So this was what his life had come to. A life once so filled with promise.
In the end, everyone was a loser. What had been was taken away. The road led downhill, irrevocably, and the final victor was death. Life was a cheat, a fraud. It was a losing proposition.
• • •
“What do you want?” Dolores asked uneasily, when her husband said he had some business with her. He had cornered her in her bedroom.
“You did it for me, you’ll tell me,” he said. “Oh yes, you’re beautiful. You look like a Madonna.”
She screamed. The whip lashed out, catching the gold of the sun. It hissed, but it didn’t touch her. Curling, smoking, it burned on the tiled floor.
“No,” Dolores cried, the blood rushing to her head. She had never before known fear like this fear.
An arm was raised again.
She gasped, put her hands up.
“Constant! For God’s sake! Yes, I did it for you.”
This time the whip didn’t hit the floor. It curled across the woman’s tanned, splendid shoulders, wound itself in a terrible caress, laid open an arc of tender flesh.
The scream came again. Foam bubbled at the corners of the woman’s mouth. The blood surged to the surface across her collar bones.
The next scream was cut off in mid-air as the whip swung once more. This time she fell to the floor. She smelled her own blood, was blinded with pain and desperation. With the third blow she was speechless, able only to mew like a cat, her almost blind eyes watching the swing of the whip.
And then that was about all. The fourth lash swept across her face, her beautiful face. Sinking, soaked in blood and drowning in white agony, she knew that her beauty was gone forever. Even the physical punishment couldn’t equal that hideous knowledge. But it was all soon forgotten. Her eyes closed, her senses failed, and Constant Comstock, watching her pitilessly, threw away the whip and went down and got into the car.
He drove steadily, in control of himself, and thought, I have loved this city, and remembered its topography, its history, its legends. It kept him company, the lore and splendor of his adopted Madrid, as he drove to the pine-clad mountains of the Guadarrama, climbing steadily, and the breezes were fragrant with the scent of pine and broom.
Near the top he turned the car, idled the motor as he looked down at the valleys below. Just before he put the car in motion again he looked up at those clear, blue Velazquez skies.
Then he took a deep breath, gunned the motor, and let her go. The turns were serpentine. For a few minutes his hands guided the wheel, then he sat on them. The car, on its own power, zoomed down, gaining speed. There was an overwhelming impulse to put his hands back on the wheel, but Constant Comstock closed his eyes and, perhaps praying, kept his palms down, letting the vehicle go where it would. It has to be, he reasoned with himself. There was no other way.
He heard the rending crash as the car hit an impediment in the road. His eyes flew open and his hands came up from the seat. But they didn’t go to the wheel. He saw the precipice below, felt the car careening toward it, and his hands went to his face, blotting out what was going to happen next.
He was Daedelus, winged, flying into the blue …
The impetus, as the car hurtled the cliff, smashed him against the roof of the tonneau: as the impact knocked him senseless there was one last thought.
And yet I did love her …
After a dozen overspins the car came to rest on a lower plateau. It caught fire almost at once. Plumes of red soared into the sky. And after a while there was only the smoldering. There were several annual accidents in the dangerous Guadarrama mountains. This time it was no accident, but would be lumped with the rest of the fatal disasters that, yearly, took place in the mountain passages where once a girl named Carmen had taken refuge with her lover, Don Jose.
CHAPTER 18
Lisbon.
The hotel was the Tivoli, on the Avenida da Liberdade, a broad, gorgeous thoroughfare rising from the sea in a steep incline and culminating at its top in the Praco de Marques de Pombal, where a gigantic statue of the grandee towered at its center, its gaze fixed on the River Tagus down below.
They spent most of the day at the Estoril. It was easier to hire a car and driver, so they did that. They sat and drank and then rented bathing suits and swam in the blue water, lay on the white sand and slept, holding hands.
The day passed all too soon. Later, back at the hotel, they had an early dinner and then went to bed.
Kelly packed, soberly, was ready the following morning. From time and training she was in Ops at the airport at the proper time. “There’s a California film star in first class,” she was told. “Confidentially,” the briefing instructor added, “he’s a notorious drunk.”
The passengers came on board.
“Good morning, may I have your seat number?” the welcoming stewardess said in honeyed tones.
And then Kelly saw Steve climb on board.
“This is my future,” she said to the girl at the gate. “Give this guy the red carpet treatment.”
There was a double take and then a giggle. “Got it,” the girl said. “Oh, my, he’s terribly attractive, Kelly.”
The 747, the Monster, cut across the sky above the Atlantic Ocean. In a short lull, Kelly sat with Steve. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Well, then,” she said. “I have a little time to myself. And during that time, there are a few questions I’d like to have answers to.”
“Yes, dear?”
“What’s your racket?”
“What vulgar language from a Scarsdale girl.”
“Shove it,” she said. “I’m, for the last time, serious. What was your connection with Richard Comstock and relatives? Are you a dick?”
“A dick?” He frowned fastidiously.
“An eye, a private guy. Tell me.”
“There’s no mystery about it,” he said. “My connection with the Comstock compound was purely personal. Richard’s aunt Elizabeth is a friend of mine. She’s almost fifty years old, but when her husband ditched her, she decided she wanted to get her Ph.D. So she’s in one of my classes at Columbia. I teach English. Also Psychology. I have tenure. And a reasonably good salary. Just under seventeen thousand.”
“You’re putting me on,” she said.
“Not at all. This is the truth. But of course there’s something else. I write on the side. Crime stories. Very good little crime stories. You’ll never starve, Kelly.”
He smiled, and took her hand. “I want you to meet Aunt Elizabeth,” he said. “You’ll like her very much. She’s the only member of the Comstock family who isn’t a jerk. I mean, outside of Richard.”
“Steve, I can’t believe my ears. You mean you teach?”
“What’s that, a dirty word?”
He kissed her, and then lit a cigar. “Yes, Richard’s aunt was worried about him. So I promised to keep an eye on him in Spain. She’s such an old darling, you’ll like her.”
She laughed. “Oh, Steve. And I thought you were C.I.A Or Mafia. You’re a professor! You with your Humphrey Bogart act. A real tough guy. I could die laughing.”
“They laughed at Fulton,” he said. “And at Socrates, for that matter. But I notice those fellas had the last hee haw.”
• • •
It was six in the evening when they left Kennedy Airport in a taxi. The sky was pink and blue and promised a bright day for tomorrow. “These are the good days,” Steve said. “Summer’s coming in. I like this time of year.”
“Me too.”
They went through Queens, turning up toward Madison and the East Side.
“Your place or mine?” Steve asked.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
She thought about it. And then she looked at him. It didn’t really matter whose place. It would be their place before long. But when it happened, she decided, she would just as soon have it in her t
wo rooms with the familiar objects surrounding her, so that she could guide Steve in every way possible into her life, knowing the shape of the boundaries in which she had existed for so long. And there lead him into their common future.
“Just off Madison,” she told the driver. “Where those bright lights are to the left.”
The cab pulled to a stop. She stood waiting, and the maple tree on the corner was in full leaf. It was an end, and a beginning. The taxi pulled away and Kelly reached out a hand.
“Watch the steps,” she said, and helped him up. In the dusk they smiled at each other and went up the single flight that led into another time, another way of doing things, another life.
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 © 1970 by Dorothy Fletcher
ISBN 10: 1-4405-7202-X
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7202-9
eISBN 10: 1-4405-7201-1
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-7201-2
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 © 123rf.com; istockphoto.com/izusek
The Late Contessa
Dorothy Fletcher
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 One
I learned that I was an heiress on the thirtieth of April. It was Saturday, a true spring day, the sky baby blue with puffy white clouds, and the temperature in the high sixties. I could scarcely wait to get dressed and out of the house; the winter had been hard and long, and there was in the air that drifted through an open window in my brownstone apartment a kind of fragrance, like roses. It was, of course, simply the smell of new grass growing and the maple tree out front giving off the sap of renewed life.
It was my habit, on weekend mornings, to walk the dozen or so blocks to my parents’ flat, for breakfast and a daughterly chat. Clad in casual pants and a shirt, I shrugged into a jacket and locked my door. It was only nine thirty, but the mail, in the East Seventies, was delivered early. I said hello to my next door neighbor, who was putting out her rubbish in a lacy blue nightgown, and ran down the stairs. I had a small package in my handbag … some cheese I had bought at a neighborhood shop, cheddar with pistachio nuts … it was a treat for my mother and father. I was in the best of moods: spring always does that to me, with its promise of summer ahead, the beach, coming vacation, sunny skies. I was humming as I put the key in my mailbox.
It was stuffed. There was a circular from a department store where I had a charge, a communication from my Congressman, and two letters. There was something else too, a stiff, bulky envelope which, when I eased it out, bore foreign stamps and the printed words VIA AERIA. I thought there must be some mistake, that what I held in my hands had been meant for someone else’s box and had, inadvertently, been put into mine.
But there was no mistake. It was addressed to me, Miss Barbara Loomis, neatly typed on an electric. I fingered it and looked at the letterhead in the upper left hand corner. Whom did I know in Florence, Italy? I asked myself, but it was academic. I could see right away that this was not an ordinary letter but something quite different. For one thing, it was from a firm of lawyers, Predelli and Pineider, the Via Tornabuoni, Firenze, Italia, 50123.
Lawyers?
I was fascinated: I looked at the colorful stamps once more, turned the envelope over, felt its weight, and then tore the flap open. There was an impressive, legal brief inside, to which was attached a typewritten letter. The letter was addressed to me and, at the bottom, after the words, “sincerely yours,” a signature, Antonio Predelli. And then I read the letter, after which I sat down on one of the stone steps leading to the street and read it again … and yet again.
At last I folded it, shoved it back into the crackly envelope, thrust it into my handbag and trotted over to the parental flat on East 81 Street, marveling … and wondering. Fred, the doorman, greeted me with some remark about the wonderful weather, told me I was looking perky and when I reached the eleventh floor and rang the bell, Millie let me in with a smile and her usual little peck on my cheek. There was the smell of coffee and bacon crisping. “I hope you brought your appetite with you,” Millie said, as she always did, and in the big, cheerful living room my father was reading The Times, looking through his bifocals. He looked up and waved abstractedly, murmuring something. Mother was arranging flowers — tulips, fern, and baby’s breath, in a crystal vase.
“Hello, there,” she said.
I had to laugh. They were both so scrupulous … treating me like a friend instead of a daughter who, rather than take life easy in the ancestral co-op, with Millie to wait on me and launder my underthings, had apostasized and found an apartment of her own. Not a reproachful word had been said, but by their very absence of open censure there was an implicit animadversion. Or perhaps it was more basic than that. “It’s your funeral, darling …”
However, I was content. I had one large, sunny room, with fourteen foot ceilings, an adequate if tiny kitchen and an adequate if tiny bath. With my decent-paying job at Plandome Press, Publishers, I could manage very well. They knew that, pere and mere, and respected me for it, but they would — and in subtle ways made it clear — have preferred their only child to remain at home until the finality of the marriage vows. I was not at all resentful, but rather tender and understanding. One day I too would know the wrench of parting from a child of my own, and there was no real generation gap in our little family. We coexisted.
I picked up a tulip and smelt it. It was a glorious scarlet, tight and unopened, with velvety petals. “Darling, don’t bruise it,” my mother said and I put a hand on her shoulder. “Listen,” I said. “I’ve inherited some money.”
“Oh?”
I suppose she thought I’d had a refund on my income taxes. She smiled and added, “Isn’t that nice, dear?”
“No no, I mean it,” I said breathlessly. “I’m rich. Someone’s left me ten thousand dollars.”
I had her full attention then. Holding a spray of baby’s breath between her pretty and still young fingers she turned away from the vase. “What on earth are you talking about?” she demanded.
“It’s true. Someone’s left me money. Ten thousand dollars. What do you think of that?”
“Who?” she asked, squinting a little bit in disbelief. The way she’d looked at me as a child, telling some true but lurid story that had seemed to her a figment of my imagination. I remembered her questioning me. “Is that pretend, Barbara? Or real? Don’t be afraid to say. I’ve a lively imagination myself.”
I pulled the stiff envelope out of my handbag. “Here,” I said. “Read it You’ll see. It’s true. I can’t credit it, but there you are. I have a lot of money. She left it to me.”
Mother took the envelope I handed to her. “But who?” she asked crisply. “Who is this someone?”
“Her name is … was … Mercedes. Mercedes d’Albiensi. She’s … or rather was … a Contessa. Shen — ”
My father threw down The Times and yanked off his bifocals. Mother dropped the sprig of baby’s breath. Both said at the same time, “Mercedes?”
“You knew her?”
They stood together, a
fter my father got up and went to Mother. They were fighting over the letter. “Let me read it,” Mother said excitedly and my father, “But what does it say? What is this about money, about — ”
“I can’t tell until I read it,” Mother cried. “Or else you read it, Howard, only for heaven’s sake, how can anyone make head or tails of this unless …”
Then, like a good wife, she gave him the letter. He put on his bifocals again and read what I had read only a quarter of an hour ago. I remembered the approximate message.
Dear Miss Loomis:
Please read the attached, as relevant to your interests in the estate of the Contessa d’Albiensi, deceased. In order to clarify the meaning of the papers herein enclosed, which may be of little significance to you, may I say that the burden of this communication is to advise that you are an inheritor of the late Contessa Mercedes d’Albiensi, nee Reynolds, whose death occurred on the fifth of March of this year, 1971. The legator, the afore-mentioned Mercedes d’Albiensi was a great-aunt of yourself and has bequeathed this sum, free and clear, in your name —
And, a few sentences later, the amount of the inheritance. Ten thousand dollars. Bemused, I thought, who would have guessed, when I woke up this morning.
“But this is incredible,” Mother said after a while. She and my father looked at each other. “Yes,” he agreed. I said, “Then you knew her? This Mercedes?”
“Yes, of course. But — ”
My father finished the sentence. “But after all these years!”
“All right, suppose we talk it out,” I said, sitting down. “A great aunt, the man who wrote the letter says. On whose side?”
“Mine,” Mother said.
“But we only knew her for a day or two,” my father interrupted, looking stunned.
“Evidently she never forgot.”
“I remember I liked her very much.”
“So did I.”
And then I heard the story, piecemeal, it’s true, but at least the whole thing began to make sense to me. Mercedes Reynolds, who in fact had been christened Meredith (after the author) had, after leaving finishing school, taken the Grand Tour, ending up in Italy, where she had met and married an Italian gentleman of wealth and title, the Conte d’Albiensi, and never returned to the United States. Instead, she had changed the spelling of her name to Mercedes, had become enamored of her adopted country, had established a salone though bearing no children, and when the Conte died in the year 1949, had still not cared enough about the land of her birth to return. In short, the Contessa d’Albiensi, now dead, had become more Italian than the Italians … but had thought enough of at least one of her countrywomen to leave a sum of money to her.
Classic Love: 7 Vintage Romances Page 65