‘And what’s Barbie going to say about it?’ Laurel inquired dryly. ‘You know how she regards men.’
‘Oh, she’ll get over that.’ Anthea dismissed that aspect of the matter quite blithely. ‘I wonder how long Manoel will stay here, though. We may have to work quickly.’
Laurel’s eyes widened in dismay. ‘Oh no!’ she said quickly. ‘Not again, Anthea!’
Anthea gave her a gaily defiant glance. ‘Why not?’
‘No girl likes matchmaking going on behind her back. It’s humiliating to be thrown at a man’s head.’
‘Heavens above, I don’t do it with brickbats!’ Anthea said indignantly. ‘I think I’ve managed things very well so far.’ A provocative and teasing smile turned her lips. ‘In fact, I’m quite satisfied with progress. Aren’t you?’
Laurel bit back a sharp retort. ‘I wasn’t aware that any progress had been made,’ she evaded.
‘Don’t tell me you still dislike him.’
Laurel remained silent, but her expression was answer enough, as it had been once before, and Anthea shook her head wonderingly.
‘I just don’t get it. He’s good-looking and I’d stake my life on it that he makes love in an extremely acceptable way.’
‘Anthea! Don’t be so...’ Laurel began indignantly, but Anthea cut across her words.
‘And don’t you be such a prude,’ Anthea retorted.
‘What makes you think it’s acceptable, then?’ Laurel demanded, with a faint snap in her voice.
‘How would you know?’ Anthea was teasing again, but her eyes widened in sudden delighted surprise at the flush Laurel could not control. ‘Don’t tell me!’ she breathed softly.
Laurel came to her feet swiftly, with taut, restrained anger. ‘I have no intention whatsoever of telling you anything,’ she said coldly, and started to walk towards the door. ‘I suggest that it’s about time we joined the others.’
Anthea came up out of her chair, her hands outstretched in a sweet, unaffected gesture. With a few quick steps she caught hold of Laurel’s hands.
‘Please, Laurel! I’m sorry. I know I sometimes speak out of turn...’
‘Why do you do it, then? Why do you try and arrange other people’s lives?’
Laurel felt her anger evaporating and was quite powerless to stop it, even though she felt also that she should take a firm stand.
Anthea made a little deprecating movement. ‘I suppose it’s because when I like someone I want them to find happiness with someone nice.’ She dropped her eyes, which had become more serious than Laurel had ever seen them before, and her voice was little more than a whisper. T adore Stephen. I ... I think I would do anything for him. He was hurt very badly once. I don’t want it to happen again.’
Laurel made no mention of the fact that Marian Dalkeith had already given her an intimation of some such episode in the past.
‘You can’t stop him being hurt by trying to arrange his life,’ she pointed out quietly. ‘In any case, Stephen is quite able to look after himself. I’m sure he wouldn’t like any interference, especially when it’s such a personal matter.’
‘I suppose not,’ Anthea agreed, although reluctantly. She turned back to the mirror and at last began to apply lipstick with a careful hand. Laurel stood by the doorway, watching her and thinking about the woman who had somehow managed to hurt Stephen Barrington. It seemed incredible to her, knowing him as he was now, that such a thing had ever been possible, but she was sure from her own knowledge now that it had happened. There had been that moment, quickly restrained, when she had put out her hand to him in sympathy, with an odd desire to ease the hurt that he hid so well behind the mask of worldly cynicism and the mocking sharpness of his eyes. She had been certain then.
Now it was strangely doubled, that silly urge to help a man who she was sure would scorn any such offer, the desire to ease pain that she was at the same time just as sure he had himself banished and if it ever recurred regarded it with detached mockery until it was sent on its way again.
Anthea’s voice interrupted her thoughts, as the younger girl turned round from the mirror again. There was a faintly whimsical half-deprecating smile on her face.
‘What about Barbie? Am I allowed to get my sticky fingers in there?’
‘Must you?’ Laurel asked reasonably. ‘Why not let things just run their course?’
To her relief Anthea seemed to agree with her, although she said nothing. At least her expression was not complete disagreement.
‘Just so long as that Bertram-Smythe woman doesn’t try to marry her off to any money-bagged ancient,’ she said after a moment, in rather a tart voice. Her glance slid to Laurel with a hint of Stephen’s mockery. ‘Don’t look so shocked. You’ve seen enough of Mrs. B-S to know what she’s like. Her main idea is to get Barbie married off to money, irrespective of the man tacked on to the cheque book. Can you wonder I want to interfere?’ she finished explosively, and jumped to her feet. ‘I think you’re right. We’d better join the others or we might come to blows.’
Laurel smiled and shook her head. ‘Pax! We won’t fight over it. Personally I think Barbie is far too sensible a girl to let her mother push her into any marriage that’s distasteful to her. At the moment it’s quite obvious that she has no interest in the subject, but if Manoel really should fall in love with her he might be able to make her change her mind. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?’
During lunch, in the course of conversation, Manoel informed them that his yacht would be anchored off Ladrana for some time, and Anthea, with all her usual gaiety, insisted that they should have a small party, just the six of them, that evening, to celebrate his arrival. Barbie was the only one who hesitated to acclaim it a good idea, but her pleasing recollections of the day she had spent at Castelanto very quickly won her over.
Angel, wide awake and beginning to give the lie to her name, was hoisted unceremoniously on to her sister’s shoulder and carried out to Ned’s car.
During the drive, the deviation that they had to make to reach the Bertram-Smythe house took them to the top of a hill. Below them, in the distance, Milton lay spread out, with the arms of its harbour encircling the few ships in port. There was a newcomer there now, a slender white yacht they guessed belonged to Manoel.
‘That must be Manoel’s yacht,’ Barbie said, putting the thought into words. She leaned forward, peering downwards. ‘This must be visitors’ day. There’s another yacht just outside the harbour. I wonder if it will be stopping here, or just sailing by.’
Laurel followed her glance and saw it, a craft that looked small and insignificant with distance—but for some reason she had an unaccountable pang of apprehension. Then it was gone, as quickly and as suddenly as it had appeared, and she shrugged, dismissing it from her thoughts and turning aside to give the whole of her attention to Anthea and the arrangements that were being made for the evening.
It was an evening Laurel remembered for a very long time. Lately she had been leading a fairly social life, and by contrast with her life in England it was certainly eventful. She found herself meeting people—some of them pleasing, some of them not so pleasing. Mrs. Bertram-Smythe was amongst the ‘not so pleasing’, and Stephen Barrington had the distinction of being the only one on the island of Ladrana who had aroused her wholehearted hostility.
But even the hostility she felt for Stephen had faded a little with the passing of the days. She could feel sorry for him now, since she knew that he was in a sense vulnerable, and in order to feel sorry for a person you had to cease feeling violently antagonistic towards them.
After they returned to Ned’s cottage she was still not quite sure—in fact, very far from sure—why the evening that loomed ahead of her was not entirely distasteful. In fact, if she was truthful, she was looking forward to it ... And she spent a lot of time selecting a dress to wear that would do justice to it and give her confidence which was far more important, really, than that she should create a good impression.
She an
d Ned had a swift drink when they got back, and then there was a scramble for the bath-hut. Naturally, in the end, Ned gave way graciously to his sister, and while he was still coping with his toilet she sat waiting for him in the sitting-room, touching up her nails with an attractive dusky peach-coloured varnish, and looking infinitely alluring and at the same time deliciously simple in white broderie anglaise.
As usual Ned pretended to be quite literally bowled over at sight of her, and then he walked across the room and dropped a kiss lightly on her tobacco brown curls.
‘You look adorable, infant,’ he told her. ‘If that fellow Manoel doesn’t eat out of your hand tonight I shall be amazed.’
She smiled at him, dimpling as she did so.
‘I’m not interested in that fellow Manoel.’
‘No?’ He slanted a curious glance at her. ‘Then who—?’
‘No one.’ She continued to dimple and to look demure. ‘I dress to please myself, and if I look nice ... well, that pleases me! I don’t bother about anybody else.’
He looked, she thought, a little dubious, but as they were rather late he didn’t pause to argue the matter, but insisted that they went out to the car. It was perfectly clear to Laurel that he was counting the moments until he could feast his eyes on Anthea again.
Laurel felt a little odd as they neared the Portuguese-type house of the Barringtons. Earlier in the day, when she saw the yacht in the harbour, she had experienced the same sort of oddness. But now it seemed to be reinforced. She had never encouraged the idea that she possessed a kind of sixth sense, but the Shannons as a family were known to be fey. For one moment as they arrived in the patio of Castelanto she wanted to urge Ned almost frantically to start the car up and take them home again. But she managed to get the better of the impulse.
Even Ned seemed to think that the home of the Barringtons was blazing with rather more light than usual. The whole of the west front, where the main bedrooms were situated, was a sequence of lighted windows, and drawn up in the patio there were two long and powerful cars.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen either of those before,’ Ned remarked, as he helped his sister alight.
‘I expect one of them belongs to Manoel,’ Laurel replied, and Ned accepted it as rather more than likely.
‘Normally I wouldn’t wonder,’ he said, ‘only Anthea said there were to be only the six of us.’
It was quite plain, the moment they entered the house, that its atmosphere had undergone a change. There was a feeling of excitement ... of tension as well. So many voices seemed to be talking at once that Ned glanced at Laurel and lifted his eyebrows.
Anthea came running down the staircase to greet them. She looked brilliantly beautiful in a flaunting scarlet dress, and Laurel noticed in a vague sort of way that there were diamonds at her neck and wrists. Her expression was both gay and arch, and at the same time it seemed to Laurel that her eyes were fixed on her so intently that she actually thought they were appealing to her.
‘Darlings,’ and she gestured with her hands, ‘we’ve got a surprise for you. This really is a day of days! First Manoel turns up unexpectedly this morning, and now the whole house is full! You remember the other yacht we saw this morning? Well, her owner and his guests are old friends, and they’re staying with us! Isn’t it marvellous?’
There was undoubtedly something feverish about her expression, and her flow of speech was like a bubbling mountain stream. She gestured to the group behind her, and out of them all Laurel picked one woman—a graceful, exquisite creature with red-bronze hair and cool eyes, who appeared to be watching her with interest despite the fact that Stephen was engaging her in conversation—and concentrated all her attention upon her, as if she knew without having it explained to her that here was someone fate had intended her to meet, and as a result of their meeting nothing was ever going to be quite the same again.
She saw Anthea turn to her and call her by name: ‘Come here, Roberta, you’ve got to meet Laurel and Ned—and particularly Laurel!’
The others were admiring the hall and its graceful proportions, and it was Ned who counted heads swiftly and realized there were five of them. Three beautifully turned-out men—one of them very tall and fair, like a Viking—and two charmingly dressed women, who seemed genuinely attracted by the Portuguese architecture and impressed by the array of portraits in the gallery.
The woman called Roberta, who was splendidly tanned and wearing white slipper satin that contrasted arrestingly with her tan, said something laughingly to Stephen and moved across the hall to stand at the side of her youthful hostess, and it was then that Anthea made the announcement that must have shaken Stephen, and very nearly floored Laurel.
‘They were going to keep it secret until dinner tonight ... but I simply can’t wait! Roberta, you’ve got to be the first to offer your congratulations. This is Stephen’s fiancée, Laurel Shannon!’
CHAPTER FOUR
For one awful moment Laurel thought she was suffering the ill effects of too much powerful and unaccustomed sun that day. And then, while Ned’s eyes fixed themselves upon her as if he, too, suspected they had been overdoing things that day, she heard Anthea rushing on with her introductions.
‘Laurel, this is Mrs. Fransom, a very old friend of Stephen’s.’ There was no doubt about it, she underlined the words ‘a very old friend of Stephen’s’ with deliberate emphasis, and her eyes didn’t merely appeal to Laurel, they actually sought to compel her in some wild way. She probably knew she was burning her own boats and almost certainly risking quite a violent scene if Laurel chose to be unco-operative and insisted on denying such an outrageous statement. But before Laurel could even formulate the words that would have revealed the truth to Roberta Stephen stepped forward and made it impossible for her to do so.
‘Annoying brat!’ he accused his sister. ‘You even have to deny me the thrill of announcing my own engagement!’
He swung round and reached for Laurel’s hand, drew it through his arm, and then bowed to the entire assembly of his guests. ‘All right, then, you can go ahead with your congratulations! We’ll celebrate before dinner!’
They all crowded round, the latest contingent of visitors Manoel, Barbie, Ned. Barbie accused Stephen of being a dark horse, and Ned quite plainly could not have been more delighted once his astonishment passed.
‘Well, I’m damned!’ he declared, and would have separated his sister from Stephen in order to hug her and give her his blessing, but for the fact that Stephen refused to allow Laurel to be detached from his side. He kept tight hold of her hand that was resting nervously in the crook of his arm, and when she looked as if she needed a little support he freed her hand and put his arm about her. She would never have believed that the feel of Stephen’s arm supporting her would give her courage ... But when she needed it most, and in her bewilderment, affected as she was by a sense of outrage, and horrified at the same time because she was a pretty poor actress, and she knew it, the steel-strong pressure of his arm in a white dinner-jacket sleeve filled her with the sort of gratitude she would have felt if someone had flung her a lifeline when she was drowning.
‘Smile,’ he commanded, with audacious calmness, for her ear alone, and she smiled. She glanced up desperately into his face, and his grey eyes were looking down at her with a star-like glitter peeping at her between his eyelashes, while at the same time the lines of his mouth were firm—but gentle. With nothing else to preoccupy her she could have been amazed by that gentleness, because it even occurred to her that there was a kind of protective tenderness at the corners of his mouth as well.
But that could have been entirely due to her imagination.
They went through into the drawing-room, where champagne cocktails were handed out to the guests, and Laurel found herself sipping hers with a shaking hand clutching the stem of the glass. Roberta Fransom came and stood near her, and although she said nothing at all she smiled in a most peculiar way. It was a smile that made Laurel feel she couldn’t possib
ly carry on with this piece of deception when she encountered it.
‘When did it all happen?’ Ned wanted to know in his innocent way.
‘The first day Laurel arrived,’ Stephen replied, so promptly that Laurel stared at him with her mouth very nearly dropping open.
‘The first day?’ That was Barbie, expressing quite understandable surprise. ‘That makes it love at first sight,’ she commented, with extraordinary complacency considering her present attitude to romance.
‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’ Anthea pretended to look incredulous. ‘But these things do happen, of course!’
‘Only very, very rarely, in my experience,’ Mrs. Fransom observed from the middle of a priceless Persian rug near the fireplace.
She and Stephen exchanged glances that no one else in the room—except Laurel—observed.
Laurel listened with a feeling of complete unreality to the fascinating story of how she and Stephen had fallen in love, and she was so bemused by the turn events had taken that she almost believed it herself as she listened. Stephen undoubtedly enjoyed himself for some reason as he held forth on the subject, and the fact that his sister’s eyes were anxious whenever they rested upon him did nothing to effect the charm of the story for the assembled guests ... but it explained a good deal to Laurel. Anthea was half afraid of her brother, but she was also devoted to him and knew him very well, and it quite plainly struck her that he was either over-acting, or she didn’t know him quite as well as she thought.
Whenever she met Laurel’s eyes Anthea’s were still pleading ... and for no sensible reason that she could think of—not even any practical reason—Laurel refrained from letting her down.
The whole of dinner was taken up with talk of the engagement, and after dinner, while the ladies waited for the gentlemen to join them, Laurel had to submit to a good deal of quizzing on the part of Barbie. Anthea was not unnaturally more considerate, and Mrs. Fransom was plainly not very much addicted to light conversation. She preferred to curl up gracefully in the corner of a settee and smoke one of her own cigarettes in a long and obviously expensive holder, and study Laurel thoughtfully from a distance. The thoughtfulness of her look was so marked that Laurel was even glad when the men came in and, as if by right, Stephen attached himself to her side.
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