“It is too late now,” the Duke said without turning round. “But your father is alive.”
“For how long?”
The Duke turned.
“I would answer that question with optimism,” he said, “if I did not think that you may lessen his chances of survival by your own attitude.”
He had meant to startle the Princess and he succeeded.
“What do you mean?” she asked angrily.
“I mean,” he said, “that, as a Russian you are well aware that you are all extremely sensitive to other people’s feelings, their emotions and even their thoughts. I, who am not Russian but have Scottish blood, am vividly aware of your hatred and resentment of me. Do you really believe that kind of attitude is good for your father in his present state?”
For the first time since he had known her, the Princess lost her calm and became agitated.
“I-I don’t – understand what you are – trying to say.”
“That is not true!” the Duke retorted. “You are perfectly aware that just as I can sense your vibrations, your father is able to sense them too. What I am asking you to do is to give him hope and that means setting aside your own personal feelings, although, of course, you may not love him enough to do so.”
“Of course I love him!” the Princess cried. “I would die if it would make him well and prevent him from suffering as he has done these past years.”
“I am not asking you to die for him, but to live for him and you will find when you are as old as I am, it is a much more difficult thing to do.”
He saw as he spoke that the Princess was still perturbed.
Now she made a helpless little gesture with her hands.
“As I said at the beginning of this conversation,” he went on, “none of us can turn back the clock, but if you love your father you will help him. I think he needs to try to forget the tragic past by believing that there are still many years of interesting and enjoyable life ahead of you both.”
The Duke spoke sternly.
Then, as if she capitulated, the Princess said,
“What do you – want me to – do?”
“I want you to borrow the clothes you need to make yourself less conspicuous among my guests and join with Prince Ivan and Prince Alexander in spending some time with us until we reach Egypt.”
The Princess made an inarticulate little murmur, but the Duke continued,
“When we arrive in Alexandria, then we will talk together to see what can be done for your father without making me feel that I have to climb a snow-bound mountain if I wish to communicate with you.”
There was a note of laughter in the Duke’s voice as he said the last sentence and he thought there was just a flicker of response in the Princess’s eyes.
Then she said,
“If I ask you something – will you tell me the – truth?”
“Of course,” the Duke replied. “As it happens I always speak the truth!”
“Then – if we had just asked you to take us to Egypt without – demanding it in the way we did – would you have agreed?”
“Because I want to be completely honest with you,” the Duke answered after a moment’s pause, “I will reply that I might, if I had not realised the danger you were in, have given you money and left you to make your own arrangements.”
He thought the Princess was about to speak and when she did not, he went on,
“Owing perhaps to the dramatic manner in which Prince Ivan threatened me, I was not afraid, but I became aware that you were not only suffering from starvation but from the real danger of being murdered.”
“Even now I don’t – believe that we are – safe,” the Princess said in a low voice.
“But you are,” the Duke insisted, “and that is why your attitude seems rather ridiculous when you are a guest on my yacht and may I say very sincerely that I am delighted to have you!”
She looked at him searchingly as if she wished to be sure that this was true.
Then with a little sigh she said,
“Very well, Your Grace. To prevent you from being inconvenienced by my becoming ill I will accept the offer of Lady Radstock’s coat, but as you suggest I will pay for the privilege by mending anything that I am given either of hers or of anybody else’s.”
“Pride! Pride!” the Duke said. “When Sir Walter Scott wrote of ‘burning pride and high disdain’ he might have been thinking of you!”
The Princess raised her chin.
“You may mock at pride, Your Grace, but you forget it is the only thing I have left and therefore very precious.”
The Duke smiled.
“I understand that. At the same time, as I have already suggested, if you think of your father, pride could be harmful. What is needed is love.”
He was surprised at his own words as he said them, but they seemed to come to his mind.
The Princess rose to her feet and he knew that she was angry.
“If you are suggesting, Your Grace, that I do not love my father and am too selfish to put my own feelings aside for him, you are very much mistaken! I would do anything – anything to – restore him to health. But I will certainly consider what you have said very carefully in case there is some truth in your assertions.”
“I think you will find that I am right, as I usually am,” the Duke said in a lofty tone.
He thought she was about to argue with him, but instead she said,
“I think if Your Grace has now finished what you have to say, I should return to my father.”
“On one condition,” the Duke replied.
She waited looking at him a little uncertainly.
“First that you promise me that tomorrow you will go out on deck,” he said, “preferably about midday when the sun is at its warmest and secondly I am hoping that when you are more settled you will join my party for meals if not at any other time.”
“May I reply that I will think about it?” the Princess answered and moved towards the cabin door.
The Duke reached it before she did.
Then holding the handle he said,
“You are young. Try to remember that every day of your life is precious. Enjoy the moments that are pleasant and forget the rest.”
The Princess looked up at him, but she could not move because he did not open the door.
Then he said quietly,
“As I have said, you are young and also you are very beautiful. A great many women all over the world would be prepared to suffer a great deal for just those two precious attributes.”
For a moment she looked at him incredulously as if she felt that she had not heard him aright.
Then she turned her face away from him to stare at the door as if she willed him to open it for her.
He opened it. Then so swiftly that he was surprised, she had left him and vanished down the passageway.
The Duke was smiling as he went back to his cabin. He had the feeling that he had fought a complicated battle and been the victor.
Then, as he settled himself comfortably in one of the armchairs to think over what had been said, the cabin door opened and Dolly came in.
“I thought you were coming back to the Saloon, Buck,” she said reproachfully, before the Duke could rise.
“I intended to do so in a few minutes.”
“You have been away a long time,” she said, “and I saw the Princess coming away from here just now. I suppose she has been with you?”
“I have been talking to her about her father’s health.”
“Was that all?”
The Duke felt irritated by her attitude.
“The Princess has been through years of misery,” he said, “and in circumstances under which most women would collapse. I hope, Dolly, that you will be kind to her, for I think that all our Russian guests are greatly in need of kindness.”
“I don’t mind being ‘kind’ to her, as you call it, as long as you keep your hands off her.”
It was not the way she spoke, but what
she said that made the Duke think as he had never thought before, that Dolly had a common streak in her.
He always disliked it when a woman showed her jealousy too obviously.
Although it was an emotion he had grown used to since unfortunately women always loved him more than he loved them, he knew now that he was impatient and bored with Dolly’s possessive attitude.
“Do you want to stay here?” he asked, “or shall we go back to the Saloon?”
“I am prepared to stay here with you, alone,” Dolly replied, “and I would like you to pay me a great deal more attention than you have paid me these past twenty-four hours.”
The Duke, by the way she spoke, knew that she was piqued that he had not come to her cabin last night, as she expected.
He had actually been so delighted at having rescued the Grand Duke and his party that he found talking to the Princes with Harry and George was more attractive than she was.
They had sat up quite late and Prince Ivan had fascinated them with his tales of his adventures since 1918 when he had learned of the assassination of the Royal Family and known that the Grand Duke was on the list of those who were also to die.
The Prince related that they had moved from place to place getting poorer as the money they had with them was spent. Then they had been forced to sell off for very meagre sums the few jewels and other valuables they carried with them.
“It must have been very hard on the Princess,” Harry remarked.
“She was magnificent!” Prince Ivan replied. “She was only a child when we first started on our wanderings, but she had grown older and in circumstances which would have made most older women faint at the terror of it, apart from the discomfort.”
“Somehow she made it an adventure,” Prince Alexander reminisced, “but you can imagine that, as she grew older and became nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, she was always afraid that something might happen to us and she would be left alone.”
“It must have been an added problem,” Lord Radstock commented.
“A very big one,” Prince Ivan agreed. “There were always men who looked at her in a way that terrified me. Fortunately in some ways, she is still very young, in others she is as wise as Solomon.”
The two Princes looked at each other and smiled as if they shared a love for Militsa that was impossible to put into words.
Then George Radstock asked them more questions and they went on talking of their adventures.
When the Duke had finally gone to his own cabin, he knew that the Princes would fall asleep the moment their heads touched their pillows.
He had, however, lain awake for a long time going over the tales they had told and thinking that like horses with an Arab strain they had, because of their blood, their breeding and their intelligence, survived where other men would have collapsed.
At the back of his mind, he was aware that Dolly was waiting for him, but he was less interested in her than in what he had just heard and his own thoughts about it.
Now it suddenly struck him, almost like an iron door closing, that she no longer interested him at all.
Always before, her beauty had made him desire her physically even while many aspects of her character irritated him and he was aware that she was avaricious and greedy.
Yet when he held her in his arms nothing had seemed to matter, but that she excited him and when he desired her he could forget everything else.
Now he knew that whatever attraction she had had for him, it was finished. But he told himself uncomfortably that it was an unfortunate position to be in when they were a long way from home and it was difficult to escape from each other in the yacht.
Almost as if she sensed his feelings, Dolly came and sat on the arm of his chair and put her arms around his neck.
“I love you, Buck,” she said, “and I want you to love me. I resent these people intruding on our close intimate little party because it means that they prevent you and me from being alone together.”
The Duke forced himself to take her hand in his, but as he did so he had the unmistakable feeling he had no wish to touch her.
‘I must be mad!’ he told himself.
There had always in his varied love affairs been a ‘cooling off’ period before he finally admitted that his feelings had changed and the lady in question no longer attracted him.
But never, he thought, had he known a complete ‘shut-down’ without any warning and without giving him any time to think what he should do about it.
It flashed through his mind that perhaps he could send the whole party back from Alexandria by a different route.
There were always P. & O. Steamers en route from India in the harbour, on which he could book passages for them and he thought he might say he wished to go by himself on a safari or perhaps travel on to the Sudan.
But in the latter case he was quite sure that Dolly would insist on going with him.
“What is the matter, Buck?” she asked now. “Why are you so silent? I am worried about you.”
The Duke disentangled himself from her arms and rose to his feet.
“I think I must have a cold coming,” he said. “The winds are always treacherous at this time of the year.”
“I certainly don’t want a cold!” Dolly exclaimed. “If there is one thing that is really unbecoming, it’s a red nose!”
“Then you had better keep away from me.”
“Perhaps I will risk it,” she said after a moment’s pause.
She moved towards him, but the Duke had already reached the door.
“Let’s go and find the others,” he said. “We don’t want them to feel neglected.”
“Really, Buck, I have never heard anything so ridiculous – !” Dolly began.
Then, as the Duke was moving down the passageway, she was forced to follow him.
As she went, she thought angrily,
‘It’s these damned Russians who have changed everything! I wish to God they had stayed in their own country!’
Chapter Five
The Duke, watching the first rays of the sun sweeping away the darkness of the night, looked round from the bow to see that he was not the only person on deck.
Like a sportsman who sights a stag that he had been stalking for a long time he felt an irrepressible excitement as he realised that it was Princess Militsa who was walking towards the stern.
For the last few days he had veered between frustration and anger because, despite all he had said, she had not joined the party at meals or at other times.
He knew from Nancy Radstock that she had accepted the loan of an overcoat and other small necessities in return for needlework, which Nancy described as ‘absolutely fantastic’.
“I have never seen such tiny stitches or such exquisite work,” she told the Duke, “and I guessed before she told me that the Princess had been taught by a Frenchwoman who had been educated in a Convent.”
The Duke smiled.
It was fashionable amongst the aristocrats in St. Petersburg to employ French Governesses and Tutors for their children and the Czar and his Court always spoke to each other either in French or in English.
“At first I was only amused at her insistence on doing something for me if I lent her anything,” Nancy said, “but now I am delighted when something needs mending because she repairs it better than any shop or lady’s maid could ever do.”
At least, the Duke thought, the Princess was being sensible about that, but while he had hoped at every mealtime that she would join the party, she remained in her father’s cabin eating with him.
Moreover, whenever he visited the Grand Duke, which he did twice a day, she always left the cabin and did not return until after he had gone.
This meant that there was no chance of talking to her, but he was aware before Nancy pointed it out that her appearance was changing.
The good food, the rest and, he thought, freedom from anxiety except perhaps when she thought about the future, had taken away the look of strain and fear and there w
as no doubt that her face and, he suspected, her body too, was filling out.
‘She is very beautiful,’ he mused.
He found himself wondering what she would look like dressed in the latest fashion and laughing happily as Nancy and Dolly contrived to do even though Dolly was annoyed with him.
As he had continued to proclaim that he was developing a cold, he had managed to avoid intimate tête-à-têtes with Dolly, which he was certain would end in arguments and recriminations.
Because she thought it would make him jealous, she was indulging in an ostentatious flirtation with Prince Alexander, who was obviously captivated by her beauty and was only too willing to play any such part she assigned to him.
The Duke found himself spending more time than usual on the bridge or reading in his cabin.
He was not surprised when Dawkins had asked him if the Princess could borrow some of the books he had the yacht’s library.
“Her Serene Highness told me she be starved of literature,” Dawkins said, “and I told her that Your Grace could feed her with books as well as with food!”
“I am delighted for Her Serene Highness to have anything she requires from here,” the Duke replied. “Tell her that she can come and choose them at any time.”
He hoped the Princess would do so when he was there, but he might have guessed that she was clever enough to go to the library when he himself was either at luncheon or dinner.
The same, he found, applied to the fresh air that he had ordered her to take.
He thought at first that she was deliberately disobeying his instructions until he learnt that she had in fact borrowed Nancy’s coat, which made him aware that she took both air and exercise at times when she was not likely to encounter him.
The Duke had never before met a woman who was determined to avoid him, just as he had never met a woman who actively disliked him.
It made him feel strange when he thought about it and it also presented him with a challenge that he found irresistible.
He knew how grateful the Princes were for the way he had saved them and the Grand Duke thanked him every time they talked together.
But Princess Militsa was made of different material.
By now he was determined to break down the barriers that she had erected and make her realise that, however much she might in theory hate the English, he was different.
Princes and Princesses: Favourite Royal Romances Page 82
