I looked surprised because, although everyone was always talking about David, no one had ever said anything about his social connections. Knowing how snobby some people could be, I thought it strange that no one had mentioned that he was connected with the Peerage.
I didn’t question David. He was busy taking me back to the hall where he opened the door of the drawing room.
It was a lovely room with white panelled walls and long French windows opening out into the garden.
The furniture was rather old-fashioned but comfortable and the chintzes were mellow with age and reminded me of ours at the Vicarage.
The whole house had a very lived-in cosy look and while I realised that some of the covers were badly faded and occasionally a carpet appeared threadbare, it all seemed to blend harmoniously with the age of the house itself.
We walked through the drawing room and into the library, which made me exclaim with delight because there were so many books.
There was a gun room with a big table in the centre of it and glass-fronted cupboards where the guns were kept when they were not in use.
We went upstairs and I saw that all the rooms were as charming as the one I had tidied myself in before lunch. They also had delightful names like ‘The Queen Room’, because as David explained, it was rumoured that Queen Elizabeth had once stayed there.
There was ‘The Duke’s Room’ and ‘The Captain’s Room’, referring to a Sea Captain who had commanded a man-o’-war in the first Duke of Marlborough’s time.
They all opened off one long passage at the end of which was a baize-covered door. David opened it and I thought we were going into the servants’ quarters, but instead there was a nursery.
It was just like the big nursery at The Castle before the Butterworths bought it and where Daddy had played as a little boy and my own nursery at the Vicarage was similar only on a much smaller scale.
There was a comfortable armchair in front of the fireplace, which had a brass rail on which children’s clothes could be dried and there was a screen covered with transfers, Christmas cards and scraps which had been varnished over.
There was a toy fort in one corner of the room, a very old one that looked as if it might have belonged to little boys for centuries. And a rocking horse that had lost its tail stood in front of the window.
There was a table in the middle of the room with a heavy blue tablecloth just like the one on which I used to eat my bread and milk.
Through an open door I could see the night nursery with a narrow bed for the Nanny and a cot with sides which could let down.
“What a lovely nursery!” I exclaimed to David.
I walked towards the fort and then I saw a cupboard beside it.
I opened the door and there, as I expected, were the toys, battered building bricks, a skipping rope, a top, a box of tin soldiers and naturally a teddy bear.
I picked it up and held it in my arms.
“This is just like my teddy bear, except that mine had lost an eye,” I told David. “I used to worry in case he minded being blind.”
“Come here, Samantha,” David said. “I want to talk to you.”
He spoke in such a strange way that I turned round.
He was standing in the centre of the room.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Come and sit down,” he answered.
There was a small chintz-covered sofa by the window and we sat down on it. Because I still had the teddy bear in my arms, I set him on my knee.
“You talked to me last night, Samantha,” David began, “and now I have a lot of things to say to you.”
I felt rather worried because of the serious manner in which he was speaking. But he didn’t look at me and after a moment he said,
“I suppose really I should start by apologising. I knew two minutes after you had run away from me that day in the flat that I had behaved brutally, almost criminally to you.”
I made a little sound of protest, but he went on,
“I have no excuses for what I said, Samantha, except that perhaps you will understand why I behaved in such a manner when I tell you about myself. It is something I ought to have done long ago.”
I didn’t answer and he went on,
“I was brought up in this house by my uncle because my parents died when I was quite young. I loved my aunt as if she was my mother. She was a sweet and gentle person, but my uncle was a hard unbending character.
“He had commanded the Coldstream Guards at one time and spoke to me as if I was a raw recruit in need of discipline.
“While my aunt was alive, I suppose she protected me from my uncle, but when she died I found that he was impossible to live with.
“I left school and as the War was on I went into the Army when I was seventeen-and-a-half. When I was eighteen, I had four months in France, fighting in the trenches, before the War ended. It revolutionised everything I had thought and believed in until then.”
David drew in his breath as if he was remembering the horror of it before he continued,
“When the War was over, my uncle wished me to continue in the Regiment or else go to Oxford. But I had no wish to go back to school and I had had enough of soldiering.
“We quarrelled bitterly and, because I would not do what he wanted, he tried to force me into obeying him. But that was fatal as far as I was concerned – I was already rebellious against the existing order of things because of what I had seen in France.
“I told my uncle that I would manage to live on my own without his assistance and he could keep what money was mine until I was of age. Then I would come and claim it.”
David gave a little laugh.
“I must have sounded very defiant and I suppose that my uncle thought it would do me good to learn the hard way that I must be dependent on him. He literally cut me off without a shilling!
“Fortunately I had a hundred pounds in the bank and I set off round the world with a friend. We walked, we hitchhiked and we worked our way. I did too many different jobs to even remember them now.
“Some were amusing, some were unspeakably horrible, but I did them because I would not give in. By the time I was twenty I had seen a lot of the world and learnt through a series of mistakes to look after myself quite competently.
“A friend in Singapore suggested that I should write an article and send it to a newspaper in England. I took his advice and the newspaper accepted the article with alacrity and paid me far more than I had expected.
“In a year’s time I was writing almost continuously for newspapers all over the world. I certainly didn’t make a fortune, but I lived a little better than I should have done otherwise.
“I had changed my name because when I left England I didn’t want any favours because I was Lord Wycombe’s nephew.
“The family name is Dunne and I changed mine to ‘Durham’. I stayed away from England for six years. When I came back, I had achieved quite a success in America with the first book I had written.
“It was half a travel book, half an autobiography, with some parts entirely fictional and it was a success. I had now found that I could write and knew it was something I enjoyed doing.
“I claimed what was my inheritance and found that my uncle seemed to have shrunk in stature since I went away. I was no longer afraid of him. I realised that he was only a narrow-minded, bigoted old man with whom I would never be likely to have anything in common.
“After a short time in England I went off again abroad. I wrote another travel book and then finally Vultures Pick Their Bones.
David took a deep breath.
“As you know, Samantha, it became an overnight success and, of course, that meant that I was a success too and it went to my already swollen head!”
I made a little murmur of protest and he said,
“After you left me and I couldn’t find you, I realised just how spoilt and conceited I had become. Because I was continually in the newspapers, because I was spoken of as being a controversi
al personality, I had begun to think of myself as someone pretty important!”
He paused and went on,
“And, of course, Samantha, you will understand when I tell you that there were a lot of women.
“There have always been women in my life, but none of them ever meant anything special to me and I never stayed long enough in one place to find any woman essential to my happiness.”
His voice deepened.
“That was – until I met you.”
I sat looking at him, holding the teddy bear as it were protectively in my arms.
“You are so lovely, Samantha, and so different from any woman I had ever met, that I was captivated by you from the first moment I saw you. But I didn’t understand.”
“What didn’t you – understand?” I asked.
“That you were the embodiment of all I had wanted, all I had dreamt of and hoped existed somewhere in the world for me as the other part of myself,” David answered.
“I suppose,” he went on, “that you were something too big for me to grasp, especially as I was eaten up with my own conceit.”
He added quickly as I would have spoken,
“No, that is the truth. I had begun to think of myself as irresistible. That was why, Samantha, I could not understand that your principles could mean more than the fact that I wanted you.
“Put into words, that sounds ghastly, doesn’t it? But it’s the truth. Because I knew that you loved me, that you belonged to me in a way that no one else ever had, it gave me a sense of power.
“I imagine all men have a cruel streak in them somewhere. It was that streak, combined with my desire to show my authority over you, that made me continually strike away the radiance I saw in your face with a harsh word.
“Your eyes are very sensitive and very expressive, Samantha. At times I couldn’t resist hurting you, simply because your feelings were mirrored so clearly that it made me feel omnipotent. Then you defied me and I couldn’t believe it possible that I would not subdue you into doing what I wanted.
“That day when I rang you up and told you that I was going to America, my first feeling, even though I was excited about the film, was a frightful sense of loss because I had to leave you.
“But I wouldn’t tell you so! I was too busy thinking how clever I was to humble myself even in love and God knows I did love you, Samantha.”
There was a pain in his voice, which made me say,
“Don’t be – upset – David.”
“Upset?” he answered. “What do you think I suffered when I couldn’t find you? When I thought I had lost you and realised what a fool I had been! Not only a fool, Samantha, but a brute! A man who had no right to your love, because he was utterly and completely despicable!”
“No – David – no!” I murmured.
“It’s true,” he said. “I faced myself and found in my shoes an extremely unpleasant person – someone I had not realised existed.”
He paused for a moment before he went on,
“Oscar Wilde said, ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. Because I was angry with you, Samantha, because I wanted to hurt you when you wouldn’t give in to me, because as it happens, you had unjustly accused me, I wanted to be cruel to you and I succeeded.”
He turned to look at me and said,
“First of all, let me tell you that Bettine Leyton was not travelling with me as my mistress. We had had a love affair many years before which meant very little to either of us. I had in fact introduced her to my publisher, Frank Leyton, whom she married. When I had the telegram asking me to go to Hollywood, he said that they would both go with me.”
I gave a little exclamation and David added,
“What you thought was entirely understandable, especially after the way I behaved at Bray Park, but it merely accentuated my anger because you had every right to be upset while I was behaving like a cad.”
“No – David,” I said again.
“It is true,” he said almost savagely. “Do you suppose I don’t know how totally despicable I was? That, Samantha, was why I hurt you and in the effort hurt not only you but myself.
“You see, my darling,” he said, his voice deepening, “what I loved about you first was that you were ignorant and I had never known a woman less self-assertive, more gentle, more amenable, more divinely humble about her own beauty.
“I loved you for that and there was so much I wanted to teach you. But more than anything else, I loved you because you were innocent. It took me some time to realise how completely unspoilt and pure you were. When I knew it, instead of trying to despoil you, I should have gone down on my knees and thanked God that I had found you before any other man did.”
I looked at David in surprise.
“You mean – you don’t mind that I am so – inexperienced?”
“Do you suppose I want you any other way?” he asked fiercely. “I love you, Samantha. I will kill any other man who touches you. You are mine! Mine, as you have been since the first moment we kissed each other on the Embankment. That wonderful magical kiss, which I can never forget!”
He made a sound that was almost one of pain and then he put his arm round me and drew me close to him.
“How can I ever tell you what it means to know that through my criminal stupidity you might have belonged to someone else? I could murder Victor Fitzroy for taking you away with him, if I wasn’t so overwhelmingly grateful to him for bringing you back still untouched – still my Samantha, as you were always meant to be.”
“But you may – still find me a – bore,” I whispered.
My voice was unsteady because thrills were running through me as David’s arms were round me and his lips were so near to mine.
“I am in love, Samantha,” David answered, “in love as I never imagined it possible to be. They tell me that no one has ever been bored when in love. You fascinate me, my darling, everything about you is utterly perfect, unique, and unlike any other woman.”
“Oh – David!” I murmured.
“I don’t deserve you. If you had any sense you would send me away. But instead will you forgive me and say that you will marry me?”
There was a return of the masterful note in his voice that I knew so well as he went on,
“You see, darling, I cannot live without you and I certainly could not live here in this big house by myself.”
“Here?” I questioned.
“My uncle is dead,” David answered. “I have inherited the estate. I am also, as it happens, the new Lord Wycombe!”
I gave a little gasp and he went on,
“Do you think you would find it boring, Samantha, two miles from the nearest village? I am not going to let you live in London – you are too beautiful! I also have quite a number of books I want to write. Some will be filmed. Hollywood has already taken an option on them and if we go there we go together. Otherwise I intend to stay here. But I would be very lonely and very unhappy without you, my precious darling!”
He looked down into my eyes and they must have been shining with the excitement of what he was saying to me.
Then, suddenly, as if something broke inside him he pulled me closer to him and his lips were on mine.
He kissed me wildly, passionately, frantically and it was even more wonderful and more glorious than it had ever been before.
I had never believed that anyone could feel such perfectly marvellous sensations and not die of happiness.
David raised his head.
“I adore you!” he said. “My sweet, perfect, innocent little love.”
Then he was kissing my eyes, my ears, my nose, my chin and the little pulse that was beating in my neck because I was so excited.
His kisses made me thrill even more than ever and then his lips were on mine again.
I felt as though he flew me up to the sun and we were both blinded by the wonder of it.
Finally, in a voice I hardly recognised, David said,
“Are you going to marry me? Please say yes, Sa
mantha.”
I put my arms round his neck and drew his lips nearer to mine.
“I will – marry you on one – condition.”
“And what is that?” David asked.
“That you will tell me how to – fill this wonderful – nursery with lots and lots of – our babies,” I whispered.
He held me so tightly that it was impossible for me to breathe and then he murmured unsteadily,
“The answer is – yes, Samantha!”
OTHER BOOKS IN THIS SERIES
The Barbara Cartland Eternal Collection is the unique opportunity to collect as ebooks all five hundred of the timeless beautiful romantic novels written by the world’s most celebrated and enduring romantic author.
Named the Eternal Collection because Barbara’s inspiring stories of pure love, just the same as love itself, the books will be published on the Internet at the rate of four titles per month until all five hundred are available.
The Eternal Collection, classic pure romance available worldwide for all time .
Elizabethan Lover
The Little Pretender
A Ghost in Monte Carlo
A Duel of Hearts
The Saint and the Sinner
The Penniless Peer
The Proud Princess
The Dare-Devil Duke
Diona and a Dalmatian
A Shaft of Sunlight
Lies for Love
Love and Lucia
Love and the Loathsome Leopard
Beauty or Brains
The Temptation of Torilla
The Goddess and the Gaiety Girl
Fragrant Flower
Look Listen and Love
The Duke and the Preacher’s Daughter
A Kiss for the King
The Mysterious Maid-servant
Lucky Logan Finds Love
The Wings of Ecstasy
Mission to Monte Carlo
Revenge of the Heart
The Unbreakable Spell
Never Laugh at Love
Bride to a Brigand
Lucifer and the Angel
Journey to a Star
Solita and the Spies
The Chieftain Without a Heart
No Escape from Love
Dollars for the duke
Say Yes Samantha Page 17
