Bride by Arrangement (11 page)

Chloe found that she could say nothing. There had been other occasions in her life when she had been afflicted in this way—particularly since she had known him—but now in addition her heart was hammering, and prickles of apprehension felt like tiny pin-points up and down her spine.

Pierre came a little farther into the room.

“I expected to find you in bed,” he remarked.

“I—I have been to bed,” Chloe managed huskily. Even her tongue was dry, and her fingers had taken a tight hold of the curtain behind her.

“But you couldn’t sleep? Not so surprising, perhaps, since this is after all your wedding night! You were expecting to spend it in the arms of the man you love, isn’t that it, little Chloe?” with a softness that made her shiver inwardly. “You don’t like being disappointed?"

Chloe felt her whole body blush with humiliation, and when he moved sinuously round to the bedside lamp and switched it on she made a frantic dive for her dressing-gown to conceal the flimsy nightdress that was her only covering. But Pierre anticipated the move with a swiftness that not merely prevented her achieving her objective, but disconcerted her so completely that she turned blindly to rush away from him and reach the door. But he anticipated that move too, and caught her round her slender middle and swung her up in his arms and carried her over to the bed.

“If you don’t put me down
I’ll
scream the house down!” she warned him, but he laughed and deposited her once more among her pillows, and then stood back to regard her.

“And what sort of response do you think you’ll get if you do scream?” he wanted to know, as she strove frantically to cover herself with the bedclothes,. “You’re a married woman now, my sweet, and you can’t expect Burton—or even Mrs. McClay—to come rushing to your rescue as they might have done if you'd been single!”

Chloe cowered down among the bedclothes, and she felt sickened by the look in his eyes. And she started to shiver uncontrollably. This couldn’t be the Pierre she knew
...
Not even the Pierre who had deceived her, and who had married her to obtain possession of his aunt’s money. The whole
expression of his dark face was sardonic and almost cruel, and his eyes were so hard they frightened her, even though they gloated over her and her bare white shoulders that declined to be satisfactorily covered by the sheet.

He moved swiftly near to her again and ripped the sheet away from her, and at sight of the frothy lace on the cobwebby nightdress, the ribbon looped through the waist, his lips curved in a cruelly amused smile, and he remarked that she looked like a pretty doll—a doll tricked out by Eunice!

“But you’re not a doll! You’re my wife!” he exclaimed. “And whatever you may have decided I don’t intend to spend my wedding night doing without a brand new wife!” and he threw himself down on the side of the bed and seized her in his arms. He was wearing a paisley silk dressing-gown beneath which were blue silk pyjamas, and as he kissed her in a way he had never done before, Chloe felt herself become frozen and for a brief while even her wits seemed numbed.

Then she thrust at him with her hands, and she twisted her face all ways to avoid his demanding mouth. In between his kisses he was whispering to her hoarsely, and he called her his lovely little Chloe, his enchanting little Chloe who had made herself enchanting because he had kissed her awake, and now she was going to reap the benefits of becoming a rich woman as well as a wife and discover what it was like to possess a husband! A husband who was determined not to be cheated out of anything that was rightfully his ... his aunt's money and his aunt's secretary-companion, who had so won his aunt’s confidence that she had left her everything she possessed!

“And of course you didn’t expect it, did you, Chloe?” Pierre’s arms were hurting her intolerably, and his mouth bruised her skin; his hands felt like fire. “You were always the nice demure little girl who didn’t expect anything—except, perhaps, to marry a rich man like David Pentland later on! As soon as he asked you! But you didn’t have to marry David after all, for riches came your way without it, and although unfortunately you had to marry me we’ll see to it that you get something out of your marriage! Tonight, at any rate!
...”

Chloe realised that he was beyond listening to her even if she tried to appeal to him, so she lay very still for a few seconds, and then when he was deceived by her apparent
quiescence
succeeded in wrenching herself out of his arms and finally reached the carpeted floor, where she stood clinging on to the bedpost as she had done once before.

“If you touch me again,” she gasped, “I really will scream! I’ll scream and scream until someone has to come! I won’t stop screaming!”

She couldn’t reach her dressing-gown, and she was beyond caring about her flimsy nightdress, so she stood shivering convulsively and clutching at the carved wood beneath her hands. Pierre lay looking at her for perhaps half a minute, his face very pale, his eyes bright, and then he sat up and slipped off the bed and came round to her very slowly.

“I’m sorry, Chloe,” he said, with a strange thickness in his voice. “It won’t be necessary for you to scream!”

She shut her eyes, and swayed slightly. Her teeth were chattering behind her closed lips.

“I'll go,” Pierre said.

“Please do,” she whispered. “And please,” she added, the soft, desperate whisper seeming to fill all the room, “never, never come anywhere near me again! Not to my room! Never!”

“I won’t,” he promised, and for the second time since she had married him she heard the click of a closing door as he left her alone. But this time she rushed feverishly across the room and locked the door.

CHAPTER SIX

Three days later Chloe sat beside her husband, at the wheel of his familiar car, and drove towards the sea.

The sea seemed to play an inescapable part in her association with Pierre. Chloe thought about it as they drove, and as they neither of them talked very much she had plenty of time to think.

The sea had been there in the background on the night they had first met, hurling itself angrily against the foot of the cliff that supported the elegant white house that was now hers and Pierre’s. On the night Pierre kissed her for the first time—and that seemed so long ago now that she wondered whether she had ever really felt as she did then, as if a doorway to an exquisite form of happiness was slowly opening before her eyes—the sea had been murmuring slumbrously at the foot of the cliff. And when they drove away from Trelas on the morning after their wedding day the sea had looked bright and enticing, as if it was displaying all its wares in an effort to tempt them to return soon.

All the way up to London he had treated her as if she was a
stranger to whom he wanted to behave with meticulous politeness. Their one night in London had passed without any sort of incident, and they had done a show—which was something he had arranged previously, and for which he had obtained the tickets—and then gone quietly to bed in adjoining rooms (after altering the reservation for “one large double,” and making it two large singles). In Paris they had had an entire suite to themselves in the large hotel overlooking the Place Vendome, and as they stayed there two nights this was a much more satisfactory arrangement since it didn’t arouse the curiosity of chambermaids. In a country like France a young couple sharing the same name might well be expected to share the same room, and the fact that Pierre used the dressing-room could be easily accounted for by a belief that they had quarrelled.

Pierre had taken Chloe on what was undoubtedly the equivalent of a conducted tour of Paris, showing her everything that he thought she ought to see, and doing it with the bland, detached air of one who was paid for the task. He showed her Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur, the Church of the Madeleine and the Palais de Justice. He showed her the Louvre and the Place de la Bastille, the Observatory and the Orangery and the Museum of National Antiquities; and in between he permitted her to draw breath in the Luxembourg Gardens, and drove her out to Fontainebleau. Their night life was confined to dining each night in the hotel, surveying the endless stream of traffic from the balcony of their sitting-room, and going to bed as they had done in London, after the briefest and politest of good nights.

And it was the politeness of those good nights—the cool, measured politeness—that affected Chloe in such a way that she lay for hours dwelling upon them, and experiencing a cold, comfortless sensation in the region of her heart because
they might well be marketing the pattern of her whole life ... her married life with Pierre!

Pierre seemed to become more withdrawn and remote, and more closely wrapped up in his own thoughts, with every mile that separated them from Paris. His hands gripped the wheel purposefully, his eyes never left the road ahead, and Chloe received the impression that he was concentrating almost fiercely on reaching their destination. She had no idea where it was that he was taking her, but she knew it was all part of a prearranged plan—the plan that was made when she was close enough to him to ask questions—and that for some reason it was important to Pierre, almost as important as finally arriving in Mecca used to be to the early pilgrims.

She could feel the rising eagerness in him when they first sighted the sea, and an old crumbling watch-tower rose against the skyline. She wondered whether this was the landscape that was more familiar to him than any other, one he had been familiar with since boyhood. But she didn’t dare ask. She hadn’t the courage to ask him anything, and she had the oddest conviction that she hadn’t the right to ask him anything.

However he had behaved, she was his wife, and ... well, she had forfeited the right to ask him questions, and she had put a blank wall between them that would probably never be torn down!

The car gathered speed, as if it too smelt the sea, and knew that it was returning to familiar places, and they tunnelled through a tiny outcrop of woodland, and flashed between green grazing where contented cattle watched them. Chloe sat up, as if she expected any minute to see something quite undreamed of appear before her eyes, but Pierre spoke quietly:

“We won’t be long now, but we’re not there yet. You’ve got time for a little doze if you feel like it.”

It was very warm, and she had been dozing, she knew, intermittently, since lunch. Once, when she had opened her eyes, Pierre had had his own eyes averted from the road and was gazing at her. She had felt suddenly acutely aware of flushed cheeks and tumbled hair, through which the wind sang gently, and of the yellow linen dress she had put on because it suited her, and she knew it. For the same reason she had looped a yellow ribbon through her curls, but that had come adrift and she had put it in her handbag.

Now, bereft of the ribbon, and with Pierre gazing fixedly ahead, she didn’t want to sleep, but she longed to ask questions. She longed, if it were only possible, to be back on the terms she had once been with Pierre, and to know that there wasn’t even the shadow of a wall between them.

Once again Pierre spoke quietly:

“When you get there you’ll be able to have a bath and a rest—and a cup of tea. I expect you feel you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

Chloe returned awkwardly:

“Do—do you have tea over here in France?”

“Of course. My housekeeper makes excellent tea, and in fact she’s a very good housekeeper. I don’t
suppose I’d ever find a better.”

“I didn’t know you had a housekeeper.”

“No?” His eyebrows lifted, and his mouth twisted cynically. “But then we once agreed that we know virtually nothing about one another, didn’t we? We’re married, and you bear my name,
but we’re about as close as this particular corner of Brittany is to Cornwall. There’s a strip of turbulent water between them, and you can’t walk across it, as apparently you could once. And you’ll find that the scenery is vaguely reminiscent, but only vaguely. Everything French is very French, and everything British is very British!”

“You’re—half British and half French,” she reminded him.

“And now you’re the wife of a man who is half British and half French, so what does that make you?” and he looked round at her mockingly. “What would it make our children if we ever had any? Which we’re never likely to do!”

Chloe felt as if he had slapped her across the face, and for an instant she knew the instinct to cower down in the car. She bit her lip very hard instead, and asked in as conversational a tone as she could muster:

“If you’ve a housekeeper you must have a house. Have you a house?”

“That’s logical,” he answered. “And yes, I have a house.”

“Are we—going to stay there?”

“We’re going there. How long we’ll stay I don’t know, but then I don’t seem to know very much these days. Everything takes m
e
by surprise! I have a wife, a large income, part interest in a house in Cornwall, and when I set off for England a few weeks ago I had only one house and a very modest income. But, on the whole, I think I preferred my modest income to my sudden acquisition of fortune, with all its attendant responsibilities!”

“You mean me?” in a very low voice, with a slight and not easily detectable catch in it “I’ve suddenly become a responsibility, and deprived you of your freedom as well!”

“As for freedom,” he replied almost suavely, as they approached a pair of wrought
iron gates,” so far as I am aware I haven’t surrendered my freedom. The mere act of marriage—that is, taking a woman to be my wife, and afterwards signing a register—doesn’t make me feel that I have been deprived of anything that I value. However, this is not the time to discuss our problems, is it? You’re tired, and
I’
m looking forward to getting back to where I belong. If I’d had any sense, and hadn’t possessed a tiresome old aunt, I’d never have left here at all!”

“You mean—you don’t mean that you were born here?” Chloe asked rather feebly, as they flashed between the wrought
iron gates and sped up a drive.

“No, I wasn’t
born here. But I’ve made up my mind that this is where I’ll end my days if it’s humanly possible.”