He spoke with such satisfaction that Weena could only think that he was a very lucky man.
‘Even if I am not so lucky,’ she thought to herself, ‘I am marrying the man I love and nothing else counts.’
Ivor drank his coffee and then he said,
“Now we have to think about you, Weena. You ran away last night, but I told the Viscount that girls are often shy. He would have to woo you without upsetting you and it would perhaps be for the best if you are married before me.”
Weena drew in her breath.
Then she said,
“I think perhaps we had better discuss this matter in another room as the servants will be coming in here with my breakfast at any moment and I don’t want them to think that we are quarrelling.”
“We are not going to quarrel,” Ivor said. “I wish to have my own way in looking after you and you have to see sense and, of course, nothing could be more fortunate than that you should have a title and marry into a family which is acknowledged to be one of the oldest and most respected in England.”
As Weena had no wish to argue with him, she was thankful when at that moment the door opened and then Brownlow came in with her breakfast.
“I’ve been keepin’ it hot for Your Highness,” he said, “and I think you’ll enjoy it as the fish were fresh from the market this mornin’.”
“I am sure it is delicious,” Weena said, “and thank you, Brownlow, for remembering that I like sole more than any other fish.”
“It were cook who remembered that,” he replied as if he felt that he ought not to take all the credit.
Brownlow poured out a cup of coffee for Weena and then left the room.
Because she thought that David might be arriving at any moment, Weena hurried to eat her breakfast.
Before she had finished, her brother, picking up the newspapers that were lying on the side table, said,
“I want to talk to you and we will do it in the study. Join me as soon as you are ready and I expect that there will be a number of invitations to more parties and we will have to decide which are the best ones for us to accept.”
He reached the door as he was speaking and went out closing it behind him.
Weena gave a sigh of relief.
She had no wish to quarrel with her brother or to upset him when he was so happy.
‘He has everything he could possibly wish for,’ she thought, ‘and I want only one wish, which is David.’
They might be very poor, they might have to live in a small cottage in the country, but they would be together and nothing else could ever matter.
Perhaps if they saved up their money carefully they would occasionally be able to take a holiday.
He could show her some of the foreign places he had talked about and found so attractive.
It would not matter if they had to stay in very cheap lodgings as long as they were in each other’s arms.
She would try in every way she could to make him feel that he was not in any way inferior to Ivor who now would have so much money and such valuable possessions.
She could not imagine Ivor being content with a cottage just because he was sharing it with Mavis.
‘I would be happy in a cave if only David was with me,’ she told herself again and again.
She felt once more the thrill of his kisses and the strange way her heart seemed to turn over when he told her that he loved her.
‘I love him, I adore him,’ she thought, ‘and nothing must prevent us from being married.’
At the same time she was certain that Ivor intended to force her into marriage with the Viscount.
She would have to be very firm and resist him.
She could only hope that he would not be rude and unkind to David because he was of no importance as far as her brother was concerned.
She kept wondering to herself if he would have married Mavis if she had been as plain as a pikestaff.
But she would have fallen in love with Ivor anyway because he was so handsome and dashing.
She had seen the way that the women looked at him at parties.
She was very certain that when they thought of him as a romantic Prince, they were ready to surrender to his kisses.
Of course they would marry him if they had enough money for him to ask them to do so.
‘I want to be married for myself,’ Weena thought. ‘And that is what David is doing. He saw us travelling in a very cheap ship and he loves me because I am me and not because I am pretending to be a Princess. Or in fact come from a decent Russian family even though the house and the estate is no longer ours.’
At the same time while she was so happy because David loved her just as she loved him, she realised that it was going to be a hard battle with her brother.
He was determined to cash in on the success she already was in the Social world and marry her to a future Earl.
‘I hate the Viscount, I hate him!’ she cried out to herself desperately.
But she knew it would not be the sort of argument her brother would listen to and she would have to think of something better.
It was then she had an idea and, jumping up from the breakfast table, ran into the hall.
“There is a gentleman calling to see me,” she told Brownlow, who was instructing the new footman how to polish a side table.
“At what time does Your Highness expect him?” Brownlow asked.
“I don’t know,” Weena replied, “he just said that he would come here this morning. I will be in the study with His Highness.”
“I’ll bring him there when he arrives,” Brownlow said. “Will you then be askin’ the gentleman to stay on for luncheon?”
“I am not sure,” Weena answered. “But tell cook we may be one extra and, of course, as usual we will be out to dinner tonight.”
“I guessed that already, Your Highness.”
As she walked away from him, Weena was thinking that perhaps she and David might have to run away.
In which case they would be out to dinner and have to find some small cheap place where they could eat.
It would be very different from the party that they had already accepted which was to take place that evening at the Duchess of Devonshire’s house.
It would, Weena had already learnt, be one of the most prestigious balls of the Season.
Then, just as if she was being tempted, a voice in her mind piped up,
‘Just think what you will miss if you are living in a small house in the country. No more dinner parties, no fast horses and you may never have a chance of wearing your pretty gowns like the one you are wearing this morning.’
As if Weena was listening to the voice and knew the answer, she said to herself,
‘But I will be with David and that is what really matters.’
She reached the study door and entered to find Ivor sitting at the desk opening the letters that had arrived by the morning post.
“You will hardly believe it,” he said in an excited voice as she came in. “But we have been asked to dine at Marlborough House!”
“Marlborough House?” she questioned. “Who lives there?”
“Don’t be so silly!” her brother snapped. “It’s the Prince of Wales who has asked us or rather the Princess. Just think of it and only a short time ago we were watching those devils burn down our house and believing we were destitute and had nothing left in the world but what I had managed to hide away.”
“It is certainly most exciting and a great honour to be asked to dine with the Prince of Wales,” Weena agreed.
At the same time she was thinking that perhaps she would be unable to accept as she would have run away by then to the country with David.
“It will undoubtedly impress my future father-in-law,” Ivor was saying. “He is so thrilled that his daughter is to be a Princess and has promised to pay an enormous sum of money into my bank account so that you need not worry about your trousseau. I promise you that it will be as beautiful and as expensive as Mavis’s.”
Weena did not answer for the simple reason that she knew it would be a mistake for her to go into battle with Ivor before David arrived.
Instead she picked up the newspapers that had been put on a stool in front of the fireplace and said,
“I am sure the party we attended last night will be reported in the Social columns and I want to see if we are mentioned.”
“I have already done so,” Ivor replied. “I assure you we are both there and they actually say that Princess Alweena was looking especially beautiful in a lovely dress of white tulle decorated with pink roses.”
“Do they really say that or are you making it up?” Weena asked.
“Look for yourself,” her brother told her, “and see how famous you are becoming. You are nearly at the top of the list of invited guests.”
Weena had just found the piece about herself in The Times when the door opened and Brownlow announced,
“The Duke of Hartington, Your Highnesses.”
Both Weena and Ivor looked towards the newcomer with surprise.
Then, as David walked into the room, Weena gave a little cry.
“David, it is you!” she called out.
He walked towards her.
Taking her hand, he kissed it before he said,
“We had so much to say to each other last night that I forgot to tell you who I am.”
“But you were coming to London on the same ship with us!” Ivor now exclaimed.
“I was on the ship calling myself David Hart which is the name that I always use when I am travelling,” David replied.
“But why did you bother to disguise yourself?” Ivor asked. “I don’t understand.”
“For much the same reason you were doing,” David answered. “It was only just now when the butler asked my name that I realised you and Weena were still thinking of me as the man of no consequence you met on the ship.”
“You were of great consequence to me,” Weena murmured.
He took her hand and turned towards Ivor.
“I am sure,” he said, “that you will not be surprised to learn that your sister and I want to be married as soon as possible.”
Ivor then rose from the chair with his hand up to his forehead.
“I am now completely bewildered,” he admitted. “I believed that we had disguised ourselves so as to travel as cheaply as possible, but I never for one moment thought that you might be doing the same.”
“It is rather deflating to find that you and the people on board ship, who did not know my real name, thought I was of no standing whatsoever,” David commented rather poignantly.
“But you were of great importance to me,” Weena said again. “And you made me very happy until you ran away.”
“I am ashamed for doing so,” David replied. “It was only when I lost you that I realised it was impossible for me to live without you. I was determined to find you even if it took me a thousand years to do so.”
Weena laughed.
“I am very glad it did not take you as long as that!”
“No, I was fortunate. When I went to the party last night, it was merely to apologise for being so late, but I found you and that mattered more than anything else.”
He then gazed into her eyes as he spoke and it was impossible for either of them to look away.
And for a moment they forgot that Ivor was there in the room watching them.
In fact they both started when he broke the spell by saying,
“I still don’t understand. If you are a Duke and I would imagine a very important one, why should you want to travel Second Class on that ship and in disguise?”
“Simply and solely because if you are a Duke,” he replied, “you are pursued by very many people who are impressed only with your name and who wish to know you just because you have a prestigious title.”
He pulled Weena a little nearer to him as he added,
“As you will find, a large number of people want to marry off their daughter to you because she can then share your title with you and thus impress her friends who are not so fortunate.”
“But you did not tell me last night that you were a Duke,” Weena pointed out.
“That is what makes the story even more wonderful for me than it is already,” David replied. “I was always terrified of being married simply because of my title which is yet another reason why I hide it whenever I have the chance.”
He paused for a moment before he said,
“But you, my darling one, promised to marry me without knowing who I actually am or for that matter what I possess.”
“I would be extremely happy to be alone with you in a small cottage in the country,” Weena whispered.
“I know,” he answered. “That is what makes me even more grateful to the Gods who brought you to me in Greece. One of the things we will do on our honeymoon is to go back there and thank them for doing so.”
“I would love that,” Weena sighed. “It would be absolute Heaven to be in Greece with you.”
“That is what I was thinking too,” David added.
They gazed again into each other’s eyes and forgot the world for a moment.
Then Ivor coughed and said,
“I am naturally delighted that my sister should be so happy. I can only suggest that, as I will want to give her away at what will obviously be a very lavish wedding, you should be married before Mavis and me. If our friends find it expensive having to provide two presents so quickly, I am not going to commiserate with them about it!”
They all laughed at this.
Then Ivor said,
“I know it is early in the morning, but we have to celebrate this unique occasion and I am going to ring for Brownlow to bring us a bottle of champagne.”
“Anything will taste like the nectar of the Gods at this particular moment,” David suggested.
He was quite certain later that the champagne had made it easy to persuade Ivor that they should be married as soon as possible.
“I want to take your sister on my new yacht,” David said. “I am sure that she will need only a few days to buy her trousseau.”
“I will mind dreadfully not being at your wedding, Ivor,” Weena said, “but I do want to go away with David and see the places around the world he has told me about, which I thought I would only see in my dreams and read about in books.”
“You will see them all,” David insisted. “But it will not really matter what we are looking at. You know as well as I do it will be Heaven just to be with each other.”
It seemed to Weena from that moment on that she could not think of anything except her wedding and the excitement of going away on their honeymoon.
She knew that every precious moment they were together she loved him more than she did already.
And she felt that he was telling her the truth when he said exactly the same.
*
It was only three days before they were actually to be married that Weena suddenly realised she had not told David, because it had not occurred to her, that she was not really a Princess and that she and Ivor had adopted the title simply to impress the English.
‘I must tell him, I really must tell him,’ she thought. ‘How could I start my life with a lie? If he found out from anyone else, he would never forgive me.’
She thought about it all day when she was trying on clothes for her trousseau in the smart shops in Bond Street.
It was when she went to David’s house in Belgrave Square that she knew she had to tell him the truth even if he would then no longer wish to marry her.
‘I just cannot live a lie,’ she told herself, ‘and God would be angry and perhaps terrible things would happen simply because I was being wicked instead of good, as I was brought up to be.’
That night they were dining alone because instead of attending a party they were going to the ballet to see the beautiful dancing that David had told her about.
The ballet music was always so romantic and that is what they were both
feeling as they held hands all the way through the performance.
Yet she was now afraid, deeply afraid that if she told him the truth he might cease to love her and disappear as he had done before.
She realised that one of the reasons he had never married was because he thought that women were attracted to him not for himself but for his title and possessions.
“I am told that every debutante wants to end up a Duchess,” he had said scornfully. “So I was determined that I would never marry until someone really loved me for myself. That is what you have done, my darling. I knew then that I had found the true love I had always wanted. The love we both believe belongs to Greece and the Gods and Goddesses”
“Where you found me,” Weena added softly.
“You fell down into my arms as if given to me by the Gods themselves,” David said. “But I was too stupid not to realise that I had found what I was seeking and need never hide again.”
“I am sure that many women would have loved you just because you are you,” Weena pointed out.
David smiled.
“My family is somewhat like your brother, they are terribly impressed with people’s titles and, if I had married someone without one, it would have been a misalliance. I am quite sure that my family would have done their best to oppose it.”
He had said all this the other night when they were talking.
And it was this conversation that had decided her that she must tell him the truth.
If she married him on a lie, it would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Therefore after they had been to the ballet and held hands while the music seemed to envelop them as if it was a voice from Heaven, they had gone back to his house in Park Lane.
It was where everything was already arranged for the Reception after their wedding had been solemnised at St. George’s Church in Hanover Square.
David took Weena into the study.
It was the only room that was not filled with the magnificent presents they were continually receiving.
“I must have one room,” he had said, “which is free from white flowers and the scent of them where I can write a letter without knocking over a wedding present!”
“I must not keep you up late,” David was saying as they entered the study. “You have a busy day tomorrow and I want you to look so beautiful on our wedding day that everyone there will think, as I do, that I am the luckiest man in the world.”
Rescued by Love Page 13