Moon at the Full

by Susan Barrie

  “The little one is still half asleep,” the Comte explained smoothly.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THAT night Steve ascertained that no one required her services after dinner, and retired to her cabin early. She was normally entirely free in the evenings, but sometimes Mrs. Trent asked her to play cards with her—she was very fond of piquet—or she was required to make a fourth at bridge. She was not a very good bridge player, but she was useful when no one else was eager to make up a four.

  Her duties, on the whole, were very simple, and made few demands on her capabilities. There was very little secretarial work, although she occasionally answered letters for Mrs. Trent. She was an excellent needlewoman, and Madame Villennes pressed her into service when she wanted some fine lace mended, or got into trouble with her embroidery. Steve was excellent at understanding knitting patterns, and could pick up a dropped stitch with speed and adroitness. She could always provide the right word for Mrs. Trent’s crossword puzzles, which the latter did whenever they were able to get hold of English newspapers, and was always ready to adjust foot-rests and tuck in cushions behind elderly heads. And when requested to do so she read aloud from newspapers and magazines.

  The few things she did not like doing were answering peremptory summonses to assist with some special beauty treatment in Gabrielle’s luxurious cabin, altering a hemline at short notice for Rosalie, and clearing up the state of chaos which so often prevailed in Madelon’s cabin, and which the latter seemed to think was all part of the English girl’s duties.

  There wasn’t one of the women who didn’t make use of her, and on some days she was kept actively employed from morning till night. But there were other days when she had quite a lot of free time, and the men all treated her with respect and friendliness. Ever the amorous Raoul, once he got used to the idea that she really wasn’t interested in light flirtations, and could resist the melting appeal in his dark eyes, accorded her a sort of amused friendliness, and Neil Heritage was the one she talked to most, and who sought her out whenever he had the least idea that she was free.

  After the day on Ischia, when she seized the opportunity to say good night early, he was waiting for her in the short corridor which led from the main saloon to the companion stairway leading upwards to the recreation deck. He accosted her smilingly, and refused to believe she was going to bed.

  “It’s too early,” he said, “and anyway, it’s hot, and you won’t sleep. Come up and smoke a cigarette with me!”

  “I’ve already smoked my last cigarette for the day,” she informed him. And then, at the wry look in his eyes, she repented. “Oh, all right ... just one! That won’t ruin my teeth.”

  “If I may so, they’re most attractive teeth,” he told her, when they were ensconced on deck in a couple of deck-chairs placed side by side at the rail. The Odette, like a giant refreshed—or a slim grey ghost suddenly endowed with nervous energy—after her engines had stayed idle all day, was slipping through the moonlit water around them at what seemed to be an astonishing number of knots, and the constant slight vibration was like an eager pulse throbbing beneath their feet.

  Steve, ignoring the compliment that had been paid to her teeth, looked up at the silvery shape that was the moon itself—an enormous moon, not yet quite at its full—and she confided that the thing she found most awe-inspiring at sea was the quality of the blackness that closed down like a mantle once the sun had set, and before the moon had a chance to rise.

  “It’s like coming up against a solid wall,” she said, “when you stand at the side of the ship and want to put out your hand and touch it. It’s frightening, because if you did touch it—or touch something!—you’d be petrified.”

  He smiled.

  “You might be, but I’ve had so many years at sea that I find even the blackest night afloat friendly rather than alarming. During the war we welcomed a dark night because it was, in actual fact, our friend, whereas a moonbright night made it a simple matter for the enemy to pick us out, and let us have it.”

  She looked at him with a certain amount of surprise, and also curiosity.

  “You don’t look old enough to me to have served in the last war,” she said.

  “Don’t I?” He smiled again, and she could see his white teeth flash as he did so, and the crimson flower in the white lapel of his dinner-jacket lent him a debonair, jaunty air. But she knew he was not really debonair. He was a serious, fair-haired man with fine networks of wrinkles at the corners of his deep blue eyes, which were no doubt, due to those years at sea, when he had so often had to crinkle up his eyes to peer into the distance. To pierce the night-time blackness which she found impenetrable! “Well, we’ll accept it that I wear well; and I do assure you I remember the last war very well indeed. But I’ll admit I was rather young when I defied my parents and ran away to sea!”

  “And they forgave you?" she asked. “You never regretted it?”

  “They forgave me, and I never regretted it. But when my father died a year or so ago I had to step into his shoes, and now I’m glad to take advantage of a friend’s invitation and go cruising in his yacht.”

  “You mean the Comte?” she said.

  “Yes, Léon. Another man who might have made an excellent buccaneer, or at least some form of adventurer, if he’d lived in a different age, and wasn’t already burdened by so much money. It’s an unusual thing nowadays to have an acquaintance who really is as rich as Croesus, but Léon is just that. Taxation makes little difference to him, and he can gratify any whim he wants gratified. The only thing he hasn’t done so far is acquire a wife.”

  “But this cruise was planned to...” And then Steve stopped short. Had she any right to reveal what the Comte had told her? And even if his friends were well aware of the purpose of this cruise, was it her business to discuss it? “There are three very beautiful young women on board the Odette,” she said, a little lamely. “If he’s thinking of taking a wife he could hardly look farther than one of them.”

  Neil Heritage smiled again.

  “And you seriously believe he is contemplating marrying one of them?”

  “I ... how would I know?” she asked.

  He shrugged, offering her another of the specially blended cigarettes which were provided in lavish quantities for the guests of the Comte.

  “A looker-on frequently sees quite a lot of the game,” he remarked. “And you are, in a sense, a looker-on.”

  “And so are you,” she reminded him swiftly, feeling a sudden oddly breathless sensation at the base of her throat. “Haven’t you any idea whether he is seriously interested in ... one of them? Mademoiselle Descarté, for instance?”

  He regarded her over the flame of his lighter, and then as the result of the light pressure of his thumb the blue flame of the lighter was extinguished.

  “It has struck you that he has a particular interest in her?” he murmured. “Well, she’s rather devastating, isn’t she? And if a man happened to be looking for an exceptionally glamorous wife she’d very definitely fill the bill! But I find Miss Trent quite charming too, and the little Madelon has an enormous amount of appeal.” There was a light note in his voice, as if he wasn’t particularly serious, and was amused because she evidently was. Because she believed that a marriage would result from the cruise of the Odette. “Well, all I can say in support of any theory you have formed is that I know Léon fairly well, and in addition to being rich he never allows himself to be stampeded into anything. He and his father and, I believe, his grandfather before them, were all the same. Hard, detached men. Coolly calculating men. They have a motto, you know ... a sort of family crest...”

  She quoted it:

  “ ‘Black is the knight, and blacker the heart’!”

  “Oh, so you know it?” he said, and glanced at her almost as curiously as she had glanced at him a short while before. “Are you interested in family crests? They’re a lot of nonsense, of course. My family has one that really nauseates me. Glorious unto death. We are not all
a glorious family, and so far as I’ve been able to make out not one of us has ever distinguished himself.”

  Steve laughed, and then checked her laughter quickly to declare:

  “I'm sure you distinguished yourself in the last war. You’re the type to collect a lot of medals, I feel certain.”

  “Well,” he admitted modestly, “I collected the D.S.O., but that was probably because they couldn’t think of anyone else to bestow it on at the time.”

  She denied the possibility of this so indignantly that this time it was he who laughed; and then she asked him what he meant when he said that he had given up the sea to step into his father’s shoes, and he admitted that he had an estate in Suffolk, and that he also ran part of it as a model farm.

  “One day you must come and see it,” he said, one of his fine brown hands unexpectedly covering both of hers, where they rested in her lap. “It’s quite an attractive old house ... Elizabethan. And I think the farm itself might interest you.”

  Steve admitted wistfully that she loved the country, but she seldom had an opportunity to visit it nowadays.

  “Then you must certainly make the acquaintance of my part of the world,” he said, giving her fingers a warm squeeze. “You strike me as the sort of girl who ought never to have to cope with the wearing rush and tear of town life, and in the country I’m sure you’d thrive. Anyway, it’s a promise that you’ll come to Suffolk some time?” But before she could answer the vague murmur of voices and laughter that had been floating out through the open porthole windows below them became a positive hubbub, and Gabrielle came running swiftly up the companion stairway to the deck. Her perilous high heels made a noise like machine-gun fire when she reached the deck, and then she stood with her back to the rail, waiting for her pursuers to catch up with her, while the moonlight flung its splendour across her and the misty loveliness of her sequin-studded black net dress.

  There was so little motion that she was able to stand without support, and behind her her hands grasped something determinedly. Against the whiteness of her fingers—and as she was standing sideways on to the spot where Steve and Heritage had their deck-chairs arranged it was a simple matter for Steve to see her hands—a brilliant green shimmer, of a cat’s eyes, attracted further rays of moonlight, and Steve gasped.

  The Comte’s voice rang out icily in the quiet of the Mediterranean night.

  “Gabrielle, this is no joke! I insist that you return those stones immediately!”

  Gabrielle put back her head, and the lovely burnished shape of it was defiant.

  “But I want to borrow them ... for just one night, chéri! You. said that the legend goes that whoever wears the stones for just one night shall be happy! Well, I want to be happy—” her voice catching with excitement and pleading “—and I want to wear the emeralds! They mean nothing to me apart from the fact that I wish to wear them, so please, Léon ...!”

  But his voice was firm.

  “I’m sorry, Gabrielle, but you must give them back to me.” And he held out his hand.

  Her green eyes grew stormy, her face white and mutinous.

  “Then why did you tell us about the legend? Why did you permit us to see the stones again?”

  “I told you about the legend because it is a legend—only! So far as I know Marie-Thérèse was not a particularly happy woman. Her daughter—our unfortunate Marie-Antoinette—lost her head. And I permitted you to see the stones again because you expressed a great desire to see them. Now, may have the back?”

  The necklace came snaking through the silvery moonlight on deck, and lay at his feet, flung there by a furious hand with blood-red fingernails. Steve blinked at the blaze of green fire that seemed to be burning a hole in the deck.

  “There, take them,” Gabrielle cried, her voice choked with her rage—and Steve would never have believed that she could display such rage. “Take them and return them to wherever it is that you keep them! And if they are so valuable why are they not at your bank in Paris, instead of aboard a yacht?”

  “You may depend upon it that mu bank in Paris will have the custody of them as soon as it is convenient for me to hand them over,” Léon de Courvalles replied quietly, his eyes very dark and utterly inscrutable. “And there they will remain until the intended recipient can take her own measure to safeguard them!”

  Gabriel uttered another choked, frustrated sound, and then plunged towards the head of the companion ladder. As she descended like an angry whirlwind, Rosalie and Madelon who had listened breathlessly to the interchange from somewhere near the bottom, dispersed like blown leaves before a gale; and in the privacy of their cabins they no doubt hugged themselves because for once the beautiful model they so resented and who had had things very much her own way until now, had been temporarily thwarted and made to look foolish, at least.

  If she had imagined that her charm was so fatal that the Comte couldn’t resist it she now knew there were occasions when he could resist it! They all knew, even Signor Valdoli, who was her devoted shadow, and who had declined to join in the exodus from the saloon.

  The Comte bent and picked up the emeralds, and Neil Heritage rose and said something uncomfortably.

  “It really would be better if you kept those things in a safe place, Léon. I’d no idea you had them aboard the Odette.”

  The Comte looked at him coolly—there was even a suspicion of a frown on his face—and slipped the fabulous necklace into a pocket of his white dinner-jacket.

  “Mrs. Trent was asking for you, Neil,” he said stiltedly. “She wants you to play chess with her.” It was tantamount to a request to him to go below, but the Englishman also frowned, and then glanced at Steve.

  “You were on your way to bed, Miss Blair, when I asked you to come up here,” he said. “I think it would be advisable if you didn’t stay up here too long, because that dress you’re wearing is very thin, and around about midnight the atmosphere cools—”

  “You may be sure I shall not permit Miss Blair to catch a chill,” the host interrupted him suavely. And then made it impossible for him to linger any longer by stating bluntly: “I want a few words with her.”

  When they were alone, Steve rose and stood uncomfortably regarding her employer, and he returned her regard with the same inscrutable look in his eyes that had entered them when Mademoiselle Descarté flung the emeralds at him.

  “You would like to go to bed?” he asked. “Or would you care to stay up here for a short while longer?”

  “I ... you said you wanted to talk to me;” she reminded him.

  “That is true,” he agreed, his eyes narrowing as they took in the slightness of her figure against the white wall of the chart-house behind her. She put up a nervous hand and tucked an end of her golden hair behind her ear. “You find it pleasant to talk to a fellow countryman?” he asked. And then, without waiting for her answer, “What were you talking about just now when Gabrielle erupted on to the deck? Did she interrupt something cosy and confidential?”

  “No.” She couldn’t entirely understand why her heart was beating so quickly beneath the flimsy material of her dress, and why, at the same time, it seemed to be labouring heavily as he moved nearer to her and leaned on the yacht rail. The sleeping sea was all around them, the foam of their passage strung out like a pennant behind them, ahead the path of moonlight into which they were journeying slipping sideways as the hour grew late. “We were talking about his home in Suffolk ... Mr. Heritage’s home,” she added, in some confusion.

  The Comte nodded, his expression more revealing.

  “And did he suggest that you visit it some time?” he inquired dryly.

  “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, he did.”

  The Comte looked suddenly sardonic.

  “Englishmen don’t lose many opportunities, do they? Although we Latins are supposed to be the ones who are always out for romance.” He removed the emerald necklace from his pocket, and practically blinded her with it as he swung it before her eyes. “But Neil is a goo
d type, and if he asks you to visit his house in Suffolk then you can take it from me it will be safe to do so. It is up to you to decide whether or not you wish to do so.”

  She was silent.

  He invited her inspection of the necklace.

  “You admire it?” he asked. “It would be difficult not to do so, wouldn’t it, especially if you like emeralds?”

  “I don’t think I’m the type to wear emeralds,” Steve said, in rather a small voice. “In fact, I don’t think I’m the type to wear very much jewellery at all.”

  “Put this on,” Léon de Courvalles said, his voice very soft, but insistent. “Let us see how it looks on your small white throat.”

  But she shrank back.

  “Oh, no, I’d rather not! And besides...”

  “Besides what?” he inquired, in the same soft voice. “Did you not hear what Mademoiselle Descarté said? To wear the necklace for one night means happiness!”

  “But you said Marie-Thérèse, who once owned it, had very little happiness. And her daughter died.”

  “That is true,” he said, almost curtly, and thrust the necklace back into his pocket. “Perhaps it will be as well if we exchange it for something else ... sell it and buy something even more precious, and then we shall not tempt Providence! I have never thought it a wise thing to temp Providence.”

  Steve’s heart was not merely beating quickly now, it was hammering away inside her breast. The Comte was very close, the scent of his aftershave lotion and the familiar blend of his cigarette smoke were in her nostrils, and they seemed to be doing curious things to her powers of concentration, for she was clinging to the yacht rail: and her fingers were cold with nervousness and an utterly bewildering and foreign sensation like acute delight. He was murmuring gently in her ear.