He did not know what it was.
He could not put it into words, but just as when in India he had known instinctively, even before it happened, that he was in danger, so he knew now with a sixth sense that could not be denied that there was something very wrong, something he was being warned about.
Without really thinking what he was doing, he climbed out of bed.
He walked across the room and pulled back one of the curtains.
Outside the moon was rising in the sky and shining on the sea. The stars were bright and he thought for the moment that it was very beautiful.
Then he knew that this beauty did not at the moment really appeal to him.
He wanted to think and he wanted to understand the feelings he had within himself which he had to listen to.
He walked to the wardrobe, pulled it open and put on a shirt and his kilt.
He was used to dressing himself in a hurry and he was ready in what his valet would have called ‘record time’.
He tied a silk handkerchief around his neck and tucked it into his shirt.
Then, putting on a tweed jacket, he walked towards the door.
He opened it quietly and found the passage outside was not quite in darkness, for one candle had been left alight in a silver sconce.
There was just enough light to see the stairs and the hall below.
To his relief there was no night-footman on duty as there would have been in London, and again very quietly he unlocked the solid oak door and drew back a well-oiled bolt.
It was a relief to feel the cool air from the sea outside on his face and there was no wind.
Quickly, just in case he was seen by somebody who would think it strange that he should be so restless, he walked away from the house.
He moved first through a walled garden, then out at the other end of it and found himself in a shrubbery, which gave way to a woodland of fir trees.
They grew almost to the edge of the cliff and there was a path through them that was discernible in the moonlight. This the Duke followed, so deep in his thoughts that he was hardly aware of where he was going.
Then suddenly he heard the sound of falling water and remembered how at dinner before the conversation became more sophisticated that the Dowager had said,
“Tomorrow I want to show you our salmon river. I regret to say that it is not as good as yours, but we catch quite a lot of good fish in it.”
“I shall look forward to trying it,” the Duke said, smiling.
“You must also see our cascade,” she continued. “I expect you remember it as a boy and because we had a great deal of rain last month it is at the moment in spate.”
The Duke had not thought of the cascade at Dalbeth for years, but now he remembered it flowed from a high piece of ground in which there was both a spring and a meeting of the winter rains, resulting in the cascade, which fell down the side of the cliff directly into the sea.
He remembered it was a beauty spot that tourists always wanted to view when they came to this part of Scotland and he looked forward to seeing it again.
Now he heard the sound of it like the fall of torrential rain and he came through the trees and caught a glimpse of the water, silver in the moonlight just above him.
Then he saw that standing silhouetted against it was a woman.
chapter two
The Duke’s first feeling was one of irritation.
He realised that it would be a mistake for him to be seen by anybody from the house walking about at night and he had never expected there would be anybody else in the woods or, for that matter, by the cascade.
It seemed unlikely that she was a tourist and was therefore probably a servant who would go back to the house to announce that she had seen him.
He stood in the shadows of the trees thinking that the best thing he could do was to return the way he had come, when the woman ahead of him moved a little nearer to the cascade and he saw that she was looking down as if she was feeling her way.
It struck him that it was a dangerous thing to do for, if she overbalanced, she would be swept by the water hundreds of feet down onto the rocks where the cascade, foaming onto them, became merged with the sea.
Then his perceptiveness, which he used unconsciously, told him that she was deliberately endangering her life.
Without thinking he moved swiftly forward and, just as she would have thrown herself over the edge, he caught hold of her arm.
The roar of the water had prevented her from hearing him approach and she gave a little scream of fear as he pulled her back from the very edge onto safer ground.
“What do you think you are doing?” he asked roughly. “If you had fallen, you would have been dashed to death on the rocks below.”
“That – is what I – want.”
He could hardly hear the words and yet she had said them.
Now, still holding onto her arm as if she might escape from him, he looked down at her in the moonlight.
He saw a small pointed face that was dominated by two huge frightened eyes staring up at him.
Her hair, which fell over her shoulders was, he thought, fair, but seemed to catch the moonbeams so that it shone like silver.
She was so slim and insubstantial that it flashed through his mind that she might almost be a sprite or a nymph from the cascade itself.
Then he said sharply,
“How can you want to do anything so wicked and so wrong when you are so young?”
“There is – nothing else I – can do.”
Her voice was very low and hesitating and he thought that it was an effort for her to speak.
He looked down at her and realised that she was staring longingly at the water pouring down from the hillside.
As if she made up her mind, she said pleadingly.
“Please – go away and – leave me. I only want to make sure that – I fall into the water and I find it – difficult to see clearly.”
“It would be a very wrong thing to do,” the Duke said quietly.
“W-why – when it is what – they want?”
“Who wants?” he asked. “And who are ‘they’? Why should they want you to die?”
She did not answer and he thought that her whole body stiffened as if she realised that she had said too much.
Still holding on to her arm, he suggested,
“Suppose we move a little farther away from here and you tell me what is upsetting you?”
He spoke quietly and beguilingly in a voice that he had often used to extract information from men who had no wish to give it to him, but could be coaxed, or perhaps ‘mesmerised’ was a better word, into doing what he wanted.
The girl he was holding shook her head.
“N-no – n-no,” she stammered. “P-please – go away. I will – never get this chance again – and you can just – forget you have – ever seen me.”
“Unfortunately that would be impossible,” the Duke said, “and, if there was a hue and cry when you were lost, I should feel very guilty for not having stopped you from destroying something so precious as your life.”
“It’s – not precious to me,” she said hesitatingly, “and – there will be no – hue and cry.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“I am only – doing what is – wanted by – dying quicker than I will anyway. I – find doing it slowly is – intolerable!”
She spoke hesitatingly, as if she was speaking to herself.
As her voice grew softer and softer at the last word, she bent her head almost as if she was humbly accepting the inevitable.
Gently, with his arm round her shoulders, the Duke moved her slowly back, knowing as he did so, that she was too weak to resist him.
Before they reached the fir trees there were a few tree trunks that had been cut down by the woodcutters and were doubtless waiting to be removed.
Four of them were formed into a seat and, as they reached them, the Duke said,
“Suppose we sit down and talk about this?”
As if she was only semi-conscious of what he was doing and, as he stopped leading her, the girl looked back at the cascade and said,
“P-please leave me – as I have told you – this is my only – chance.”
“Your only chance of dying?” the Duke enquired. “How is that possible?”
He released her arm and, when he would have asked her again to sit on the trunks of the trees, he realised that she was scantily dressed in what he thought incredulously was a nightgown.
Realising that it would be very uncomfortable for her to sit on the rough tree trunk, he pulled off his tweed jacket and laid it down to make a cushion for her.
Then, as she seemed incapable of movement, he pushed her gently onto it.
When she was seated, he looked down and saw that she was wearing a pair of bedroom slippers and her ankles were bare.
“Now tell me about yourself,” he asked her quietly.
She turned to look at him and he thought that it was impossible for any woman’s eyes to fill her face in such a strange way.
Then, as he looked at her wrists, he realised that she was suffering from starvation.
He had seen too many people in India on the verge of death through lack of food not to recognise the symptoms, the protruding bones, the tightness of the skin and the sharpness of the chin line.
“Tell me what is wrong,” he enquired very quietly. “I can see that you have had literally nothing to eat.”
It flashed through his mind that this was the sort of poverty that the Countess’s money would be able to save his Clansmen from in the future.
He was listening intently as the girl looked away from him again and said,
“They – bring me the food upstairs – to impress the servants – but they don’t – give it to m-me.”
“I don’t understand,” the Duke replied. “Who are ‘they’ and how can they do something so cruel?”
The girl gave a sudden cry.
“Forget I – said that! Please – forget it! It was a – mistake!”
Now there was a terror in her voice that had not been there before and, as she looked away from him towards the cascade, he knew once again that she was contemplating how she could reach it without his stopping her.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” the Duke suggested. “Tell me your name.”
“G-Giovanna,” she replied slowly.
“Is that all?”
“That is my – name. I have – no other.”
It seemed to the Duke extraordinary that she should have an Italian name in the middle of Scotland, but he did not question her further.
He merely said,
“And now, Giovanna, you cannot do anything so unkind as to leave me curious about you for the rest of my life.”
“Y-you are – going to – leave me?”
There was a sudden note of hope in her voice and he knew that, if he did leave her, she would drown herself immediately.
“If I do so,” he said, choosing his words with care, “you will have to convince me that I would be right in allowing anybody so young to throw away the most precious thing any of us possess.”
Giovanna drew in her breath.
Then she said,
“I-I have to – I swear to you – if I don’t – drown myself – which you stopped me from doing – I shall only – waste away growing weaker and – weaker until I am – dead!”
“Where will you do that?” the Duke asked.
“In my prison – but tonight because they were so excited at – having an important visitor – the old maid – pretended to bring me my food – but she forgot to lock the door and so – I escaped!”
She gave a deep sigh. Then, as if she was talking to herself, she said,
“I have always – loved the cascade. I am – quite happy to – die in its arms.”
“It would be very very foolish,” the Duke pointed out.
She shook her head.
“I shall – die soon – anyway.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because it is what I – have to do – so that – ”
He thought that she would say more. Then she seemed to bite back the words as they came to her lips.
There was silence until after a moment she went on,
“I – have told you what you – wanted to know now – please say goodbye and – leave me.”
“If I do that,” the Duke said in a deep voice, “do you think I could ever live with myself again, thinking about you swept down by the water onto the rocks and out to sea?”
“I will be – happy in the – sea.”
“But you would be on my conscience for the rest of my life,” the Duke pointed out, “and that is something I cannot contemplate.”
“Why – not? You are a – stranger, you know – nothing about me. Perhaps tomorrow you will – think this was all a dream.”
“And when they tell me that you are dead, what am I to say?”
Giovanna gave a laugh that was not a laugh but a strange strangled sound. Yet for a moment her lips were curved in a smile.
“Do you really – think that they would tell you – or anybody else?”
Then, as if an idea had struck her, she turned to look at him.
“Who are – you?” she asked. “You don’t – speak like – one of the – Clansmen, which I thought you were – when you first caught – hold of me.”
“My name is Talbot.”
She was silent for a moment and the Duke guessed that she was thinking of the many Talbots she perhaps knew and wondering if he was one of them.
Then in a voice that was hardly audible she said in a whisper,
“T-Talbot – McCaron! You are not – you cannot be the – Duke!”
She looked up at him as she spoke and saw the answer in his face and gave a little scream.
“How could – you come here? How could – I have – met you? Now they will certainly kill me – and I cannot bear it.”
She gave another little scream and toppled forward and collapsed on the ground at the Duke’s feet.
He stared down at her for a moment in consternation, then rose and picked her up in his arms.
As he did so, he knew he was right in thinking that she was wearing nothing but a nightgown.
He could feel how thin and emaciated her body was. Her hip bones were sticking out sharply and he was sure that every rib was visible.
She had fainted and, as her head went back over his arm, her long hair streamed down and seemed to be part of the cascade itself.
He wondered what he should do with her and where he should take her.
Then suddenly his sixth sense took over and everything fell into place in the strange manner it always did when he was in danger or it was imperative that he should make a quick decision.
He could not explain to himself how it had happened a dozen times in India to save his life and that of his men.
Yet the ideas had come to him so clearly and so positively that he had known all he had to do was to obey them.
Now, without hesitating, he carried Giovanna back through the wood and into the shrubbery and only when he reached the edge of the gardens did he leave the path he had come by.
Instead he walked away from the house and down through what appeared to be an orchard of fruit trees until he almost reached the end of the drive.
Here he put Giovanna down amongst the shrubs that bordered the drive from the lodge to the front door and, looking at her as she lay in the grass, he thought for a moment that she was dead.
Then he was aware that, so faintly that her breasts hardly seemed to move, she was breathing and her pulse, although perceptible, was very weak.
He had seen so many people near death at one time or another that he was aware, without asking the advice of any physician, that, unless something was done quickly about Giovanna, she would certainly die.
Again the subconscious part of his brain told him what to do.
He pu
lled off the silk handkerchief he had tied around his neck and knotting it skilfully around one of Giovanna’s thin wrists, tied her securely to the root of a rhododendron bush.
He then remembered that he had left his tweed jacket behind on the tree trunks where they had been sitting, which he might have put behind her head.
But she looked fairly comfortable lying stretched out on the grass and he thought it unlikely that she would regain consciousness very rapidly.
He took one last look at her to make certain that it would be impossible for anybody who was passing down the drive to see her and then went hurriedly back to the house.
The front door was ajar, just as it had been when he left and he went up the stairs to his bedroom.
Closing the door behind him, he rang the bell for his valet.
*
When the Duke left India he had brought with him his batman who had served with him in the Regiment for nearly ten years.
He was a Scotsman by the name of Ross and was the only person except for a few high officials who knew of the dangerous exploits his Master had undertaken in The Great Game.
The Great Game was a part of an intelligence service so secret that its members were known only by numbers and the actions they undertook on behalf of the British Raj were never spoken about except in secret by the most senior officials behind closed doors.
Talbot McCaron had found Ross indispensable and he had only been afraid that, now that he had returned to civilian life, the man would leave him because he missed the excitement that had been so much part of their lives during the last few years.
It was Ross who had said to him when he was dressing for dinner,
“They’ve certainly made Your Grace comfortable! They’ve even run a bell from this room to mine just in case you wants somethin’ in the night!”
The Duke had laughed.
“That is unlikely.”
“Well, if you do. I’ll hear you,” Ross said. “It’ll be impossible not to. The bell’s fixed to the bed!”
The Duke laughed again. He was certain that the Dowager was determined to make a fuss of him and it was another way of ensuring that there was no way he could escape from the planned marriage.
Now as he waited, wondering what he would do if Ross had not heard the bell or if it did not work, it was with a sense of relief that he heard his footsteps outside and the door open quietly.
The Devilish Deception Page 3