The Dollar Prince's Wife

by Paula Marshall

  ‘Do you wear a mask?’ she asked him bluntly, straightening herself, and doing his bidding.

  ‘Of course. I fancy, though, that I have a larger collection of them than most people do.’

  ‘What have you been doing in London?’

  For some reason the line of conversation she had begun was frightening Dinah a little. She hoped that her question was an innocuous one. She wasn’t to know that it was very far from being that.

  Cobie thought of Will Walker and laughed to himself a little.

  He said, ‘I have been pursuing my business interests.’

  He didn’t add that he had not been doing so from Southwest Mining and Associates plush offices in the shadow of Saint Paul’s, but from the dingy cubby-hole which Mr Dilley had rented.

  Nor did he tell her of something else which was on his mind. His meeting with his foster-sister Susanna Winthrop three days ago…

  Cobie had gone straight home from his encounter with Will Walker and his minions. He had changed back into his usual immaculate clothes at his East End bolt-hole. He walked into the black-and-white flagged entrance hall of his Park Lane home to be met by the butler whom he had hired for the duration of his stay in England.

  ‘Mrs Winthrop arrived earlier this afternoon, sir. I told her that I had no idea when you would return, but she insisted on waiting. She is in the small drawing room, sir.’

  ‘Have you sent tea in?’

  ‘I was about to do so, sir.’

  ‘See to it immediately. I wish to go to my room before I attend on Mrs Winthrop. Tell her that I shall be with her in about a quarter of an hour. Send my valet to me.’

  Giles had been Cobie’s man for the last five years. He was used to his master’s vagaries, never asked any questions and kept his mouth commendably shut when newsmen and others tried to pump him about Mr Grant’s activities, sexual or financial.

  He arrived in Cobie’s room to find that his master had his blond head in a bowl of water.

  ‘You couldn’t wait for me, sir?’ he asked reprovingly.

  ‘No, I couldn’t, Giles.’ Cobie was brisk. ‘I know I have a visitor, but I need to refresh myself before I go to her.’

  Washing Walker off himself was his internal gloss. ‘You may assist me now that you are here.’

  His hair was sleekly damp when he joined Susanna, who was sitting hunched in an armchair, an untouched tea tray in front of her.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. She had sprung to her feet on his entrance. ‘But I have had a difficult afternoon, and had to ready myself before I saw you.’

  This was not strictly true. Intuition had told him that he might not like Susanna’s errand. The euphoria of having successfully danced Walker and his men around, and of entertaining a group of deprived children had died away, and left him feeling stale and tired, hardly ready to face another problem.

  He was sure that it must be a problem which had brought Susanna to him without any preliminary warning, and had kept her waiting for so long, and had caused her to be so agitated at the sight of him.

  ‘Oh, Cobie,’ she exclaimed, and flung her arms around him, hiding her face in his chest. ‘You’ve no idea how relieved I am to see you.’

  Her behaviour would have told him that without her words. The Susanna he had known all his life had always been coolly controlled. There was nothing controlled about her now. She was trembling against him.

  Cobie held her away, saying gently, ‘Sit down, Susanna, pour us both some tea, and then tell me what is wrong.’

  ‘I don’t want tea,’ she flung at him pettishly, but she sat down all the same, staring at nothing. When he said, ‘Allow me,’ and began to organise the tea tray as though he had been doing it all his life, she made no demur, but accepted the cup and saucer from him.

  She took a shuddering sip, put it petulantly down, and watched him drink his own tea. Had she been more observant she would have noticed that he was not quite so much in control of himself as he usually was.

  ‘What is it, Susanna?’ he asked her, still gentle.

  She put her head in her hands, lifted it to look at him, her eyes full of unshed tears, and said hoarsely, ‘Don’t tell me that you don’t know, Cobie, you always know everything. It’s Arthur.’

  ‘Arthur?’

  He put his cup down, and waited for her to continue.

  After a moment, looking away from him, she said, ‘I think that I’ve always known that there was something wrong, ever since we were first married. But I’ve always pretended that there wasn’t. I looked away, preferring not to know. Safer so, I suppose.’ She stopped, began again.

  ‘Don’t ask me for the details, but last night, quite accidentally, I found out the truth I’ve never wanted to know. All of it. I…can’t say it. Don’t make me. I’m sure that you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he told her while she looked blindly away from him. ‘I’ve known for a long time. Not always. Not when you first married him, although I never liked him…’

  ‘God help me, I thought that you were simply jealous when you tried to tell me that I was making a mistake in marrying him. God forgive me, I think…that if…he were straightforwardly perverse, I could almost live with it. But children…Cobie…children, like those people at Madame Louise’s recently. I know he used to go there…we haven’t been man and wife for a long time… Oh, God, what am I to do?’

  She stood up, and said frantically, ‘I must go home. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I thought…I don’t know what I thought.’

  Cobie was on his feet, too. He went over to her, put an arm around her to comfort her and began to pet her as though she were a small child.

  Susanna shuddered again, at the impersonality of it, remembering how differently he had once embraced her.

  ‘All those years ago I rejected you, because of the difference in our ages. I wouldn’t reject you now, Cobie. I wouldn’t refuse you now, not now.’

  She pulled his head down to kiss him on the lips. ‘Love me, Cobie, and I might be able to survive.’

  She looked deep into his eyes, her own tragically brilliant.

  He stood transfixed, thinking of how these words would once have moved him, with what joy he would have taken her into his arms, would have married her and bedded her.

  To his horror, the very memory of it, combined with the familiar, once so dearly loved scent of her, roused him. For a moment his friendly petting of her became something more, his arms tightened about her, and she turned in them with a little sigh, as though she were coming home…as though she were his wife…

  His wife! He thought of Dinah, being groomed for him in Paris. He pulled away.

  ‘No!’ Susanna pulled him back, put her mouth to his and began to kiss him. She was suddenly seduction itself. She was his first love, his lost love, so long regretted. He tried to hold the memory of Dinah to him, but even so he felt his body responding…he had gone so long without love, and bedding Violet and the others had been no substitute for love.

  Susanna thought that she had won. ‘Oh, now, Cobie, now,’ she whispered to him, ‘after all these years.’

  Her voice called him back from the brink which he was rapidly approaching. He turned away from her, his body one vast ache. The piano was open before him. He dropped both hands on to the keyboard and the dissonance of the chord he had created matched that of his mood.

  He was in torment. So often in his life he had been confronted with this terrible dilemma: whichever course of action he chose would be wrong. Of two ills, how to choose the lesser? To take Susanna to bed would be to betray Dinah, not to do so would, he was sure, destroy the precarious relationship between himself and his foster-sister for ever. He thought that he knew which evil was the lesser, but he could not be sure.

  ‘No, Susanna, no,’ he said, facing her. The tears were pouring down her face, and she tried to clutch him to her. ‘Too late, too late. The boy you loved is dead and gone. He died in Arizona Territory, never to be resurrected. And the man who succeeded
him knew how right you were to refuse him then, even though it broke his heart at the time.

  ‘Oh, Susanna, I still love you dearly, but only after the fashion that a brother loves a sister. If I took you to bed now, it would not only be celebrating mindless lust, but it would also be an act of treachery to the young wife I have just taken. I couldn’t betray Dinah, Susanna, not even to make you happy. She has suffered so much all her short life. She mustn’t suffer that.’

  ‘She doesn’t love you,’ said Susanna, her face an agony of sorrow.

  ‘No, I’m not sure that she does. But I’m not going to take you as a consolation prize, Susanna. I have a little honour left. Not much, but one thing I will not do is betray my young wife before we are a full month married. It was right for you to reject me all those years ago, and now we must live with that rejection.’

  ‘If I hadn’t rejected you just after you found out that you were not legitimate,’ she said, ‘you might never have gone to Arizona Territory, would never have become the man you are, a man I hardly know. I killed the innocent boy you were when I sent you away. I hardly knew you when you came back. What happened, Cobie, what happened?’

  ‘I grew up,’ he said roughly, ‘and so must you. It might be of comfort to you to know that it was not because of your rejection of me that I fled to the Southwest shortly afterwards. It was for quite another reason. What changed me happened there, in the Territory, and had nothing to do with my life before I left New York—and you—behind.’

  Susanna chose to ignore what he had just told her. ‘Oh, I do so want a child before it is too late,’ she wailed. ‘He will never give me one. You could, Cobie, you could.’

  It was the worst thing she could have said to him. He wheeled away from her. ‘What! And create one more unhappy bastard! We all have to choose, Susanna, and live with our choices. You chose nearly ten years ago, and for good or for ill, you changed our lives. But I will not sentence another to what I have had to endure myself.’

  ‘No one thinks the less of you…’ she began, but, agonisingly, she knew that there was nothing left for her to say to him. Whatever had lain between them was over, but she could not resist telling him mournfully, ‘You are so hard, Cobie, so hard, I never thought…’

  The face he turned on her was one of such suffering that she recoiled from it.

  ‘No, Susanna. If I am hard, it is better so. I could comfort you here and now, but think, what would be the end of such treachery?’

  He sat down again, and said prosaically, ‘The tea is still hot enough to drink. Let me pour you another cup.’

  She was shuddering and trembling. ‘I should like to go home, Cobie. I can’t stay with you now. I think that I never want to see you again.’

  What to say? What to do? Nothing. No words could suffice. Again, of two ills which is the lesser? It would be useless to say to her, You will be pleased one day that you did the right thing, for nothing could console Susanna in her present misery…

  He held out the tea cup to her.

  ‘Drink your tea, Susanna, better so.’

  Desolately, she took it, and drank it to the dregs, which were symbolic of what time and chance had made of her life.

  Cobie was back with Dinah, trying to banish the memory of Susanna’s face when she had left him that afternoon.

  He looked at Dinah’s hopeful one instead, and thought, I was right not to betray my wife, even if I do not love her, whatever we feel, or do not feel, for each other, but oh, how I wish that I had not been faced with such an agonising dilemma.

  One thing at least I have gained: I am easy with my bride—which I would not have been if I had given way to Susanna’s misery—and who knows, my bride may soon be ready to be easy with me.

  Chapter Nine

  That night, preparing to go to bed, with both Hortense and Pearson in attendance, so grand had she grown, Dinah was thinking about her husband and her so far non-consummated marriage.

  She thought that he had been remarkably considerate in not making her his true wife immediately, when he had already decided to put upon her the burden of transforming her so rapidly from gauche, dowdy Dinah Freville into a Parisienne beauty.

  On the other hand, it might not have been consideration at all, far from it. He might have simply been deferring the evil day when he had to take to bed an untutored girl whom he had married for reasons she did not understand, but which she was sure, did not include a desperate desire to…to… Her imagination would not supply her with a decorous word—only a vulgar one!

  One thing she was now sure of. At some point he would make a move towards her, but that did not mean that if she decided that she was tired of waiting, he would rebuff her if she went to him and… She blushed at the thought but she now knew him well enough to be aware that he would never do anything as unkind as that.

  Should she, or shouldn’t she, go to him? Her sense of humour, one of the things about Dinah which had attracted her husband, set her thinking, I need a daisy, and instead of plucking off the petals and saying ‘He loves me, or he loves me not’, I should be asking ‘Shall I? Or shan’t I?’ But there aren’t any daisies off the Faubourg Saint Germain for me to pluck. Perhaps I ought to wait until I get home, or go to Moorings where the fields will be full of them!

  Yes, that was it. This alien city, so artificial, even if so beautiful and cultured, was not the place where Dinah Freville ought to become Mrs Cobie Grant in fact as well as in law.

  She was unaware that her husband, still disturbed by the scene with his foster-sister, had come to the same conclusion. He would wait until they were back in London, where she would be surrounded by the things which she knew.

  He thought, with a great deal of wry amusement, that she would be only the second virgin he had initiated into love. The previous one had been over thirty, ten years older than he had then been, and that, like Susanna, she had asked him to be her lover—for one night only. He had agreed, because he owed her his life, and he had betrayed no one by doing as she wished.

  It was the first time for many years that he had thought of Jane, who had been so unlike Dinah, and he wondered what had become of her. He shook his head and dismissed the past. Yes, they would return to London shortly—and what would happen—would happen!

  Sir Ratcliffe Heneage decided that he disliked Mr Jacobus Grant intensely. Before Grant’s marriage to Dinah Freville, on the night when Grant had broken Rainey, he had lost all and more of the money he had won from him at poker and baccarat in those early weeks when Grant’s luck had been so bad. Money which, like Rainey, he couldn’t afford to lose: he was bankrupt in all but name.

  He didn’t believe in Grant’s bad luck any more. An American friend, over from the States, had told him what a tiger Grant truly was on Wall Street. He knew nothing about Grant’s ability, or otherwise, at cards, but he couldn’t believe that he was other than a tiger with them, too.

  ‘Grant’s uncanny,’ he had said. ‘He seems to know what you are thinking. He’s a ruthless devil. What he wants, he takes, whether it’s money or women. He sails close to the wind in everything he does.’

  In consequence Sir Ratcliffe Heneage no longer believed that Grant had destroyed Rainey by good luck or by accident. He also thought that Grant had used the cards he, Sir Ratcliffe, had marked for himself, to do so. Looking back, there had been several previous occasions when odd things had happened at the table: times when Grant had lost when he should have won.

  Had he been using his marked cards to lose, in order to lull everyone into believing he was an easy mark and make a killing when he wished to do so? Sir Ratcliffe rather thought that he had since there was no chance that Grant had ever had an opportunity to mark the cards himself.

  Grant had taken Violet Kenilworth from him, too, just when he thought that Violet was about to capitulate to him—and he hadn’t even had to try. Violet had just fallen flat on her back in front of the Yankee pirate! His friend from the States had told him that that was par for the course as we
ll.

  Which was all the more remarkable when you thought that he had ended up by marrying that frump, Dinah Freville, who was both plain and portionless. Particularly when gossip had it that he had almost blackmailed Rainey, after that disastrous session at cards, into allowing the marriage.

  His friend had said, when told of this, ‘Well, if that’s so, Grant knows something about the girl that the rest of you don’t.’

  ‘What’s to know?’ Sir Ratcliffe had said coarsely. ‘A plain poverty-stricken bitch, useless in bed, one supposes. Now…her sister…’ and he licked his lips.

  His friend had also told him something else. Gossip had it that Grant and his foster-sister were close. ‘Very protective of her, I understand.’

  Sir Ratcliffe had said nothing but he had thought a lot. He had been living a life more continent than he had done for years, his favourite sports denied him. Ever since Madame Louise’s had been raided he had been fearful of visiting any night house… Who knew which one might be raided next? On the other hand, when and if Hoskyns found for him the child who had run away—why, that would be a different matter…

  Susanna Winthrop was just the sort of woman he had a taste for. Not too buxom, figure almost boyish, and with pretty deferential manners. If Violet Kenilworth had a fault it was that she was too loud, too demanding. His own wife, with whom he had not slept for many years, although she shared his home and public life, being seen with him on all official occasions, was a pale, defeated woman whom he had married for her money—all of which he had spent.

  Now Susanna, on whom he had had his eye since he had lost Violet and the little boys and girls in quick succession, would make up for all of them. She liked pleasant gentle men, that was plain, and he would be as pleasant and gentle as a man could be—to begin with, anyway.

  He had approached her the other night, after Grant had returned to Paris, and commiserated with her on his absence, and she had been so gracious to him, that before the evening was over they had been conversing together as though they were old friends.