Prince of Secrets (26 page)

Dinah, almost too full of unshed tears to speak, nodded her head. ‘Of course. You must understand that my husband can have no visitors. He is still critically ill.'

The small basket of flowers, when it arrived in the hands of a little girl whose eyes were big with wonder at being allowed into such a splendid palace, affected Dinah more than the great bouquets which arrived every day from the Prince and Princess of Wales. Not that their kindness was false, but that the sacrifice which the carnations and roses represented was a very real one since children had given up all their small savings to buy it.

For the first time she was on the verge of breaking down. Both men saw that this was so, and both, in their different ways, tried to comfort her.

‘I cannot believe,' said the Salvation Army captain, ‘that God will take him from you, Lady Dinah. But if he does,
rest assured that it is all part of the divine plan. We must trust in Him, or we have nothing.'

Mr Dilley, thought Dinah, placing the flowers on a small console table. So that is what he called himself when he was wearing those strange clothes—and financing a children's home! Whoever would have guessed that? She would have liked to throw that piece of information at Sir Halbert Parker!

Besides flowers from the Prince of Wales, there were his daily messengers, and a letter written in his own hand, hoping that Mr Grant would make a full recovery.

‘I owe your husband a debt of gratitude,' wrote the Prince, ‘and I wish there were some tangible way in which I could thank him. Believe me, my thoughts are with you both.'

She was reading this with some wonder when Mrs Susanna Winthrop was announced. Susanna almost ran into the drawing room, looking tired and ill, the radiance which had shone from her when Dinah had first met her quite gone.

‘How is he?' she began, without preliminary or waiting for an answer. ‘Lord Kenilworth says that he is still unconscious. I cannot tell you how I feel…'

She burst into tears, sank down on to a sofa and buried her head in the cushions, lifting it only to wail at Dinah, ‘Oh, life is too cruel, and I have behaved quite dreadfully. I cannot think what came over me. I have allowed people to believe that Cobie was my lover, when the truth is, he refused me when I asked him…and I hated you so because he did…

‘After that I threw myself at Sir Ratcliffe to try to forget him, and he only wanted me to spite Cobie, and was vile to me when his child was on the way…and then I lost it…and now Cobie's dying, and I feel responsible.'

Dinah worked out from this jumble of self-reproach what
Susanna was trying to say. She sat down by her, took her into her arms and rocked her so that the wild crying presently stopped.

‘I didn't believe you,' she told the distraught woman gently. ‘Oh, perhaps a little at first, but I never thought that he would play me as false as that.'

‘No, indeed,' said Susanna, sniffing inelegantly. ‘We did love one another when he was very young, but I sent him away, which I knew was the right thing to do, but I have regretted it all my life. Even more when he married you, and I saw that he truly cared for you. I can't tell you how sorry I am for lying to you.'

‘It doesn't matter,' Dinah said stoically, thinking that everything which Susanna said bore out what Cobie had told her.

‘What I really came to say,' Susanna announced a few moments later when Dinah had rung for tea and she was drinking it, and beginning to regain her self-control, ‘is that his father and mother are on the way here. Not to see him, but because I invited them. They don't know what has happened, of course, they're still on the high seas. I think that they will take this badly, although they have been at outs with him ever since he went to the South West. I thought that you ought to know, not have it sprung on you at the last moment.'

She drank her tea in a desperate manner, as though it were brandy. Once she had gone, after yet another bout of wild crying, Dinah went up to Cobie's room and stared at his unchanging appearance. His face was white and the pure lines of it were strongly marked now that illness had thinned it. She wondered at the true nature of the man she had married. Oh, if only he would wake up properly and speak to her, even if only for a moment. In his brief periods of consciousness he never spoke to anyone.

After that nothing could her surprise her—not even Lady Heneage's arrival. What on earth could she have to say to the wife of the man whom her husband had tried to kill? Might even have succeeded in killing—for there was no sign of Cobie returning to life.

‘My dear Lady Dinah,' Lady Heneage said when she was shown in, ‘I have to thank you for seeing me when your instinct must have been to refuse to have anything to do with the connections of the man who tried to murder your husband. I felt, though, that I ought to come, if only to thank him, through you, for what he did for me after I left my husband.'

She saw Dinah's small start of surprise, and said drily, ‘Yes, my husband lied in the witness box, Lady Dinah. I left him immediately after the Markendale house party broke up, I could no longer endure his cruelty. Last week, before the action ended, I discovered that your husband had paid into my account half the value of the stolen Heneage diamonds. I walked in on him when he was stealing them,' she said, as though she were speaking of the most banal thing in the world.

‘Oh, he was disguised, but I knew him at once. He could not disguise himself from me. My husband deserved to lose the diamonds. There was a note waiting for me at the bank. Mr. Grant simply wrote that he thought that I had earned half of what the diamonds were worth and he hoped that I would not refuse it. He also said that the rest of the money for them had gone to support a good cause—he didn't say what.'

The children's home—among other things, thought Dinah. How enraged Sir Ratcliffe would have been if he had ever discovered that his diamonds had paid for a small fortune for his neglected wife and a sanctuary for poor children!

Like Susanna, Lady Heneage drank tea—it seemed to Dinah that she had dispensed gallons of the stuff while Cobie lay ill. When this is over, she thought wearily, I shall never see or drink it again.

Then there was Walker. Like the Prince, Hendrick Van Deusen, Susanna, Lady Heneage and Father Anselm and Captain Bristow, he owed her husband a debt of some sort, but he gave her no clue as to exactly what it was. He came most days to ask how Mr Grant was doing, and to offer her his rough comfort.

Once he said, cryptically, ‘I shouldn't say this, Lady Dinah, but it was a good thing that someone shot that brute, Sir Ratcliffe Heneage, down. The scandal which would have been created if he had lived would have shaken society even more than his action did—and that was bad enough.'

Dinah gave him tea, too. And chocolate cake—the cake which Cobie had once taunted him with. He, too, ate his food desperately, and took her hand before he left, saying, ‘Hold on, Lady Dinah, for all our sakes.'

She carried the thought with her upstairs, wondering how many more grateful people would arrive to tell her what Cobie had been doing when she had imagined him doing—what? Exactly how he had become involved with Inspector Walker was a bit of a mystery—something to do with his role as Mr Dilley, she supposed.

Outside his bedroom she was met by an excited nurse. ‘Oh, Lady Dinah, we must send for the doctors at once. Mr Grant has not exactly woken up, but he has started to talk in his sleep!'

Dinah sat by him on the bed, and picked up his hand which lay lax on the coverlet. He looked blindly at her, before beginning to speak again. Elation that he might be recovering gave way—considering what all her visitors had
said, and had not said—to fear as to what he might be saying, and how it might betray him.

Whatever the cost in time and energy, she must now nurse him herself. She couldn't risk the nurses hearing any unwanted revelations. She wondered where he thought he was, what he thought he was doing…

Cobie was roaming in his dreams through the country of his past. He was being refused by Susanna—and suffering bitter regret. He was in Sophie Massingham's drawing room, tactlessly refusing her sexual advances—and being jeeringly informed of his illegitimacy. He was with Liz and Paige, playing cards in his early happier days at Bratt's Crossing. He was being strapped to the corral fence by Greer to be flogged almost to death for daring to try to help the townsfolk there. Next he was high among the rocks, tracking down the men who were trying to kill Hendrick from ambush—and killing them instead. He was with Jennie in the bath in her brothel, and engaged in his first bank robbery.

He relived his brief stay in San Miguel. Again and again he was with Belita, as though by reliving her death he could somehow make it not happen. He knew—how did he know?—that he was holding a woman's hand, and that she was talking to him, although what she was saying was more unreal to him than what the shadows among whom he moved were saying to him.

Something in Dinah's voice triggered off another chain of memories, and he was talking to Violet at Moorings, being blackmailed by her, being told to disillusion Dinah, on pain of Dinah's being sent into exile.

Numbed, Dinah listened to the restless voice. When he spoke of Moorings, she tried to stop him, by putting a gentle hand over his mouth, but he took it away, and she heard
him to the bitter end. So that was why he married me, and tricked Rainey—to save me from Violet!

He was rescuing Lizzie Steele from Sir Ratcliffe—and pursuing him and Hoskyns relentlessly. She knew why he and Walker had sparred on the night of the fire. Then she found out why the Prince felt that he owed Cobie Grant something, why he had stolen Sir Ratcliffe's diamonds and why Walker owed him such a debt of gratitude.

Finally, a little hoarse, he stopped, and still holding Dinah's hand as though it were a talisman, he fell asleep. The night nurse, looking in later that evening, saw that husband and wife were both sleeping. Dinah still held Cobie's hand, and her head was beside his, on the pillow.

Cobie woke her up early the next morning by starting to talk again, after drinking milk: she wondered what he thought that he was doing. He spoke more quietly and showed less distress—and she stayed with him, until he slept again. He had still been in dreamland, as Dinah called it, but she had known that he wasn't dreaming, he was reliving his memories good and bad, and now she had the answer to many of his mysteries. He had also repeatedly told her something which she had long wanted to hear: that he loved her.

When he next awoke, his hand searched the coverlet as though looking for hers. She took it, stroked his forehead, which seemed to soothe him and began to talk gently to him. Never mind that he couldn't hear her, it made her feel better.

She told him about the baby. ‘Oh, how I wish that I had done so before,' she said sadly, ‘but I wanted to wait until the action was over and Sir Ratcliffe was defeated, so that we could celebrate without the shadow of that over us. Do you want a boy or a girl, my darling? I don't really mind
which. Of course, we could have twins, I suppose, like your grandmother.'

He stirred as though he had heard her, and for a moment she thought that he was recovering complete consciousness, but he closed his eyes, sighed, took his hand out of hers, and settled down as though he were about to sleep forever.

For the first time Dinah gave up hope. The tears which she had held at bay were about to fall. A knock on the door steadied her. It was the nurse.

‘You have visitors, Lady Dinah. I think that it is important that you see them.'

‘Who are they?' she asked wearily.

‘Mr and Mrs John Dilhorne,' said the nurse. ‘They are in the drawing room, Lady Dinah.'

Cobie's father and mother, from whom he was estranged. She remembered then that Susanna had told her that they were on their way. She went down to greet them.

A woman was sitting on the sofa before the hearth, a man was pacing the room nervously. He stopped to face her. The woman rose. She would have known who the man was if she had met him in the street. He was so like Cobie, except that his face was so much more gentle, and his hair was silver, instead of gold. It was not that his face was soft, but Cobie's classic good looks concealed a sternness, an inward severity, which this man did not possess. Kindliness shone from him.

Cobie's mother was a surprise. She was tall, dark and erect. Her face was full of character, but she was not, and never had been, a beauty. No one, Dinah thought, would have taken her for his mother, they were so unalike. Except…except…it was from her that he had inherited his severity. How she knew this was beyond Dinah in her state of exhaustion—a state which Cobie's mother recognised at
once. She moved towards Dinah, and put out her hand—it was shapely, like
his
.

‘Oh, my dear. We shouldn't have come. You look all in.'

Dinah shook her head. ‘Oh, no,' she said earnestly, ‘it is only right that you should come, only…he is talking but he knows no one and nothing at the moment… I…we…don't even know whether he is going to live…I'm afraid…'

Jack Dilhorne gave a short exclamation and turned away, grief on his face.

Marietta, without hesitation, instinctively took Dinah in her arms. ‘Oh, my dear, my dear. Now I'm glad that we are here. You will let me help you, won't you? Susanna thought you might be in need of us.'

Dinah lay against Marietta's loving breast. She could smell her delicate violet scent, and knew again from where Cobie had gained his strength. Marietta gently led her to the sofa and helped her to sit on it. Dinah felt that her legs had turned to water.

‘Now
you
must forgive
me
,' she offered shakily. ‘I haven't been as stupid as this since it happened. Perhaps…' and she was hesitant ‘…perhaps if you went in to see him, spoke to him, he might hear and recognise your voices, he doesn't seem to know mine. You see, he has repeatedly told me in his delirium how much he wishes to be reconciled with you.'