Love in High Places

by Jane Beaufort

  “Good night, Miss Brown,” he said softly. “Miss Valentine Brown! It should never, never be Val!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The following morning Valentine wandered through the village after it had been deserted by the flock of eager skiers who poured from their hotels as soon as breakfast was over, and their morning mail read. She made for the cafe that was empty at this hour, but would be crowded a short while before lunch, and ordered herself a beaker of hot chocolate and a couple of tempting-looking pastries.

  She had no need to bother about her figure, for, if anything, it was a little on the too-slight side, and although she had a reasonably healthy colour there was a Dresden-china delicacy about her at times. Her pastel-blue vorlagers, and daffodil-yellow parka, seemed to emphasise the delicacy. She had a spring-like quality about her, a quality of untried youth, although her golden eyes were sad sometimes, and she lacked the sparkle of eager youth. She was alone, forlorn, but somehow not particularly vulnerable.

  She had grown beyond vulnerability, and done it in a remarkably short space of time.

  The owner of the cafe liked to talk to her, and unlike so many of his customers she could chatter away in his language with the greatest of ease. She had had an excellent education, was widely travelled, and he liked to hear about America and other lands across the seas he had never crossed. His daughter, who had once worked in England in a domestic capacity, pressed upon Valentine only the choicest of the cream cakes, and beamed at her as if she were a very close friend or relative. She had seen her with the golden-headed American girl who appeared to have the right to order her about, but she considered Valentine had something the other lacked.

  She couldn’t flash an expensive cigarette-case about, or order coffee laced with cream for every casual acquaintance who followed her into the cafe. But she had a smile that was different, her voice was low. Low and quiet and friendly.

  When a villager greeted her with the inevitable “Gruss Gott,” she responded immediately. She came alive easily at the most unexpected moments, rather like His Excellency the Herr Baron who was staying up at the Grand Imperial Hotel, and who sometimes looked so bored it was a kind of deathly boredom. But when there were children around he would catch them by their yellow plaits and ask them whether they liked chocolate, and laugh to see them eat it, and thrust a whole handful of notes into Gretchen’s hand to provide them with more.

  The American girl was never very far from the Herr Baron’s side, but she didn’t seem to be very fond of children. She would protest that he would make them sick.

  “And why not?” he would demand, his white teeth flashing at her, his eyes alight. “Have you never been sick yourself, my lovely Lou, as the direct result of eating too much of something you liked? It is one of the few delights left to us in this world to make pigs of ourselves when the opportunity arises!”

  But his lovely Lou plainly did not agree with him, and she would look down fastidiously at her elegant parka and shrink lest chocolatey fingers touched her accidentally. And the Baron would put his head on one side and regard her speculatively, buy her another drink, and urge that they went to lunch.

  “A pity we do not see eye to eye on quite a few things, Liebling,” he would say. “But who is to say that they are important things? We must convince ourselves that they are quite, quite unimportant!”

  And Gretchen herself would have agreed that the village children could survive without chocolate—although it put money into her till—and excess was always a bad thing.

  This morning, when Valentine Brown entered the cafe, she seemed more than ever alone. Perhaps that was because there was not another single soul sitting at a table.

  “It is a pity you do not go off with the rest, Fraulein,” Gretchen observed, as she handed over the usual foaming beverage. “It would be amusing, ja?”

  “Perhaps.” Valentine was growing a little tired of explaining that she was not entirely a free agent, and she concentrated on admiring the knitting that lay on the counter. “You must teach me to knit in the way that you all do it out here,” she said. “It is so much quicker, and it looks so easy. I will buy some wool and bring it here and you shall show me exactly how you do it.”

  Gretchen smiled at her pityingly. A young woman with a skin like a drift of apple blossom, and eyes as golden as honey, and she talked about learning to knit. She should be out there on the snow slopes, the sun and the wind in her face, a stout young man at her elbow to pull her out of a snowdrift when her skis buckled and she lighted head first in one. Instead of which she discouraged the admiring looks of all young men, and preferred to be alone.

  The door opened behind her, and a very tall man entered. He was not precisely young—somewhere about thirty-five, Gretchen judged him—but he had a tanned face and most pleasing grey eyes. When Valentine whipped round to look at him her own eyes grew a degree or so brighter.

  “Mr. Haversham!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?”

  “I’ve been stalking you,” he admitted. “I saw you leave the hotel, watched you buy stamps at the post office, and come on here. I followed you, and now I’m glad I did, for I can do with some of that hot coffee.”

  “They do an excellent hot wine punch here,” she told him, “but it’s only intended for the experts who risk their necks on the ski runs.”

  “Then why aren’t we risking ours?” he demanded, sinking into the place beside her and smiling at her. He was wearing a thick windcheater and a gaily tasselled cap, and somehow the warmth of his smile made her suddenly aware of the brilliance of the morning outside, the dark shadow of the pines on the snow, the hard blueness of the sky, the yellow gold of the sun. “As a matter of fact, I planned to ask you last night whether we couldn’t go off ski-ing together to-day, but I allowed the opportunity to pass me by. Will you take pity on me this afternoon and let’s risk our necks in unison?” She smiled back at him slightly.

  “There are lots of pretty girls who would be willing to take pity on you, Mr. Haversham. Why pick on me?”

  “Because you’re by far and away the prettiest,” he answered without a moment’s pause.

  She was so unaccustomed to compliments—or had been during the last year or so-that she blushed vividly.

  “That was a very nice thing to say,” she told him. “Very nice! Particularly if you mean it,” she added.

  “I do mean it.” His eyes were on a stray curl—the dark reddish-gold that Titian would have loved—escaping from under her close woollen cap, and suddenly she realised that he was not a man who paid idle compliments. “Will you let me explain something?” he asked almost gravely. “Something I think you ought to know. Something I want you to know!”

  “Why, of course,” she answered, but the colour lingered in her cheeks, and she stirred her coffee vigorously. “Is it an explanation of the reason why you pay such delightful compliments to a young woman you’ve only known a few hours? Or perhaps you normally do that?” with a sideways glance at him.

  “No. No, I don’t. I don’t find it easy to pay compliments.”

  “Well...?” She lifted her lashes, and brown eyes and grey eyes looked closely at one another.

  “A few weeks ago I had ’flu. Oh, nothing serious, but it ran me down a bit, and I couldn’t work. I have a lot of work to do—writers don’t get much time to themselves, you know!—and I decided I’d better brisk myself up a bit by taking a holiday. I decided to come here because I’ve been here before, but I wasn’t very keen... until last night. When I saw you!”

  She said nothing, but her eyelashes fluttered.

  “But before I left I had a curious kind of conviction. This wasn’t going to be an ordinary holiday ... an ordinary break! Although I would honestly rather have stayed at home and swallowed a few vitamin pills I had to come! Was that Fate, do you think?”

  She smiled uncertainly at her finger-tips.

  “I think it was Mr. Haversham, the detective, getting down to the job! T
here’s probably something or somebody here that’s going to provide you with some wonderful material for a new book. Perhaps a murder on the snow slopes!”

  “You don’t think it could possibly be love on the snow slopes?”

  Her face went blank, she moved without seeming to do so very slightly away from him, and his hand went out and covered one of hers. He patted it gently.

  “All right, perhaps it was just the old instincts at work ... the incessant desire to get hold of some new copy! But I’ll tell you one thing more, if I may? The detective in me has been very definitely alerted by a certain Miss Valentine Brown, and if I could get to the bottom of the mystery she represents then it would be a cause of great satisfaction. I’d like to know, for instance, why the name of Brown leapt so readily to mind when it had to be married to a perfectly legitimate one of Valentine, and why you’re performing all those nasty little tasks you told me about last night. Putting an anything but helpless young woman to bed, and that sort of thing... And having ‘cast-offs’ flung at you!”

  “They’re never flung at me,” Valentine said, defending Lou. “And they’re frequently very welcome!”

  “Very likely so,” he agreed. “But it’s a pity you couldn’t pick an employer who could refrain from putting you in your place publicly!”

  Once more Valentine leapt to Lou’s defence.

  “She didn’t mean it,” she said. “It’s just a way she has sometimes, and last night was not one of her good nights. It began badly and ended unexpectedly well.”

  “With the return of the Baron, you mean? Well, it’s obvious she’d like to be a Baroness, but it might be wiser in the long run if she refrained from rushing things too much. There are Barons and Barons, and she’s got a find out all I can about you, Valentine,” he told her quietly, “before we both leave here. Do you mind?”

  She regarded him uncertainly.

  “Not really ... Or I don’t think I do!”

  “Good.” He smiled. “You understand I’ve no intention of prying? It’s vital interest.”

  Her soft mouth quivered.

  “It’s quite a long time since anyone took a vital interest in me.”

  “I guessed that,” he said softly, and once again his hand touched hers lightly. “And we’ll ski together this afternoon? You admitted last night that you do ski.”

  “Yes. It was one of the things we had to learn when I was at school in Switzerland, and my father ... My father was keen.”

  They went on talking for nearly another hour, and then the door burst open and the first of the hot wine-punch drinkers stamped noisily in. Amongst them was Lou and the Baron von Felden, and the latter glanced curiously at the table at which Valentine sat quietly engrossed in conversation with her fellow-countryman. Lou said something in her loud, unmistakably American voice, and Valentine started and looked round almost guiltily to find the Baron’s eyes fixed on her.

  “You should have been with us this morning, Fraulein,” he told her. “We would have been happy to have you, and I would have been interested to make the discovery how well—or how badly!—you perform on skis!”

  His tone was dry, disinterested, but his eyes had a look in them that made Valentine feel as if her blood had grown sluggish over the past year or so, and all at once it was quickening with a desire to flow freely. So dark and deep they were that she wanted to gasp, and at the same time she felt her cheeks grow hot.

  Lou spoke impatiently.

  “Don’t force Val to admit that she’s not the athletic type,” she said, as she climbed on to one of the leather-covered stools at the counter. “If she has a thing about breaking her neck then let her keep it to herself, and don’t be such a pest, Alex. We can’t all shine in the out-of-doors.”

  “I don’t think Miss Brown is in the least afraid of breaking her neck as a result of sampling the amenities of a place like this,” Giles Haversham exclaimed, with rather a curt note in his voice. “And as a matter of fact I have just asked her to try one of the easy slopes with me this afternoon. I’m not much of a veteran myself, and I’m sure she can do better than I can.”

  “Then you must both amuse yourselves on the nursery slopes,” Lou replied more affably. “I noticed the other day that you weren’t a terribly brilliant performer,” smiling at him to take the sting out of her words. “And so far as I know there’s nothing special Val has to do for me.”

  “Not unless you can think of something,” Valentine interjected quietly.

  Lou glanced at her carelessly, and then slipped a hand inside the Baron’s arm and rested her blonde head against his sleeve.

  “I can’t, because we’re going on a frightfully hazardous run this afternoon, and I can’t think of anything else!”

  The Austrian gave an order to Gretchen, and although strands of fair hair tickled his chin, and the scent of it rose up to his nostrils, his face remained impassive. Giles Haversham said quickly to Valentine that he would walk back to the hotel with her if she was ready, and as they slipped out no one turned their head. The Baron by that time was smiling whimsically into Lou’s blue eyes.

  It was a wonderful afternoon for Valentine, and she thoroughly enjoyed it. She had forgotten how exhilarating it could be to race across frozen snow with the eerie whine of the churned-up wind in her ears, and the sting of it on her unprotected glowing face. She forgot occasionally what to do with her ski-sticks, and had some undignified tumbles during the first hour; but Giles—who was a much better skier than she was, and certainly hadn’t merited that cool criticism of Lou’s in the cafe—betrayed the utmost patience in coaching her, and by degrees some of her schoolgirl confidence came back to her. They laughed every time he had to dig her out of a small mountain of snow, and when his hands brushed her free of the clinging particles there was a tiny flickering light in his eyes that made her realise there was nothing unattractive about a very high colour and hair that was matted with snow.

  On the contrary, red-gold hair that was matted with snow struck him as curiously beautiful, and he very nearly told her so as they tramped back to the hotel. But her eyes were so clear and bright, and she was looking so animated, that he didn’t want to arouse self-consciousness and bring back that near-tragic look she had worn sometimes the night before. He wanted her to be gay, and carefree, and enjoy herself, and that much he did tell her as once more the high peaks turned rosy with the sunset, and the valley filled slowly with a grape-like bloom before it was abruptly blotted out by the coming of the night.

  “We must do this often,” he said, “or as often as you can manage. It will do you good. You were far too pale last night.”

  “Was I?” she returned carelessly, contentedly. “But redheads are always pale. You should know that.”

  “How long do you think Miss Morgan will stay on here?” he asked, frowning at the lights of the hotel as they approached it.

  “I don’t know. As long as the Baron von Felden stays, I should think,” Valentine added, with a little smile.

  “And he’s such an unknown quantity that it would be impossible to predict how long he’ll stay.”

  She glanced at him quickly.

  “Would you say he’s an unknown quantity? It hasn’t struck me that there’s anything pretentious about him. The local people know him, and he’s very well vouched for.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean that ... he, in himself, is an unknown quantity! He probably doesn’t know himself what he wants from life! He’s a drifter, aimless, without any sense of direction. Deprived of all the trappings that made his title valuable he’s a little bit pathetic too.”

  “You mean he’s a playboy?”

  Haversham shrugged.

  “A gigolo, perhaps. I wouldn’t know. But the ladies love him, don’t they? Miss Morgan isn’t the only one.”

  Valentine had been aware of that ever since she had been aware of the Baron. Feminine eyes followed him everywhere, and he couldn’t help but be aware of it. And when everyone in the hotel, from the bell-boy up
wards, addressed him as Excellency, he must realise that that, too, added to his appeal for lonely widows with big bank balances, and impressionable young women with the eternal feminine in their hearts, and a desire for romance above everything else.

  If he was a gigolo it was because women made him that very thing. Because so many of them wanted it that way, and he was too hard up to have principles.

  When they reached the hotel he was standing in the brightly lighted entrance, and he saw them at once as they passed inside. Lou was apparently nowhere about.

  “You did very well,” he told Valentine, as she would have passed him by. “With practice you will do better, but you did very well.”

  She sensed that Haversham, at her side, resented the criticism, but the Baron did not even acknowledge him. He was leaning back against the panelled wall to be out of the way of the ski-sticks and the returning skiers, and a pair of elk horns above his head in some way emphasised the brooding dark beauty of his face, with its thickly lashed eyes. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers, and as Valentine looked up at him a thin column of smoke rose between them and the severe black sweater he was wearing, with a wine-dark muffler wound about his neck and tucked into the front of it. And she had a momentary recollection of a black shape that had shot out above her head, and right across the valley, while she was clinging to a dizzy ledge earlier that afternoon.

  She knew now that it was the Baron who was demonstrating not merely his close affinity with a pair of skis, but his ability to take note of what was going on around him while in mid-flight as it were.

  “Where is Lou?” she asked, rather stupidly, standing still to put the question although Haversham would plainly have preferred to go straight on to the lift.

  The black shoulder shrugged.