An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (76 page)

As she thought of what lay ahead, her eyes narrowed and a smile twisted her lips. She looked evil at that moment, but after a while, as her thoughts wandered back into the past, her eyes softened, as invariably they did when she thought of Alice – Alice who had been the one thing she had loved in her life. How different her rest would be tonight in the big comfortable bed awaiting her from what it had been when she had come here last with Alice! Then they had arrived battered and bruised from their journey from Nice, but they had been greeted with cries of excitement and a loving welcome from the aunt and cousins with whom they had come to stay.

Emilie had never met them before, those nephews and nieces of her mother’s and her own first cousins, and she had not expected such a warm greeting or such a sincere one when she had written to ask if she and Alice might visit them for a month or so. She had almost expected a refusal in reply to her letter despite the fact that Marie had spoken of Louise as being her favourite sister.

Aunt Louise had indeed taken them to her ample bosom, and her family of six boys and four girls had been none the less generous in their efforts at hospitality. Emilie had always been inclined to be superior and standoffish with her French relatives, for she liked to remember that her father was an Englishman. She had also when she was quite young been aware of her own illegitimacy and felt aggressively self-conscious that this stood as a barrier between her and her mother’s family. But in actual fact she need not have worried herself on this score. The Riguad family accepted the result of Marie’s courtship with the young Englishman as philosophically as they accepted a bad lambing season or a storm which did damage to the crops.

It was a pity, but there was nothing to be done about it, they would aver with a shrug of their shoulders, and they were far more awkward with Emilie because she had a sharp tongue and they felt that her English blood made her despise them than because they had any inclination to cast aspersions upon her parentage.

Just as her grandfather, old Louis Riguad, had accepted philosophically and without reproach the irregularities of Marie’s love affair and eventually Emilie’s own arrival at the farm, so the rest of the family had looked upon it as part of the inscrutable ways of Providence.

If anything, they were rather proud of Emilie’s connection with a distinguished English family, especially after John Wytham brought Alice to Brittany. Alice was a true aristocrat, the Riguads told themselves. They all learned of her arrival at the farm in the extraordinary way that news travels among families without the aid of the written word, and they knew too that she was the result of John Wytham’s marriage with a lady of his own class.

That the child of such a union should be brought to Marie Riguad’s home to be brought up by her was a compliment to the whole Riguad family. If Emilie had feared that she and Alice might prove unwelcome at Monaco, her mind was set at rest within a few minutes of her arrival.

Talking excitedly, gesticulating and striving to point out all the possible objects of interest at the same time as they asked questions about the journey, the Riguad family bore Emilie and Alice off down the hill to their home. It was a noisy, triumphant procession and Alice, white-faced and fair, walking in the midst of the dark haired and dark skinned Riguads, looked like a creature from another world.

The Riguads’ home was an old-fashioned shack, almost on the shore itself, but as their aunt and uncle explained, they were lucky to have that, although it meant a long way for the boys to walk to where they could graze the goats. The peasants’ houses in Monaco were few and in very bad repair. How could they be anything else when the whole Principality was impoverished and there seemed to be no possible way of improving conditions?

The Princess Caroline, wife of Florestan I, it was true, had tried to introduce lace making and the manufacture of perfumes among the industries of the Peninsula. There was also flower growing and the distillation of alcohol, but none of these seemed to be very successful and as communication with the outside world was so difficult it was easier in most cases to remain poor and hungry, but happy and lazy in the sunshine.

Certainly Emilie and Alice had been happy in the Riguads’ ramshackle house by the sea. Alice’s cough, the reason for which the whole journey had been undertaken, began to get better. It appeared regularly every winter when the raw winds swept across the flat plains of Brittany and the damp mists lay over the ground in the early morning.

Her face, too, lost that white pinched look and her laugh rang out more frequently. In Emilie’s eyes at any rate she seemed to assume a new beauty. Yes, they had been happy in those spring days nineteen years ago until something happened, something which even now Emilie could not remember without clenching her hands, without feeling the slow dull anger rise within her, virulent and malignant. She could see it all happening so clearly.

Alice in her blue frock, which matched the blue of her eyes, had taken the youngest Riguad child, a baby of two, up to the top of the rock to look at the Palace. Alice had been attracted by the Palace. She had never known much about Princes and Kings, for in the past eight years in Brittany people had seldom mentioned such exalted personages.

Now the Palace and its encircling walls and the high battlements appeared to fascinate her. It was her favourite walk. She would climb from the shore to the top of the rock to sit there and look at the Palace, watching the soldiers go in and out and occasionally seeing Prince Florestan come driving past, his carriage drawn by a pair of magnificent white horses.

Occasionally, too, she would look at the only other great building on the Peninsula. It was called a
Chateau
, but to Alice it, too, appeared to be a Palace. It reminded her somewhat strangely of her grandfather’s house in England. It was of grey stone with one great tower in the centre of it, and there were wrought iron gates surmounted by crowns opening on to the road. Although the garden was filled with flowers and fountains it had a grandeur which in itself held for Alice an inexplicable attraction.

It was here, they told her, that the Grand Duke Ivan of Russia lived. A friend of the reigning Prince, he had built the
Chateau
about six years earlier. He had meant it to serve him as an occasional holiday residence when he visited his friend, the Prince of Monaco. But when it was completed, he found the climate and the house itself so much to his liking that he stayed on almost indefinitely, returning to Russia at very infrequent intervals and every year adding to the size of his
Chateau
until it looked as if it would eventually be larger and more impressive than the Palace itself.

‘What is he like, the Grand Duke?’ Alice had asked.

‘He is tall and very handsome,’ someone replied, ‘but now he is sad, for his wife, a lovely Russian lady, has died. The cold in Russia was too intense for her. They went back, it is said, because the Czar wished them to be present at a Court Ball, but it was cold, very cold, and the Grand Duchess caught a chill. She grew worse and worse, and not all the Doctors in Russia could save her.’

‘Oh, poor thing!’ Alice exclaimed. ‘So now the Grand Duke is alone?’

‘Not entirely,’ she was told. ‘The Grand Duchess left behind her little baby, Prince Nikolai. He is two years old, a dear little boy, and always he lives here because if he goes to Russia the Grand Duke is afraid that the cold will kill him too – poor little motherless babe.’

Emilie could remember how interested Alice had become in the widowed Grand Duke and his little son. Day after day she used to go up to the top of the rock to look at the
Chateau d’Horizon
where the Duke lived. And then it happened.

The Duke’s carriage, coming swiftly and unexpectedly along the dusty track which served the Peninsula as a road, nearly ran down the Riguad baby, little Thérése. Just in time Alice was able to snatch her from under the horses’ hoofs, but she stood there white and shaken while the baby screamed in terror. The carriage was drawn to a standstill and the Grand Duke himself descended to speak to Alice and to reassure the frightened baby.

No one else was present and no one ever knew exactly what he said or what Alice replied, but she must have told him of her interest in his house and perhaps how it reminded her of her grandfather’s mansion in England, for the next day the Duke’s carriage called at the Riguads’ shack to take Alice to the
Chateau
. It was only when the carriage arrived that Alice related what had happened the day before, and before Emilie, dumbfounded and astonished, could make any protestation, she had driven off alone.

If Emilie was speechless then, she was certainly not speechless when Alice returned. She took her out on to the shore, for there was little privacy to be found in the Riguad household, and she extracted from her the whole story of her meeting with the Grand Duke. Word by word she learned all that had taken place that afternoon at the
Chateau
.

‘He is very kind,’ Alice kept saying, ‘and his little son is so sweet.’

That is not the point,’ Emilie insisted. ‘Why did he ask you?’

‘He wanted to show me his
Chateau
.’

‘And why should he want to show you his house? He has friends of his own class.’

Alice merely looked at her.

‘I think I am his friend,’ she said quietly.

It was then that Emilie had raved at her, speaking brutally as she had never spoken in all the eight years that they had lived together.

She told Alice what she knew already, that her father had never married Marie Riguad. She told her how her grandfather had come and fetched him away back to England, promising a sum of money for the unborn child which Marie expected, but forgetting either deliberately or inadvertently to send it.

‘It was to have been my dowry,’ Emilie said, ‘but do you think it would have been any help to me, born between two worlds, half of noble blood and half of peasant stock? The men who wanted me were like dirt, and the ones I might have liked considered that I was beneath them.’

‘Poor Emilie,’ Alice said simply, but Emilie had known that she had not understood.

Driven by her own fear she added,

‘That is what will happen to you, and to the child you may have if you persist in making friends with men like the Grand Duke. He will never be anything to you. He knows where you are staying and that we, the Riguads, are your relations. Can you imagine that someone like that will offer you marriage? No, he is interested in you because you are pretty, because you are young. There are thousands of women of his own world only too ready to marry him should he but say the word. A man like that is not concerned with marriage. You are not to see him again, do you hear me?’

Emilie had spoken passionately and somehow it was infinitely frightening that Alice did not answer her. Instead she sat staring out to sea, her eyes almost as blue as the water on which they rested.

‘
Do you hear me?
’ Emilie repeated.

Alice had turned her face towards her then,

‘Yes, I hear you.’

‘And you will obey me?’ Emilie insisted. ‘It is understood, Alice, that you are not to see him again, you are not to accept any other invitations to the
Chateau d’Horizon
.’

But still Alice did not answer. Emilie was certain, though, that she would not disobey. She had never had any trouble with Alice, who had always been very obedient.

Then Fate had taken a hand, or so it seemed later to Emilie. The very next day brought a letter from the farm. Marie Riguad was ill. She had fallen down and broken her leg and Emilie must return at once.

For a moment she contemplated taking Alice with her, and then she thought that such a precaution was ridiculous. They had only just arrived, the change and warm sunshine had already done Alice good. It would be cruel to take her back, to drag her away to the north, to subject her to the bitter March winds and storms of Brittany which invariably left her weak and listless.

Emilie decided to go alone, but before she went she spoke to Alice once again about the Grand Duke.

‘He has doubtless forgotten about you by now,’ she said, ‘but in case an invitation comes, you are to refuse it. Do you understand? You are not to show yourself near his house either, but stay here on the shore. As soon as mother is better, I will return for you.’

Emilie had left. She could remember driving away over the rough road, leaning out of the window waving, waving until Alice was lost to sight. It had been that last picture which was to haunt Emilie now on her first night in the
Hôtel de Paris.
Alice with the sun on her face, her head thrown back, her fair hair glinting like a halo round her head, the wheels of the coach drawing them further and further apart.

She must have dreamt of Alice too lying in the big room on the warm, comfortable mattress, for when she awoke she heard her own voice whispering, ‘Alice, Alice!’

It seemed to start the day all wrong, and Mistral found her very cross at breakfast.

‘Oh, Aunt Emilie,’ Mistral cried. ‘This is the loveliest place in the whole world. I had no idea the sea could be so blue.’

‘Come and eat your breakfast, Mistral,’ Emilie said sharply, ‘and stop running in and out of the balcony. I spoke to you about it last night.

‘But, Aunt Emilie, surely you don’t mind today? We are going out, aren’t we?’

Emilie made up her mind.

‘No, Mistral, we are not. You are staying here and in these rooms until dinner time, then you shall make an appearance.’

‘But, Aunt Emilie – ’

There was no reproach, just utter consternation in the young voice.

‘Now, Mistral, do not argue. I have told you that you must obey me, that I have my reasons for whatever decisions I make.’

‘But not to go out, our first day in Monte Carlo!’

Emilie’s lips tightened.

‘We are staying here for some time. Tomorrow we will inspect the place, not that I imagine there is a great deal to see. Today we shall not appear until the hour for dinner.’