Bewitched (Bantam Series No. 16) (5 page)

The Marquis considered a moment.

“I should think about five pounds would cover it, Hobley. Ask Mr. Graystone for the money.”

“I will, M’Lord. When shall we see Your Lordship again?”

“I have no idea,” the Marquis replied. “The Season is at its height, Hobley, and I am sure you would not wish me to miss any of the endless extravagant and exhausting entertainments which take place night after night.”

The Marquis spoke sarcastically, then smiled almost apologetically at the old servant who he knew had loved him since he was a child.

“Anything wrong, Master Fabius?” Hobley asked.

It was a question that seemed to the Marquis to have echoed all down the years. It was always Hobley who had understood if things went awry or if he was upset.

“No, Hobley, not really,” he said quietly. “It is just that Captain Collington and I were saying only last night we are getting older. Things do not seem as amusing as they were when I was young.”

“You’re still young enough to enjoy yourself, M’Lord,” Hobley said with a twinkle in his eye, “and if Your Lordship takes my advice you won’t waste one minute of the years as they pass.”

“Are you having regrets about your own lost youth?” the Marquis enquired.

“No, M’Lord, I’ve no regrets, and that’s something I pray that Your Lordship’ll never have. In my experience there’s always something to look forward to and there’s always adventures when we least expect them.”

“You have cheered me up, Hobley!”

The Marquis was smiling as he walked across the Hall and ordered his Phaeton to be brought round immediately.

No-one was more surprised than the Marquis to find himself a week later travelling the same road from London to call on Eurydice.

He had expected to see her at the Duchess of Devonshire’s Ball, and he had searched for her during the next four nights at Assemblies, Balls and dinner parties given by their mutual friends, to which he was quite sure she had been invited.

But there was no sign of her and, as the Duke of Severn was also missing, it was not difficult to imagine where they could both be found.

He had confided to no-one that he was waiting for Eurydice’s answer to his proposal of marriage, but his friend, Charles Collington, was aware that he was restless and unusually inattentive and uninterested in the succession of parties they attended.

“What is the matter, Fabius?” he asked. “You are like a bear with a sore head!”

“I will tell you about it later,” the Marquis promised.

“Jethro has not been up to his tricks again?” Charles asked suspiciously.

“If he has, it was as ineffectual as the falling masonry from my roof!” the Marquis said.

“I hardly think that is a joking matter,” Charles Collington replied severely.

“As a matter of fact it is not,” the Marquis said. “I had the roof inspected the following day and the stonemason I employed informed me that it was quite impossible for such a large piece of the parapet to have broken away accidentally.”

“You mean—as we suspected—it was deliberate?” Charles Collington asked incredulously.

“I was thinking,” the Marquis said, “how it would have been quite easy for someone to have hidden in the garden in the centre of the Square. Then when I appeared in the doorway—with the lights behind me—they had only to signal to whoever was on the roof.”

“That of course is exactly what happened!” Charles Collington exclaimed. “It was just fortunate that you turned back to speak to Burton.”

“Very fortunate!” the Marquis agreed.

“Well, for God’s sake—be careful!”

“How can I?” the Marquis asked irritably. “If I have to go about with an armed guard, stay at home, or live eternally on the alert expecting to be poisoned, shot at or struck to the ground—all I can say is—let Jethro try and get it over!”

“If we had taken up that attitude where Bonaparte was concerned, we would have lost the war!”

The Marquis was about to make some quite heated reply, when he burst out laughing.

“I cannot allow you, Charles,” he said, “to compare Jethro with Napoleon! It is giving him an undue importance!”

“I never thought it mattered if a man was important or not, if it was his gun which blew a piece of lead through me,” Charles Collington retorted, and for a moment the Marquis had no reply.

Driving to the country now, he thought he had taken an unwise step in his effort to circumvent Jethro’s plan for securing the inheritance for himself.

He knew, if he was honest with himself, that he did not really wish to marry Eurydice.

In theory it had seemed a good idea. In practice he knew they had no chance of real happiness together and little hope of even getting on reasonably well.

He was quite sure that the reason Eurydice had sent for him was to tell him that Severn had not proposed as she had expected, and she was therefore willing to become the Marchioness of Ruckley.

It had seemed, as he had told her, a practical and sensible idea and one that could be a surprise to neither of them.

But when he thought of Eurydice being permanently at his side either in London or at Ruckley House, the Marquis knew that never had his freedom seemed more attractive.

However what had been done could not be undone. He had offered Eurydice marriage, and if she accepted him he must put a good face on it.

It was with a sense of depression and an ominous feeling of foreboding that the Marquis stepped down outside the pillared portico of Eurydice’s house and was ushered with due ceremony into the Drawing-Room where she was waiting for him.

He could not help appreciating that she was looking exceedingly lovely. The sunshine haloed her fair hair as she turned from the window and as she moved towards him with a smile he thought he had never seen her face more radiant.

“You have come, Fabius! I am so glad to see you!”

The Marquis raised her hand to his lips.

“I am honoured by such a warm welcome,” he said in his deep voice.

“You must forgive me for dragging you away from London for the second time,” Eurydice said, “but what I have to say is of the utmost importance.”

The Marquis drew in his breath and waited for the blow to fall. “Shall we sit down?” Eurydice suggested.

She indicated a chair with her hand and as the Marquis settled himself she sat down on the sofa.

“I have much to tell you, Fabius, but I will start with what is most important to you.”

The Marquis nodded his head.

His eyes were on her face and he thought that she was in fact in a completely different mood from the one in which he had last seen her.

“I have first to ask you,” Eurydice said, “if you will take over this Estate and run it with your own?”

“But of course. That is understood,” the Marquis replied. “It would be a waste of time and money for us both to employ separate Managers, Overseers and Agents. It will just be a question of which of our employees are the most dependable.”

Eurydice smiled.

“What I am really saying, perhaps not very clearly, is that later I may sell you the Estate, but at the moment I would rather that you ran it for me. You can rent it if you would prefer.”

The Marquis looked at her in a puzzled way.

“I do not understand.”

“Why should you?” Eurydice asked and she gave a little sigh.

It seemed to be an expression of almost rapturous satisfaction.

“I am going away, Fabius, and I cannot just leave the Estate with no-one to look after it. It would seem a betrayal of my home.”

“Going away?” the Marquis repeated. “Are you telling me that you have accepted Severn?”

“No, I refused him.”

The Marquis was very still.

“Then...”

“I am to be married,” Eurydice said quickly, “but not to the Duke, nor to you.”

“There is someone else?” the Marquis asked incredulously, “but who?”

“Someone of whom you have never heard,” Eurydice replied. “His name is Silas Wingdale.”

The Marquis raised his eyebrows.

“Silas Wingdale?” he repeated. “Who the devil is he?”

Eurydice jumped to her feet and she was laughing.

“I thought you would be astonished,” she said. “He is an American. He lives in Virginia and I love him! Yes, I love him! And so I am going to marry him, Fabius.”

“Are you telling me the truth?” the Marquis asked in astonishment.

“I do not care a fig for the Ducal strawberry leaves or the Ruckley diamonds or any of the things you thought were so important to me,” Eurydice said in an ecstatic voice. “I am in love as I have never been in love for years! Not since I first knew poor Beaugrave. But this is different! Silas is older and he loves me in a very different way. In fact being with him is like reaching Heaven itself!”

The Marquis put his hand up to his forehead.

“Are you quite certain this is not just a joke?” he asked. “You are serious, Eurydice?”

“I have never been more serious in my life,” she answered. “Silas and I are to be married quietly tomorrow morning and then we are taking a ship to America from Plymouth and Heaven knows if I shall ever return to this country.”

“Do you know what you are letting yourself in for, or the sort of place where you are going to live?” the Marquis asked.

“I have seen sketches of Silas’s house and it is delightful. Very like a large English manor, for that matter. But it would not matter to me if he lived in a shack. I love him, Fabius, and he loves me! That is more important than anything else ... but I have only just realised it!”

It was an hour later that the Marquis, still feeling bemused and astonished by what he had heard, drove his horses to his own house.

He could hardly credit that anyone, least of all Eurydice, would throw up everything which before had seemed important in life to set off across the ocean with a man of whom she knew little, though in her eyes he seemed endowed with all the virtues.

The Marquis had in fact argued with her, and asked her at least to delay her marriage and her departure until her friends had a chance to meet Silas Wingdale.

“It would not matter what you said about him so why should I delay my marriage?” Eurydice asked, with a touch of her old aggressiveness. “I am not asking you to marry him, Fabius, so whatever your opinion might be, it is of no consequence.”

Then she had reached up her hand to touch the Marquis’s cheek.

“When you fall in love, as you undoubtedly will one day,” she said softly, “you will understand why there are no arguments that could change my mind, and nothing that anyone could say would influence me. It is Silas I want and Silas I intend to have.”

Eurydice had spoken with such warmth that the Marquis realised she was a very different person from the hard, scheming young woman she had become after her husband’s death.

He had thought she was out only for social advancement and for making herself the most notorious and the most talked about figure in the
Beau Monde.

It was astonishing that she could have changed so quickly from a determined schemer into a gentle, feminine creature whose eyes shone and who seemed to glow at the mere mention of the name of the man with whom she was in love.

‘Dammit,’ the Marquis thought, as he drove down the drive towards Ruckley House, ‘why cannot I feel like that?’

Then he laughed at himself for imagining that such a thing was possible.

The servants were surprised to see him.

“This is a pleasure, M’Lord,” the Butler said, hurrying into the Hall.

“Where is Hobley?” the Marquis enquired.

“I’ll send for him, M’Lord. The Reverend’s in the Library.”

“Then I will go and talk to him.”

The Marquis opened the door of the Library and saw that his Tutor was not, as he had expected, sitting at the big desk in the centre of the room, but that standing at a bookcase was a slim figure he had seen once before.

She turned round to face him, and his first impression was that her eyes were far too big for her face.

Fringed by the dark lashes he had noticed before, they were very unusual eyes but only as he drew nearer did he realise that while the pupils seemed unnaturally large, the colour of the Gypsy’s eyes was not black, as he might have expected, but a very dark green.

She did not speak, but waited as the Marquis advanced towards her. When he reached her he held out his hand.

“I am the Marquis of Ruckley and I owe you an apology.”

Almost reluctantly it seemed to him she laid her fingers in
his. They
were cool and as he held them for a moment he had the unaccountable feeling that some strange vibration passed between them.

“You are better?” he asked.

“I have recovered, thank you.”

The voice was low and musical with a faint foreign accent.

The Marquis glanced at her forehead.

The wound where the wheel of the Phaeton had hit her was still red, and the skin around it was discoloured the purple and orange of a deep bruise.