“Do you love me?”
“You know I do. So much that it seems to me that there is nothing in the world but my love for you. I am yours, all of me.”
Had he been different or less sensitive, he would have reached out towards her then, but there was a contact between them that had no need for physical expression.
She was right, they belonged to each other and they were each of them a part of the other.
He sat for a long time, allowing the tender calm of Julia to flow through him, soothing away his worries and his irritations, his perplexities and his problems.
Half an hour later, at peace in a manner that seemed somehow miraculous, he bent to kiss her goodnight.
For a moment her lips, soft and warm, yielded to his.
“Goodnight, my darling,” she whispered.
Just for a moment he hesitated. At the touch of her a flame within himself flickered into life.
Then he realised how tired he was and how in need of sleep.
“Goodnight, my perfect one, my most beloved in all the world.”
He lowered his head and kissed her breast where it curved beneath the soft lace of her nightgown and then, without looking back, he went from the room and closed the door.
In his own room he felt sleep stealing over him like the waves of a tranquil sea.
He abandoned his mind and his body to the soft rhythm of it and fell into a deep slumber that lasted until late the following morning.
Chapter 13
“Richard Melton! I seem to have heard the name.”
“That perhaps is not surprising. I have waited on Your Excellency for six days hoping for an audience.”
The Prince Talleyrand shrugged his shoulders.
“I am busy, young man, and – popular.”
He smiled wryly at the last word and his thick lips parted to show his rotted and blackened teeth.
He was a strange sight as he sat in the morning sunshine in the huge and elaborate bedroom. Two barbers were attending to his elaborate coiffure and his valet was pouring vinegar over his lame foot.
The Kaunitz Palace had housed many strange guests, but never one stranger than Prince Talleyrand.
The long path of diplomatic policy, and by no means a straight one, had brought him to Vienna as Minister of the newly created Louis XVIII.
He had been preceded by a cook, two valets, two lackeys and his own musician and from the moment he arrived his salon was the centre of opposition.
He gathered round him the discontented and he regaled them with his wit, his superlative food and an exhibition of his brilliant if treacherous art in diplomacy.
Looking at Richard with his small deep-set eyes without any expression in them, the Prince subjected the tall handsome Englishman standing before him to a scrutiny that was in itself an insolence.
“And what do you want of me?” he asked.
“A position in Paris, Your Excellency.”
“And why should I give you that?”
“My father, whom you may recall as Lord John Melton, was at the Embassy in Paris for many years. You did, on one occasion, visit my late uncle, the third Marquis of Glencarron in London.”
“Yes, yes, I recollect both of them. Your father is dead?”
“He died five years ago,” Richard replied. “It must be fifteen years since he was in Paris and yet I feel sure that many of his friends will remember him.”
“Few people have long memories,” the Prince replied evasively. “Why should you wish to go to Paris?”
“I cannot return to England.”
The Frenchman raised his eyebrows.
“Indeed! Are you exiled?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Why?”
“For duelling. Your Excellency.”
The Prince put the tips of his fingers together.
“Where are you staying in Vienna?”
“At the Hofburg. I am the guest of his Imperial Majesty, the Czar of Russia.”
“So, you are housed in that camp, are you?”
“The Czar has been kind enough to befriend me,” Richard said stiffly. “The Congress and its politics are no personal concern of mine.”
“And yet, if the Czar is your protector here, it would seem that he might be persuaded to offer you a post in St. Petersburg?”
“I would prefer Paris, Your Excellency.”
“So many people have said that,” Prince Talleyrand replied, “but Paris is already overcrowded. I fear, young man, I can be of no use to you.”
Richard bowed.
He had expected nothing else from the first moment that he had set eyes on the Prince’s cold inscrutable face.
It had been absurd to imagine that this man, who had betrayed every Master he had ever served, would be moved to do a kindly action from which he personally could gain no particular advantage.
Richard checked an impulse to say something bitter.
His father had often told him how, when he was at the Embassy in Paris, he had helped Prince Talleyrand at a most crucial moment in his career.
Well might the Frenchman affirm now that most people’s memories were not long.
Richard went from the salon into the anteroom outside.
There a crowd of visitors waited with bored faces and a deliberately assumed pose of indifference, as he himself had waited this past week.
As he walked past, one man rose and together they descended the wide marble staircase with its gold banisters.
“Any luck?” the stranger enquired.
He was a middle-aged man with a weather-beaten face and Richard judged him to be a soldier who had fallen on hard times.
“None,” he replied bitterly.
“I am not surprised,” his companion remarked. “Talleyrand would rather cut his throat than speak a kind or helpful word. I was there when Napoleon Bonaparte in the presence of the whole Court called him ‘a piece of dung in a silk stocking’! He was right and the Prince has not changed.”
Richard laughed at the description, but he thought as he walked away from the Palace that hard words were no consolation. It had been a forlorn hope to imagine that Prince Talleyrand might in gratitude for his father’s kindness in the past offer him a small position in Paris.
However small, however badly paid, it would have made it possible for him to ask Wanda to marry him.
But without any prospects in the future, without the possibility of any settled income, how could he ask any woman to share his life?
Since the night of the fire at the Razumovsky Palace, he had moved from the Hofburg to the Baroness Waluzen’s house and they had sat up every night, talking, planning and scheming, but they arrived always at precisely the same conclusion – that two people could not live on air.
Then Richard had thought of Prince Talleyrand and, having told the Baroness and Wanda of his intention to call upon the French Minister, he had gone to the Kaunitz Palace with high hopes and unquestionable optimism, only to find himself growing more despondent day by day as he was kept waiting for an audience and saw the crowds of other suppliants who were turned away.
Now, after waiting for so long, he was no further advanced in his search for security than he had been that first night when he had taken Wanda home after the fire and told both her and the Baroness the truth about himself.
“But we love each other,” Wanda had said not once but a thousand times in the ensuing days when they had discussed the future,
“Love does not fill a hungry belly,” the Baroness told her. “Love won’t light a fire in the grate or buy your husband a new coat when his is threadbare.”
“Then what shall we do?” Wanda asked forlornly.
The despair on her little face, the trembling of her soft lips and the fear in her blue eyes forced Richard to appear more confident than he was.
“I will find something,” he promised her. “Trust me, I swear I will not fail you.”
It was so easy that way to bring the colour back into he
r cheeks and the happiness to her eyes and yet, when he was alone, he admitted to himself that his head ached with thinking and he felt almost sick at the thought that he must fail her.
What could he do? What was there for him to do?
It was hard to credit in the midst of so much lavish expenditure that poverty, dirt and hunger lurked just round the corner.
Richard had heard talk of Comtesses and other noble ladies who had come to the Congress because it was their last chance of being social, who appeared at the banquets and entertainments blazing with magnificent diamonds that were entailed to their descendants and went away to sleep in a garret and starve until their next public appearance.
Now, as he thought of his own plight, he could credit that and a great many other things as well.
He had not admitted either to Wanda or the Baroness why it was impossible for him to approach the Czar, who was the most likely person to prove benevolent and generous, but he thought they both guessed that Katharina barred the way to that solution.
He had seen the Princess at a ball that he had attended in the company of the Baroness and Wanda and, while she had smiled at him from a distance, there had been no excuse or opportunity for them to talk more intimately.
Man-like, now the crisis was past, be began to forget about it. He thought too that Wanda had also erased from her memory those moments of terror in the Razumovsky Palace.
She was too happy with him to allow anything to cloud her love and her joy, save the fear that they might be separated.
“I suppose you know you are spoiling her chances,” the Baroness said tartly to Richard. “I had at least two eligible young men in mind for her and now she not only treats them as if they were invisible, but is curt to the point of rudeness when they ask her for a dance.”
“I am glad about that. But do you blame me?” Richard enquired.
The Baroness looked at his handsome face and smiled.
“I have told you before,” she said, “that your love for each other is madness, but – I would give up my hope of Heaven to be young and mad!”
Richard had grown to have a real affection for the old lady. Like Wanda, he realised that her caustic wit and sharp tongue were the only weapons left for her now that her beauty had faded and the men who had loved her had died or gone.
“Sometimes I remember that I too shall grow old,” Wanda whispered to him once, “and when I think of those years ahead of me, I know that, unless I can have you or perhaps at the end only my memories of you, I would rather not live at all. I would prefer to die now at this moment when I am happy with your arms round me.”
He kissed her then, wildly and passionately, feeling as if Fate was trying to separate them, that every moment, every second, was precious because tomorrow they might be parted.
“I love you, Richard. Oh, darling, do you think I would mind being poor with you?” Wanda asked, her mouth close to his. “I will cook for you, mend your socks and, if God is kind, bear your sons.”
She blushed as she said that and hid her face against his neck. Richard, as he held her close, thought that in her sweet innocence she destroyed almost his last hope that somehow they might contrive to get married.
How could he take upon himself to support not only a wife but a family? If they had been in England, he might have risked it. He had friends who would never fail him and there would have been at least a roof over their heads and the nursery, where he had played himself, for his children.
But here, in Europe, they had nothing, just a few diminishing golden sovereigns and the loyalty and devotion of Harry.
Despite his despair, Richard smiled to himself as he thought of Harry whilst he trudged through the slushy snow-covered streets of Vienna.
Harry, who despite the fact that he disliked women and those he called ‘the Guv’s fancy bits’, was already Wanda’s devoted slave.
She laughed delightedly at the way he talked, she flattered him by listening to his stories and she found his sense of humour as irresistible as Richard did.
“He is so funny,” she would say, wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes as she recounted to the Baroness or Richard some caustic remark Harry had made about their friends or acquaintances.
“He has no notion of how to behave,” the Baroness would say stiffly, even while her eyes were twinkling. “He is not my idea of a servant.”
“Nor mine,” Richard agreed. “He is our friend.”
Of one thing he was quite certain, if they were able to get married, Harry would fill the role of cook, housemaid and if necessary Nanny with the same humorous dexterity as he had enacted innumerable and varied roles in the past. Yet what was the use of a servant without a house?
Richard sighed as he plodded on through the snow, envying for a moment those driving past him in the carriages and sleighs and quelling the thought that, if he had still been at the Hofburg, he could have commanded one of the many carriages that had been fashioned for the Emperor of Austria’s guests.
It was nearly luncheon time when Richard reached the Baroness Waluzen’s house to find Wanda waiting for him.
She knew by his face what was the result of his interview with Prince Talleyrand and instead of asking stupid questions, as another woman might have done, she merely went to him and, putting her arms round his neck, drew his face down to hers.
For one second he was too disappointed at the news he had to tell to respond even to her sweetness and then, as he felt her lips seeking his, he held her to him fiercely, enfolding her in his arms as if he would never let her go.
“There will be something else. I know there will be something else,” Wanda murmured.
“I was a fool to raise your hopes,” Richard said roughly.
“We are neither of us going to give up hoping because of one small setback,” Wanda answered.
There was something strong and resolute in her tone and, as he had looked down at her, he thought that she had grown older and perhaps wiser these past few days.
Love had made her mature and for a moment he regretted the shy lost child he had encountered that night at the masked ball.
Then he knew that it was a woman he wanted, a woman who could help and comfort him, a woman who would be his companion through life and not just a plaything of the moment.
“I love you,” he heard his own voice vibrate on the words and then, as she smiled her response, everything was forgotten.
“The Baroness and I drove to the villa on the Rennweg,” she said later. “Prince Metternich is returning sometime today so we can see him tomorrow.”
“Is that good news or bad?” Richard asked.
“I don’t know,” Wanda answered. “Sometimes I think he will understand when I tell him that we love each other, while at others I think that he will be angry with me because I have failed him.”
As she spoke, she reached up her hand quickly and pressed her fingers against Richard’s lips.
“No, you are not to say what you think about that,” she commanded. “I know you disapprove of the task Prince Metternich set me, but remember, if he had not asked my help, if I had not gone to the masked ball, we might never have met. It was Fate, darling, as I have told you before.”
“It was Fate,” Richard agreed, kissing her fingers, “and now Fate must go further and help me to find some way that I can make money.”
“I have prayed for that,” Wanda answered, “and I cannot believe that my prayers will go unheard.”
He held her once again in his arms and then luncheon was announced and they went in together with their faces so alight with happiness that the Baroness sighed again for her lost youth.
*
In the afternoon the Baroness took Wanda with her to a reception that Richard had not been invited to and, because he disliked being left behind, he went off in an ill-temper for a ride in the Prater.
He hoped among his many acquaintances to find one who might be of use to him.
But, although he talked with many peop
le, kissed many white fingers and paid his respects to several visiting Sovereigns, the afternoon was a wasted one.
He soon grew tired of making himself pleasant and galloped away from the crowds. He followed the Prater until it led him far from the City and out into the woods.
There he let his horse have its head and after an invigorating and exhilarating gallop along the snow-covered tracks beneath the leafless trees, he turned for home as dusk was falling.
He felt happy as he rode back into the City. Wanda would be waiting for him and they had planned to spend the evening together at home.
He had worried so much lately that sometimes he felt his brain had lost the capacity to worry any more, but he let life take its leisurely course.
Tomorrow – there was always tomorrow to bring a change of circumstance, a lucky chance, perhaps a prize in one of the lotteries in which all Vienna indulged with their love for gambling.
Darkness was falling and the roofs of the great houses were silhouetted against the sky and the first evening stars were just appearing.
Richard found himself whistling a little tune beneath his breath and then he recognised it. It was the waltz that he and Wanda had danced that first night at the masked ball.
‘An enchanted waltz’ she had called it and certainly it had proved enchanted for both of them. It had bound them together with magical bonds that he knew would last for all eternity.
He turned in at the Baroness’s drive gate and dismounted at the front door.
He looked round in surprise because Harry was not waiting.
Usually when he went riding the little man was hanging about, watching for his return and chivvying the grooms to attention. Because he himself had once been in the stable, he swore that he knew their lazy habits and slovenly ways whether they were in England or Vienna.
A footman opened the front door and a shaft of light came streaming out.
When he saw who stood there, Richard heard him give peremptory orders to another lesser servant and a few seconds later a groom came hurrying round the side of the house to take the horse.
Richard walked up the steps and into the hall.
As he did so, Harry appeared from a door leading to the back premises.
The Enchanted Waltz Page 19
