She had not intended to strike him. She had meant only to disarm him, or perhaps to nick his arm. But Andrew lay motionless on the ground, blood spurting from the wound and turning the grass a dark red. Sir James hurried forward to attend to him. Enid stood frozen to the spot.
Gustav and Kemble ran to her side.
“It was a freak moment. You could not avoid what happened,” the actor murmured.
“I cannot look at him,” she gasped, turning her back. “Tell me, is he badly hurt?”
Kemble nodded and went to kneel by Sir James. He remained there for several minutes before he approached her again. She knew at once that the situation was grave.
“He is dying,” Kemble told her frankly. “The blade pierced his heart. He asks that he be allowed to congratulate you on your victory.”
“No!” she cried, her eyes blurred with tears.
“It is his dying wish,” Kemble pointed out.
Enid hesitated for a moment. Gustav and the actor put an arm through hers and guided her to where Andrew lay. Sir Drake was still trying to offer assistance. She knelt close to Andrew. His face was deathly pale; blood was flowing freely from the wound. The blood that could not be staunched.
Weeping, she removed her mask and sobbed, “I did not mean to harm you!”
Andrew smiled faintly. “I knew it was you … the moment you discarded the cloak. I meant to kill you … I tried to!”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she whispered.
“I have been … less than fair …” Andrew’s voice grew weaker. “Less than fair …” Then he choked on the blood rising up in his throat and closed his eyes forever.
The carriage ride back to the flat was endured in silence by Enid and her friends. She felt numb, lifeless, as if she were moving among gray shadows that were part of a nether world.
When they reached her building, Kemble eased her out of the coach and saw her to the door.
“It will be all right,” he said tenderly, kissing her on the cheek.
She was too filled with grief to reply. She merely nodded and went inside. Upstairs in the apartment she found the nurse bathing Armand’s head with cool water. His eyes were open and focused, and as she approached his bedside, they lit up from within with a black fire.
“So very beautiful!” he whispered, grasping her hand.
“You must rest, my love. Go back to sleep now.”
His grip tightened and his eyes burned into hers. “Tomorrow morning will settle it! We shall have a new life for ourselves!”
“Yes,” Enid said softly. “A new life for ourselves.”
As she bent down to brush her lips against his, the sun broke clearly through the mist and lighted the chamber. She glanced up and smiled to herself. Yes, we shall have a new life for ourselves, she thought, and it has begun this very day.
This edition published by
Crimson Romance
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242
www.crimsonromance.com
Copyright © 1980 by Daniel Ross
ISBN 10: 1-4405-7287-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7287-6
eISBN 10: 1-4405-7288-7
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7288-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © iStock/mammuth
Eternal Desire
Clarissa Ross
Avon, Massachusetts
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Copyright
Chapter One
A wave of cold air brushed Della Standish’s lovely face like the breath of some phantom come to block her way. The twenty-two-year-old English beauty came to a halt in the dank, dark passage. The wavering flame of the candle she held reflected on her pale oval face and long, auburn tresses. Fear distorted her features as she peered into the shadows with her exquisite green eyes.
“Raphael!” she called out. Her frantic cry echoed in the dark depths of the catacombs. But there was no reply.
A moment ago the handsome Prince Raphael had been at her side. Now he had mysteriously vanished. She was completely alone.
She swung around and plaintively called out again, “Raphael! Please answer me!”
There was only the grim echoing of her anguished plea for help followed by the silence of the tomb. The shadows of the narrow stone-carved passage mocked her.
The charming Prince Raphael had brought her here to view the famed catacombs of Rome. They had descended from gardens filled with blood-red gladioli to the blackness of the underground passages. The Prince had warned her to keep close by him because of the danger of being lost underground. Unfortunate visitors to this eerie place had been known to slowly go mad while trying to find their way out of the maze of the dead.
Tens of thousands of bodies were buried in the narrow passageways and recesses. It was a place of eternal chill.
Though it was an August afternoon in the hot summer of 1890, no hint of the sun’s warmth touched this black cave.
It was always night in the subterranean place. It was the dark world of the dead. Used by Christians for centuries as a burial vault, the maze of passages stretched almost endlessly; to be lost here without a guide was to be doomed.
She was trembling and her eyes widened with the terror of her plight. She ran a few feet back and the candle almost went out. This brought her to a frightened halt.
“Please!” she prayed. “Please let this end!”
As if in a miraculous answer to her tautly whispered prayer, she heard, from a distance, Raphael’s slightly accented voice cry out, “Della! Where are you?”
“Here!” she cried out at once. “Here! Do come to me!” And she waited in the weird darkness with her heart pounding with fear.
She thought she heard footsteps approaching and then all at once there was the welcome sight of a candle’s glow: Prince Raphael was walking toward her with a lighted taper in his hand.
Delia ran to greet him breathlessly. “Raphael, what happened? I almost died of terror!”
He placed an arm around her and consoled her. “You managed to get too far ahead of me. I lost my way at the turn. Don’t worry! We’ll get out of here somehow!”
• • •
Della felt this bizarre adventure had begun on a bleak afternoon in late May of 1890. Sir Roger Drexel, the family solicitor, had contacted her at the great mansion in Doane Square to tell her he would make a late-afternoon call on a matter of urgency. She had thought little of it at the time, supposing that it had to do with some business document that required her signature.
She was the heir to the Standish fortune and legally the head of the family firm’s many enterprises, though in fact she had nothing to do with the day-to-day workings of them. Sir Roger looked after legal matters and a group of competent managers took care of the various businesses. Still, from time to time, her approval was required.
“What a bore!” she had grumbled to her prim Aunt Isobel Moore, a sister of her late mother who had been with her since the death of her parents.
Aunt Isobel, tall and thin with a dried-up face which belied her kindly nature, replied, �
�You have no right to neglect your small duties. The estate brings you a fine income every year.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Della had smiled at her aunt. “But I’d counted on going to the dressmaker’s today. All my new summer clothes are waiting for fittings.”
Aunt Isobel, as drab in dress as of feature, said, “You’ll have other days for that. You must be here when Sir Roger Drexel arrives.”
“I will be,” she promised.
Standing by the velvet drapes at a window overlooking the square, she gazed out at passing horse-driven carriages and sighed.
Aunt Isobel sat primly in a high-backed chair by the fireplace of the high-ceilinged, elegantly furnished living room. The old woman said, “If your sister Irma had lived it would all have been different for you.”
Della, who was wearing a chic green linen suit, glanced at her aunt over her shoulder and said, “Much would surely be different if that were true.”
And so it would have. Twenty years earlier the dark shadow of tragedy had come to hang over the family. A wicked governess had vanished in the night, taking with her Della’s twin sister, Irma. When the loss was discovered in the morning every step was taken to find the vindictive woman and recover the child. But to no avail.
Police and private investigators alike gave up attempting to find out where the woman had gone and what had happened to the missing two-year-old. All the wealth of Delia’s parents had been useless in the face of this tragedy. It was as if the woman and her child captive had vanished from the earth.
In the end that was the opinion of most. It was felt that perhaps the woman had accidentally drowned and the young Irma had perished beneath the waters of the Thames with her. The woman was known to have an admirer of dubious character who worked on a river scow. But he could not be found either.
Delia’s mother had been a frail person and the loss of a beloved child had not helped her health. When a bout of pneumonia swept the city in 1876, she was one of the plague’s victims. It was said that she had died pleading with her husband not to give up the search for the missing Irma which, at that time, had already been in progress for years.
Della had been only eight at the time and her Aunt Isobel, who had been called in during her mother’s illness, had remained with her and tried to console her. But Della would always remember her tall, mustached father coming out of her mother’s bedchamber with a look of shocked sorrow on his aristocratic face.
Seeing her, he impulsively fell to his knees sobbing and took her in his arms. She began to cry as well, for she knew that her mother must have died.
And so she had. Aunt Isobel remained in the fine house which now was somber and silent. The servants moved about on tiptoe for weeks after the death of a beloved mistress. Delia’s father began to be absent from the house more and more, and all too frequently when he returned he was in a drunken state.
There were periods when he seemed to repent his fall into drunkenness and then he would remain at home and be most attentive to Della. These were times of unbelievable happiness for her, all the more so because she knew they wouldn’t last.
Nor did they. Invariably he returned to his drunken ways and brought sorrow to them all. Somehow he managed to look after the family business so they did not suffer financially. And he kept his word to his dead wife by continuing to employ private agents to locate the little kidnapped girl, whom everyone else believed to be dead. He would not give up if only because he must fulfill his late wife’s dying request.
Aunt Isobel had protested petulantly, “It is wrong! A foolish quest! And it keeps the tragedy continually with him! No wonder he drinks.”
“But Mother pleaded that he not give up the search,” Della reminded her aunt.
“She was delirious and dying when she made the request,” Aunt Isobel said tartly. “He should have ignored it!”
“Father wouldn’t,” she said quietly. She had great love and respect for her sole surviving parent.
“I warn you it will lead to no good,” the prim older woman predicted.
And unhappily her prediction proved all too true. One evening about a year later word was brought to the mansion in Doane Square that her father had suffered an accident. He had toppled down the winding stairway of his club and been taken unconscious to a hospital.
Della and Aunt Isobel at once rushed to the hospital. By the time they reached her father’s side he was dead. She learned the tragic fact that his fall had taken place because he was drunk. So she was now alone except for Aunt Isobel and some distant cousins.
Della had been numbed by this second bereavement. But Aunt Isobel had stood by her and instilled courage in her. This had always been a characteristic of the stout-hearted maiden lady and she was not going to allow Della to grow up without infusing her with some of it.
As a result Della became a lively, adventurous young woman with many admirers rather than a meek, sorrowful and shy girl. Life took on an even, pleasant tone in the old mansion and the search for her missing twin was dropped. It was agreed by Aunt Isobel, Sir Roger Drexel and even by Della that it was a sad, futile business and there was no point continuing it.
At twenty-two, Della still had not found a young man whom she wished to marry. Aunt Isobel had accused her of being too much of a flirt and too difficult to please.
“Watch out or you’ll end up an old maid like me,” Aunt Isobel had threatened.
“Perhaps I might enjoy that!” she’d said with a smile.
“You might now,” the older woman said. “It’s all fun when you’re young and able to turn every male head. But when you’re older and less attractive, it’s a different matter. You’ll wish you had a husband.”
Della had raised her chin in a show of confidence and said, “I know many wives, some young ones, who don’t appear all that happy!”
“And a good many more that are! A husband and babies! What else should a woman ask for?”
“Romance, for one thing!” Della declared. “And a little fun as well!”
“You’re spoiled!”
Della laughed. “If I am, dear Aunt Isobel, then you are wholly to blame since you have been both mother and father to me all these years!”
Aunt Isobel’s dried-up face showed the hint of a smile, but she said, “I haven’t put such ideas in your head. It’s those wicked, romantic novels you’ve been reading!”
“They’ve taught me a good deal about life and men!”
“I’ll warrant that! But all the wrong things!”
“I wouldn’t say so!”
“I will,” Aunt Isobel insisted. “You went with that young lawyer apprenticed to Sir Roger’s firm for most of a year. I thought it would be a match. And then you dropped him!”
Della’s cheeks crimsoned. “I don’t wish to discuss that!”
“Just the same, Henry Clarkson was a good-looking, pleasant young man.”
“He had no vision or true humor and a head full of dull law!” Della exclaimed.
“There are no perfect men!”
“There must be some better than Henry Clarkson,” Della said, turning away so her aunt could not study her expression. The fact was she had liked Henry Clarkson a great deal, but there had been an unfortunate circumstance that had ended their budding romance.
While driving with a girl friend in a carriage in the park one day, she had happened to look across the road and seen Henry Clarkson at the reins of a carriage drawn by a frisky black horse and with an equally frisky, black-haired young woman at his side.
Later, when she had challenged him about this, he had behaved most guiltily and insisted that the girl was a school friend of his sister. He had agreed to show her some of London. But the more she probed the more she learned about his attentions to this girl. It had not been a matter of a single afternoon, friends of hers had seen him with the dark girl at other times and places.
So, in spite of his protests that it had all been most innocent, she had broken off with him abruptly. He’d made seve
ral requests to see her since, but she’d always refused him. When they met at parties she did her best to avoid him. But it had been difficult for her and she’d needed all her courage to put on a brave front and turn to other swains who interested her not at all.
This was her situation at the moment. She rarely went out with a young man twice. And since she knew hosts of the most eligible young fellows in London and because she was lovely enough to capture their fancies, she had no lack of male companions. The price she was paying was to be considered a heartless flirt!
And this was too bad. Since she was anything but that. Often she sat alone mourning the unhappy twist of fate that had parted her from the one man she’d truly cared for. But she let no one else guess.
So now she found herself in the great living room with her aunt, awaiting the arrival of Sir Roger Drexel. She respected the tall old man with his craggy face, heavy white hair and sideburns and booming voice. In a way he had become a kind of father figure to her.
Sir Roger arrived exactly at four as he had promised. He had the military bearing of the former cavalry officer he was and made a magnificent figure in his gray trousers, fawn vest and brown frock coat. His cravat was also of dark brown. He approached Aunt Isobel with a smile on his face and bowed and kissed the back of her hand.
“You look in good health, Miss Moore,” he boomed in his loud voice.
Aunt Isobel’s dried face showed pleasure. “I’m as well as I can expect for one of my years!”
“Years! Ha!” the grand old man said, dismissing her age with the gesture of a huge hand. “You are in the prime of life, ma’am.”
“I’d hardly say that!” Aunt Isobel replied.
“I say you are,” the big man said, his eyebrows almost meeting as he frowned. “For I’m a good many years your senior and I’m not about to pop into my grave!”
Della laughed and went to kiss him dutifully on the cheek as he leaned down to her. “I can’t ever imagine you doing that, Sir Roger!”
“Well, the Sudanese tried to do me in when I was in the army but without any luck,” the big man laughed. “I enjoy life.”
Vintage Love Page 62