Devil's Darling

by Violet Winspear

  The look that she gave the Don was a trifle defiant, for she had been reared by Marcus to be fastidious of her person and always well-groomed. Her world had truly turned awry for her to be looking like this!

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve made a mess of your handkerchief, señor,’ she said, and her voice that was always slightly husky had increased in huskiness. ‘I’d offer to wash it, but I’ve been thrown out of Stonehill as if I’d never belonged there. My name should be Orphan Annie and there should be a storm... farcical, isn’t it, that a girl of twenty should suddenly find herself homeless, moneyless, and not even trained to wash dishes! It should be good for a laugh, but I’m feeling too blue for laughing. I should be laying white roses on dear Marcus’s coffin, but they said I wasn’t a member of the family - they implied that I had no rights at all, though they allowed Lucrezia to attend because she was his nurse when he was a boy. Strange, but I never could imagine Marcus as a boy. He always seemed so adult and worldly.’

  Persepha gazed directly into the face of the Spaniard, whose eyes were intent upon her face. ‘I cared deeply for Marcus - there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for him.’

  ‘I am glad to hear that.’ The dark eyes gazing back into hers were unreadable, and though deeply set they were not small eyes. Their lids were heavy, almost carved, and the length of his lashes intensified his secretive look. It seemed to Persepha that he had a dash of Indian blood in his veins, for his skin was bronzed rather than sallow, and his facial bones were firm and distinct beneath his skin, like those of the Aztec warriors of old Mexico. He might even be called noble-looking, and though there wasn’t a thing about him that Persepha found physically unattractive, he aroused in her a certain fear that was physical.

  She twined his handkerchief around her fingers and glanced away from his eyes that seemed to penetrate into her very mind, there to read her thoughts with a disturbing clarity of vision and experience.

  ‘Are you hungry, señorita? I imagine that you have not had a very satisfactory breakfast, and it is now close on lunch time.’

  ‘I wasn’t feeling hungry—’ For some reason his concern startled her. ‘But I suppose - yes, I could eat something right now.’

  ‘Then let us eat,’ he said, and lifted to the seat a lunch-basket which contained a cold roasted chicken, tomatoes, sticks of celery, sesame rolls and wine in a plaited straw bottle. There were also wine glasses on stems, and when the Don had poured the wine it gleamed tawny in the bowls.

  ‘This you will have first of all.’ He handed Persepha a glass of the wine and she saw from his face that he would brook no refusal. She accepted the glass, and her eyes dwelt gravely on his face as he murmured: ‘Salud, señorita. May the wine ease a little of your heartache.’

  He was a strange man, she thought, and not to be denied, for she found herself drinking his wine and eating his food without demur. It was even enjoyable, as picnics usually are, and the wine had to be a fine one, and fairly potent, for soon the events of the last few days seemed to lose that sharp edge of pain and to become more bearable. At last, after the dessert of large sweet strawberries, Persepha let herself relax against the upholstery of the car seat, and her thoughts and feelings drifted awhile in the pain-killing haze induced by the wine, of which she had had two glasses.

  It seemed for now that nothing very much mattered any more. Perhaps the arrogant Spaniard was going to seduce her, and there would be no guardian to take a whip to his shoulders, as Marcus had taken one to that reckless-eyed boy called Rashleigh, who had climbed the ivy to her bedroom, and had entered through the french windows to find her in nothing but her robe. It had been after midnight, after her nineteenth party had ended. Peter and his father Lord Rashleigh were staying as guests for the week-end, and it had been that young man’s behaviour which had helped to make Persepha wary of men, even contemptuous of them. They seemed to want only one thing of a girl, and when she had cried out and Marcus had heard and thrashed Peter, she had watched and not cared that her guardian had used his whip and not his fists. She had always known that Marcus could be cruel when he liked, and offended by Peter, by the things he had said before Marcus had stormed into her room, she hadn’t felt any pity for him.

  ‘You said, Don Diablo, that you had something to say to me.’ She heard the slight note of bravado in her voice, for it was a lonely feeling, a cut-loose and forlorn emotion, not to have Marcus around to defend her against men who wanted her just for her looks. She couldn’t pretend not to know that she had a certain beauty, for she looked like Daisy, and each time she looked at Daisy’s portrait she saw the fair and fragile attraction which had made a slave all his life of Marcus Stonehill. He had been the kind of man who could have had anyone he wanted, but he had chosen to be a bachelor all for the sake of a clergyman’s daughter who had run off with an impecunious and unfaithful actor and gone on the stage which in the end had killed her. Marcus had made a goddess of Daisy, and in her own way Persepha had made a god of Marcus.

  She looked at Don Diablo and saw a man with the face of a devil.

  ‘Was your telephone call only an excuse to get me here?’ she asked.

  ‘I never make excuses, señorita.’ He, too, lay back against the grey upholstery and his long fingers toyed with a flat gold cigarette-case. ‘You permit that I smoke? I have noticed that you don’t have the habit yourself.’

  ‘Of course you may smoke, señor,’ She said it almost eagerly, for every action that occupied his hands and his lips kept her free of what she was beginning to think would be an inevitable struggle. Though so tall, and so lean that he might have been a Toledo blade sheathed in fine cloth, there was a great look of strength about Don Diablo. It was there in his hands, his shoulders, and in that way he had of walking, as if in silent quest of prey.

  ‘Marcus never liked me to smoke,’ she added. ‘He said it was bad for a woman’s skin and caused wrinkles and a poor colour. He adored my mother, you see, and he always said that her skin was like rose petals that never faded. Roses were always his favourite flower, and that was why—’ Persepha caught her breath. ‘He could be cruel, you know, but he was never vindictive like those relations of his. They’ve treated me like his kept woman, but I was his ward. I know that some people thought otherwise because he was so good-looking, and a gambler, but Marcus loved me as if I were his daughter—’

  ‘I know, señorita.’ An unusual cigarette smoke drifted from the Don’s aquiline nostrils. ‘I come of a race who are swift at judging people, and you may rest assured that in the short while I knew Senor Stonehill, I very much respected him for a shrewd, quick-witted man, strangely honourable in his own fashion. Were you curious as to how we came to be acquainted?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, breathing the smoke that seemed to hold a suggestion of an exotic, faraway place. ‘I knew Marcus all my life and I travelled abroad with him, but we had never met you in any of those places, and he never mentioned a Don Diablo.’

  ‘He and I never met before I came to Stonehill Mansion. It was a most curious mission that brought me, and a story he would have told you, had destiny not touched him on the shoulder and beckoned him away. You will listen patiently, señorita, while I tell it to you?’

  ‘I seem to have nowhere else to go,’ she said, with that little touch of humour which had always brought an answering glint to the grey eyes of Marcus. ‘And I am rather fond of stories, señor.’

  ‘This one is fact, not fiction, señorita,’ he rejoined, and the carved eyelids narrowed across his eyes that were so dark as to be like jet. ‘It is a tale that started in Mexico and ended, or very nearly, here in England. One day in my own country, on my own estate, I was riding a fresh young horse that shied from a snake and threw me to the ground, where I struck my head against a boulder and was knocked unconscious. In the fall my slouch hat became dislodged, and if I had lain in the full Mexican sunlight, senseless and hatless for even an hour, I should have woken with brain fever, or even a partial loss of my sight, for in high sum
mer the sun is hot as in a desert land, fierce and penetrating, even for a skin as dark as mine. But as fortune would have it a covered wagon came by, the home on wheels of the travelling tinker, so tanned and ragged I thought him a Mexican until he spoke, in an amazingly cultured English voice. He covered me from the sun in the shade of the wagon, bathed my head with the precious water in his barrel, and in truth he saved my reason, if not my life.’

  Don Diablo regarded the cigarette in his hand, in the ivory holder, and there was about his stern lips a faintly sardonic smile. ‘We talked, that man and I, and I discovered that he had been for many years an actor on the English stage, not a very successful one, however, who when his young wife left him for another man, left England and became a seeker of his fortune in South America, Peru, and Argentine, until he had drifted into Mexico, there to work a little here, a little there, until he took to the life of an itinerant seller of pots, pans and patent medicines. I discovered that he amused me, for he had so many tales to tell, and my life at the hacienda was not a very sociable one. I invited this man to work for me in the capacity of an odd-job man, and he agreed, for he was not at that time in a good state of health and he welcomed the chance to have a more settled home. As I say, in many ways he was cultured, and we spent many evenings together, talking of the world and what we thought of it.’

  The Don paused and regarded Persepha with thoughtful eyes. ‘Yes, señorita, it was your mother whom you resembled, not your father. In that rugged, worn, tanned face his eyes were blue, and yours are a golden-brown.’

  Persepha stared at the Don with those eyes of hers, which indeed had flecks of gold in them. What was he saying? What was he implying? That this man whom he had befriended in Mexico had been her father?

  ‘Yes, Miss Paget.’ The Don inclined his head as he read her eyes and saw the look of shock that flashed in them. ‘When a final illness overtook Charles Paget he gave me a miniature which he always wore around his neck on a chain; it was of a beautiful woman, the girl who had been his wife, whom in his youth he had treated less than well. He admitted this, a matter of hours before he passed away. He knew that she had gone to the man who would have made her a far better husband, and because he knew that she was to have a child, and that Marcus Stonehill could take better care of her, he let the matter rest. But, before he died, he asked that if I ever came to England I would look up Stonehill and ensure that the child was happy and cared for, and this I did, Miss Paget, when a few weeks ago a matter of business brought me to this country.’

  The Don removed the end of his cigarette from the holder and tossed it from the car window. He put the holder away in his pocket, and from that same pocket he took out the miniature on a chain about which he had spoken. Faded, worn by the sun of many countries, yet still discernible, the features that were so much like Persepha’s, framed by the silvery-gold hair that dipped in a truant wave above the large eyes, pools of brown shimmering with a soft laughter.

  ‘This lovely woman was your mother, señorita?’

  ‘Yes,’ Persepha whispered. ‘And my father's name was Charles. But it’s incredible, señor.’ She held the miniature and visualized it around the sun-tanned neck of that travelling tinker who had walked out of her life all those years ago ... to walk back a ghost this strange, lost day when Marcus was laid to rest.

  ‘Not incredible,’ said the Don, ‘but a stroke of fate. He left you to Marcus Stonehill, and now Marcus leaves you to me.’

  Again the Don spoke words that seemed to strike to the centre of Persepha’s heart, making it beat so fast that she felt she couldn’t take a normal breath.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Her fingers clenched the miniature.

  ‘Exactly what I say, señorita. I hold you - if this does not sound too melodramatic - in my power.’

  ‘Only Marcus could say that,’ she disputed hotly. ‘Only he had power over, me, and only because I wanted it that way.’

  ‘You always did what he required of you, eh? You always abided by his wishes?’

  ‘I loved him! He was the only person who cared two halfpennies about me when my mother died. Of course I liked to please him by doing as he asked. It was my way of repaying him - for all my real father cared I could have gone into a home for foundlings!’

  ‘I quite agree.’ The Don leaned a little forward, fixing her with his eyes that had a mesmeric quality not quite human, or so it seemed to Persepha. Hawk’s eyes, intent on his prey before he pounced. She drew back and away from him, pressing into the angle of her seat, and feeling real fear for the first time in her life.

  ‘Your guardian,’ he said deliberately, ‘wished for you to become my wife. He and I discussed it one afternoon when I came to Stonehill, and because he knew of the precarious state of his health he desired to ensure that you would be secure for the rest of your life. Do you doubt me, señorita? You knew your guardian better than most. You must have known that he had it in mind to find a rich husband for you.’

  Persepha crouched as tense as a young cat in a corner of the car, and though she wanted to cry out, to claw, to fight for her freedom, she was held immobile by the strange power of this man who came from another world and claimed her from the dear, dead hands of Marcus.

  ‘You know that I speak the truth, don’t you?’ the Don’s voice had softened, not with gentleness but with a sort of menace. ‘You know that had he lived he would have told you himself that he approved my request to make you my wife.’

  ‘But you don’t know me - you don’t love me,’ she said hoarsely.

  ‘In Mexico, señorita, the knowing and the loving come after the marriage.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT was a place out of a dream, but to Persepha it seemed more like a nightmare from which she couldn’t awake.

  She had married a man she hardly knew and the ceremony itself was a vague memory of the church of St. Anne, quite near to where she had lived with her guardian. There had been candles and roses, and a silver crucifix shining against the robes of the priest. There had been words spoken in Latin which she had not understood, and a pair of pure gold rings, one for her and one for Don Diablo. Then there had been a swift journey by car, and the coloured lights of the airfield glimmering through a sudden spate of rain ... but here in Mexico the sun shone as if reflected in the facets of a great diamond, and the high walls of the hacienda had a fabulous glow about them, which a gorgeous mantling of scarlet flowers turned into a vision, as if a splendid cloak had been tossed from the shoulders of a matador and flung across the stonework.

  A place to love ... had she loved the Don her husband. But Persepha didn’t even know him, and so the hacienda was like a prison set high on a rocky crag above a gorge that overflowed with huge blossoms, giant green ferns, and waterfalls that from high up looked like ribbons of liquid silver.

  The Hacienda Ruy... the Royal House as it was called by the several hundred people who lived and worked on the estate, which was so vast that Persepha didn’t dare to wonder what the Don was worth in terms of land and cash and power. It was as if some feudal lord had come riding by and had snatched her for his own, and because it seemed as if Marcus had let his gambling soul be swayed by so much power and wealth, she had in a mood devoid of emotion let herself be married to a man who inspired her with a sort of fear rather than any desire of the heart, or the body her guardian had shielded from other men.

  ‘Why the Royal House?’ she had asked, and though she had meant to say it with scorn there had been something in her husband’s look which had made her afraid to scorn him.

  ‘I had an ancestress who was an Aztec priestess.’ His smile had been a sardonic flicker on his lips chiselled like the rest of his face. ‘The hacienda is built on the site of her temple. There in that gorge below us,’ he had swept out a hand so the gold ring of alliance gleamed in the sun against his dark skin, ‘a thousand of her people were slaughtered by the conquistadores from Spain. A Spanish nobleman forced the priestess to marry him, and a year to the day of the wedding s
he took her baby to the edge of the gorge and was going to leap off with him. But at the last moment she changed her mind about taking the helpless child with her to infinity and she left him to be found in the ferns by her husband. It was to her mind a Spanish child, and so she left him to found the family from whose roots I have sprung. So now you know, queridisima.’

  Each time he used a Spanish term of endearment a shiver ran deep in Persepha. In England there had been a formality about him; in his way of dressing, in his attitude towards people.

  But here in Mexico she began to glimpse a new side to him ... here he wore the close-fitting pants of the country, the white frilled shirt, and the black slouch hat pulled over a dark eye. He had, she suspected, a diverse personality and one that would be revealed to her as it suited him.

  Already in her thoughts she was calling him Don Devil, and she gave a start almost of terror as in his silent way he came tall to her side of the high terrace balustrade, below which the gorge fell sheer in red and green, a place that drew her, fascinated her, especially so since the story he had told her.

  ‘Our food is on the table, mia. It will grow cold and spoil, and the best cook in this region will be most annoyed with me.’

  ‘Would that worry you, that a servant of yours should be annoyed?’ Persepha turned from the cream stone of the terrace to look at him, and her gaze as always was defiant. ‘I have the impression that not a thing on earth would ever truly ruffle your feelings.’

  ‘You must then think me as hard as iron,’ he said. ‘Is that why you fear to come near me, in case your soft body should bruise and break against mine?’

  His eyes seemed to glint, but she thought not with laughter, as they swept up and down her slim figure in the hyacinth-blue shirt and the pale-coloured, narrow-fitting trousers.