The Dollar Prince's Wife

by Paula Marshall

  Cobie passed the door of her room, and kicked open his own. Candles had been lit—he had so instructed before he had left. The new electric light was too glaring for what he had in mind. The room was full of shadows. For a moment he saw himself, another shadow, in a pier glass, holding Dinah to him, before he laid her on his bed.

  She gave a little sigh, put her hand under her cheek, and turned confidingly towards him where he stood over her.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said sleepily. He wondered to whom she thought that she was speaking.

  Cobie ripped off his tie and unbuttoned the constricting shirt at his throat before pulling off his tight black coat. There were times when he could hardly bear the conventional constraints of civilised urban wear and urban living, and tonight was one of them.

  ‘We should be alone, under the stars,’ he said aloud, ‘away from everyone, and beneath a sky full of flaming banners, all of different colours, and there I would teach you the delights of love-making.’

  Nostalgia for his lost life in the American Southwest filled him to such a degree that he could almost smell again the scents of the desert, see the mountains, deep mauve against a pale mauve sky…ribbons of varicoloured light beneath a rising moon…

  And then he was sitting beside his child wife, the sounds of London life all about him, the Arizona desert far away. She had not heard him speak of what he had once known so well: she was lost in her own dreams, in which, on so many nights, Cobie Grant, unrecognisable, a pistol in his left hand, visited her, and said, ‘Remember this, Dinah, appearances often deceive.’

  He disappeared, and she was alone in a strange place unlike anywhere she had ever seen. She was lying on the ground, strange shapes all about her; deep mauve mountains were etched against a pale mauve sky in which the moon rode high. Banners of light, in all colours of the spectrum, waved beneath it, and someone was gently speaking her name…

  She was lying, fully dressed, on a bed. But she was not on her own bed, she was on Cobie’s and it was he who was speaking to her…in a candle-lit room, full of strange shapes….

  For a moment she was disorientated, and then she remembered the Hertfords’ reception, coming home, and… ‘I must have fallen asleep in the carriage,’ she murmured, rising on one elbow and looking up at her husband who was sitting by her. ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘How do you think, Dinah?’ he asked her, and his voice was soft and tender. He had taken off his black coat, and in his open-necked white shirt he looked more splendid than ever.

  ‘You carried me.’

  She sat up, and rested her head against the elaborately carved bed-head. It had come from a palace in Florence, she knew. She should have been feeling worried that she was here, alone with him on his bed in the small hours, and half of her was afraid, and the other half was expectant. She shivered—but not with cold.

  Cobie turned away from her, rose, and walked into the shadows. He came back carrying a champagne glass in each hand. He handed her one of them, and put the other on the small table by his bed.

  ‘In a moment,’ he told her, ‘we shall drink a toast.’

  ‘We shall?’

  ‘Yes. Do you want to hear it, Dinah?’

  She nodded, mutely, holding the glass carefully so that nothing was spilled from it.

  ‘Very well. It is to us, and to our marriage.’

  He sat on the bed again, and picked up his glass to clink it against her own.

  ‘To us, tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Tonight?’ she echoed, and shivered again.

  Cobie usually read her correctly, but not this time. He thought that her shiver was one of fear only, when instead it was of fear mixed with expectancy. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and put his glass down. He took hers from her: she must have drunk the champagne as he had done, in one prodigious swallow, almost without thinking. Their hands touched and she shivered again.

  He put a gentle arm around her, and gave her a brotherly hug, saying to her, in an almost conversational voice, ‘Your bitch of a sister frightened you, didn’t she?’

  Fascinated, Dinah nodded, mute again. She remembered the stream of spite from Violet’s lips on the night before her wedding, designed to turn her against the man whom Violet coveted, but whom her despised little sister had won.

  ‘She told you I was a tiger in bed, didn’t she?’

  This time Dinah felt that she must speak, ‘Yes, she did… How did you know?’

  ‘I’m a mind reader,’ he said lightly, cursing Violet for making his task more difficult. ‘She said that you wouldn’t satisfy me?’

  How did he know such things? Could he read minds? More than once since their marriage, he had told her when he had thought that people were lying to them, and so far, he had always been correct in his judgments.

  ‘Yes,’ she managed through stiff lips.

  ‘I shan’t be a tiger with you, Dinah. You do believe me, I hope.’

  He put up his hand, his beautiful hand, turned her face towards him and kissed her on the lips, a light kiss, a brotherly kiss.

  ‘I shall try to be as gentle as you would wish me to be, but…loving…Dinah, is often not a gentle thing, you understand me?’

  He gave her another kiss, then, when she opened her mouth to answer him, a much less brotherly kiss.

  Cobie could feel her heart beating. It was like holding a frightened bird in his hands, the bird throbbing at his touch, fearful, wanting its freedom. He was using his voice to quieten the bird.

  Now he turned her fully into his arms. She stiffened for a moment, but she didn’t resist him. He put his hands into her hair, and kissed her, more strongly this time, forcing her lips apart gently. One hand trailed down her neck, and to Dinah his touch was like fire running down her body, causing it to tremble and shake.

  She was on her back now, and he was half above her. His voice said lazily in her ear, ‘We’re wearing too many clothes, Dinah, but we can’t send for our servants to remove them, can we? What do you propose we do?’

  And then, his voice loving her, and teasing her, he whispered, ‘You do know, you do understand what we are finally going to do tonight?’

  She whispered into his ear, ‘Yes. Violet told me,’ and she shivered again.

  ‘But not why,’ he said, a trifle grimly, but his blue eyes were soft. ‘We are meant to enjoy ourselves, Dinah, and from our enjoyment there may come a new life. There might be no new life if enjoyment were missing. You understand me?’

  Yes, she understood him, But she couldn’t imagine doing what Violet had told her of with anyone, let alone the man who was holding her so closely. And yet…and yet…strange things were happening to her, for she suddenly wanted to touch him.

  ‘Shall I…shall I undress for you?’ she asked him shyly.

  Her husband thought, wryly, that she was saying it as though she were asking, ‘Do you wish to tie me to the rack?’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s my privilege?’ he told her gently. ‘And, in return, you might do the same for me.’

  Dinah closed her eyes.

  ‘If you like,’ she told him meekly, a lamb preparing herself for the slaughter.

  ‘Oh, I do like,’ he smiled, and rose from the bed, to free her, but only for a moment.

  ‘Stand up, Dinah, my love, and face me. A husband likes to enjoy his wife in every way possible.’

  She did his bidding without demur, and then, with as much, if not more, dexterity than Pearson or Hortense, he slowly stripped her of her ballroom finery.

  Only Pearson and Hortense did not caress her with lips and mouth while they did so. Nor did they brush their hands across her body, stroking every part of it, even her secret parts, so that it began to vibrate and sing with such pleasure that suddenly she was barely able to stand, but sighed and sagged against him.

  She was naked, except for the jewels around her neck and wrists and on her hands, and, hanging unresisting against him, she felt his clever hands continue their work. Suddenly he laughed, de
ep in his throat, and swung her around to face the long mirror, and stood behind her, still caressing her.

  Was that Dinah Grant in the mirror? Was she that wanton maenad, her hair around her shoulders, a man’s hands on, and in, her body. They produced suddenly such a sensation of mindless pleasure that she cried his name aloud, closing her eyes, when the ecstasy took her.

  ‘Open your eyes, Dinah!’ he commanded, and she did so—to see his face behind hers in the mirror, pleasure at her pleasure on it.

  During, and after, the mindless ecstasy he supported her, for her legs were like water—which he must have known, for he held her so tightly, so lovingly—saying, and his own breathing was short, ‘There, that was nothing to be frightened of, Dinah, was it?—and it was only a foretaste. Now we must share our pleasure. But first, you must strip and love me.’

  All conscious thought had flown, and Dinah’s fear had flown with it. Her inward trembling stopped at last, the rapid beat of her heart slowed, until she was able to strip him in exchange for him having stripped her. She unbuttoned his shirt, removed it, unbuttoned his elegant black trousers and helped him to remove them, until he stood naked before her—they were Adam and Eve together before the Fall.

  Dinah shivered and panted again at the sight of him. He was more beautiful stripped than clothed, and she understood Violet’s rage at losing him. She was still a little fearful of him, and of his masculinity which, in all the nude male statues she had seen, had been cunningly hidden from sight. Nothing had prepared her for the sight of a roused man.

  Cobie saw her reaction, leaned towards her and, taking her in his arms, so that they stood, entwined, a pair of lovers before the mirror, said in her ear, ‘You enjoyed the pleasure I gave you just now, Dinah?’

  ‘You know I did,’ she whispered back.

  ‘Do you also understand that, as I pleasured you, I might like to be pleasured by you?’ and he took her hand and slipped it between them, so that he lay stiff and erect in it.

  Dinah gasped at the sensation, for what she held was as smooth and warm as velvet, and instinctively her own hand moved to pleasure him after the fashion in which he had pleasured her, a moment before.

  He said hoarsely, ‘Yes! Stroke me, Dinah, as I stroked you, ah…’ and when she did so, tentatively at first, and then more strongly, he sighed and sobbed exactly as she had done, until she felt the ecstasy take him. So now it was he who was shuddering, his face in her neck, and it was her name he was calling, and she was holding him in the final ecstasy.

  After a moment he said, still panting, ‘You see what you do to me, Dinah. For all my strength, I am helpless before you.’

  ‘As I was to you,’ she agreed, her own breathing short again, for his ecstasy had roused her once more.

  He nodded, mute, as she had been, and then, a moment later, he lifted her on to the bed, to lie beside him. For the first time, she moved towards him, turning to put her arms around him, to feel him warm against her.

  The desire to touch him, there, to kiss him, was so strong that she found her wanton hands were now at work about his body. He laughed his soundless laugh again, and rolled her beneath him, saying, ‘Impatient nymph that you are, your satyr needs a little time to recover. But some gentle loving will revive him, I think.’

  Revived he was and, before long, Dinah was calling his name and begging him to do she knew not what, ‘Oh, please, Cobie, please.’

  With joy in his heart that his young wife had not allowed her fear of him—and of loving—to destroy her, but after experiencing their separate joys was looking to him to provide them with a mutual one, he finally made her his. At last the two became one, and Dinah discovered the pleasure that follows and transcends pain.

  ‘Not tigers,’ he whispered, after their mutual ecstasy had ended, ‘but cubs, playing together. Making love’s not a battlefield, Dinah, it’s a playground of happiness, of shared joy.’

  So why, after laughing with him in their final transports, was she crying? she asked him a little later. Her tears were salt on his tongue, and he was licking them away.

  ‘Strong emotions, Dinah, resemble one another strongly. Tears and laughter are never far apart.’

  Well, that was true enough, she thought, wondering why she had ever been frightened of him. She was a little awed by his ability, not only to overcome her fear, but to lead her into realms of sensation she had never thought to experience.

  He had told her that he did not, could not, love anyone. Yet what he had done for her surely had love in it for, novice though she was, Dinah was already beginning to understand that he had subsumed his own pleasure in hers in order to ensure that she should be gently initiated into true womanhood.

  Before they finally fell asleep she caressed him. In doing so, Dinah consciously registered what she had barely noticed during their love play: that his back was horribly and brutally scarred. She could feel the welts and ridges beneath her fingers. She said nothing, but when he rose from the bed to slip on a dressing gown with his back to her, she saw it fully for the first time, and the sight horrified her.

  Unlike Violet, when she had first seen it, she didn’t question him, and again, unlike Violet, she knew, intuitively, because she had never seen such a thing before, that he had been cruelly and brutally beaten. His explanation to Violet that he had been dragged for some distance on his back by a mustang which he had failed to control would not have deceived Dinah.

  Her own heart was full of love for him, because of the consideration with which he had just treated her, so different from anything which Violet had suggested might be her fate. How could anyone have been so cruel to him, he who had been so kind to her?

  Dinah was sure that, kind though he was, he had been telling the truth when he had said that he did not love her, and she wondered all over again why he had virtually bought her from Rainey. She could only be grateful to him, not only for rescuing her from Violet and penury, but for making her his true wife in such a tender and apparently loving manner.

  ‘Remember this, Dinah,’ she told herself, when she too, fell asleep, ‘appearances often deceive’—and did not know why she said it.

  Chapter Ten

  Walker was meeting one of his informers in a small pub off the Strand. His man was a member of the demi-monde, who called himself Captain Legge. He was someone who was accepted in male society, who was present at little all-masculine dinners, and was welcome in men’s clubs, but who was never invited to such important thrashes as the Hertfords.

  Despite that, he knew all the gossip that ran around Mayfair and Belgravia, and some that didn’t, but which was often more important. A few weeks ago Walker had asked him to discover what he could about Mr Jacobus Grant, the American financier. There would be a little something for him, Walker said, if he came up trumps.

  He was already drinking when Walker arrived, and said, jovially, ‘There you are, Will. A noggin for you, eh?’

  Walker didn’t refuse. He accepted his pint and drank some of it down before saying, ‘Well?’

  ‘Very well. What’s it worth?’

  Walker named a sum. His informant laughed scornfully. ‘More’n that. I want at least a tenner.’

  ‘A tenner! You’re joking. Scotland Yard ain’t made of money.’

  ‘That’s the price, chum. I’ve his life story for you. You’re not the only one interested in him and his past. Several people are after knowing all about Mr Cobie Grant, and his goings on, and are prepared to pay me well. But if you don’t want to know…’ and he made to get up and go.

  ‘Oh, very well. I’ll give you your tenner. But you’d better make sure that what you tell me is worth it.’

  ‘Your Mr Grant is a strange sort of cove altogether. He was supposed to have been adopted by Jack Dilhorne, the big man at Dilhorne and Rutherfurds, in the States, up there with the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. Gossip says, though, that he was Dilhorne’s bastard by his wife Marietta Hope, born some little time before they were married. Her father was Senator J
acobus Hope—get it?—which seems to bear that out. Also he’s the image of Jack Dilhorne, and Jack’s brother here, Sir Alan Dilhorne of Temple Hatton, late Cabinet minister, but he’s never been acknowledged.’

  ‘Dilhorne,’ muttered Walker, thinking of Mr Dilley and Mr Horne, and a man who had laughed in his face and as much as admitted that he was a bastard. ‘Go on, this is interesting.’

  ‘He was brought up as a rich man’s son. He did well at Yale as a scholar and an athlete. He became a mining engineer, and rumour says that there was a plum job in the firm waiting for him when he graduated. Except that, suddenly, without warning, he threw everything up, went to Arizona Territory and got himself a little post at a tinpot mine in a place called Bratt’s Crossing.

  ‘After being there for six months he left quite suddenly and disappeared for over eighteen months before turning up in New York with a small fortune which he made into a big one on Wall Street—he wouldn’t touch his foster-father’s money, I’m told. He became one of Wall Street’s biggest pirates.’

  ‘Where’d he get his money from?’ asked Walker, interested in this dime-novel adventure.

  ‘Who knows? My informant says that recently a Pinkerton’s man was sent to the Territory, but Bratt’s Crossing has been a ghost town for years and there was little to be discovered about what happened ten years ago. It seems that about a year or so after Grant left the mine was blown up in a fracas among thieves. The local rancher, named Blenkiron, who ran it for Southwest Associates, and who had earlier employed Grant, was killed in a shoot-out by two ruffians. His hired gunman, Greer, a noted villain, was wounded in it, but had left the district and couldn’t be found.

  ‘With the rancher dead, and the mine useless, there was no reason for anyone to live there. The editor of the local paper was a woman, and she was tracked down, quite by chance. She had married the man who had kept the store at Bratt’s Crossing and now owned Blenkiron’s ranch. They both said that they had no idea where Grant had gone when he left Bratt’s Crossing. He never came back, they said.