She spoke like a child who was told she could not have another iced cake. But Tempera did not smile, instead she said almost despairingly,
“I want you to be happy, Belle-mère, I want you to have all the fun in the world, but you know we cannot afford it. Have you forgotten that when we get home there will be innumerable bills waiting for us – the rates, Agnes’ wages, the ground rent, oh – a thousand other things!”
Lady Rothley rose from the dressing-table to walk to the window.
She looked out over the sea but she was not admiring the view.
“Shall I be truthful, Tempera,” she asked, “and tell you that I am attracted by the Count? Perhaps more than I have ever before been attracted by a man.”
“But he is an Italian – a Catholic. He will not marry you,” Tempera replied, “although he may ask you to be his mistress.”
“I think he may do so,” Lady Rothley said in a low voice, “and I am wondering what my answer will be.”
“Belle-mère!”
Tempera was shocked. There was no doubt about that and the note in her voice made her stepmother turn to see the expression on her face.
She moved towards her and put her arms around her.
“Do not look like that, dearest,” she begged. “It is wrong of me – I know it is wrong – but I cannot help myself.”
She held Tempera close to her for a moment, then she walked across the room to fling herself down on the bed.
“I know now,” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself, “that all my life I have been what is called a cold woman. I thought I was in love with the man to whom I was engaged, but while I was very fond of Harry and wept bitterly when he was killed, it never meant very much to me when he kissed me.”
She paused and did not look at Tempera as she went on,
“When I met your father and he fell in love with me I admired him and thought him charming, and it was very exciting to be Lady Rothley.”
Tempera wanted to beg her not to go on, but somehow the words would not come to her lips.
“I was devoted to Francis,” her Stepmother continued in a low voice. “I felt safe with him, and I had never known before what it was to be important and to meet exciting people.”
“Please – Belle-mère,” Tempera said almost beneath her breath.
But she realised that her stepmother was not really talking to her but sorting things out in her own mind.
“When he made love to me I wanted to please him and I thought that all a woman had to do in love-making was to be acquiescent. I did not know – I had no idea that I could feel as I feel now.”
Tempera gave a deep sigh and sat down on the stool in front of the dressing-table.
“When the Count talks to me,” Lady Rothley murmured, “I feel little ripples of excitement going down my spine and when he kisses my hand I want him to kiss my lips and I want – ”
She stopped.
“You are too young, Tempera, for me to be talking to you like this. But sometimes I feel as if you were older than I and that I, in reality, am only a very young girl who has never before woken up to find she is a – woman.”
Quite unexpectedly Lady Rothley’s voice broke on the last word, and the tears were running from her blue eyes down her pink-and-white cheeks.
“Oh, Tempera,” she exclaimed in a broken voice, “what am I to do?”
It was impossible for Tempera to resist the appeal for help and she rose from the stool to go to the bed and put her arms round her stepmother.
“It is all right, dearest, do not cry,” she begged. “We will find a way out of this somehow.”
“How? How?” Lady Rothley sobbed. “You are quite right, Tempera, I am sure he will not marry me – but I love him! That is the truth. I love him madly, wildly, crazily, so that it is impossible to think straight!”
Could anything be more disastrous, Tempera thought, than that this should happen at this moment?
But she could not bear to see her stepmother in tears, realising how seldom she cried.
She wiped the tears from her cheeks, talking to her almost as if she were a small child.
“You must not cry, you will make yourself look plain! The Count and the Duke will be there at luncheon, both admiring you, both thinking you are the most beautiful woman they have ever seen! You must not disappoint them.”
Lady Rothley sat up and blew her nose almost defiantly.
“Supposing neither of them offers me – anything?” she asked despondently.
“I think we can be sure of what the Count will offer you,” Tempera said with a touch of irony in her voice, “but I know from what I have heard about him that he is an inveterate flirt, and there is nothing to stop you once you are a Duchess from going on flirting with him.”
“How could I – marry anybody else when I – love him?” Lady Rothley asked.
Her voice was so unhappy that Tempera thought she was in fact right when she said she felt like a young girl.
She might pretend to be sophisticated, she might wish to move in a Society where married women took lovers and aristocratic marriages were arranged almost the way they were in France, but now that she was in love, she was just as moonstruck as any peasant girl might be.
All the time Tempera was dressing her Lady Rothley talked of the Count, veering between an ecstatic description of his attractions and moments of despondency because she could mean nothing in his life.
It was Tempera who tried to bring the conversation down to the commonplace.
“What you have to decide, Belle-mère, is if the Count asks you to be his mistress, what you will say.”
Lady Rothley made a little choked sound, but she did not speak and Tempera went on,
“You know as well as I do that if you agree your position in Society will be ruined forever. You cannot go away with the Count, then come back to England as if nothing had happened.”
She paused before she continued,
“From all you have told me it is obvious that love affairs amongst the aristocracy are always extremely discreet. The two people concerned meet at the big house parties they attend, and they are invited together – but everybody pretends it is just by chance!”
“That is true,” Lady Rothley murmured.
“When the liaison is over,” Tempera went on, “I gather that they return to their respective husbands and wives as if nothing had happened.”
As Lady Rothley did not speak Tempera said positively “But you have no husband, Belle-mère, no-one to protect you from the scandal which you will arouse if you live with a man as important and well-known as the Count.”
“He would not leave me – penniless,” Lady Rothley said faintly.
“He might leave you with money, but nothing else,” Tempera retorted. “What good would money be if you were not asked to the Balls, Receptions and parties you enjoy so much? You know as well as I do that the doors of houses like the Duke’s would be closed to you.”
“What you are telling me is true, and you are quite right,” Lady Rothley said pathetically, “but I love him, Tempera, I love him!”
Tempera thought the tears were likely to begin again and so she soothed her stepmother, arranged her hair in a new and becoming fashion and dressed her in one of her prettiest gowns.
“Forget the future and enjoy the present,” she admonished her. “You were a success last night! Go downstairs and be a success to-day, darling Belle-mère! As Papa often said when he was irritated, ‘Tomorrow will come to reckoning – but be damned to it!’”
“Tempera!”
Lady Rothley looked quite shocked at the swear word, and then she laughed.
“Oh, Tempera, I love you! Could any woman ever have a kinder and more adorable stepdaughter?”
With the quick change of mood her face lit up and her eyes were smiling.
“The sun is shining,” she said. “We are staying with a Duke and there is a Count waiting to make love to me. What more could any woman want?”
“Nothing, except to look as beautiful as you,” Tempera replied.
“I will go down and dazzle them!” Lady Rothley said. “And it is one satisfaction to know that Rosie Holcombe is longing to scratch my eyes out!”
She went from the room leaving Tempera laughing, but the smile faded and she sat down on a chair rather helplessly, thinking of the mess they were in.
She tried to remember all her father had told her about the Count in the past.
She had met him twice or perhaps three times, but he had not paid any attention to a schoolgirl.
Yet she had the feeling that his dark eyes missed nothing and that he had a retentive memory.
‘Whatever happens he must not catch a glimpse of me,’ she thought.
It suddenly came to her how much it would damage her stepmother if it was learnt that she was employing her own stepdaughter as a lady’s maid.
It was the kind of titbit of gossip which would spread like wildfire amongst the people who had nothing better to do than to chitter-chatter about each other.
It would doubtless be magnified and exaggerated into a kind of fairy story about the wicked stepmother who beat and oppressed the pretty heroine.
“I shall have to keep out of sight,” Tempera told herself, “not only of the Count but also of the Duke, and of course Lord Eustace!”
The last thought was reinforced by what she heard when she joined the two other lady’s maids at luncheon. Tempera learnt that Lady Holcombe had lost quite a considerable sum at Baccarat the previous night, and she and her husband had had some very unpleasant words about it. Sir William Barnard, on the other hand, because he was so rich, had won a small fortune, but there had been trouble in the Casino because a woman had accused him of collecting her winnings along with his own.
How the maids learnt of these things Tempera had no idea, but they always had something to relate to each other and she in fact was the only person who did not contribute anything to the conversation.
“I can tell you one thing,” Miss Briggs said as they were drinking the large cups of tea which accompanied every meal.
“What’s that?” Miss Smith enquired. “His Lordship’s up to his tricks again.”
“Do you mean Lord Eustace?”
“Who else?” Miss Briggs demanded with a note of contempt in her voice.
“What’s he done now?” Miss Smith asked.
“As I was going along to her Ladyship’s room this morning I heard what sounded like screams and a lot of giggling coming from the direction of the Tower,” Miss Briggs replied.
“You did?” Miss Smith ejaculated, her eyes alert with interest.
“I dropped something by accident,” Miss Briggs said, “and while I was picking it up the door of his Lordship’s room opened and out came Madeleine.”
“Which one’s that?” Miss Smith asked.
“The big, bosomy girl who I always think is cheeky when I can understand what she’s saying,” Miss Briggs replied.
“Oh, I know her,” Miss Smith said. “I wouldn’t trust her far, and that’s a fact.”
“And you would be quite right,” Miss Briggs agreed. “Her hair was untidy, her apron crumpled, and as she shut the door behind her I had a glimpse of his Lordship in his shirtsleeves.”
“Well I never!” Miss Smith exclaimed. “You’d think he’d leave the chambermaids alone.”
“Not him,” Miss Briggs said with satisfaction, “he’s always the same. I remember two years ago when we were staying in the North with the Duke of Hull – ”
She started off on a long story of Lord Eustace’s predilection for a pretty maid-servant, but Tempera was not listening.
She was reliving the lucky escape she had had this morning and how after the way he had looked at her when they first met she knew she must keep out of his way.
He was the sort of gentleman who she had heard seduced lonely young Governesses who were then dismissed without a reference.
‘He is despicable!’ she thought. ‘I cannot believe that the Duke is aware of his behaviour – otherwise he would not have him to stay.’
The thought struck her almost like a dagger that perhaps the Duke also found servants fair game. Then she was ashamed that the thought had even crossed her mind.
How could any man who had understood what she was trying to say about looking and listening to the beauty of the night not be honourable and straightforward in his behaviour?
However Lord Eustace might behave, she would stake her soul on the Duke’s complete and absolute integrity.
And yet she had to avoid him also.
It was a depressing thought, but she told herself that she must do nothing which might prevent him from admiring her stepmother.
It was absurd to think that she might interest him as a woman – but she might as an artist, which was a different thing, though still a diversion.
She was quite certain that if the Duke should propose marriage to Belle-mère, there would be no question after that of her philandering with the Count.
No woman who liked Society would refuse to be a Duchess and, as Tempera well knew, her stepmother loved the social world and longed to be a shining star in its glittering firmament.
She only hoped that Lady Rothley would not show too obviously her preference for the alluring Count.
He had seemed very old to Tempera when she was a child because he was nearing her father’s age, but when she thought about him she could remember dark, flashing eyes in a lean face with aristocratic features which declared him obviously a patrician.
She could remember his voice, too, deep and somehow resonant, and she thought as she looked back that he often seemed to be laughing.
‘It is just what Belle-mère would enjoy,’ she thought, ‘the frothy gaiety of champagne which the Count can offer her, when what she will have to prefer is the solid fare of an English meal.’
She laughed a little at the metaphor, then told herself it was really very serious.
The only eventuality she had not foreseen on this adventure they had undertaken together was that Belle-mère, of all people, would fall in love for the first time in her life.
Because that, Tempera knew, was what had happened. She was in love and the only thing that could save her from taking a disastrous step in the wrong direction would be her inherent sense of snobbery.
It was all so perplexing that when Tempera reached her bedroom she stood for a long time irresolute just inside the door, so bemused by her thoughts that she was not even certain where she was.
Then suddenly she told herself that if she intended to put the picture downstairs on the Duke’s desk this was the moment.
The house party was having luncheon on the terrace. They had been eating for less than an hour and Tempera knew that any meal would take twice, if not three times as long as that.
It was delightful on the terrace with the bougainvillaea climbing up the walls and over the railings which bordered the deep precipice on the side of which the Chateau was built.
The terrace was paved and there were awnings to protect those who sat or ate there from the sun. It must be, Tempera thought, rather like being in an eagle’s nest, high above the world, but secure and safe.
The men-servants were all engaged in waiting at the luncheon and by now the housemaids would have tidied the Sitting Room and there would be nobody there.
This was the chance, Tempera guessed, for which she had been waiting.
Picking up her picture, she walked very carefully down the stairs, thinking that if she should meet anybody her excuse about the loss of a handkerchief would serve as well as any other.
The Sitting Room was however empty and there was only the sound of voices laughing and talking in the distance.
Tempera took a fleeting glance at the pictures as she passed them, almost as if she greeted them as old friends. Then she entered the Duke’s room and found to her relief that this time there was no-one there.
She put her picture down o
n the desk and felt as she did so that she had taken an irrevocable step towards behaving from now on in a very different manner.
She would not make the same mistakes again, and even if it meant that she must stay indoors at night she would not risk meeting the Duke in the moonlight.
That constituted a danger to her plans not only for her stepmother but also for herself.
She was not prepared to explain why, but in her heart she knew the reason and would not face it.
On the Duke’s desk was a huge blotter with silver edges with his monogram also in silver emblazoned on the leather cover.
The inkpot was very beautiful and Tempera was certain that it was made in the time of Charles II and extremely rare.
She could not help looking at it for a moment before she propped her picture against it. Then having done so, almost as if it drew her irresistibly, she raised her eyes to Leonardo da Vinci’s angel.
Whoever had painted the reproduction had done it very skilfully, and Tempera was certain that the artist had copied it from the original picture in the Louvre and not from the one in the National Gallery.
“Am I really like that?” she asked herself. It was difficult to be sure.
The angel’s sweet, sensitive face was so engraved on her mind that it was as familiar as the reflection she saw in her own mirror.
And what did the Duke think?
Tempera told herself that, if in fact he had thought she resembled the angel whom he faced every time he wrote a letter, he would have mentioned it to her.
They had been so close last night that she had almost known what he was thinking and that he had been aware of what she was trying to express.
It would have been simple for him to say when they had spoken of the pictures in his room that her face in some small way reminded him of the one which Leonardo da Vinci had painted 421 years ago.
‘Perhaps he will think of it later,’ Tempera thought, then shied away from the implication.
She moved towards the door and as she did so she could not help lingering for one moment to take another look at the ‘Madonna in the Church’.
‘It stands out,’ she thought, ‘like a glittering diamond even among the other jewels this room contains.’
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