in bewilderment.
“I thought that you would be the most likely to know the answer to that question,” the Dowager reproved him “It certainly cannot be any of the gentlemen who have offered for her not once but a dozen times. If you have had some of them pleading with you for help, I assure you I have had twice as many begging my co-operation in making her accept them.”
“Blast it! But then who in God’s name can it be?” Lord Melburne asked angrily, as if the mystery was incensing him to the point of losing his self-control.
“I will excuse your language,” the Dowager said coldly, “because I infer you are really concerned about Clarinda’s happiness. Betty is persuaded that it is a man the child knew in the country.”
“That is just impossible!” Lord Melburne retorted. “The only men she knew were Julien Wilsdon, who is a mere boy not much older than herself, Nicholas Vernon, who is now dead, and – ”
He stopped suddenly, an almost stupefied look on his face as if a sudden idea had come to him. An idea so unexpected and so revolutionary, that he sat still and rigid as if turned to stone.
The Dowager said nothing, watching him with her shrewd bright eyes, till suddenly as if galvanised into action he rose to his feet and she knew that their conversation was at an end.
“Your servant, Grandmama,” he said. “I hope you can be ready by ten-thirty. Clarinda will travel with you in your carriage. I shall drive my phaeton.”
“I will be ready,” she replied, “and I hope that this hasty departure from London, which I deprecate, will at least solve the problem of Clarinda’s tears.”
“I earnestly hope so, ma’am,” Lord Melburne concurred.
She saw a sudden glint in his eyes like a leaping flame, which was in strange contrast to the solemnity of his voice. The blue look had gone from his mouth.
He left closing the door behind him and, when she was alone, the Dowager gave a little chuckle as if she was extremely amused by some private joke.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Clarinda galloped down Dingle’s Ride and found it a joy to be mounted on a horse again, especially one from Lord Melburne’s perfect stables.
She had slipped away when luncheon was over, feeling strongly that she must be alone and determined to tell no one where she was going.
She wanted to visit The Priory and, although she was sure that neither the Dowager nor Lord Melburne would wish to accompany her, she had a slight feeling of guilt because she had not told them of her plans.
She had spent a sleepless night after she had left Lord Melburne in the library. She had tossed and turned, living over and over those extreme moments of horror and humiliation when she had been unable to escape from Sir Gerald and had felt herself helpless beneath him.
Now it seemed as clearly as if he was by her side, that she could hear Lord Melburne’s voice telling her that the only way she could be safe and the only way she could avoid the menaces of the masked men who had seen her in the role of Venus, was to marry!
She dre
w up her horse at the end of Dingle’s Ride and recalled the wild elation of the morning when she tried to escape from Lord Melburne and he had outridden her on Saladin, his stallion with Arab blood in it.
She had hated him, but there had been something stimulating and thrilling in her very defiance of him.
As she thought of it, she turned her horse across the Ride and rode on down the twisting path through the wood that led into the lush green parkland which surrounded The Priory.
There was the sweet fresh smell of the countryside that she had so missed in London, the trees full-leaved and the hedgerows thick with wild roses and honeysuckle.
But Clarinda was recalling her feelings when she had ridden away from Lord Melburne after he had proved himself the victor in Dingle’s Ride.
Her hatred had been unmixed and bitter. It was a violent hatred for the man who she had loathed for over four years because of the way that he had treated her friend, Jessica Tansley. There had been no complications or compromise then about her emotions.
It must have been after Lord Melburne had rescued her from the caves, Clarinda thought, that she had found that it was becoming difficult to go on nourishing her anger against him. Perhaps it had begun even earlier than that, maybe it was that moment when he had shaken her and fiercely kissed her mouth because he had seen her embracing Julien Wilsdon.
She had never been able to forget the touch of his lips, at first hard and almost cruel in their pressure on hers and then suddenly persuading, beguiling and possessive as if they will draw her very heart from her breast.
She remembered how she had meant to remain icily calm and rigid within his arms, but because his kisses had disturbed her beyond endurance, she had flared out at him, incensed with a fear not so much of him as of herself.
Clarinda gave a little sob.
“Oh, God,” she said cried out aloud, “why did this have to happen to me?”
She had cried last night into her pillow as she had cried so many nights before, not only because she felt helpless and vulnerable and afraid but because she knew that however great a success she might be in the Social world, she could never find happiness with any of the men who had besought her so ardently to marry them.
How could she possibly marry anyone when her affections were captured hopelessly and irrevocably by a man for whom, she told herself, she had no respect and who did not love her anyway?
She had loved Lord Melburne before they went to London. But, when he appeared to ignore her, had contrived never to be alone with her and had never asked her to dance at any of the balls which they attended, she had to acknowledge that there was an aching emptiness within her which no amount of praise and adulation from other men could dispense.
She had fought against such a betrayal of her friend, accusing herself night after night of disloyalty, of hypocrisy and of being weak and vacillating.
Yet however much she condemned herself and however much she flagellated herself with reproaches, the fact remained that she only had to see Lord Melburne’s broad shoulders coming towards her at some party, to have a glimpse of him ascending the stairs at Melburne House and to watch him seated at the end of his dining table for her heart to turn over in her breast.
She would feel a strange breathless thrill running through her that was unmistakably and irrefutably love!
‘Don’t let me love him, please God, don’t let me love him,’ she had prayed, knowing, even as she said the words in the darkness of her bedchamber, that it was too late!
She knew now that she had loved him when he had come to her rescue in the caves and she had loved him when he had held her racked with tears in his strong arms. She had loved him as she pleaded with him not to leave her after he had carried her upstairs to lay her gently on her bed!
Yet now she had to marry someone else. She had to choose a husband from one of her many suitors, while her own heart was irretrievably given for ever to a man who was not in the least interested in her.
Perhaps, Clarinda thought despairingly, that if she had behaved differently he might have been attracted by her.
Then she remembered that all the women in whom he had been interested had been dark-haired. There was Lady Romayne with her raven-black elegantly coiffured locks, there was Liane, who Betty had told her was French and who was dark-haired.
And there were various other lovely women who she suspected of being old flirts of Lord Melburne because of the way they had looked at her with malice and envy in their eyes and because the Dowager had hinted more or less inadvertently that once they had been in Lord Melburne’s life. They were all brunettes,!
Last night Clarinda had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion just before dawn to have a nightmare that she was in Sir Gerald Kegan’s arms and all around them there were masked men jeering and laughing at her helplessness.
She had woken with a muffled cry to find herself trembling and, because the dream had been so vivid, she had slipped out of bed in the dark and opened the door into the passage.
The candles had guttered down low in their silver sconces, but at the end of the landing from which the main bedrooms opened, she could see Lord Melburne’s room. His door was ajar and the room was lit inside so that she knew that he was awake and watching over her as he had promised to do.
She felt her fears vanish. She closed her door very quietly and slipped back into bed to lie thinking about him and just how much and hopelessly she loved him until finally for the second time that night she cried bitterly and despairingly.
If the Dowager had noticed the lines under her eyes and her pale face when they left the house for the country, she made no comment.
Clarinda had learnt that Lord Melburne had already gone ahead of them. She wished that she could have driven with him in his high perch phaeton, feeling the wind in her face and, knowing that even if he had no need of her, he was for the moment at her side.
‘I love him,’ she murmured to herself and knew that she was consumed by an urgency to reach Melburne and see him again.
Now, riding towards The Priory, Clarinda wondered if she would ever be free of the pain which the mere thought of him evoked in her. It was almost like being stabbed by a knife, but at times there was a strange ecstasy in it, because the hurt, agonising though it was, seemed only to intensify her love for him.
Clarinda was so deep in her thoughts that she was well within sight of The Priory itself before she realised it. The long low Elizabethan house, half-hidden by trees and the pointed gables and worn red brick held a familiar beauty which told her that she was now home.
Yet she found herself reining her horse in. She had a sudden irrepressible impulse to turn back to Melburne and not to visit the house she had lived in for four years.
She realised now how restricted her life at The Priory had been. It was Lord Melburne who had compelled her to go to London, who had insisted that she broaden her horizon, that she must meet people and that she must have a chance to shine in London Society.
He had been right, she thought, but then he was always right! She had enjoyed London, even though she had been puzzled and saddened by his indifference to her from the moment they reached Melburne House in Berkeley Square.
However, she would not have been human had she not enjoyed finding out that she was beautiful, that men lost their hearts to her and that even women acclaimed her a huge success.
But now Clarinda knew that she had to face facts. Life would be impossible unless she could find herself a husband! She could never live in peace in the obscurity of The Priory for fear that one of those masked men, knowing who she was, would come in search of her.
She could not go back to London and attend balls because every time a man asked her for a dance she would wonder if he was one of those who had seen her as Venus in the caves.
Even Lord Melburne could not protect her against such a terror as that.
Clarinda reached the drive and walked her horse through a tunnel of green leaves formed by the great oaks.
Everything, she felt bitterly, reminded her of Lord Melburne. Even here she was haunted by her first sight of him tooling his high perch phaeton and looking so incredibly handsome with his high hat sported at a raffish angle and his cravat looking spotlessly white against his sunburnt face.
‘I might have known then I would come to love him,’ Clarinda told herself with a sob.
If only she had forgotten her hatred and had greeted him pleasantly, perhaps the whole story of their tempestuous relationship might have been different.
‘Why did I not say I would be friends with him when he asked me?’ she chided herself.
She knew that, although she had told Lord Melburne that the memory of Jessica Tansley lay between them, it was also because she was afraid that if they had any more intimate talks together he would guess that she loved him.
That was an ultimate humiliation that she could not endure.
She could not allow him to guess that she had succumbed to his attractions like all the other women he knew had succumbed. He was the irresistible Buck Melburne, the man who attracted women to the point where they cast away all dignity and discretion and behaved like Lady Romayne, with her air of possessiveness, the provocative pouting of her lips and her hands going out to touch him.
Clarinda felt herself shiver.
‘I will not think about him – I will not,’ she urged herself.
But now, try as she might, his face was always before her eyes.
She arrived at the big nail-studded oak door of The Priory, which had stood there since the house was first built and found to her surprise that it was open. Old Ned, the ostler, came hurrying to hold her horse and Bates appeared in the doorway.
“Welcome home, Miss Clarinda,” he bowed.
“Were you expecting me?” Clarinda asked in surprise.
“Yes, indeed, miss. His Lordship stopped by on his way to Melburne this morning and told us you would be coming sometime today. It’s real glad we are to see you, Miss Clarinda, and looking more beautiful, if you’ll pardon me for saying so, than I’ve ever seen you.”
The Irresistible Buck Page 19
