She moved back to sit beside her aunt.
“We are nearly there, Aunt Lily. Leave everything to me. Once I have bought the tickets just walk as quickly as you can to the train. We don’t want to be seen if we can help it.”
It was nearly five and twenty minutes to three when they got out at the Gare de Lyon. Gardenia bought the tickets. Mercifully the train was not that full and all the wagon-lits were not booked.
Then, almost running beside the porter pushing their luggage, they hurried down the long platform. They climbed in a few seconds before the train was due to leave.
“Don’t forget this, miss.”
It was Arthur’s respectful voice, as he held up her aunt’s dressing case. Gardenia took it, realising as she did so that it was emblazoned with a huge Ducal coronet.
“Thank you, Arthur. You have been very helpful. I know that Her Grace is grateful.”
“The best of luck, miss,” Arthur said fervently and almost as he spoke the train began to leave. Gardenia gave him a quick wave of her hand, went into her aunt’s wagon-lit and closed the door.
Her aunt was half-lying on the seat with her head in her hands.
“I am sorry, Aunt Lily,” Gardenia said. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“Brandy,” the Duchesse muttered. “I want some brandy.”
Gardenia rang the bell and after some time the Steward brought in a bottle of Courvoisier and two glasses. He set them down on the table.
“Will you be wanting dinner tonight, madame?” he enquired. “The first service is at six o’clock.”
“We will have something to eat in here,” Gardenia said hastily. “So I will ring for you later.”
“Very good, mamselle. I’ll make the beds up after we pass Aignon.”
He went from the compartment and Gardenia poured out the brandy and gave a glass to her aunt.
“At least we have got away,” she said. “But we shall not be safe until we have crossed the frontier tomorrow morning. I wonder what time that is.”
“About seven o’clock in the morning,” her aunt said. “I have done it so often.”
“Over sixteen hours ahead! Will it be possible for us to elude the Police for all that time? They could so easily send a wire and we could be taken off the train at any of the Stations down the line.”
Gardenia began to wonder now if it would have been better if they had gone to Belgium or Holland, but that too would have meant going from the Gare du Nord. She was sure Bertie had been right when he thought that the Sûreté would expect them to go North rather than South.
Aunt Lily held out her glass for more brandy. She drank the second one off as quickly as the first and now that the colour was coming back to her face she looked less stricken.
“Let me take your hat off,” Gardenia said, “and your coat. No one will see you now and you might just as well be comfortable.”
“You are quite sure that the Baron has left Paris?” her aunt asked. “I ought to have tried to get in touch with him to be quite certain that he knew what has happened.”
“Mr. Cunningham told me that he had definitely gone,” Gardenia said coldly.
“I was always afraid that this would happen,” the Duchesse murmured, almost as though she was talking to herself rather than to her niece. “I never trusted that Pierre Gozlin.”
“Who would?” Gardenia asked scornfully. “He is a horrible man.”
“But Heinrich claimed that he was clever, very clever.”
Gardenia drew in her breath.
“Aunt Lily, how could you spy against France?” she asked. “How could you sink to do such a thing, you who are English?”
Her aunt looked at her as though she realised for the first time who she was talking to.
“I don’t admit anything,” she said almost angrily. “The Baron knew his own business best. Pierre Gozlin was telling lies. Lies, do you hear? If he says anything against Heinrich or me, it is not the truth.”
“Do you realise that all your money will be frozen?” Gardenia asked. “Mr. Cunningham told me that – and they will take over your house, at least until after the trial. What do you own outside France?”
The Duchesse put her glass down on the table and stared at Gardenia.
“Nothing,” she said in a low voice. “Everything I possess belonged to my husband. It is all invested in French stock, I have never bothered to change it.”
“Then what are we going to live on?” Gardenia queried in a practical voice.
For a moment the Duchesse looked worried and then she shrugged her shoulders.
“Heinrich will see to it. He is so clever, somehow he will contrive to get some money out to me, I am certain of that.”
“He has gone to Germany,” Gardenia said. “We have not very much with us.”
She opened her bag and took out what remained of the money that Monsieur Groise had given her. She counted it carefully.
“Five hundred and forty-nine francs. It seems a fortune to me, but it will not last very long.”
“Is that all Groise has given you?” the Duchesse said sharply. “This is ridiculous! He has thousands of francs, thousands in the house in case I should need it.”
“He was going to go to the Bank tomorrow morning,” Gardenia replied. “There is a party tomorrow night?”
“Yes, of course, I signed the cheque today.”
For a moment the Duchesse looked frightened and then she brightened up again.
“Never mind, we will not want ready cash, we will go to the Hôtel de Paris where they know me. When Heinrich sends me some money or arranges for my own to be smuggled out of France, then we can pay, but not before.”
“How will the Baron know where you are?” Gardenia enquired.
“I will write to him the moment we arrive in Monte Carlo. I could, of course, telegraph. We have a way of communicating with each other that his wife does not understand. She is a tiresome jealous woman.”
Gardenia longed to say that she was not surprised, but she thought that would be unkind. Instead she unpacked some of the things that her aunt would want that night and then did the same in her own compartment. When she returned, it was to find that the Duchesse had drunk over half of the bottle of brandy.
“There is no need to worry, child,” she said, slurring her words a little. “I have been thinking it out. Heinrich will look after us. Dear Heinrich, how wonderful he is.”
Gardenia’s lips tightened.
She knew, if she did not keep a tight control on herself, she would find herself telling the Duchesse exactly what she thought of the Baron and how despicably she considered he had behaved.
However reprehensible it might be of her aunt to spy on the country of her adoption, it was the Baron who was at the bottom of it all and who had enticed, perhaps even threatened her, to do all she had done. Now he had run away, saving his own skin and he had not even made the slightest effort to save the woman who had been his accomplice.
Gardenia rang the bell and then sent for some food, but when the Steward came bringing some chicken and smoked salmon sandwiches her aunt demanded another bottle of brandy. It was not only that Gardenia thought she had had enough already, it was the waste of money entailed, an expense that they could now ill afford.
When the simple meal was finished and the bed had been made up, Gardenia persuaded her aunt to undress.
“You will be more comfortable,” she advised, “and perhaps you will sleep a little.”
She pulled down the blind and turned out the top lights, but, when she turned to go from the compartment, the Duchesse stopped her.
“Stay with me,” she demanded. “I cannot bear to be alone.”
Obediently Gardenia sat down beside her and then with a glass of brandy in her hand the Duchesse began to talk.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As the train rattled through the darkness towards safety, the Duchesse sat in her bunk with a glass of brandy in her hand and talked and talked.
She
had clearly forgotten that Gardenia was her niece or indeed younger than herself. She talked as if to a contemporary, to another woman who would understand what she had felt and what she had suffered and how strange and at times entrancing her life had been.
And, as the hours passed, Gardenia grew from girlhood into womanhood.
She was not shocked by what she heard. It was just that she began to understand for the first time so many things that had puzzled and perplexed her. She now realised humbly how foolish and stupid she had been and at the same time how strange and often wonderful life with all its complexities could be.
It seemed to her as if Aunt Lily was going back into the past and mentally assessing the credit and debit of her own life for her own satisfaction.
At times Gardenia felt that, if she had not been there, Aunt Lily would still have talked from an inner compulsion which made it imperative for her to get everything into its right perspective and to see things as they were.
In that fast train the Duchesse was leaving behind a life that had been full and varied and at times satisfying, for the problematical, unknown and perhaps frightening future.
She talked of how she had come to Paris, of her first husband who had fascinated her and in whom she had seen an escape from all that had been humdrum and dreary only to discover that he was shoddy, second-rate and a bore.
“But it did not matter,” the Duchesse said. “The moment I had arrived in Paris I became aware of my beauty and what it could do for me. Men fell in love with me on first sight, they followed me in the street, obtained introductions by hook or by crook, they wanted to acclaim me, to worship me and almost overnight I became the toast of the whole City.”
She paused for a moment to fill up her glass.
As the night wore on her speech became more slurred, but her brain seemed to remain clear and lucid.
She neither muddled nor confused events as they happened. She spoke as though she was reading them in a book or seeing them in front of her on a stage.
“I had just been in Paris for two years when I met the Duc,” she rattled on. “He, like all the other men I met, fell at my feet, told me I was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. But where the Duc was concerned it was different, he was a great connoisseur. Beauty was everything to him, his interest, his life and his love.”
The Duchesse paused and gave a little chuckle.
“People were convinced from the beginning that I was his mistress. They were wrong, so wrong. All the Duc wanted to do was to look at me.”
She gazed across the swaying compartment at Gardenia.
“I don’t suppose for a moment anyone would believe that,” she said, “but it is the truth. It gave the Duc the greatest thrill he had ever known in his life to see me, as the English call it, ‘in the altogether’, posed on some glorious Eastern silk or standing like a statue on a plinth that he had specially made at the end of our big salon.”
“Did you not you mind posing for him like that?” Gardenia asked her.
The Duchesse smiled.
“I think, if I am truthful, I also was in love with my beauty. Admiration is a heady thing and besides, as far as the Duc was concerned, it gave him pleasure and he gave me so much.”
“So he was never really your – husband,” Gardenia said trying to follow the saga.
“He gave me his name, his money and all his adoration. I was not interested in anything else. I suppose all those years I was what you would call a cold woman. I just wanted men to admire me, I did not want them to touch me. They tried, of course, they all tried. Although no one would believe it, I was faithful to my husband.”
She sipped the brandy before she continued,
“Of course, the women hated me. It was not only single men who came after me it was their husbands, their lovers and their sons. They loathed me and waited for their revenge. It came in time!”
“What happened?” Gardenia enquired.
“The Duc died and then I realised how alone I was, not just because I was a widow, but because I was growing old. Oh, Gardenia, there is nothing more horrible or more terrifying, than to have built one’s life around one’s own beauty only to find that it is slipping away and nothing you can do will prevent it from disappearing altogether.”
“But you are still beautiful,” Gardenia said passionately, longing to comfort her.
The Duchesse shook her head.
“I have never been very clever,” she said. “But I am not a fool. I have watched my body coarsen and fatten, my face get old and wrinkled and I have drunk because I hated it and that has only made things worse.”
“Oh, Aunt Lily, I am so sorry!” Gardenia cried.
“The women took their revenge,” the Duchesse went on as if she had not spoken. “They ostracised me. I had never troubled with them when I was on the top of the wave and they were not going to have me crawling back into their Society just because I no longer attracted men as I had in the past. It was then that I began to give parties. First it was because I liked gambling, it amused me to ask my old men friends to come and play two or three evenings a week. They too enjoyed gambling and gradually some of the younger ones joined in. It was all rather quiet and circumspect until I met the Baron.”
The Duchesse’s voice deepened and it appeared to Gardenia as if there was a sudden light in her eyes and her raddled weary face was transformed.
“I met him at Maxim’s one Friday night and I knew the moment I saw him, the moment he spoke to me, that he was the man I had been looking for all my life.”
“You fell in love with him!” Gardenia exclaimed incredulously.
“I fell in love,” the Duchesse repeated, her voice curiously soft. “Heinrich was the sort of man I had always dreamt about. He did not worship me, he did not want to sit watching me. He was a man, masterful and powerful, taking what he wanted, making me feel that nothing mattered except that I was a woman and he was a man.”
“But Aunt Lily – ” Gardenia began, only to realise that the Duchesse was not listening to her, but speaking with a note of ecstasy in her voice.
“I was happy. I cannot tell you how happy I was. I knew then that I had never known what love was before. I had always despised the men who admired me, who had made such a fuss over my beauty. In my heart I thought them poor creatures, but here was a man, rough and brutal at times, but a man.”
The Duchesse closed her eyes as if for a moment living again those hours of happiness.
“He was your lover,” Gardenia whispered, “but – he was married.”
“Yes, he was married,” the Duchesse said sharply, “but what did that matter? He needed me and I needed him. One day, Gardenia, you will understand what that means, not only to receive love but to be able to give it, that is what counts, that is what has always counted where a woman is concerned.”
“But if you were so happy,” Gardenia asked, “why the parties? All that noise and such a lot of people coming to the house.”
The Duchesse smiled and it was almost maternal.
“Heinrich wanted parties. He believed that Paris was gay and he had always imagined that there would be noise, gambling, lots of champagne and beautiful women. That was his dream, so I gave him what he wanted. It was only too easy. There are always people ready to attend parties whoever gives them and there are always men who want to gamble and there are always young people who will make a noise.”
“So that is why you gave them,” Gardenia said. “I did not understand, it did not seem like you somehow.”
“I liked the gambling, I have always liked it,” the Duchesse said. “It excites me. I find it hard to tear myself away from the tables and so I began to play. Heinrich liked it too.”
“Perhaps he found it useful,” Gardenia commented, a note of bitterness in her voice, “to bring people like Pierre Gozlin to your house.”
She was sorry for what she had said the moment she said it.
The Duchesse’s face changed and she looked suddenly haggard.
<
br /> “There had been others before Pierre Gozlin and I knew that the Baron was using me, but I did not care. Do you follow me, Gardenia, I just did not care? I wanted him to have what he wanted. I was not French, I was English, and I always made that excuse to myself.”
“If the Germans fight the French, they will also fight us,” Gardenia pointed out.
“The Germans are not going to fight anyone,” the Duchesse said positively. “The Baron told me so. They only want peace. The Kaiser wants living space for his people and he wants a big Navy to equal ours. Why should Britain, which is only a small island, have more ships than Germany, which is twice its size?”
Gardenia sighed. She realised only too clearly that her aunt was repeating what the Baron had told her.
“Can Pierre Gozlin really incriminate, you, Aunt Lily?” she asked. “That is the important thing. Mr. Cunningham thought he could. After all you could always say that you had no idea what the Baron was doing. They could not prove that you were selling secrets to the Germans as Pierre Gozlin has apparently done.”
“No, they cannot prove that,” the Duchesse agreed. “I did not accept money, not actual money, for anything I did.”
“What do you mean by actual money?” Gardenia enquired. “Did you accept anything else?”
The Duchesse hesitated.
“The chinchilla cape!” Gardenia exclaimed. “Did the Baron give you that?”
“No, not the Baron,” the Duchesse replied hastily. “He would not have had money for that sort of thing.”
“Then the German Government,” Gardenia said. “Oh, Aunt Lily, how could you have accepted such a present?”
“Heinrich wanted me to have it,” her aunt answered simply. “He said that it would look strange, perhaps a reflection on him, if I refused their offer.”
“But Aunt Lily, you must have seen that this made you part of their plot, their scheme or whatever it was to spy on France. You must have realised that if it was ever found out you would be convicted as a spy and nothing you could say to the contrary would be believed.”
“I never thought they would be found out,” the Duchesse replied, “and Heinrich said that all we were doing was completely unimportant. In fact he told me that because the French were so spiteful and disagreeable to the Germans, they would not even exchange the ordinary Diplomatic facts that every other country except poor Germany knew.”
An Innocent in Paris Page 19
