An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition

by Cartland, Barbara

  ‘He is very kind,’ Alice kept saying, ‘and his little son is so sweet.’

  That is not the point,’ Emilie insisted. ‘Why did he ask you?’

  ‘He wanted to show me his Chateau.’

  ‘And why should he want to show you his house? He has friends of his own class.’

  Alice merely looked at her.

  ‘I think I am his friend,’ she said quietly.

  It was then that Emilie had raved at her, speaking brutally as she had never spoken in all the eight years that they had lived together.

  She told Alice what she knew already, that her father had never married Marie Riguad. She told her how her grandfather had come and fetched him away back to England, promising a sum of money for the unborn child which Marie expected, but forgetting either deliberately or inadvertently to send it.

  ‘It was to have been my dowry,’ Emilie said, ‘but do you think it would have been any help to me, born between two worlds, half of noble blood and half of peasant stock? The men who wanted me were like dirt, and the ones I might have liked considered that I was beneath them.’

  ‘Poor Emilie,’ Alice said simply, but Emilie had known that she had not understood.

  Driven by her own fear she added,

  ‘That is what will happen to you, and to the child you may have if you persist in making friends with men like the Grand Duke. He will never be anything to you. He knows where you are staying and that we, the Riguads, are your relations. Can you imagine that someone like that will offer you marriage? No, he is interested in you because you are pretty, because you are young. There are thousands of women of his own world only too ready to marry him should he but say the word. A man like that is not concerned with marriage. You are not to see him again, do you hear me?’

  Emilie had spoken passionately and somehow it was infinitely frightening that Alice did not answer her. Instead she sat staring out to sea, her eyes almost as blue as the water on which they rested.

  ‘Do you hear me?’ Emilie repeated.

  Alice had turned her face towards her then,

  ‘Yes, I hear you.’

  ‘And you will obey me?’ Emilie insisted. ‘It is understood, Alice, that you are not to see him again, you are not to accept any other invitations to the Chateau d’Horizon.’

  But still Alice did not answer. Emilie was certain, though, that she would not disobey. She had never had any trouble with Alice, who had always been very obedient.

  Then Fate had taken a hand, or so it seemed later to Emilie. The very next day brought a letter from the farm. Marie Riguad was ill. She had fallen down and broken her leg and Emilie must return at once.

  For a moment she contemplated taking Alice with her, and then she thought that such a precaution was ridiculous. They had only just arrived, the change and warm sunshine had already done Alice good. It would be cruel to take her back, to drag her away to the north, to subject her to the bitter March winds and storms of Brittany which invariably left her weak and listless.

  Emilie decided to go alone, but before she went she spoke to Alice once again about the Grand Duke.

  ‘He has doubtless forgotten about you by now,’ she said, ‘but in case an invitation comes, you are to refuse it. Do you understand? You are not to show yourself near his house either, but stay here on the shore. As soon as mother is better, I will return for you.’

  Emilie had left. She could remember driving away over the rough road, leaning out of the window waving, waving until Alice was lost to sight. It had been that last picture which was to haunt Emilie now on her first night in the Hôtel de Paris. Alice with the sun on her face, her head thrown back, her fair hair glinting like a halo round her head, the wheels of the coach drawing them further and further apart.

  She must have dreamt of Alice too lying in the big room on the warm, comfortable mattress, for when she awoke she heard her own voice whispering, ‘Alice, Alice!’

  It seemed to start the day all wrong, and Mistral found her very cross at breakfast.

  ‘Oh, Aunt Emilie,’ Mistral cried. ‘This is the loveliest place in the whole world. I had no idea the sea could be so blue.’

  ‘Come and eat your breakfast, Mistral,’ Emilie said sharply, ‘and stop running in and out of the balcony. I spoke to you about it last night.

  ‘But, Aunt Emilie, surely you don’t mind today? We are going out, aren’t we?’

  Emilie made up her mind.

  ‘No, Mistral, we are not. You are staying here and in these rooms until dinner time, then you shall make an appearance.’

  ‘But, Aunt Emilie – ’

  There was no reproach, just utter consternation in the young voice.

  ‘Now, Mistral, do not argue. I have told you that you must obey me, that I have my reasons for whatever decisions I make.’

  ‘But not to go out, our first day in Monte Carlo!’

  Emilie’s lips tightened.

  ‘We are staying here for some time. Tomorrow we will inspect the place, not that I imagine there is a great deal to see. Today we shall not appear until the hour for dinner.’

  Mistral knew what that inflexible quality of determination in Emilie’s voice meant.

  She sighed.

  She knew it was no use asking her to change her mind.

  ‘Aunt Emilie,’ she said after a long pause, ‘there is something I want to ask you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Why was I christened Mistral? I have often wondered and have often meant to ask you.’

  ‘Your mother chose the name. She chose it because she hated the wind that blows here along the shore.’

  ‘Because she hated it?’ Mistral echoed. ‘Then my mother came here? She knew Monte Carlo?’

  ‘Yes, your mother came here,’ Emilie said grimly, ‘but she did not know Monte Carlo. It was not built nineteen years ago.’

  ‘Nineteen years ago,’ Mistral repeated. ‘Then she was here just before I was born. Oh, Aunt Emilie, how exciting! Did she love it? Perhaps that is why it seems so beautiful and wonderful to me, because my mother liked it when she was here.’

  ‘I have not said your Mother liked it,’ Emilie replied. ‘When she told me what your name was to be, she said, “It will be a girl and I want her to be called Mistral. That terrible wind, I can hear it still. Yes, call her Mistral”.’

  ‘Why did she say that?’ Mistral asked, ‘and if she said it before I was born, how was she certain that I would be a girl? I might have been a boy.’

  She seemed very sure that you would be a girl,’ Emilie said briefly.

  Even as she spoke, she could see Alice’s haunted eyes. They had worn the same look when she had chosen the name Mistral as when she had said to Emilie,

  ‘You are not to tell him! Swear on the Bible that you will never tell him that I am to have a child.’

  She could hear Alice’s voice, almost hysterical with fear. She could see her face, white and haunted, and she had promised because at that moment there was nothing she would not have done to soothe her distress. But afterwards how bitterly she had regretted, not once but many times, that promise which had been given on the Bible.

  Even towards the very end, when Alice’s life was fading away and the Doctor had given her up, for there was nothing more that he could do, Alice had whispered,

  ‘Promise you will not tell him about Mistral?’

  Emilie had knelt sobbing at the side of the bed. She had promised, but later, when Alice had gone and they had carried her slender, wasted body away to the Churchyard, Emilie would have given everything she had in the world to retract that promise.

  She had wanted to leave there and then for Monaco, to confront the Grand Duke with his crime, to call him a murderer, to show him the motherless Mistral, to know the satisfaction of denouncing him as a seducer and a betrayer.

  But she had kept her promise, partly because of her religious convictions, partly because of her love for Alice, and partly because she was innately superstitious. Emilie knew she coul
d never break that vow given on three separate occasions, but she had vowed vengeance, vowed it by all that she held sacred, and by the very memory of Alice herself.

  One day, somehow, she would make the Grand Duke suffer as he had made Alice suffer and indirectly herself as well.

  During the long nights when she had fought for the life of Mistral, when she had walked the screaming child up and down the kitchen almost from dusk to dawn, Emilie had found time to think, and gradually, as she thought, a plan formed within her mind, a plan which would take long years to put into operation, which would require endless scheming and plotting.

  But as her hatred and her desire for vengeance grew, as it intensified, day by day, week by week, year by year, until its tentacles were so firmly fixed within her that she could no longer escape from them or indeed live without them, so was she certain that one day all that she dreamt of would be fulfilled and her vengeance assured.

  And now at last, after eighteen years, the curtain was rising on the first act, the Prelude in which Mistral had grown to womanhood was finished. Looking at her, Emilie was satisfied. She was lovely – lovely enough for the part she had to play in this drama.

  And then, as she looked at Mistral, the girl’s eyes, clear and unclouded, were raised to hers, and for a moment she bore such a look of Alice that Emilie felt something contract within her heart.

  It was Alice who looked at her, Alice who was worried and whose lips trembled a little.

  ‘Please, Aunt Emilie, please, please explain things a little bit to me. It is all rather frightening, this secrecy.’

  But even as Mistral pleaded, she knew it was hopeless.

  Her aunt’s eyes seemed to soften and then abruptly Emilie turned her head away and walked across the room to the fireplace.

  Mistral did not know that it was her very simplicity which had defeated her. Emilie had known at that moment that she could not possibly put into words what she had in mind.

  ‘You must trust me,’ Emilie said, and her voice was hard. ‘Besides, for the moment there is nothing to explain. Tonight we dine downstairs. You will wear grey chiffon with the pleated frills. I have learned from the Manager that there is to be a Gala dinner tonight. The whole of Monte Carlo will be here. You will see all the celebrities and afterwards we will go across to the Concert Room at the Casino.’

  Mistral clasped her hands together.

  ‘Shall we see people gambling, Aunt Emilio?’

  ‘We will watch the tables,’ Emilie said. ‘It is an interesting sight if only for the satisfaction of watching other people make fools of themselves.’

  ‘Is it wrong to gamble?’ Mistral asked.

  ‘Wrong?’ Emilie repeated the word with an inflection of interrogation. ‘I see nothing wrong in doing what interests or amuses one. People who tell you that gambling is wrong are usually characterless and so weak that they cannot prevent themselves from pouring away at the tables money they can ill afford. No, why should you think it wrong?’

  ‘I only wondered,’ Mistral answered. ‘A Nun at the Convent told me that, although gambling had brought great prosperity to Monaco and the poor of the Principality had benefited by it, she felt that it was wrong as it encouraged the lust for money.’

  ‘A narrow creed from a narrow woman walled up in seclusion,’ Emilie sneered. ‘You will be wise not to take your sense of values from Nuns, Mistral.’

  ‘I have had little opportunity of doing anything else until now,’ Mistral replied quietly.

  Her reply was not impertinent, it was just a statement of fact, but for the moment Emilie looked startled.

  ‘You are right,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten how long you have been there. It is true that you know nothing of the world, I must not forget that.’

  ‘Why did you never let me come back to the farm?’ Mistral asked.

  ‘Because I had left the farm myself,’ Emilie replied. ‘I wanted you to be brought up a lady like your mother.

  The farm was rough and, when my grandfather died, there was not enough money to keep it together unless I had slaved there day after day, year after year, until it killed me. I wanted to pay for your education, Mistral. I wanted a proper life for myself, and so, when you went to the Convent, I went to Paris.’

  ‘To Paris!’ Mistral ejaculated. ‘And you were happy, Aunt Emilie?’

  ‘I worked very hard, Mistral, and I suppose in my own way I was content. I had an object in view and at least I was getting nearer to it.’

  Mistral rose from the table and walked across the room to her aunt. Emilie was taller than she was. She raised her lovely oval face to the older woman’s and said in a very low voice,

  ‘Aunt Emilie, you do like having me with you now, don’t you?’

  It was the cry of a child for comfort, it was the yearning for love of someone who has never known love, but Emilie, who would have understood the same appeal eighteen years earlier in Alice’s voice, was deaf to it in Mistral’s.

  ‘Of course, Mistral,’ she said frigidly. ‘I am very glad to have you and I am sure we shall enjoy ourselves together. Now, call Jeanne, for I have some instructions to give her.’

  She did not notice the disappointment in the girl’s face, did not see the sudden pain in those dark violet eyes and the soft droop of her lips.

  Obediently Mistral went from the room to call Jeanne.

  4

  ‘I think everyone in Monte Carlo is here tonight,’ Lady Violet Featherstone remarked, looking round the big dining room of the Hôtel de Paris where the tables were filling up so quickly that the appearance of each newcomer in the doorway seemed to provide another dilemma for the Maitre d’ Hôtel.

  ‘Alfonse was telling me that this is the best season they have ever known,’ Lord Drayton remarked from the other side of the table. ‘As the gross profits last year were six million francs that is no façon de parler. We should have bought come shares five or six years ago.’

  Sir Robert smiled.

  ‘It is too late now!’

  ‘For you, Robert, that is not a tragedy,’ Lord Drayton remarked. ‘What would you do with any more money?’

  ‘I can answer that question,’ Lady Violet said. ‘He would spend it on me, of course.’

  ‘And what better excuse for being extravagant?’ Lord Drayton replied with somewhat ponderous gallantry.

  Sir Robert took the menu from an attentive waiter.

  ‘Well, what are we going to eat? Violet, will you start with caviar or oysters?’

  ‘You order the dinner, Robert,’ she answered. ‘I want to watch the people, they always amuse me.’

  It was not surprising that Lady Violet, used as she was to the glittering society at Monte Carlo, should feel interested in what she saw around her tonight. The Gala dinner at the Hôtel de Paris had been arranged as a compliment to a celebrated Italian opera singer who was to appear for the first time in the Concert Room at the Casino.

  But any excuse served for a Gala evening, and because this was indeed the most brilliant and successful winter season the Principality had ever known, there seemed to be packed into those few acres of land all the wealth, beauty and aristocracy of Europe.

  There were German Barons and their wives, eager to forget their country’s recent war with France, their lineage dating back into antiquity, their pockets bulging with gold.

  There were Grand Dukes from Russia, handsome, aristocratic and incredibly wealthy, who by their very appearance seemed to give an air of distinction to the gambling rooms and the cafés.

  There were also visitors from England, men and women bearing ancient and honourable names, who stared curiously at the cosmopolitan crowd which thronged around them and who managed in some subtle way of their own to remain reserved and aloof however gay and congenial the atmosphere.

  There were Rajahs from India, Sultans from Turkey, Señors from Spain, Beys from Algeria, the most elegant and distingué of the French beau monde, and a sprinkling of Americans – big, badly dressed men with their elega
nt, over dressed wives, who seemed a little ill at ease, but whose fortunes were fabulous.

  Besides these were artists, professional gamblers, crooks, parasites and the hangers on who appear wherever there is a game of chance, and likely pickings.

  And last, but not least, there were women, women of all nationalities, creeds, classes arid types of beauty – every one of them outstanding, every one of them worth a second, third or fourth glance, and every one of them adding something to the gaiety and beauty of the place by their very presence.

  Lady Violet, looking round the dining room, thought she had never seen a more splendid array of jewellery. There were diamond tiaras which glittered and shone as if they were royal crowns, there were necklaces of emeralds and rubies and sapphires, ropes of pearls, pendants of aquamarines and amethysts, bracelets of turquoises and opals, brooches, earrings, lockets, diadems – all resplendent with precious gems, each a silent witness to a woman’s beauty. Lady Violet gave a little sigh.

  ‘I thought my emeralds were quite an adequate decoration until I came here this evening.’

  Lord Drayton glanced at the necklace around her throat and at the long emerald ear rings which dangled from her small ears.

  ‘Yours are very fine stones,’ he said.

  ‘But insignificant beside those the Princess is wearing.’

  He glanced across the room. A Polish Princess was literally blazing with emeralds, they crowned her head, encircled her neck, glittered on her wrists and fingers and almost covered the bodice of her low cut gown.

  ‘It is certainly difficult to compete with the Ossinpof collection,’ Sir Robert said, ‘but I daresay Her Highness would give them all to you if you could exchange ages at the same time.’

  It was palpably true. The Princess was over fifty and doing her best to pretend that she was a mere twenty-five. She was rouged, dyed and corseted until she could hardly breathe, and the emeralds must have been little consolation for a youth which slipped away from her year by year.