Royal Purple

by Susan Barrie

  “Dear me,” the Countess said, looking up at him steadily. “I’ll admit I have heard something about this, but it never occurred to me that Lucy’s rescuer was a modern knight-errant. A Sir Galahad who calls himself Avery! There is a beautiful obscurity about it that rings positively untrue, and I hope you don’t expect me to believe that you were born Paul Avery.” She waved a ringed hand imperiously. “Sit down and drink a glass of champagne with us. Or isn’t that permitted when you are on duty?”

  “I’m afraid it isn’t permitted, madame.”

  “A pity,” observed the Countess, taking a sip of her own champagne. “Because I would have liked to put to you a lot of questions. However, you must come and see us one evening and take a drink with us then. I have no doubt you are fully aware that we live at number twenty-four Alison Gardens,” with a distinctly meaning glance at Lucy.

  Lucy flushed, but Paul Avery neither accepted nor declined the invitation. Instead he stood aside while the waiter who had carried away the venison returned with the abject apologies of the chef, and the promise of something highly delectable that would arrive in a matter of minutes.

  The Countess, mollified immediately, beamed amiably, and Avery bent over Lucy and enquired whether her trout was exactly as she liked it. Lucy, who couldn’t remember the last time she had had trout, looked up at him shyly and assured him without hesitation that, from her point of view, everything connected with the meal was superb. And then to her astonishment she heard him enquire in that soft undertone of his:

  “Do you ever go to Kensington Gardens?”

  “Oh yes,” she answered. “Practically every afternoon.”

  “Then be there tomorrow afternoon at three. A young friend of mine will be sailing his new boat in the Round Pond. You’ll find it worth watching.” Lucy put back her head to look up at him, and his eyes were very dark close above her. She thought they were smiling. The Countess fairly clucked with satisfaction when her fresh dish of venison arrived, and after that she purred continually throughout the meal, declaring that she must have been inspired when she decided they should dine that night at the Splendide. In future they would dine there at least once a month, and if she could afford it they would lunch there occasionally too.

  “We must see to it that your friend Avery informs the chef that we require very special attention,” she added, her eyes, bright with the effects of champagne, bewildering Lucy as they studied her across the table and danced with a mixture of humour, appreciation and dryness. “It is always a good thing to have a friend at court, and now we have one here, it seems.”

  She insisted on drinking a green chartreuse with her coffee, and before they took their departure sent her compliments to the chef and repeated her invitation to Avery to call and see them one evening when he was off duty.

  “I have something very special that I will bring out to celebrate the occasion with,” she said, flushed with good food and the effects of chartreuse on top of champagne, and not entirely steady on her feet as he helped her adjust the lace stole about her shoulders. “A very fine old liqueur brandy that came out of Seronia thirty years ago!”

  Very gravely he offered to see them into a taxi, but the old lady declined any assistance save Lucy’s arm.

  “Lucy is a good girl,” she said. “Her life is very dull, but she has some wonderful new clothes.” Her look swept over him, brilliant with mockery. “I’m sure she will enjoy the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. It is a pity her escort will be nothing but a waiter, but waiters, I understand, make their fortunes out of tips!” and she left a crisp pound note on the table which he could ignore if he wished.

  Lucy was glad to get her outside and into the taxi. She had never known the Countess von Ardrath in such an elevated humour before, and she was sure the people who watched them go were entertained.

  The Countess’s tiara had slipped rakishly over one eye, she walked erratically, and continued to talk loudly.

  “What an evening!” she declared. “What a wonderful evening! I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, and the one thing I would have loved to see was the chef’s face when I returned that superbly cooked venison. It was just a gesture, you know! The sort of gesture I would have made years ago when I knew they expected it.” She sank back wearily on the seat of the taxi. “But these sort of things don’t seem to go down so well these days. That young man Avery’s face was positively disdainful! I wonder whether his pride was too great to allow him to pick up that one-pound note!”

  CHAPTER VI

  LUCY found out the following afternoon. She was waiting in soft spring sunshine beside the famous sheet of water in Kensington Gardens on which not only young people, but those of more mature years, sail boats and wait for them to cross to the farther shore with as much breathless excitement as if they were the Pilgrim Fathers themselves waiting to arrive in the New World, when she was joined by the graceful figure of Paul Avery, and together they watched the boats.

  Lucy was wearing her new cream suit, and that morning she had paid a visit to a hairdresser and had her hair cut really short. It looked enchanting, and a special rinse had given it the appearance of living gold, but Avery frowned.

  “What have you done to your hair?” he demanded.

  Lucy explained.

  “It was so long, and I couldn’t do anything to it.” Her eyes hung upon his hopefully, while the colour palpitated in her cheeks in case he was disappointed. “The Countess and I agreed that it wasn’t nearly fashionable enough, so I had it cut.”

  “And the Countess has expended some of her two thousand guineas on you, and bought you some new clothes?” touching the sleeve of the cream suit lightly.

  She nodded.

  “It was kind of her, wasn’t it?”

  He shrugged.

  “It all depends whether her motives were kind.” He indicated the swans, that were being fed by a group of tourists. “I’ve brought along some bread if you’d like to feed them too. It’s one of the things one does when one makes a trip to the Round Pond.”

  But Lucy was afraid he hadn’t been at all impressed by her new appearance, and she had to find out.

  “You—you do think I look much nicer than I did the—the first time you saw me, don’t you?” she asked, in her turn touching his sleeve.

  He looked directly down at her, and he smiled. The sight of his hard and beautiful white teeth set her heart fluttering.

  “You look adorable,” he told her. “But then you looked adorable the first time I saw you.”

  He slipped his hand inside her arm and drew her away from the pond.

  “If you don’t want to feed the swans what shall we do? I’ve a whole free afternoon ahead of me, and if you’re not in any hurry we’ll spend it together, shall we?”

  “And you won’t find that boring?” she enquired, looking up at him without any coquetry, but a lurking anxiety in her eyes in case he should change his mind about devoting so much of his time to her.

  “I won’t find it in the very slightest degree boring,” he assured her with solemnity, and led her over to a seat that was bathed pleasantly in sunshine, and overhung by some tassels of feathery spring foliage, and invited her to be seated. “We will sit here for a while and get to know one another, and then we will find somewhere that will provide us with tea.”

  She smiled with relief and delight.

  “When we said goodbye to one another the other day I never even dreamed you would want to see me again.”

  “Then it is obvious that you dream the wrong sort of dreams,” he said, and patted her hand. He took out his cigarette-case—an expensive gold case, she noted—and offered it to her, and when she refused, selected one himself. “Tell me,” he asked, a note of amusement in his voice, “how did your employer feel this morning, after her unaccustomed dissipation of last night?”

  “Oh,” Lucy assured him, “she felt perfectly all right. I’m afraid she drank rather a lot of champagne last night, and she really oughtn’t to have had that l
iqueur afterwards, but she woke up this morning without any sort of a hangover, and she’s already planning another evening out.” She paused. “She’s dying to know whether you accepted the tip she left for you last night,” she said demurely, directing a sideways look at his ultra-expensive tailoring.

  He produced a crisp pound note from a compartment of his note-case.

  “There it is.” He held it up in the sunshine. “I’m not at all sure what I’m going to do with it. I don’t think I shall spend it...” A crinkle of amusement puckered the corners of his eyes. “But I may have a little frame made for it one day.”

  “Why?” she enquired, genuinely perplexed.

  “For two reasons,” he told her softly. “Two very important reasons!” He put the pound note back in his note-case. “Now, Mademoiselle Lucy, I want to know the rest of your name. What is it? Mademoiselle Lucy—?”

  “Gray,” she supplied.

  He nodded.

  “Somehow that is very suitable. And how long have you known the Countess von Ardrath?”

  She told him: “Just over six months. I wanted a job, and the agency I went to sent me to the Countess. She fascinated me right from the beginning, and I’ve simply loved working for her. Oh, I knew right from the start, of course, that she was horribly poor, but I was horribly poor too, so it didn’t seem to matter. And I think I’ve fitted in to the household fairly well. The dogs—who are not very good-tempered because they really are grossly overfed—took to me in a way they don’t normally take to strangers, and even Augustine accepted me. Nowadays I believe she thinks of me as part of the background, as important to the Countess as her huge four-poster bed, and the rich cakes she likes for tea—when she can afford them!”

  “You say that you yourself are horribly poor,” he echoed her. “How long have you been poor, and why should this be so?”

  “Because my father never made any money, and when he died there was little or nothing for me. He was a naval officer who enjoyed his life, but I don’t think he should ever have married, because I don’t think he was ever in a position to support a wife. However, my mother died when I was a mere infant, and my father’s sister brought me up. She was very good to me in her way, and I missed her terribly after she too died.”

  “And that was when you decided to get a job?”

  “Yes. I’d been training in a half-hearted fashion to work amongst children, but on the death of my aunt I had to do something quickly, and that was when I heard of the Countess. She really is an extraordinary personality. So proud of her birth, and so full of her memories that I’m never dull, because I love listening to her, and yet not really minding about the ugliness of twenty-four Alison Gardens, and the pinching and scraping that went on there until a few days ago.”

  “When you sold the brooch?”

  “Yes.”

  He crossed one leg over the other, and she remarked the crease in his well-pressed trousers.

  “And is it really true that she still possesses a lot of expensive jewellery? Apart from the brooch that was disposed of the other day?”

  “Yes. But as I explained to you the other day Her Highness doesn’t look upon it as her own property. It is to realise funds for Seronia, and the cause of Seronia.”

  “Her Highness being the last surviving daughter of the old King of Seronia?”

  She looked swiftly sideways at him, and said, “Yes” again.

  “I’m afraid I consider your employer is misguided in her championship of such a lost cause as Seronia,” Paul Avery observed, flicking ash from his cigarette with the tip of a long forefinger. “But one can’t help admiring an old woman who denies herself in order to make possible a cherished ambition. However, I think she would display sense if she allowed the bank to take charge of her jewellery, and I hope she will never again get you to try and dispose of some of it for her. You must refuse if she asks you to do that sort of thing again.”

  “As a matter of fact, she is going to get Mr. Halliday to come and see her,” Lucy confided. “There are a few rings and other small pieces she has decided to part with, and because of what happened to me the other day she thinks it safer to ask Mr. Halliday to come to her.”

  “That is belated wisdom,” Avery remarked.

  Lucy looked sideways at him again curiously.

  “In the taxi the other day you referred to the Countess as Her Highness,” she reminded him. “You said, ‘Convey my regards to Her Highness ...’ How did you know that she is entitled to be addressed in that fashion?”

  He smiled down at her.

  “Perhaps because I am a Seronian myself. Now,” he put his fingers under her elbow, “shall we go and find some tea?”

  Lucy enjoyed having tea with him more than anything that had ever happened to her in her life before. For one thing, he took her in a taxi to the Ritz, and it was only the second time in her life that she had entered such a haunt of the fashionable and the well-to-do.

  As she sat opposite him pouring out the tea, the one thing that puzzled her—and in which she found it hard to believe—was the strange paradox he himself presented, with his elegant clothes and his confident, well-bred manner, his air of ease and familiarity with such surrounding—from the point of view of the patrons of such establishments, not those who attended to their wants—and the position she knew that he filled as a waiter.

  She supposed that in these modern days a lot of people held down jobs for which they were not by birth entirely suited; but in the case of Paul Avery it wasn’t so much that his birth and upbringing had ill fitted him for his chosen method of earning a living, but as a result of some accident of birth it would be hard to imagine him filling any of the roles a well-bred man can fill and support a family and himself without attracting attention to himself, or giving rise to speculation.

  She tried to see him as a bank clerk, or as a doctor or lawyer. Admittedly he had the quiet gravity of a lawyer, and as a doctor his bedside manner would probably be well-nigh perfect, but he was not essentially cut out to be one or the other. That slight imperious lift of the hand when he was summoning a waiter—something the Countess von Ardrath had done the night before, and with considerable effect—the way his eyes remained cool and unabashed whatever the circumstances, and his well-marked brows lifted occasionally as if in surprise at something that in itself was not surprising, were things that set him apart.

  And he had an exceptionally attractive, beautifully modulated voice, rendered even more attractive by his slight accent. He spoke English perfectly and effortlessly, but anyone could tell that he was not an Englishman by birth. And the darkness of his hair and eyes was an intense darkness, alien to Englishmen.

  And there was another thing that had struck Lucy the night before. His fellow waiters had accorded him a deference that was rather in excess of the deference accorded by an underling to a superior. Or so it had struck Lucy.

  She found that he was smiling at her in amusement as she confronted him across the table with the teapot still clutched in one hand and poised midway between the tray and the tip of her nose.

  “What is it?” he asked. “You look as if something is puzzling you, bewildering you. Is there something about me that demands an explanation?”

  “I can’t understand why you are a—waiter,” she admitted, with simple truth. “I was absolutely astonished last night when you came to our table after the Countess had insisted on making a complaint to the head waiter.”

  “Dear me,” he remarked, helping himself to a chocolate éclair and licking his fingers where some of the chocolate had come off on them. “I begin to suspect that you are something of a snob. The next thing you will be telling me is that you can’t see me again because a young lady in your position has her reputation to think about, and the whole of Alison Gardens would be shocked if they knew you were consorting with a waiter.”

  “Don’t be silly!” she protested at once, and the colour rushed to her cheeks and burned there under the lively amusement in his handsome da
rk eyes. “As if anyone in Alison Gardens would ever dream you were a waiter!”

  “But it would perturb you considerably if they did? You might have to tell me you couldn’t see me again?”

  “You’re making fun of me,” she said, and set down the teapot quickly because the heat of the handle was burning her fingers. “You know very well that isn’t what I meant.” And then, with slowly widening eyes and a diffident, hopeful note in her voice: “Are you likely to want to see me again? I mean—this isn’t just something you won’t want to repeat—?”

  “With your concurrence I shall hope to meet you many times after this,” he told her, the amusement fading from his eyes, although one corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

  “O-oh!” she said, and her eyes that were neither blue nor grey nor green began to glow as if the sun had come up behind them, and she was too inexperienced to conceal it from him.

  He leaned towards her across the table. He spoke to her with sudden gravity.

  “You don’t know much about men, do you, little one?”

  She shook her head.

  “Will you think me very impertinent if I ask you how old you are?”

  Another shake answered him.

  “I was twenty-two last birthday.”

  “And I was thirty last birthday.” He took out his cigarette-case and lighted a cigarette. “That gives me an advantage of eight years over you, and so far as experience is concerned I think we might call it eighty years. You are a mere infant who has not yet begun to live, and I sometimes feel that I have lived a very long time...” He extended a finely-fingered hand to her across the table, and when she put hers into it he said: “I hope you will allow me to see you as often as we can arrange it, little one, and I hope you won’t find it difficult to stomach the fact that I am only a waiter.”