Violet Winspear
THE DEVIL'S DARLING
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published 1975
Australian copyright 1982
Philippine copyright 1982
This edition 1982
© Violet Winspear 1975
ISBN 0 263 73766 7
CHAPTER ONE
THE dress was perfect, as she knew it would be, for her very own Lucrezia had made it for her and there was hardly anything the Italian woman couldn’t do with her clever hands. The colour was a kind of sunset flush so that the soft pallor of Persepha’s skin had almost a transparent glow, and her hair was even more burnished, pale as the gold that rims the last white clouds drifting out of a summer’s day. Her eyes in contrast were hazel-brown, so that little lights seemed to dance in them. Persepha was lovely, and adored by her guardian, and sheltered ... especially from men.
Yet tonight a man had got hold of her and was, with an insistence his laughter didn’t quite match, urging her in the direction of the Gothic garden house surrounded by luscious pink rhododendrons.
‘You are the last old-fashioned girl left on this earth,’ Larry Condamine chided her. ‘It’s the done thing to dance and kiss, and now you’ve danced, and divinely I might add, you must show me that you can kiss with equal skill. I mean it, Sepha! A girl with your looks has to be born knowing how to love, otherwise the gods wouldn’t have made you the way you are. Perfect, adorable - oh, come here!’
Grown impatient of the way she had eluded his lips as they came through the garden, Larry caught hold of her and forcibly held her, a shaft of moonlight making his eyes seem feverish as he gazed down at her face.
‘God, yes, you’re lovely!’ He almost groaned the words. ‘I wish to heaven I could afford you, but that darn guardian of yours will never let you go to any man who hasn’t thousands a year to spend on you. I hate it - don’t you? -the way Marcus Stonehill keeps you out of the clutches of young men while putting you on show for those rich, card-playing cronies he invites to Stonehill Mansion. You must know what everyone says, that he plans to hand you over to the highest bidder?’
Persepha felt the urgent young arms around her, and somewhere among the shrubs she heard a nightbird chirping; a lonely sound that caught her attention as the urgings and arguments of Larry Condamine couldn’t. Yes, Persepha knew what everyone said about Marcus, and some of it was fact, and some of it fiction. He did plan a successful marriage for her, in the sense that her husband must have real money as opposed to what Marcus made by gambling with rich fools, as he called them. He had always looked after her, ever since her mother had died, and because Persepha knew how much he had adored Daisy Paget, her actress mother, she didn’t quibble that he laid down certain rules of behaviour and expected her to abide by them. It was because he had cared so much for Daisy, who had married a poor actor and undermined her health in shabby theatres, that he treated her with an iron hand in a velvet glove, and Persepha would not have dreamed of struggling against that hand.
‘You’d better not kiss me,’ she said to Larry, as she felt his lips against her cheek, warm and seeking. ‘Not unless you want Marcus’s riding whip across your shoulders.’
At once the seeking lips came to a halt. Rumour had it that more than one impecunious suitor had limped away from the gates of Stonehill, and despite his ardour Larry Condamine was not prepared to suffer in vain.
‘Do you reckon you could love me?’ he asked. ‘I’d be prepared to go off to Australia with the right girl. I’ve heard you can buy land out there for a few thousand pounds and I can wangle that much out of my grandmother. She’d be pleased to pay me for settling down. Well, what do you say, Sepha? Is it on?’
‘Is the moon up there made of green cheese?’ Persepha drew out of his slackened arms, and the skirt of her dress made a rustling sound as she turned and began to saunter back towards the house where a large party had been in progress and to which she had been escorted by Marcus himself, for the owner of the big, brightly lit house was one of the numerous business men whom her guardian knew and with whom he dealt, mainly across a gaming table. Going into business himself would have bored Marcus to death. He preferred games of chance, and he reminded Persepha of a Regency Buck and a member of the Hellfire Club.
She smiled to herself as she heard Larry following sulkily in her wake. He was quite nice, but it wasn’t really because he had no money that she chose to fend off his advances. If she had loved him she’d have gone off to Australia and defied even Marcus. But Persepha had an idea that she didn’t care much for the emotion called love ... she had been taught too well by Marcus Stonehill that once you gave your heart away there was no recalling it. Once you allowed yourself to care deeply for another person you let yourself in for heartache more often than happiness.
She was the first to arrive in sight of the terraced house where the light of chandeliers flowed out from the big room where couples had danced ... her quick young eyes saw at once that something appeared to be wrong, for those couples were now standing in slightly scared groups and their voices were hushed, shocked, as if whatever had happened had been rather awful.
Persepha stood very still beneath the arching fronds of a willow tree and she felt the lurch of her heart as a tall figure came down the steps from the terrace, walking silently through the crowd like some kind of a bronzeskinned Indian, or a tawny tiger in human shape. That was how Persepha had thought of him the first time he had come to Stonehill; she had been introduced to him in the library, but when he had left she had kept out of his way, leaning over the gallery rail where it was shadowy and watching unseen as he departed, throwing a long shadow in the lamplight that Marcus had a preference for. Walking with that lithe, silent, dangerous grace that was utterly foreign.
The next day Marcus had told her that the man came from Mexico and was so unbelievably rich that he made English potentates seem like the bosses of cotton mills.
‘What’s his name?’ she had asked, trying hard not to sound as if she were curious, but because the man had struck her as so unusual she couldn’t help but wonder about him. Not that she had liked the look of him ... her guardian wasn’t a soft man, but the tall stranger had looked ... pitiless.
And right now Don Diablo Ezreldo Ruy came towards her, cutting a dark stern path through the silent guests, and it seemed to Persepha that the nearer he came the blacker his eyes seemed to grow, and those words of the other day came tearing back into her mind.
‘He has the look of a devil,’ she had said to Marcus. ‘His mother must have thought so when she first looked at him and gave him that name. Don Devil!’
Marcus had laughed in that sardonic, lazy way of his ... but there had been something in his eyes when he had looked at her, an intentness unrelated to amusement which had made her wonder just what his connection with the Spaniard could be.
‘Did you play cards?’ she had asked,
and had strolled about the library looking at those choice oddments which Marcus kept around him, and she had paused in front of Daisy’s portrait and seen reflected there an image of herself.
‘My dear ward,’ Marcus always called her that when he was feeling extra fond of her, ‘a man does not gamble with his master.’
‘Your master?’ she had echoed, looking at her guardian in sheerest amazement. ‘You have no master!’
‘Not even God or the Devil?’ he had drawled.
Yes, the memory of that conversation was overwhelming in Persepha’s mind as the tall Spaniard came so silently to her, there beneath the green willow, and with that foreign inclination of his head spoke other words that she would never forget.
‘I regret, Miss Paget, that your guardian has been taken ill—’
‘Then I must go to him,’ she broke in.
‘No.’ A lean hand with a fearful promise of strength detained her in her headlong rush to the house. ‘There is nothing that you can do, señorita. It was a stroke of the heart - swift, fatal. I am the emissary of death and there is no way to avoid breaking the harsh news to you who was closest to him. It is a consolation at least that the blow struck him swiftly, just as he laid down a superb hand of cards. I was watching and I saw his hand - he was smiling, Miss Paget.’
‘Smiling?’ she echoed, dazedly. ‘Smiling as he died?’
‘Yes, señorita. It can happen that way.’
‘But - no - Marcus can’t be dead!’ She screamed out the words as the pain of their meaning stabbed right through her. ‘He’s all I have! All I care about! Marcus! Marcus!’ She went to run again, like a cat in pain and terror, and swiftly the Don’s lean hands caught her, lifted her, and carried her off into the night... or so it seemed, for it was then that Persepha fainted with shock, and didn’t awaken again for hours, and by then she was in her bed at Stonehill and Lucrezia was there at her side, caring for her.
‘Carissima, you must accept and not fight what is a fact in this terrible way. The signore has gone to his rest and there he will be again with Mees Daisy. She was his only love, my heart, and now you must think of them together as they could not be here on earth.’
‘But Lucrezia,’ the girl trembled in the arms of her old Italian nurse, to whom she had been handed as a baby when the lovely Daisy Paget had died only a matter of days after giving birth to her, ‘he seemed so himself as we drove to the party. He was in a good mood - I could always tell - as if he had brought off some gambling coup that very much pleased him. He didn’t complain of feeling ill in any way. Not like that time in Florence when he was ill - oh, Crezia, is that when it began? Did he have heart trouble and kept it to himself? It would be his way, dear darling Marcus.’
‘He wanted never to cause you any suffering, my heart,’ crooned the Italian woman, the tears welling into her eyes set deeply in a network of lines. ‘He wanted only rainbows for you, never the thunder clouds that racked Mees Daisy’s life. Ah, she was so lovely, and she came to the signore too late from that husband of hers. Too late for him to set things right for her ... you understand? You are not a child any more. You are a young woman of twenty and you must accept the facts of life.’
‘But, Crezia, he was only forty-five.’ The bitter weeping shook Persepha again; the desolation of loss swept over her and made her feel as if she were drowning in loneliness ... that awful loneliness she had always feared. Marcus had always guarded her and kept her safe; been father-figure, mentor, and droll friend. His loss of Daisy had made him cynical in many respects, but Persepha had loved him beyond judgment or criticism.
‘How shall I bear it?’ she whispered to Lucrezia. ‘What shall I do? Where shall I go?’
They both knew that Stonehill Mansion was entailed and must go to a nephew of Marcus’s. The great stone house that had been her home for twenty years was no longer her home; this quaint old bedroom with its high fourposter bed was destined to pass into other hands, for the nephew was married and he had a family, and they were people who had never accepted her as a member of the Stonehill family.
‘I - I feel like an outcast,’ she said. ‘I feel as if strong walls had collapsed around me and left me all alone and desolate. It’s the worst feeling of my life, Crezia. It’s almost more than I can bear.’
Yet somehow she did manage to endure the next few days and what happened during that time. Relations of her guardian came to Stonehill and made all the arrangements for the interment, which would be in the family vault, and it was Lucrezia who informed her that these people didn’t wish her to attend the funeral. They wanted her to pack up and leave and would be giving her a cheque to tide her over until she found work of some sort.
It was incredible, not to be taken in that she was being treated like some creature with whom Marcus had lived who was now being bought off.
‘To hell with the cheque,’ she said, and tore it into fragments. Then she flung into a suitcase the less expensive garments bought for her by Marcus this season, and with tears of rage and grief in her hazel eyes she ran downstairs to the library and climbing on to a chair unhooked her mother’s portrait from the wall, and was holding it, dust on her fingers, when the telephone rang in the silent hall.
She didn’t wish to answer it, feeling too shaken, too upset by the way she had been thrust even out of Marcus’s death, but it kept on ringing, insistently, and she finally went to the instrument and snatched it from the cradle.
‘There’s no one at home,’ she said in a tear-thickened voice. ‘The members of the family are attending a funeral.’
‘That is you, Señorita Paget, who speaks?’ The voice was deep, grating, and foreign, and instantly it conjured up for Persepha an image of a ruthless dark face from the realms of other worlds and pagan customs.
‘This is she, señor. May I ask what you require?’
There was an instant of silence, and then the unusual voice struck again across her hearing. ‘I require to see you, señorita, and I shall come for you in a car in a matter of minutes.’
‘I shouldn’t do that, señor,’ she rejoined. ‘I am leaving Stonehill - I have my marching orders and I shall be gone in a matter of minutes.’
‘You will stay and wait for me,’ he ordered. ‘What I have to say to you concerns your guardian and a certain matter he and I discussed a few days before his demise. It is of the greatest importance that you remain to hear what I have to say - the Señor Stonehill would wish you to do this.’
‘I — I can’t imagine what you and Marcus would have discussed that concerned me,’ she argued, for she was too torn by her personal conflict to care about seeing anyone, least of all the man from Mexico who struck her as being as pitiless as the Stonehill relations who were throwing her out of her home. ‘I knew he gambled, but I had no part in all that—’
‘I don’t gamble, Miss Paget.’ Now a whisper of the lash came into the deep voice which would be accustomed to giving orders and having them promptly obeyed. ‘What is it, are you afraid of seeing me again?’
Persepha stared at the panelled wall in front of the telephone table, and she felt the leaping of her nerves as the hall clock stirred and chimed. Friendly sounds at one time, announcing tea and buttered scones in the library with dear Marcus, but now the chimes were like small bells of doom, tolling the end of her life as well as her guardian’s.
‘I feel as if I shall never feel anything again,’ she said to Don Diablo Ezreldo Ruy. ‘Come if you must, señor. I shall be waiting out on the steps, for I no longer belong under the roof of Stonehill.’
And there she sat as the sleek car drew to a halt at the base of the stone steps, dark-clad and hatless, her suitcase beside her, with the portrait of her mother propped against the case. The car door opened and the long, lean figure emerged, clad impeccably in stone-grey. He came to the fourth step and stood looking at her, his un-fathomable dark eyes fixed upon the pale blaze of her hair. Persepha gazed back at him, and it was obvious that she had been crying, for the marks of tears were on
her cheeks, smudged with the dust from the back of the portrait which had never been moved from the day it had been hung.
‘You have the dirty face of a child,’ he said, and he took from his pocket an immaculate white handkerchief and tossed it into her lap. ‘Wipe your eyes, señorita, and come with me.’
‘I - I’ll do no such thing—’ She gave him a mutinous look. ‘Who are you to give me orders?’
‘The man,’ he said deliberately, ‘who is going to marry you.’
Persepha, who had already suffered a tremendous shock, was so unprepared for his statement that she went almost as white as the handkerchief he had given her. Her fingers clenched the fine linen, and her eyes dwelt on his dark face with the expression of a bewildered, hurt child whom adults had suddenly decided to torment. Persepha, who for most of her life had been happy and secure with Marcus, now felt such an overwhelming sense of loss that the great tears welled again and ran down her lovely, dirty face.
‘Por deus—’ The Don suddenly bent over her, lifted her with that ease she remembered and carried her to his car, where he placed her on the back seat; where he left her while he fetched her suitcase, her mother’s portrait, and the black straw hat she had bought in the village stores to wear with her only dark garment, a jersey wool dress with pearl buttons on it.
Don Diablo joined her in the car and deliberately closed the door. He took her in his arms and, this stranger with the devil’s face, allowed her to weep all over the shoulder of his impeccable grey suit.
‘We say in Mexico that there is a time for the wine and a time for the water; a time for tears and a time for cheers. Cry out your heart, chica, and then we shall talk together as man and woman.’
Man and woman, she thought vaguely. She and this man whom she barely knew, and yet who had talked of marriage? As she dried her eyes and mopped her face she saw the smudges of grime on what had been his snowy handkerchief, and it suddenly struck her that she must look a sight. In her dash from the bedroom which she would never sleep in again she had forgotten to comb her hair, and with her hair all over her messy face she must present a very unattractive picture.
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