Jorja listened as Renzo discussed the wine list with the wine waiter; they spoke in French and she realised how much more of the world her husband knew. How naive he must secretly find her, the girl from the rectory as he had called her.
Even when Angelica had first gone to London she had already taken on a knowing air and had managed to make her outfit look stylish. Oh yes, they looked alike but under the skin they had nothing in common.
'How many languages do you speak?' she asked Renzo, when the waiter went to fetch their wine.
'Several.' His smile was enigmatic. 'Are you impressed?'
She shrugged. 'It's no more than I expect and it somehow makes your streak of ruthlessness seem all the more dangerous. You are carrying out a vendetta, aren't you?'
'Am I?' He raised an eyebrow, a man of distinction in his black and white evening wear; a man who could converse in fluent French and hide his true self from everyone.
'You're rather like those men of the Medici times, aren't you, Renzo?' The age-old pride was there in his features, yet as always it was impossible to know what he was thinking as he regarded her from across the circular table for two, where at the centre a single red rose was arranged in a slim vase.
'You think I carry a stiletto up my sleeve?' A smile came and went at the side of his handsome mouth.
'You carry one in your heart,' she rejoined, and her eyes dwelt with a blue gravity on his face. 'I know it's useless to reason with you, you'll do whatever you need to do in order to satisfy your sense of injustice—but what about mine? Don't you have the least stab of conscience where I'm concerned?'
'Don't you have the least bit of gratitude for being rescued from a life of drudgery? Did your father ever thank you, Jorja, for your servitude to him and his stony house of prayer?' Renzo spread his hands in a very Italian way. 'I doubt if he noticed you as a daughter until I came and took you away from him.'
His words were a bitter pill to swallow and Jorja felt choked by them. 'How could you know my feelings, or my father's? We understood each other before you came and interfered in our lives.'
'His life was well served by you.' Renzo's gaze was upon the soft quivering of her underlip. 'You fetched and carried without a murmur, and allowed him to regard your sister as the paragon of the family. You have a foolishly giving heart, cara.'
'It's stone where you're concerned.' She firmed her chin and despised those treacherous tears at the backs of her eyes, hot and aching to be released. Oh God, what could be more humiliating than to break down in tears in the dining-room of Duke's!
'Si, a stone in your breast.' His eyes made a lazy motion across her figure, where the fine silk showed the shape of her without clinging. 'Believe me, I know what that feels like. Do you imagine I was untouched by pain when my sister-in-law showed me the letters which Stelvio had received from your sister? He should have burned them but I imagine their content was a titillation he couldn't resist. The last thing he should have done was to keep them at home where Monica stood a chance of discovering them.'
Renzo shrugged. 'It would seem that love makes fools of us all—blind fools!'
'All the same,' Jorja bit her lip, as if to punish that quiver he couldn't help noticing, 'I'd done nothing to warrant what you've done to me.'
'You look at me as if I am the Marquis de Sade who has put you in chains with the intention of torturing you, a la Justine.'
'I've never read filth,' Jorja said scornfully.
'You read Angelica's letters.'
Jorja felt her skin go ice-white. 'You're pitiless, that's what you are, Renzo.'
'Maybe so.' He shrugged as if her opinion of him didn't worry him unduly. 'Revenge may well be wicked but the impulse is a very natural one.'
'Unnatural in your case,' she retorted. 'You're taking out your spite on me.'
'Ah, but when have I been spiteful to you, donna?' His eyes were faintly mocking. 'When I've laid hands upon you, it has been to feel the silkiness of your skin.'
'T-that's what I mean --'
'What do you mean?' He leaned forward and fingered the petals of the flower between them. 'Come, tell me that when I touch you, you feel nothing at all. I think you do, cara. I think you are an untried girl of twenty-two, with feelings that want to come alive, so what is so bad that they come alive in my arms?'
'Without any love?' She looked at him in almost a shocked way.
'Santo Dio, I find it hard to believe that you are a young woman of this century,' he softly laughed. 'Time must have stood still in Duncton and made of you the last of the virgins.'
This time she flushed to the roots of her fair hair. 'You're like those brutes in the story of the Sabine women,' she breathed.
'How many things I am.' He assumed a look of mock despair. 'Every rogue in the history books except a husband.'
'Some husband!'
'Some wife, which makes us a pair well-matched.'
'As a rabbit and a rattlesnake.'
'A divine comparison, my dear.'
'Don't mention it.' She smiled her sweetest at the waiter who served her sole with mushrooms, which looked so appetising that Jorja could barely wait for their wine to be poured, a Riesling which she hoped wouldn't clash with the rosi champagne due to be served with her duck. Oh well, if the rich food and the rare wines made her billious, then she would have the perfect excuse for eluding Renzo's later intentions.
'Wonderful sole,' she murmured. 'It melts in the mouth.'
'I can see that you relish the food,' he drawled.
She ate a delicious piece of mushroom and felt pleased with herself for being able to prod him on a nerve now and again. She sipped wine, buttered crusty knobs of bread, and left only the bones on her plate. 'That was good, madam?' Their waiter gave her an approving look.
'Yes, thank you.' She twisted the stem of her wine glass about in her fingers and felt slightly embarrassed. She had eaten the fish as if she were starving, but Sandbourne was that kind of a place, the air had always been marvellous and she had taken that solitary walk along the foreshore. Oh, that walk and those resolves which Renzo had brushed aside as if they were fluff on his sleeve.
Jorja moved her gaze about the dining-room, noticing how other women were so relaxed and self-assured, as if they never looked inside themselves, nor ever questioned their right to all this grandeur, all this perfectly cooked and perfectly served food. She didn't feel like one of these people, even though her dress was of real silk and her jewels were genuine. She was aware of her own simplicity and it made the huge dining-room seem like a theatre, the other diners so many actors playing parts in a stage production.
A woman laughed and the sound was so artificial that it made Jorja want to run away again, before life with Renzo Talmonte turned her into a shallow creature who lived only for luxury and who paid for it with a body whose feelings were of marble rather than flesh.
'What a very pensive expression you wear, Jorja.'
'I was thinking --'
'Obviously.'
'Do you admire the kind of women in this dining-room?'
'What answer am I supposed to give you?' Something intent had come into his Latin eyes. 'Are you fishing for a compliment, cara? Do you want me to compare a rose to a bunch of painted lilies?'
Her eyes widened upon his face, their pupils so expanded that the irises were rings of clearest blue. 'Y-you see it too, don't you?'
'What do I see?'
'The play-acting.'
'Isn't life a stage and people the players? Didn't Shakespeare say so?'
'But don't you see, Renzo, I can never fit into your life. I can never be the mistress of your smart house in London—I'm all wrong for the part you want me to play a-and you must let me go!'
'Povero me, are we back to that?' A sudden flash of deadly anger lit his eyes. 'You had six weeks in which to approach your father with the truth but you chose to let him go on living with the deceit. Is that really what you want to live again, being made to feel the drab housekeeper while your
sister is constantly adored as the glittering prize of the family?'
Renzo tossed back some wine. 'If you want that, Jorja, then you must be a glutton for punishment!'
Slowly she lowered her gaze and absorbed his words. They held a certain truth, for there had been that six-week interval before the wedding in which she could have told her father ... everything. Each day she had tried to find the courage, and each night she had lain awake and felt the courage die. She couldn't let him read those letters in which Angelica had described in vivid detail her lovemaking with a man who had a wife and a child. She had made constant references to Stelvio as a married man, and that he owed it to her to discard his wife and child.
Finally, he had done so, and that in itself would have been shock enough for the Reverend Michael, who all his life had preached that constancy was the foundation stone of an abiding marriage.
'Don't cry,' Renzo spoke half-mockingly. 'Not when you have half the men in this room looking at you with such admiration. They'll think me a black-hearted brute.'
'You are, and you won't catch me crying over you.' But a huskiness in her voice was a betrayal of the inner turmoil which she felt. 'I—I can do without your sarcasm, Renzo.'
'Is that what it is?'
'I'm not so country-bred that I don't know when someone's being funny at my expense.' She averted her gaze from him. 'There's a double meaning in everything you say—we have a saying in the country, don't trust a black-browed man.'
'We have a saying in my country, never pluck a green fig.' His eyes narrowed thoughtfully beneath his black brows. 'Perhaps I should wait until you ripen before I do any plucking.'
Jorja's nerves jarred at his words. 'What do you mean?'
'How green you are that you don't guess what I mean.'
He was wrong, she had guessed and it seemed hardly possible that Renzo would stay his hand and deny himself the full satisfaction of his vendetta. 'You're only playing cat and mouse with me, Renzo, and I don't intend to be taken in by you.'
'Do you imagine I can't resist your charms, Jorja?'
'I doubt if you can resist getting your value from every pound you've spent on me,' she rejoined.
'What a mercenary remark, my dear.'
'I'm not your dear, and you seem to forget that I spent years making the most of a parson's salary. Now and again a parishioner would give us a few eggs or a chicken and it was like manna from heaven.'
'I realise there have been hardships, Jorja.'
'You can't realise.' Her eyes strayed over his impeccable jacket and the gleaming studs in the cuffs of his shirt. 'Even if the wealth ran out in your family there was still the trust fund which you told me about, which enabled you to have a full education. I barely had time to study my schoolwork. My mother died and someone had to keep things from falling apart at the rectory.'
Jorja gave a shrug. 'Not that I'm complaining. I never had my sister's ambitious nature, and I felt it was enough to be needed.'
'Now you no longer feel needed, eh?'
She couldn't read his face, or tell if he was being ironic, and in the pause between them, their waiter wheeled a trolley to the side of the table on which reposed a succulent joint of beef. As the beef was being carved for Renzo, Jorja's duck was served by a boyish-looking waiter whose gaze seemed mesmerised by her necklace. Finally the food was ready on their plates, and Jorja ate her dinner in a thoughtful mood.
Renzo's words about the green fig kept going through her mind. Had he decided not to treat her like a wife? There wasn't a scrap of affection between them, and it seemed to Jorja that to be taken without love was as sordid as being a bought woman.
As she lifted her glass of rose champagne she gave Renzo a surreptitious look. He was eating his meal with a deliberate kind of enjoyment, and he had decided to share the champagne of her choice. How well he fitted into the ambience of Duke's, whose embellishments had sustained their style through the changing decades, the modern world kept firmly outside its windows and doors. It had been designed for men such as Renzo, who had the taste and looks of days gone by.
Jorja was uncertain of herself, and she dismissed his notion that other men in the room were regarding her with admiration. He wasn't dining with Angelica who had always had an immediate effect on those around her, whereas Jorja neither sought nor expected to be the centre of attention.
Renzo's remark seemed like wishful thinking to Jorja. One more sign that he wanted Angelica with him ... as he had believed her to be, as constant in her ways as she was lovely in her looks.
'We should drink a toast,' he said, raising his own glass. 'Shall we drink to the future, or will you accuse me of being sarcastic?'
She flushed slightly. 'What kind of a future is it going to be, Renzo?'
'What kind would you like it to be, Jorja?'
'I—I don't know—a lot of it is up to you, isn't it?'
'You prefer to be an ornament in my house rather than a possession, eh?'
'At least a—guest.'
'A guest!' The irony in his voice was mirrored by his eyes. 'I think my staff will find it just a trifle odd if the Signora Talmonte behaves as if she is on a visit to me. I think you may have to try and look as if you live with me.'
Jorja took a quick, steadying sip of her champagne. 'Then you do mean to—to regard our marriage as simply a contrivance? You did say, didn't you, Renzo, that it would act as a barrier against Angelica should she—want to come back to you?'
'A mariage de convenance, as the French say.' He took a deep swallow of his champagne. 'It would be tantamount to rape if I did anything else, and what could be more pathetic than a lame man chasing a reluctant bride around the bedroom?'
'I—I don't like to hear you use that word --'
'Rape?' he queried, pitching his voice down low.
'No.' Her eyes couldn't quite meet his. 'I—I don't think of you as lame—the weakness in your leg is barely noticeable, and I dare say most people relate your walking stick to your air of distinction.'
He was silent when she said that, and Jorja held her breath. He was surely going to say something with a sting in it, but instead he went on with his dinner, his smooth black head bent to his plate. He was truly an enigma and Jorja decided not to try and fathom his personality. At least he wasn't going to demand that they share a bed... after all, she was but the mirror-image of Angelica ... she was the shadow and not the substance of his desire.
Jorja liked him much better now she didn't have to think of him as a lover.
'Have you left a little room for dessert?' he asked.
She nodded and had vanilla ice-cream topped by a delicious strawberry sauce. He had cheese and biscuits, and Jorja wondered if she could regard him as a sort of guardian. He was very clever and she might improve her education in his company.
When they left the dining-room Jorja's heart felt lighter, and she could hear music drifting along a corridor with marble columns. Their intention had been to sit in the lounge where coffee was being served, but when she heard the music, and the unmistakable shuffle of dancing feet, Jorja caught at Renzo's arm and asked if they could watch the dancing for a while.
He glanced down quizzically at her eager face. 'As you wish, donna, but you may not be content just to watch and I can't be your dancing partner.'
'I can't dance either,' she said, but this wasn't strictly true. There had been the occasional hop at Duncton's village hall and as the rector's daughter she had always been involved.
When they walked in where the music was being played, Jorja smiled a little as she compared Duke's ballroom with Duncton's village hall. Brilliant chandeliers hung from the ceiling and there were groups of chairs arranged in elegant arcades all around the room.
'I feel as if time has stood still,' she smiled. 'As if we're Edwardians.'
'But the band is playing a foxtrot,' Renzo said drily, 'and the music is by Jerome Kern, perhaps the most popular writer of songs who ever lived.'
'You know a lot about music, don't you
, signoresco?' Her mood was so much lighter, and it was hard to believe that she had wanted the rich food and the unaccustomed wine to make her ill. Perhaps the champagne had gone to her head.
'I expect I do.' He raised his hand slightly as a waiter looked into the ballroom to see if a guest required coffee, or perhaps a brandy. The waiter made his discreet way to Renzo's side and took his order for coffees with cognac.
'Napoleon, if you have it.'
'Yes, sir.'
As Jorja sat down in one of the brocade-seated chairs she reflected to herself that she had never seen manners quite like Renzo's, so unstudied and certain. When he sat down in the companion chair she found her gaze resting on his left leg. What did a leg look like after every bone had been so badly broken that the surgeon had wanted to amputate?
Renzo's mother had refused to allow the operation, and quite suddenly Jorja wanted to ask him if his mother was still alive. But it was somehow a personal question and she decided against it.
'What is that tune they're playing?' she asked instead.
'A Fine Romance,' he replied, in a dry tone of voice. 'Quite appropriate, wouldn't you say?'
'Is it?' She looked at him in a questioning way.
'Obviously you've never heard the lyrics.' His lips twitched with amusement. 'It's a romance sans kisses, in which the boy laments that the girl is cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes and he might as well play bridge with his old maid aunt. The girl won't nestle, nor will she wrestle—in short, the romance hasn't got a chance.'
'Like ours?' Jorja murmured.
'Just like ours—grazie.' Renzo took his coffee and cognac from the waiter, and Jorja felt herself being very careful as she took her own. The music died away but the words as quoted by Renzo remained in her mind ... so curiously apt.
The couples out on the floor returned to their seats, and bursts of conversation and laughter took the place of the music until it struck up again.
'Would you mind, sir, if I danced with the young lady?' a voice enquired.
Jorja came out of her thoughts and saw standing in front of Renzo a young man with athletic shoulders, his fingers at his bow-tie as he met her startled gaze.
The Honeymoon Page 5
