Then with his usual ability to find a solution quickly to any problem, however complicated, he said,
“If you agree, I have an idea. You obviously cannot travel with me as yourself.”
“Why not?” Ilitta asked.
He realised once again that the question was entirely innocent.
It had not struck her for a moment that he was a man who might behave towards her in the same way as the man she had escaped from.
He thought he should warn her once again that she was being reckless and then decided it would be a mistake.
When he had finished with her services, he would try again to persuade her to return home. If she refused, then he must leave her to go her own way, having, of course, rewarded her for anything she might have done for him.
He realised as he was thinking that Ilitta’s eyes were on his face and now she said,
“If I must not come with you as myself, then what do you suggest?”
“I was thinking that you look very young,” the Duke repeated. “I have not seen you in your daytime attire, but I presume you wear your hair up and look a little older than you do at this moment.”
“But of course!” Ilitta agreed. “I am over eighteen and it was only because I was in mourning until a month ago that I have not been to any grown-up parties or balls.”
That would account, the Duke thought, for why she seemed so childlike.
He also supposed that in this part of the country, which was sparsely inhabited and with few important houses, there would not be so many gaieties as there were for girls who lived nearer London.
“Then what I am going to suggest,” he said aloud, “is that, if you agree to travel with me tomorrow, you do so as my sister.”
He smiled as he added,
“Actually I have a sister a little younger than you who is at school in Paris improving her French and doubtless learning a great deal about art.”
“She is very lucky!” Ilitta exclaimed. “I longed to go abroad and be educated, but of course Papa said it would be too expensive!”
The Duke thought that her father was probably a country gentleman living on a small estate, who would find the large bills for his daughter to be educated abroad quite beyond his means.
“Nobody where we will be going will have met my sister,” he said, “or even knows she exists.”
“It will be very exciting to pretend to be her,” Ilitta replied, “and if you want me to look really young, perhaps I had better wear my hair as it is now.”
“That is what I was going to suggest,” the Duke agreed. “But I doubt if anybody would question your identity, not to me at any rate!”
“Then – perhaps you had better tell me your name,” Ilitta said.
“Ervan Trecarron,” the Duke replied. “I am a Baronet.”
“Then you come from Cornwall!”
“How do you know that?”
“I have read a great deal about Cornwall because it always sounds so interesting and, of course, both Ervan and Trecarron are Cornish names.”
“That is very perceptive of you and as my sister’s name is really Georgina we can say if anybody asks us, which is unlikely, that Ilitta is a nickname.”
“You are being very clever!” she smiled, “but you must prevent me from making any mistakes.”
“There is no reason why you should make any,” the Duke answered, “and remember, Ilitta, these men know nothing about my private life, and quite frankly all they are interested in is my money.”
Ilitta looked serious.
“Then we shall have to be very very careful that they don’t take it from you under false pretences.”
“That is exactly why I am taking you with me,” the Duke said. “I hope you will draw me pictures of them as animals, from which I shall be able to tell far more about them than anybody could explain in words.”
Ilitta clapped her hands together.
“It all sounds a great adventure! Thank you, thank you for asking me to come with you!”
It struck the Duke once again that her attitude was really very reprehensible and somebody should stop her simply for the sake of her reputation.
Then he told himself that was none of his business.
It would doubtless be far worse for her to travel on alone to London knowing nothing of the world and having not the slightest idea of how to protect herself.
‘The only sensible thing she has done so far was to come to me when she was in danger,’ he thought. ‘At the same time, if I had been a different sort of man, she might have been in an even more precarious position than she was with the man who broke down her door!’
He knew how shocked the Society Mamas, who chaperoned their daughters as if they were encircled with chain-armour, would be at the thought of a girl of eighteen sitting in his bedroom with both of them in their night attire.
They would not for one moment believe that they were discussing art.
They would put the worst possible construction on the fact that they were alone in an isolated inn without any other woman in the place except for the servants.
‘She ought not to be behaving in this preposterous manner,’ the Duke thought and frowned.
Ilitta gave a little cry and asked,
“What is wrong? What has upset you?”
The Duke swept the frown from between his eyes and answered,
“Nothing important.”
He knew as he spoke that he should make one last attempt to persuade her to go home, but he knew if he did so he would miss what he thought of as a unique opportunity of sounding out Daltry by an original method, which he was certain had never been thought of before.
He could not imagine what would happen if Ilitta with nothing to go on but her perception and her strange ability to capture a man or a woman’s character with her pencil should denounce Daltry as a crook.
Then he thought that such an outcome was extremely unlikely and felt he was not taking much of a risk.
What most probably would happen would be that Ilitta would see Daltry as being greedy and asking more for the coal mine than its actual value.
‘Whatever she says will undoubtedly be extremely helpful,’ he told himself.
Actually he was intrigued and amused by finding something so unexpected and strange in an inn that he would never have visited in the normal course of events.
All his life the Duke had always followed his instinct when it came to exploration or seeking the unusual or original.
He knew now that those two adjectives were most applicable to Ilitta.
He glanced down at the canvas bag, which was once again lying on the floor.
Then he wondered if it was the firelight or the fact that he was tired which had blinded him to the truth about her and if her drawings were really as brilliant as he had first thought.
But he felt sure that he had not been deceived by what he had seen and in some way he could not determine at the moment he must certainly help Ilitta to pursue her talent further.
Perhaps he could arrange a grant for her, from one of the Galleries he supported or from one of the organisations of which he was a Patron.
He was much concerned with art, education and opportunities for young people and he was quite certain that it would be easy for him to help her financially when he returned to London.
Once again while he was thinking deeply, Ilitta’s eyes were on his face. Then, as he smiled at her, she said,
“You – you are not – regretting that you asked me?”
“No, of course not! I want you to come with me, but because we have a long way to go we must leave early in the morning.”
“I will go to bed in the next room,” Ilitta said. “If the stagecoach arrives I shall be woken at six o’clock. But please, if it does not arrive, would you be kind enough, when you are called, to knock on my door?”
“Yes, of course,” the Duke agreed
She rose to her feet and he rose too.
“What you must do,”
he said, “is to remove your belongings and put them in the next room and I will make certain that all the doors are securely locked and bolted so that nobody can disturb you.”
“Thank you. You are so kind that I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am.”
“The best way you can show me your gratitude,” the Duke said dryly, “is to let us both have a good night’s sleep. I have a feeling it is getting very late.”
“I have kept you awake – which was – wrong of me.”
She did not wait for his reply, but, carrying her canvas bag, she ran through the door into the next room.
The Duke heard her pull open the door on the other side that led into the room she had occupied originally.
There were two candles alight by his bed and he carried one of them into the next room and set it down on the dressing table.
As he did so, Ilitta came back carrying her bag and the gown she must have hung up in the wardrobe when she undressed.
As soon as she was in the room, the Duke closed the door behind her.
He found that there was a bolt on it, which fortunately had not been pushed home when she had come to him for his assistance.
He then bolted the door onto the passage and, seeing that the lock was intact, turned the key.
“Now go to sleep,” he said, “and don’t worry about anything. I will make sure that you are awoken in plenty of time so as not to keep me waiting. We will, of course, breakfast in my private parlour.”
“You think of everything!” Ilitta exclaimed. “I will do exactly what you have told me and try to go to sleep.”
She smiled and he thought in the candlelight that she looked rather like a small angel who had fallen out of Heaven by mistake.
Then, as he went into his own room, closing the door quietly behind him, he mused that there was nothing angelic about the perceptiveness of her mind.
Unless her drawings were untrue, she had portrayed her victims so uncannily and so cynically that she might have been a middle-aged cartoonist with years of experience behind her.
‘She is certainly very unusual,’ the Duke told himself as he climbed into bed.
Then he congratulated himself on having made a new discovery, one which might prove discomfiting to Daltry and his friends but, more importantly, would undoubtedly amuse and interest himself even more than the acquisition of a coal mine.
Chapter Three
The fog was clearing over the trees when the Duke drove his team carefully out of the inn yard.
There was no sign of the sun, but Ilitta was certain that it would break through the clouds later in the day.
She could hardly believe it was true when she was awoken by a knock on her door and heard the Duke’s voice say,
“It is nearly six o’clock and I shall be having breakfast in a quarter-of-an-hour,”
She jumped up, excited at the idea of going with him and realised as she did so that she had slept peacefully.
She thought of what had happened last night before he had saved her and felt herself shiver.
Then she told herself that there was no point in remembering anything unpleasant and today was going to be an adventure she had never envisaged in her wildest dreams.
She put on the gown she had travelled in and packed the one she had changed into for dinner.
She had never travelled alone or for that matter stayed anywhere except a very grand or respectable hotel once or twice in her life.
She therefore had no idea that wearing an evening gown of any sort constituted, because she was alone, an invitation to any man who was out for a ‘little bit of fun’.
Now she recalled that she was to be Sir Ervan’s sister and having parted her hair down the centre, she brushed it until it seemed to dance with a life of its own. She then tied it on each side of her head with blue ribbons.
She thought when she looked at herself in the mirror that she had stepped back five or six years and was sure, because she was so slim, that nobody would think she was grown up.
‘That is what he wants,’ she told herself, ‘and it is very clever of him to make me his sister.’
She hurried downstairs carrying her luggage in her hand and, when she entered the private parlour, the Duke felt as if she brought the sunshine with her.
He was already eating his breakfast, but he rose perfunctorily from his chair and then sat down again.
“Come on, Ilitta!” he urged. “We have a long way to go and the sooner we are on our way the better!”
He spoke to her, Ilitta thought, just as a brother might have done.
Actually she was as anxious to get away as he was, hoping never to see again the man who had broken into her bedroom.
There was nobody about in the inn when they left, with the exception of the publican and an ostler from the stables, who looked sleepy and disgruntled.
There was also no sign of the stagecoach which had been delayed last night.
It was a warm day for the end of September with just a few of the leaves on the trees beginning to turn brown, but when the sun came up the air was fresh and seemed almost spring-like.
Hanson sitting behind them was telling the Duke that he had found there was a shorter way to their destination, which would enable them to cut off several miles of their journey and therefore to arrive almost at the time they were expected for the meeting with Captain Daltry.
The Duke who liked to be punctilious in everything and disliked being late, even if it was unavoidable, settled down to driving his team and making sure there were no unnecessary delays on the road.
Because they were, in fact, moving at what Ilitta felt must be a record speed, she tied the ribbons on her bonnet even more tightly and enjoyed the feel of the sun on her face and the beauty of the countryside.
Hanson had accepted the Duke’s explanation while he dressed him that Ilitta was a distant cousin, to whom he was giving a lift, but that he intended to introduce her to Captain Daltry as his sister.
Having been with his Master for some years Hanson was never surprised at anything that happened.
He merely thought to himself that Ilitta was unlike most of the other ladies in the Duke’s life.
The Duke, however, was thinking as the sun rose in the sky that it was a good day for shooting partridges and he wished that he had stayed a little longer with his mother and arranged a day over the fields where he knew he had every chance of bagging a good number of birds.
He had made it clear when he inherited from his father that his mother could occupy the Dower House on every one of his estates and, because these were numerous, she had a large choice.
She had, however, chosen the Dower House near the Duke’s mansion in Gloucestershire as well as the one in Cornwall.
It was at Marazion that she had spent the happiest days of her married life and the Duke knew the reason why she seldom visited it now was that it brought back so many memories.
She still, after eight years of widowhood, missed his father unbearably.
Because he was aware that she was often lonely, he persuaded her whenever possible to come to London, where, because he was unmarried, she acted as hostess at Marazion House in Grosvenor Square.
As she was still beautiful and still had an ageless charm, the moment she arrived everybody from the Social world came to call on her.
They kept insisting that she gave another of her famous parties, like those she had given in the old days when, as somebody said to her son,
“London would not have been the same without the Duchess standing at the top of the staircase glittering like a constellation of stars!”
The Duke had smiled at the compliment and, when he remembered it afterwards, he wondered how he could ever find a wife who would look so lovely or grace the family diamonds as his mother did.
Before he left Gloucestershire he had arranged that after staying with his friend d’Arcy Armitage he would go back to spend a few more days with his mother before proceeding to London or wherever else
his fancy took him.
‘I suppose really I should go to Cornwall,’ he thought.
He had not been there since the spring and of all his estates it was Marazion where he had spent the happiest days of his childhood.
On the other hand, because it was a long way for people to travel, he was often alone there and, although he disliked admitting it to himself, at times lonely.
He thought now, driving with Ilitta beside him, that the train service already being built to Falmouth would make it easier for his friends to accept his invitations.
Although he frowned at the idea of trains supplanting horses, he knew in his heart, since trains had carried racegoers to Epsom this year, it was a losing battle.
‘Then why,’ his conscience asked him, ‘are you buying a coal mine?’
The answer was quite simple, Captain Daltry had persuaded him into it almost against his inclinations.
He had begun to think of the reports of the Children’s Employment Bill of three years earlier.
It had horrified the conscience of the country and it certainly horrified him.
The descriptions of boys and girls employed together in the darkness of the coal mines, of women naked to the waist with chains between their legs crawling on all fours down tunnels under the earth and drawing gigantic burdens, had been appalling.
He had been one of the first people to speak for Lord Ashley when he heard that he was introducing a Bill to exclude all women and girls from the pits and was delighted when he succeeded and was proclaimed a National hero.
The Duke would certainly not employ, in any mine that he owned, men who were not strong enough to endure the inevitable discomfort of working underground.
What was more he was determined to have every known safety device to ensure that there were as few accidents as possible.
‘I might even invent a few of my own,’ he reflected and, musing on what might be necessary, kept his mind occupied for a large number of miles.
It was only as the sun came out and the last vestige of the fog of the night before dispersed that he looked down at Ilitta with a smile to ask,
White Lilac Page 5
