by Susan Barrie
“Where to?” he asked, with such curtness that he sounded as if he was speaking between his teeth.
She told him: “Twenty-four Alison Gardens.”
He transmitted the address to the driver, then sank back and asked her another curt question.
“I hope you’ve got that bag of yours safe?” he regarded it as if instead of being made of unoffending leather there was something noisome about it, and he disliked it extremely. “I suppose you realize that it’s a very unwise thing to saunter about London with all that money in your possession and apparently no sense of direction?”
Lucy drew a long breath, and she suddenly realized that she was trembling rather badly. She was not unappreciative of the fact that she had been saved from something very horrible ... And she owed her escape to him. It would never do to let him know that, but for him, she might never have been in any danger at all—might have allowed a taxi to be called for her before she left the jeweller’s—but it was such an indisputable fact that she couldn’t deny it herself.
She felt bewildered, both by her stupidity and by the thing that had just happened to her.
“Oh, I wasn’t merely sauntering along without knowing where I was going,” she tried to reassure him a little feebly. “I—I intended to take a taxi.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” he remarked.
“But it’s such a lovely morning, and I’ve never had so much money in my possession—not all at once!—before.”
“Then it is your money?”
“Oh no. It belongs to my employer, the Countess von Ardrath.”
“I see,” he said, and lay back in a more relaxed fashion in his corner, and studied the passers-by. He had rather a firmly set mouth, and to Lucy it was distinctly grim at the moment, and his chin had a squareness and a strength about it that would have pleased her very much indeed if she hadn’t been afraid that he was very much annoyed. She supposed he wasn’t exactly handsome, for his face was too thin, and the eyes were too brooding, but those extraordinary eyelashes she had noticed before were quite unusual in a man, and so was the beauty of his well-cared-for hands.
He was—as she had also previously noted—impeccably dressed, and every detail of his appearance hinted at someone who was intensely fastidious. His hair was beautifully barbered, and he was almost exquisitely shaved. There was a faint aroma of expensive cigarette smoke about him, and a rather more exciting one of after-shave lotion. Lucy judged him to be either in his late twenties or early thirties. She suddenly got out with a rush:
“I—I haven’t thanked you yet for—for coming to my rescue as you did. But for you—”
She felt herself go cold as she wondered what would have happened to her if he hadn’t come to her rescue. “You must have followed me...” she suggested.
“I did.” He continued to keep his face averted, as if the people on the pavements fascinated him. “I realised you had all that money on you, and you didn’t appear to me to be behaving very sensibly.”
“The—the man who tried to take the money from me, he had a—gun. He might have shot you!”
He shook his head, and for the first time she saw him smile slightly.
“Not he. He had no gun. That was merely a piece of bluff. He was what I would call a natural-born opportunist who, when he took one look at you emerging from old Halliday’s office with your bag clutched underneath your arm, thought that the fates were being especially kind to him. You weren’t merely a sitting target, you were as good as plucked ... and I’m quite sure he’s reviling me in no uncertain terms at the moment because I interfered with a gift from the gods.”
Lucy glanced shyly at his hands.
“You gave him an awful bashing.”
“I hope he has a sore jaw for weeks.”
“The Countess will be—will be very grateful when I tell her.”
At that he turned his face towards her sharply. “The Countess appears to be as impractical as you are, and I think she should be publicly rebuked for allowing a young woman like you to undertake the task of selling jewellery for her. Why couldn’t she sell it herself if she wanted it sold? Or why couldn’t she send someone else?”
“Because there is no one else.”
He studied her openly.
“You mean that you and she live alone?”
“Not quite alone, because we have Augustine to look after us ... and Augustine has been with madame for years. But madame is old, and so is Augustine—it’s as much as she can do to climb the stairs nowadays—and I am the only one who is capable of running errands.”
“But—” She had already decided that there was something foreign about him, and he uttered an exclamation that sounded very foreign to her, and which she quite failed to translate—“selling jewellery is not running errands! It’s a job for an expert, or someone at least who understands the value of stones. Old Halliday is completely honest, but you could have been defrauded badly...”
Lucy shook her head, and this time it was she who smiled a little smile of amusement.
“Not when I had already received my instructions from madame. She knows the value of every piece of jewellery in her jewelbox—every bracelet, necklace, ring, right down to a pair of small diamond studs—ear-studs.”
His dark eyebrows elevated themselves.
“Then your ‘madame’ is by way of being a wealthy woman, if she has all this jewellery?”
But Lucy hastily corrected any false impression she had made.
“Oh no, no! It’s all for Seronia. That’s to say, it’s for the restoration of the monarchy in Seronia. Madame only consented to sell this one piece today because—because we needed the money.”
“I see,” he said again, and one corner of his mouth turned down somewhat bleakly. “It is to be hoped that Seronia acknowledges such generosity once the monarchy is restored; although so far as I know it is going along very nicely at the moment without a monarchy.”
The taxi was drawing up outside No. 24 Alison Gardens, and Lucy prepared to alight. She clutched hold of her handbag and looked at the man who was so strangely reserved although he had been of the greatest possible assistance to her that morning. She attempted to thank him again.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for keeping madame’s two thousand guineas intact for her. It would have been awful—in fact, it would have been a disaster!—if we had lost the money.”
“It would have been a disaster for madame if she had lost you, I would say,” he remarked.
He assisted her to alight, and he also insisted on paying the taxi fare.
“If you attempt to open that bag of yours we’ll have a fresh catastrophe,” he observed.
He smiled with a flash of beautiful, hard white teeth, and held out a hand to her.
“Take care of yourself, mademoiselle, and if you take my advice you will look for a nice safe job in the country, exercising pet dogs, or something of the sort. Believe me, I think you are more cut out for that sort of thing than getting mixed up in the weighty affairs of Seronia.”
Lucy realised that he hadn’t even told her his name—he hadn’t even asked for hers—and he was about to depart out of her life.
“The Countess has three dogs, which I exercise daily,” she told him for something to say. Then, as she felt his long firm fingers clasping hers, “Won’t you come inside and meet madame? Just for a moment,” she pleaded. “Let her thank you and offer you a glass of sherry.”
A twinkle invaded his eyes.
“If your employer has been forced to start selling her jewellery in order to meet expenses I wouldn’t wish to deprive her of her sherry,” he replied. “Besides—”
“But it’s good sherry,” she assured him. “Even when circumstances are very difficult madame wouldn’t dream of offering anyone—well, cooking sherry.”
“You intrigue me,” he said softly, and then to her astonishment he lifted her hand and carried it up to his lips. “I regret, however, that I have an appointment. Convey my rega
rds to Her Highness, and tell her to cease worrying her head over Seronia. If she has anything to sell, tell her to sell it and enjoy the proceeds herself. And share them, of course, with you!”
For one instant his eyes flicked over her shabby suit.
“Goodbye, mademoiselle.”
CHAPTER IV
THAT night the Countess insisted upon a celebration dinner. She sent Augustine out to buy a small, plump chicken, some mushrooms, and a bundle of asparagus. She also instructed her to call in at a confectioner’s for a very rich gateau to serve as a sweet, and a wine merchant’s for half a bottle of champagne.
“Tonight we will drink to the future,” she said to Lucy. “To your future, and the future of Seronia! We will not bother about mine, because I shall be eighty-eight next birthday, and that is eighteen years beyond my three score and ten. What little future lies ahead of me is not important.”
Lucy had refrained from passing on to her the advice of the man who had brought her home in a taxi that morning concerning Seronia. Her own private opinion was that the Countess had a perfect right to do what she pleased with her own possessions, and if it pleased her to further the cause of Seronia—or to delude herself into believing that she was furthering the cause—then that was her affair, and outside advice was hardly called for.
At the same time, the Countess’s reaction to the sight of so much money had been a little surprising, and a hopeful portent for the next period of leanness. She had called Augustine into the room while she counted every one of the notes, and they had then been locked away in a drawer of her desk. She had then sat beaming and looking bemused in her chair, and said that there were several rings and other smallish items in the jewelbox which she might part with now that the mood was on her, only this time she would send for Mr. Halliday to come and see her, and not ask Lucy to conduct the negotiations for her. She had been obviously very perturbed when Lucy told her about the incident of the morning, and the man in the loud suit; but the girl was careful not to lay too much alarming emphasis on the whole episode, and only Augustine guessed that she was soft-pedalling things, and was loud in her praise of Lucy’s rescuer, whom the Countess seemed inclined to overlook.
“And you say that he brought you all the way to the door in a taxi? What a pity you couldn’t persuade him to come inside and receive Her Highness’s thanks! Her Highness should most certainly have thanked him!”
“He didn’t want any thanks,” Lucy said quietly.
And for the first time she remembered—and now it struck her as odd—that before saying that final, “Goodbye, mademoiselle,” the dark-eyed man had asked her to convey his regards to Her Highness.
Her Highness?
How did he know that the Countess von Ardrath had the right to be referred to as ‘Highness’?
Before she went back to her kitchen, looking very much happier than she had done in the morning, Augustine took the liberty of giving Lucy’s arm a squeeze.
“It was an adventure, mademoiselle,” she whispered. “And what is life without the little adventure?”
The dinner that night seemed a fitting rounding off of such a day, or so Lucy thought. The dining-room of the maisonette was a grim apartment, containing some of the ugliest furniture she had ever seen—including a huge mahogany chiffonier with a cracked mirror, and an old fashioned round table covered, when it was not in use, with a chenille tablecloth edged with bobble fringe—but Augustine went to a lot of trouble to give it a festive appearance. She draped the portraits of the Countess’s mother and father—the last King and Queen of Seronia—with some swathes of purple velvet, and put a vase of somewhat stunted daffodils in the middle of the dinner table. The cloth itself was heavy white damask, and the cutlery gleamed. So did the silver napkin rings beside each plate.
Finger-bowls were brought out, too—exquisite, fragile affairs of Venetian glass—and over the damask cloth went lace table-mats. The half bottle of champagne was immersed in a silver ice bucket, and up to the very minute when the cork was withdrawn Augustine kept examining the cubes of ice to make certain they weren’t melting. As usual the room was over-warm, for the Countess couldn’t live in a moderate atmosphere, and Augustine kept plunging down the stairs to the kitchen to fetch fresh ice, until the Countess ordered her to stop being ridiculous and open the bottle.
“We’ve drunk champagne before,” the old lady reminded her tartly. “Years ago I could have ordered you to fill my bath with it if I’d fancied a champagne bath. Our cellars were stocked with some of the noblest vintages.”
It was then that she lifted her glass and uttered her toast.
“To the future!” A wistful expression clouded her eyes. “And to my one and only grandson, Stanislav, who is far away in America, and whom I’ve never seen, but whom I hope to see before I die.”
Lucy had often wondered about the Countess’s family connections, and now it transpired that she had a grandson. The champagne was loosening her tongue, and she confided:
“It is he who pays me my allowance. Not a very large allowance, I will admit, but there are those who wouldn’t bother at all about an old woman like myself, and Stanislav has continued what his father started before him. My son Boris amassed quite a considerable fortune as a result of some enterprise he went in for, and the family is now settled in America.”
“I’m surprised they haven’t sent for you before this,” Lucy couldn’t resist observing.
The Countess’s eyes flashed, as if her pride was up in arms.
“Why should they?” she demanded. “When I would be nothing but a nuisance to them. They have their own lives to lead, and I ... I have had my life. It would be different if my son were still alive. But he is dead. He was killed in some sort of a road accident a few years ago.”
“And your grandson is married?” Lucy asked, not so much because she was curious but because she had the feeling her employer wanted to talk of the only blood relatives she could claim nowadays.
The old lady shrugged her shoulders.
“He was married. There was some talk of divorce. However, I do not know what happened.”
“And you don’t even know whether you have any great-grandchildren?”
An unusually soft half-smile flitted across the Countess’s lips.
“If I had I should be very happy, but I think it is almost certain there are no great-grandchildren. When Stanislav wrote to me, three years ago, there was no mention of them.”
“And he hasn’t written to you since?”
“Not since that last letter. Very likely he has had nothing to write about,” the proud old woman defended the neglectful Stanislav.
“And you have no other relatives? No daughters who had children—?”
This time the Countess tightened her lips, and looking down at the bread roll on her plate broke it into pieces deliberately.
“I had two daughters. They both married well, and one of them kept in touch with me until a few years ago, when she died. The other married a man I could not approve of, and there was no question of her keeping in touch with me. Her son—and she had one son—is no doubt somewhere in the world, but where is a matter of supreme indifference to me. He and I have little interest in one another.”
Lucy felt shocked. She too crumbled her bread roll, and then she put forward a suggestion:
“But you might—if you saw one another—like one another!”
The Countess’s eyes flashed sparks at the very thought.
“Never!” she said.
Lucy gave it up. Quite obviously the Countess’s daughter had married very unwisely—even if she had married well—and her mother would never forgive her. The old lady who hoped one day to see the monarchy restored to Seronia, and could deny herself the ordinary everyday comforts of life in order to see a dream realised, was not the type to forgive and forget easily. On the contrary, she was the type to carry on a vendetta, as Lucy realised.
“One day,” the Countess said with great pride, “Stanislav will be
King of Seronia. And that will be a wonderful day for all loyal sons and daughters of Seronia!”
The Countess seized hold of the champagne bottle and divided the little that remained in it between her own and Lucy’s glasses. Her be-ringed fingers—and she was wearing many rings tonight—shook with sudden excitement.
“To King Stanislav the Fourth of Seronia!” she cried in a ringing tone. “May it not be long before he comes to his throne!”
Lucy obediently chinked glasses with hers, but her private thoughts were less optimistic, and less complimentary to the uncrowned king. Since the allowance he made his grandmother was so niggardly, and the interest he took in her practically non-existent, she could even find it in her heart to hope that the Republic would flourish, and continue to flourish, for many a long year yet.
She could tell that the old lady who employed her had suddenly become very tired, and gently but firmly she suggested bed.
“You have had an unusually exciting day, madame,” she said, “and our celebration dinner has exhausted you. In the morning I think you should lie very late in bed.”
“In the morning we are going shopping,” the Countess announced, with a resurgence of spirit. “I am going to buy you that outfit I promised you, and because this is a very dull way of having a celebration, tomorrow we will go out to dinner! We will dine at the Ritz or the Splendide. It is many years since I dined at the Splendide, and the food there used to be magnificent. You shall telephone directly after breakfast and book a table.”
Lucy felt slightly alarmed.
“Oh, but, madame,” she protested, “is that really necessary?”
Her employer fixed her with almost a belligerent eye.
“Of course it is necessary,” she returned. “Look at you—a young woman in her early twenties, sufficiently attractive to be quite a sensation if properly introduced in the right circles, wearing that appalling grey dress which has been a serious offence to me ever since you came to this house. The one thing I long to do is hand it over to Augustine to burn in the incinerator ... and with it can go that miserable suit you wore this morning. By this time tomorrow you will have a wardrobe fit for a young woman of your class!”