She turned as if to go, but the reporters were on her like a swarm of bees.
“Miss Milborne, we must know more – ”
“Please tell us – ”
“When you say – ”
Questions were being fired just as she remembered them. But somehow they had lost the power to hurt her.
“Be reasonable,” she said. “I have said quite a lot. It isn’t fair to ask me any more at this moment. I shan’t run away. I shall be here. You know as well as I do that you have enough copy for today. Your editors cannot fail to be delighted with it.”
They laughed at her joke and one reporter raised a glass of beer in her direction.
“Your health, Miss Milborne,” he said. “You’ve brought a touch of humour into these proceedings and one that has been much needed for some time.”
They all laughed at that and Aria made good her escape.
Upstairs she went back to her desk. There was a pile of cables and already quite a number of letters had arrived, all of which wanted answering.
She was so busy that she did not hear the door open and only looked up to find Lord Buckleigh halfway across the room towards her with his hands outstretched.
“You’re back! By all that’s wonderful, you’re back! Where did you spring from and why wasn’t I told?” he asked.
“I thought I might be needed,” she answered demurely.
He took both her hands in his and raised them to his lips.
“I should think you are,” he said. “There were three calls in Spanish and one in German this morning. I couldn’t understand a word of any of them.”
Aria could not help laughing.
“You see I have my uses.”
“You know I didn’t mean that,” he answered. “But I thought you had gone for good.”
“I thought I had too until I saw the papers this morning.”
Lord Buckleigh’s face darkened.
“Damn the woman!” he said. “It’s fortunate that she hit his left arm, but even so he won’t be able to play polo ever again.”
“Why did she do it?” Aria asked.
“We none of us know,” Lord Buckleigh replied. “She says it was an accident. But no accident that I’ve ever heard of would fire three bullets from the revolver in quick succession.”
“What will they do to her?” Aria asked.
“She’ll stand her trial, I suppose. She’ll get a year for a certainty.”
“A year in prison?” Aria asked in horror.
“That’s what the Solicitor thinks. I’ve just left him. She is briefing the very best Counsel available, but British judges and juries are very against people carrying revolvers. And needless to say she did not have a permit for it.”
“Where is everyone else?” Aria enquired. “I mean the people who were staying here?”
Lord Buckleigh grinned and there was a twinkle in his eyes as he answered,
“They scuttled like rabbits. The Ambassador and his wife went first with him explaining that, of course, in his position he couldn’t be too careful. And for the rest, I never knew that they could get up so early. We are the only ones left – you and I.”
“Oh, that’s a good thing,” Aria said. “Because I have a lot of work to do.”
Lord Buckleigh glanced down at the pile of correspondence on the desk.
“You have to look after me as well,” he said. “Dart can’t have all the attention.”
“What’s wrong with looking after yourself?” Aria enquired.
“Everything and I wouldn’t know how!”
His voice was light, but a moment later it was serious again.
“There is something I want to ask you.”
She had the feeling that the question was going to be one she would not want to answer.
“It’s just this,” Lord Buckleigh said. “Does Dart care for you – seriously, I mean?”
“No, of course not,” Aria answered.
Here at least she could answer in all truth.
“No,” she repeated. “I cannot think why you should imagine such a thing.”
“I had the sort of feeling – ” Lord Buckleigh began. Then added quickly, “But you would know.”
“Yes, I should know,” Aria replied.
And even as she said the words the hopelessness of them struck her and she knew that not only would she give her chance of salvation for the wonder and glory of knowing that Dart Huron loved her, but also she was prepared, whatever his feelings might be, to sacrifice anything and everything to her love for him.
To follow him, if necessary, barefooted to the ends of the world.
Chapter 14
Aria put down the receiver after a long and rather complicated conversation in German and turned to her typewriter. But somehow she could not concentrate on the letter she was typing.
She stood up and walked across the room to look out over the garden at the mist, damp and rather depressing, which hid the beauties of the valley from sight.
She was nervous and it showed itself in the sudden tightening of the muscles at the corners of her mouth, the nervous fluttering of her fingers as they laced and interlaced each other and the way her thoughts would not concentrate on any one item.
She had never known the hours pass more slowly. It seemed to her that the day had prolonged itself until each minute seemed to linger in its passing as if time stood still.
Only three o’clock. They should have been back by now. She strained her ears to listen for the sound of a car, but she could hear nothing. And with an effort that was almost superhuman she forced herself to sit down again at the desk, to continue to type the letter where she had left it off.
But after a moment she realised that she was making mistake after mistake and in a sudden frenzy she took the letter from her machine and tore it up.
She had just deposited the pieces in the wastepaper basket when the door opened. She sprang to her feet and, before Lord Buckleigh could even cross the threshold, she had run towards him.
“What happened?” she asked. “Is it all right?”
“He is tired,” he answered quietly. “But he stood it very well, considering.”
Aria looked towards the open door and he added quickly,
“They are bringing him upstairs now. The doctor is with him. You can’t be of any help.”
Aria gave a little sigh as if he had prevented her from doing something she most wanted to do.
“What happened?” she asked after a moment’s pause.
“Lulu was given a year’s imprisonment,” he answered.
“Oh, poor thing!” Aria exclaimed. “I thought Sir Frederick would get her off.”
“He did his best. A year was the very least the judge could give her and, of course, she will get remission for good conduct”
“I can’t bear to think of it,” Aria said. “She’ll never stand it, will she?”
“She was surprisingly calm when it came to the point,” Lord Buckleigh said. “Actually, the sentence, when we heard it, was a relief. At one moment it appeared as if she would be given very much more. The prosecuting Counsel presented his case very ably.”
“I suppose Dart’s evidence helped her a lot?” Aria asked in a low voice.
Lord Buckleigh looked at her in a curious manner before he answered.
“I think Lulu helped herself more than anything else. She told the truth and that was far more convincing than any trumped-up story.”
Aria looked at him with startled eyes.
“The truth?” she questioned.
He nodded.
“Yes. Under cross examination she explained exactly what had happened and why she shot Dart.”
“But – but I thought she always said it was an accident,” Aria said.
“That has been her story all along,” Lord Buckleigh answered. “And I, for one, never believed it, nor did anyone else for that matter.”
“I suppose not,” Aria said. “Well, what was the truth?”
&nb
sp; Lord Buckleigh took a cigarette from his case and seemed intent on lighting it.
“Dart has not mentioned this to you?”
“No, of course not,” Aria replied. “You know how little conversation I have had with him since he has been so ill. Besides, since there were complications over his shoulder, the doctor said particularly that he was to talk as little as possible.”
“Yes, I know,” Lord Buckleigh said. “At the same time I just wondered if he might have said something when you were alone with him.”
“I am never alone with him. Nurse Walters is always there. She has carried out the doctor’s orders to the letter. She is right, of course, but I find myself thinking of her as a very efficient watchdog.”
“She looks rather like one,” Lord Buckleigh added with a grin.
“But never mind about that now,” Aria said. “Go on telling me about the case. What did Lulu say?”
“She said,” Lord Buckleigh responded slowly, “that she shot Dart because he admitted to being in love with someone else.”
There was no mistaking the effect of his words on Aria. She stared at him with startled eyes, an expression of surprise on her face that could not have been more marked if he had thrown a bomb at her feet.
“In love – with – someone else,” she repeated in faltering tones.
“Yes, Lulu alleged that during a conversation she accused Dart of bringing an end to their love affair because he was in love with another woman. He admitted the truth of this and so she shot him.”
“But, Dart – what did Dart say?” Aria asked, the words coming from her lips so quickly that she almost stammered them.
“He agreed that what Lulu had said was the truth.”
“The truth!” Aria seemed to whisper the words and then, looking away from Lord Buckleigh, she asked in a very low voice, “did he say who the woman was?”
“Yes.”
There was a silence that was almost intolerable in its intensity before Aria forced the words between her lips.
“Who was it?”
“You.”
She swung round with a passionate intensity, the colour flooding back into her cheeks.
“But it isn’t true! How could he say such a thing when it isn’t true?”
“That was what he said.”
“Then I suppose it was an excuse thought up by Lulu’s Counsel. There could be no other reason for lying in such a manner and dragging me into it.”
“Supposing it is the truth?”
“But it isn’t. Of course it isn’t. You know as well as I do that Dart announced his engagement to me because Lulu had tried to trap him. She invited the Press here and attempted to force his hand into acknowledging that they were engaged. I’ve told you what happened. I’ve kept nothing from you.
“He paid me three thousand pounds to pretend for the time being that there was an engagement. He even sent the cheque to me at Queen’s Folly after I had gone. But I tore it up.”
“And thereby destroying valuable evidence,” Lord Buckleigh commented with a grin.
“Don’t joke about it,” Aria cried. “It isn’t funny – not to me, at any rate. But it was a businesslike arrangement. Why should I be dragged in now at the eleventh hour when it was all agreed that my name was not to be mentioned?”
“I know that was what we arranged,” Lord Buckleigh said. “Goodness knows, you and I sat long enough with that lawyer going over the facts, trying to find excuses for Lulu, and coming back always to the same conclusion, that her only possible excuse was what she had said originally – that it was an accident, the gun went off in her hand.”
“We knew it was weak,” Aria said. “But there was no alternative suggestion.”
“You never thought that Lulu might tell the truth?”
“But it isn’t the truth,” Aria almost shouted at him. “Don’t tell me that you believe such nonsense.”
“Is it nonsense?” Lord Buckleigh enquired.
“But, of course it is. Dart has never thought of me as anything except a secretary. He has, in fact, disliked me. He more or less said so, because he thought I disapproved of him and his friends.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, of course! I’ve hated Society ever since my father bankrupted himself and met his death through wantonly extravagant living, through entertaining the same type of people who come here to eat and drink everything they can get hold of and go away without saying ‘thank you’. I don’t like Society, I never have. I suppose I was not clever enough to hide my feelings.”
“Why should you?” Lord Buckleigh asked. “You are entitled to your own opinions.”
“I wasn’t paid twenty pounds a week to have opinions,” Aria said. “I was paid to run this house efficiently, to make myself a charming hostess. Dart was angry with me about that and he was angry too when Charles came and took me away. His last words to me were ‘go and to hell with you’! Does that sound like love to you?”
Lord Buckleigh stubbed his half-smoked cigarette out in an ashtray.
“Dart is a strange fellow,” he said. “I never have understood him and I don’t suppose I ever shall. If he ever loved a woman really, apart from his flirtations with pretty butterflies like Lulu, then there is no knowing how he would behave and I, for one, would not pretend to guess.”
Aria was silent for a moment and then she asked,
“Do you really think that Lulu believed that he was – fond of me?”
“Unless Lulu and Dart are the most consummate actors the world has ever seen, then they were both of them telling the truth in the witness box,” Lord Buckleigh said.
“And yet we know it wasn’t the truth,”
“You must speak for yourself,” Lord Buckleigh said. “I personally believed Dart, at any rate.”
“But it’s impossible,” Aria whispered with a little helpless gesture. “It’s quite, quite impossible.”
Lord Buckleigh bent towards her and took one of her hands in his.
“I love you,” he said. “And I know you don’t love me. It’s not easy to wish you all the luck in the world and all you wish yourself. Because you are you and the very sweetest person I have ever known, I want you to be happy.”
Her fingers tightened over his.
“Dear Tom,” she said. “It is the sort of thing you would say and I think it makes me want to cry. I wish I did love you. It would be so much, much easier.”
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly.
“We can only wait and see what happens,” he said. “In the meantime, I am going now to see the Governor of the prison and see if there is anything I can do for Lulu.”
“I am glad you are going to do that.”
“Try not to worry about anything until I come back,” he said. “And don’t read the evening papers.”
“You know they don’t even come to this house,” Aria answered.
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he replied with a smile. “I bet the servants have not missed one word of all the sensational claptrap the Press have managed to produce this last day or two.”
“Sometimes I regret my promise not to read any of it,” Aria admitted with a faint smile.
“No, you don’t,” he said positively. “You would hate it.”
He kissed her hand again and went from the room.
When he had gone, she sat down on the sofa and covered her face with her hands.
It was true that she had not read the newspapers this past week. Lord Buckleigh had forced her to promise that she would not do so and had ordered McDougall to bring none through to the front of the house.
He had understood, because of his affection for her, how besmirched and dirty she felt every time her own name was blazoned, with Dart’s and Lulu’s, across the pages of the more sensational Press.
It was agony to see pictures of Queen’s Folly and old photographs of her father jostling photographs of Lulu’s swimming bath at Beverly Hills, of exotic parties taken in nightclu
bs and snapshots of her and her friends lounging half-naked on the Riviera.
It was hard too to read some of the descriptions of Dart’s love affairs – of the women with whom his name had been associated and to realise that she had joined the long list and that in public opinion she was no worse or no better than Lulu Carlo and her like.
“Why torture yourself?” Lord Buckleigh had said savagely when he had found her in tears over a picture which showed Dart Huron looking his most attractive, while around him in a circle were the heads of every woman with whom his name had ever been coupled.
It was because of this ban on newspapers that Aria had not followed the last minute excitements over Lulu Carlo’s trial and had been concerned only with the difficulty of getting Dart well enough to attend it.
He had trouble with his shoulder as the bullet had splintered a bone and inflammation had set in.
For a less healthy man it might have been more serious than it actually was, but, because he was so hard and wiry after long hours in the saddle and because, as one doctor said, he had the constitution of an ox, he was, in an incredibly short time, stronger and better than he had ever hoped.
Even so he had gone to Court today with a nurse and a doctor in attendance and buoyed up by injections and drugs to make him capable of standing the strain of giving evidence.
And that evidence had been something that she, Aria, had never expected even in her wildest dreams. Not for one moment did she imagine it was anything but a lie by which Lulu could extract herself in some little way from the full punishment of the law.
But even so it had the power to unnerve her.
Why, she asked herself must he say that of all things? Why was she dragged deeper into the mire than she was already?
What would Charles, who was already furiously angry that she had returned to Summerhill and had written her long and surprisingly eloquent letters asking her to return home and telling her how shocked and disgusted he was, feel about was being said in the Press.
Love Forbidden Page 23
