“Then there is a nursery wing here?” Caroline felt relief well over her, as well as a small degree of satisfaction. “I thought there must be, and it will be much better for Richard and me to be on our own, and our meals served separately, and that sort of thing.” She could have added that she personally would prefer it, and the less she saw of the noble Marques and his lovely visitor during her stay in Portugal the better, but Dom Vasco’s eyes gleamed suddenly with a certain dry amusement, and he reminded her:
“I thought you were of the opinion the senhora disliked being separated from her child!”
And then before she could say anything further he disappeared up the steps and into the quinta, and she could hear him calling imperiously for the housekeeper.
The next few hours were nothing if not hectic, and although by noon the sun was high in the sky , and the enervating heat was making itself felt even beneath the spreading branches in the quinta garden, the uproar inside the house continued.
Apparently the Marques seldom visited the Quinta de Fonteira, and this unexpectedly announced intention of his to actually stay in the house for a period of possibly several weeks threw everyone out of their normal routine, and in particular it threw Senhora Lopes into a most unusual flutter. She was responsible for the careful maintenance of the house, and she had no wish for her employer to find things anything other than perfect. Although a speck of dust had been unknown to settle for longer than a few minutes on any piece of furniture, everything—that is to say all the main furniture, in all the main rooms—was given a thorough going over, and the smell of beeswax began to fill the house, as well as the sounds of bustle.
The great dining-room was transformed. Masses more silver were brought out and arrayed on the giant sideboard and other side tables, and the drawing room had its crystal chandeliers and mirrors freed from the protection of linen covers, and every piece of elegant furniture shone. Satin-backed chairs were arranged in less formal positions, and flowers were brought into the hall, but only into the hall. Caroline would have liked to offer to arrange flowers in the rooms, but Senhora Lopes didn’t look as if she would welcome any interference. She was a woman who made her own plans, and stuck to them, and disliked outside help or suggestions when she could do without them.
But Richard and Caroline did help to clear their own rooms, and since no one had much time to devote to the nursery wing they set about making it habitable for themselves. It had been unoccupied for a number of years, and although it was maintained in a state of vigorous cleanliness, and well aired, there was nothing particularly inviting about the old-fashioned furniture, and the bathroom was so old-fashioned that Caroline wondered whether it would stand up to the sudden demands that were to be made on it.
But the great attraction that the nursery wing had for her was the door that securely shut it off from the rest of the house. And it was at the end of a long corridor which further emphasised their seclusion.
Dom Vasco, who had been interviewing the head gardener, and making arrangements about fruit and vegetables for the house, as well as inspecting every corner of the house after Senhora Lopes and her minions had finished with it, suddenly made his appearance in the corridor leading to the nursery wing, and when he passed through the door that was the symbol of their future isolation Caroline was sitting in an old rocking-chair of Portuguese oak with faded blue cushions in the schoolroom, rocking herself gently to and fro, and Richard was already giving his few possessions the kind of prominence he liked them to receive, and making the room look like a room that in future was to be inhabited by a child.
“Well, well!” Dom Vasco came to a pause in the doorway, and before Caroline stood up hastily and confronted him demurely he had time to observe how attractive was the picture she made in the old-fashioned rocking-chair, with her blue dress matching the cushions, and her golden hair imprisoning the sunlight as her shapely head lay relaxed against one of them. “So this is where you are to hide yourselves away in future! Well, Senhora de Fonteira may agree ... but the Marques will certainly want to see something of his great-nephew occasionally!”
The boy ceased piling books on a side table and went and stood close to Caroline’s knee, one hand reaching out instinctively to clutch at her.
Dom Vasco’s eyes glinted strangely.
“I wonder how your mama will approve such continued devotion?” he enquired whimsically of the definitely depressing furnishings, and then walked round and inspected them with an eagle eye. “You will need many new things for this room,” he observed at the end of it. “And the bedrooms? Are they as inadequately prepared for you as this room?” Caroline accompanied him into one of them, and he nodded his head. When he saw the second bedroom, which was to be hers, he actually frowned. When he saw the bathroom he scowled.
“Much will have to be done,” he remarked. “I must make a note of it,” and he made several hurriedly scribbled notes in his notebook. Then she found his dark eyes smiling quizzically into hers. “It is a misfortune of the house that so few children have occupied it,” he observed. “If the Marques had had a family these rooms might not appear so neglected.”
“Perhaps one day—perhaps the Marques ... There will be children,” she heard herself say a little awkwardly.
His smiling dark glance passed over her and lighted upon Richard.
“Perhaps,” he agreed carelessly, gently ruffling the boy’s hair. “Who knows? I have said that the Marques will one day marry again!”
For a brief fraction of time Caroline found herself working out the true relationship that would exist between an uncle and his niece by marriage should her beauty tempt him into considering matrimony for the second time, and then she dismissed the idea as somehow vaguely unpleasant. The Marques de Fonteira was no longer a young man, even if he wasn’t old, and Ilse was still young and very, very beautiful. She would make a magnificent marchioness, but...
“Forget the idea,” Dom Vasco advised, still meeting her eyes with that inscrutable smile in his, and obviously following the train of her thoughts very easily. “It is quite impracticable. Besides—”
“Besides what?” she enquired, as he appeared to be considering something that had suddenly struck him.
“Ricardo might be deprived of his rights if the Marques married again,” Vasco said. “We couldn’t have that, could we, Ricardo?” tip-tilting his chin with a very lean, brown finger.
Richard stared back at him with blank brown eyes, and Dom Vasco sighed, quite unexpectedly.
“You are a pretty boy, Ricardo,” he told him, “and one day, no doubt, you will make a personable man. But who knows—who knows what is ahead of you?”
“We none of us know what is ahead of us,” Caroline said quickly, grasping Richard’s hand protectively, and the Portuguese smiled again. This time without reservation.
“For you, senhorita, we can easily predict what is ahead,” he declared. “Marriage ... Marriage is obviously the Big Thing on the horizon, and as a result, perhaps, a little one like—Ricardo?” He glanced from the boy to the fair-haired girl, and although his lips remained quirked upwards at the corners in a slightly unreadable smile his eyes were suddenly very still and dark and mystifying. “Although, as you will almost certainly marry an Anglo-Saxon, it is most unlikely that he will be as dark as Richard,” he concluded with sudden curtness, and walked away.
Caroline followed him to the door, and there he took his leave of them. He was formal all at once, excessively businesslike.
“There are many things still to be done,” he declared, “for the reception of the Marques, and little time left to do them in. He will be here about six o’clock, and after such a journey he will wish to rest. But I have arranged a dinner-party for this evening, and my cousin Carmelita will act the part of hostess. She has done so many times for Duarte, although she is unmarried, and it is unusual for an unmarried lady to act the part of hostess in Portugal. However, as everyone knows that she—”
‘Will one day be marr
ied to you,’ she thought, as she gazed up at him as if the compulsion in his eyes made it impossible for her to do anything else, and was surprised when he concluded instead:
“Is an extraordinarily capable young woman, accustomed to every aspect of running a house, and entirely to be depended upon, it is not such an unconventional departure. And Senhora de Fonteira is to be a guest, and she will in any case be too tired after the journey and her recent flight from London to be regarded as anything other than a guest. So, senhorita, anything you can do to be of assistance to Senhorita de Capuchos and to Senhora Lopes will be of value,” he assured her.
“Of course, senhor,” she returned. “I will do anything I can.”
“Including keeping Richard out of the way when the cars appear in the drive?” He shook a long, brown forefinger at her. “That, senhorita, is something you must not do! You are to be in evidence—you understand—when the Marques and his guests arrive. And I forgot to make it clear that there will be others, apart from Senhora de Fonteira. You are to be in evidence ... in the hall! Wearing something that will make you look very English,” he added, with a most peculiar dryness.
“But,” she objected, “I don’t understand, senhor! Surely...?”
He shook a sleek dark head at her.
“You have your instructions, Miss Worth! I feel sure it is unnecessary for me to repeat them.” But he was smiling oddly as he at last strode away down the corridor. “Au revoir, Miss Caroline!” And hearing her Christian name on his lips made her start, and feel a little foolish, in addition to feeling surprised because the name sounded different, somehow ... infinitely more attractive. She caught an amused flash in his dark eyes. “Remember! Not hiding away in the nursery, but in evidence in the hall!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
CAROLINE obeyed the instruction, but she was not at all happy when the hour arrived for the Marques de Fonteira to make his expected appearance in the drive leading to the pink-washed front of his hunting-lodge.
Everything gleamed to such an extent around her that she was almost oppressed by it, and Ricardo was no happier than she was when the housekeeper took up a position near them and betrayed by the slight but unmistakable nervousness of her manner, and the tension in her face, that this was an occasion and must not be marred by any irresponsible behaviour on the part of a small boy, even if he was the heir to the estates and all that went with them.
Washed and brushed and wearing an immaculate white shirt and new patent-leather shoes—all Portuguese children of good family wore patent-leather shoes, Caroline had discovered, since her arrival in Portugal—and depressed by the very odour of cleanliness that clung about him, he refused to release Caroline’s hand as they stood there in the hall and more than once he whispered to her that they could get a far better view of the Marques arrival if they went back upstairs and watched from one of their own windows, which were in the front of the house and overlooked the drive.
But Caroline had received her instructions, and on this occasion at least she had no intention of going against them. When she first met Dom Vasco she might have been tempted to exercise her own discretion on an occasion such as this, but since recently he had made it plain that he had a considerable amount of faith in her and her integrity—largely because Richard had declined to do without her—she felt it was more or less incumbent upon her to humour him, as it were.
He wished her to be present when the Marques arrived, and therefore she was present. And not merely was she present with her charge, but she had taken great pains to appear at her best—also because Dom Vasco had apparently desired it—and was looking very English in a flowered silk dress that was cream overlaid with several tones of blue, and had put her hair up in a neat pleat and been careful to dispense with anything in the nature of jewellery.
If the Marques—like Dom Vasco—objected to a frivolous appearance when he was paying her a salary, he would not find it in her. She looked trim, and rather flowerlike, cool, and a little remote, and even the housekeeper, when she glanced at her occasionally, looked as if she might well have nodded approval. But Senhora Lopes was so preoccupied with the correctness of her own appearance, and the dignified picture she made in the flower-decked hall, that she had no nods to spare. She merely stood there grimly watching the clock and comparing it with the timepiece that she wore on the front of her dress, and occasionally her angular figure stiffened when the noise of a car reached them from the road beyond the ornamental, wrought-iron gates, or some other sound goaded her into temporary activity as a prelude to the welcome she was reserving for her employer.
At a quarter to six Dom Vasco’s car slipped between the gates, and when he entered the hall Senhora Lopes accorded him something in the nature of a restrained curtsey. He glanced at her for a bare fraction of time, however, and then looked hard at Caroline. She was surprised to see how miraculously his face softened, and his dark eyes positively beamed their approval.
“Good, senhorita!” he said, as he crossed the hall to where she and Richard were standing, and gave the boy an approving pat on the head. “You both look good enough to—” he smiled in such a brilliant fashion that he amazed her—“I was going to say eat, but one does not eat an English governess, or a properly conducted small boy of seven, does one?” Then he looked down at Richard again and lightly pinched his ear. “Don’t look so alarmed, Ricardo! Your great-uncle will not eat you, and you should be happy to see your mama again! Are you not looking forward to seeing your mama?” with a slight dryness in his tone that caused Richard to look up at him dubiously.
“I suppose so,” he mumbled.
Dom Vasco elevated his eyebrows.
“You suppose so? But that hardly sounds as if you can barely contain your impatience! And yet when I was a small boy I thought that the sun and the moon and the stars revolved around my mother!” He met Caroline’s eyes for an instant, and it seemed to her that a mild form of consternation warred with the softness that memories brought to the velvet darkness that gleamed between his thick dark eyelashes. Then he tweaked Richard’s ear again and shrugged his shoulders.
“Ah, well ... Perhaps it is that there are mothers and mothers!”
Senhora Lopes made an excited movement.
“Here they are!” She flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the voluminous skirt of her black silk dress, and stepped forward to be nearer the doorway. The housemaids and the parlourmaid and the two men servants who stood behind her were content to remain where they were. Tyres grated on the gravel of the drive, and a couple of sleek black cars swept up to the entrance. A uniformed chauffeur alighted from the first, and held open the door for the Marques to alight.
Caroline was pleasantly surprised when she caught her first glimpse of him. He appeared to her to be a very slender man, elegantly attired in a light grey suit, and his hair was flecked with the same silvery grey. He had a flower in his buttonhole, and his expression was completely relaxed, his movements as lithe and careless as a very young man as he descended on to the drive and held out his hand to assist Ilse to alight, too. It was when she stood beside him on the drive, the deep gold of the westering sun pouring all about her, and her flower-pink dress and hat creating an illusion of a radiant pink camellia blown like a leaf from a tree, that Caroline felt the interest stir in the man who stood beside her. Dom Vasco uttered a slight sound, as if his surprise had to find some sort of a vent. And then he went forward quickly to welcome his kinsman and his guest.
Ilse de Fonteira came into the hall leaning on the arm of her host. It wasn’t that she needed assistance, but the Marques obviously expected her to submit to such close attention. She was laughing and protesting that she felt as fresh as when they started out, but the Marques declined to believe her. He handled her as if she was made of Dresden china, and Dom Vasco, escorting her on her other side, looked as if he was already convinced she was as fragile as blown glass, and was ready to proffer his own arm at any moment that it might be required.
Ilse cau
ght sight of Richard, and called out to him as if she had been thinking of nothing else but him since their parting on the ship.
“Why, darling, how wonderful to see you!” she exclaimed, with a slight break in her voice. Her fair face actually radiated mother-love. “And how is my little Dicky-boy?” she cooed, and deprived herself of the support of the Marques’s arm in order to take a few impulsive steps forward in the direction of her son.
Richard recoiled hastily—for never before had she called him ‘Dicky-boy,’ and never before had she looked at him quite like that—and came up against a slender pedestal supporting an exquisite bronze and very nearly overset it. But Ilse pounced as if she could no longer wait to get her arms about him, and he had to submit to some slightly frenzied kissing and listen to her exclaiming over him as if he was a baby, while the Marques de Fonteira stood looking on and beaming approval, and Dom Vasco seemed positively rooted to the spot by the spectacle, and unable to remove his eyes from Ilse and her glowing face and glorious, jewel-bright eyes. To say nothing of the rest of her enchanting pink figure.
At last the somewhat one-sided reunion was over, and Richard was presented to his great-uncle, who shook hands with him formally, but smiled at him in a faintly whimsical fashion out of a pair of extraordinarily attractive hazel-grey eyes. And then Caroline felt her hand held by the Marques, and the same hazel-grey eyes were subjecting her to an interested scrutiny, and Dom Vasco said something about Miss Worth doing a very good job looking after Ricardo.
Man of Destiny Page 7
