A Nightingale Sang

by Barbara Cartland

  Mr. Wardolf had also insisted that they should repair the orangery and bring in fresh orange trees from Spain since those that had been there for centuries before the war had died.

  “Kings Wayte is going to be exactly as it was in Grandpapa’s day,” Harry had said with a note of elation in his voice. “Think how wonderful it will be for us when our tenants have gone and we can have it all to ourselves!”

  He had spoken in that manner some time ago, but now every day he seemed to grow quieter and Aleta thought, more depressed, although she could not imagine what was troubling him.

  Because she found it impossible to sit idle, she took a linen pillowcase that she was mending for Mrs. Abbott from her work-basket and sat down in an armchair by the window.

  But after a few minutes the work slipped to her lap and involuntarily her thoughts were back with the Duke.

  Ever since she had nursed him on the night of his accident she found herself thinking about him a hundred times a day.

  It was not only because he was so good-looking, there was something else she could not explain, something that made it impossible for her to forget him, even though she told herself severely that was what she should do.

  ‘How can I be so ridiculous as to keep thinking about a man who is to marry Miss Wardolf and whom I shall never see face to face or have a chance to speak to?’ Aleta asked herself.

  But however much she tried to prevent it, he was there in her thoughts and the tips of her fingers still seemed to feel his skin beneath them as she massaged his forehead and sent him back to sleep.

  Almost angrily she picked up her work again.

  ‘I must think about something sensible,’ she told herself, ‘Harry – the horses – the farm – ’

  She pushed her needle determinedly into the white linen and as she did so, she heard the door of the room open.

  “May I come in?” a man’s voice asked.

  Aleta turned her head and then with a little exclamation she started to her feet.

  It was the Duke who stood there!

  The Duke, looking very different from when she had last seen him lying white and helpless against his pillows.

  But there was no mistaking his handsome features, except now she saw that he had dark blue eyes that were looking at her in a strangely searching manner.

  “W-why – have you – come here?” Aleta faltered.

  Her voice not only sounded surprised, but it had a touch of fear in it because she was so astonished to see him in the nursery.

  “I have come to see you,” he answered.

  “To – see me?” Aleta asked.

  Then even as he walked a little further into the room she knew! Knew by his voice and knew too why there had been something familiar about him when she stood by his bedside.

  For a moment she thought that she must be dreaming.

  It could not be true, it could not be possible that the Duke was the man she had thought about so often, the man she had talked to in the Temple in the garden in Berkeley Square and who had kissed her.

  Aleta had known that she should have been shocked at herself for allowing a strange man she had not been introduced to and had never even seen before to kiss her.

  Yet she had never been able to feel anything about that kiss except that it was the most enchanting wonderful thing that had ever happened in her life.

  It had been magic, sheer magic!

  The magic of the star-strewn night, of the nightingales in the trees, of the music, not so much from the band playing at the ball, as the music in her heart, music she had thought afterwards that must have played in his heart too.

  It was not only his lips that had held her spellbound, but something within her soul, something that had been not of this world, but of another.

  An enchantment as mysterious and beautiful as the stars, as perfect as the light of the moon shining through the trees.

  And now he was here, standing facing her, and she felt as if there was nothing to say and she could only feel as if once again she had stepped into a dream.

  To the Duke Aleta was just as he had expected her to be, the hesitant little voice in the darkness, the girl who he had said was the Goddess of the Temple and who might, in fact, have stepped down from Mount Olympus.

  She was small and delicate and completely different from the exuberant young women fox-trotting downstairs.

  Her grey eyes seemed to fill her small pointed face and her hair, the colour of the sky at dawn, was swept back in an unfashionable knot at the base of her neck.

  And yet there was a rightness about her, a kind of perfection that went with her voice and the touch of her hand. The Duke thought that only a painter like Botticelli could do her beauty justice and she might in fact, not be real, but one of the nymphs in his picture of Spring.

  “How – how did you know I was – here?” Aleta asked.

  Her voice had all the musical quality he had remembered in his dreams and when he was unconscious.

  His smile seemed to illuminate his face.

  “It has certainly been a puzzle to find you,” he replied, “and I am very proud that I have been able to solve it. It has not been easy.”

  “You were – not meant to – find me.”

  “I realised that and I would like to know why, but it is not really important. What matters is that you are here.”

  They stood looking at each other until at last in a frightened little voice that he remembered, Aleta said,

  “But you – must not come here. Please – go away and – forget that you ever – found me.”

  “Do you think that it would be possible for me to do that?” the Duke asked. “I have been looking for you, Aleta, for a very long time.”

  There was a long pause before she asked so faintly that he could hardly hear it,

  “Wh-why?”

  “For a great number of reasons, but mostly because I knew when you nursed me the first night after my accident that it was imperative for me to find you as I have wanted to do ever since I came back to England.”

  “You have – been away?”

  It was a conventional question, but her eyes fixed on his were saying, he thought, very different things, things more intimate and personal, and which he answered with some part of himself which he had never before known existed.

  “May I sit down?” he asked. “I want to talk to you and I have a great deal to say.”

  As if his question made her realise that he was there in the nursery where he had no right to be, Aleta gave a little cry.

  “No!” she said quickly. “No. We cannot talk here. Harry might come back and he will be very angry with me, or the servants might see you.”

  There was no mistaking the fact that she was agitated and the Duke said quietly,

  “We have to talk, you know that. Where can we do so?” “

  Not here – not now.”

  “Then where and when?”

  Aleta clasped her fingers together as if in an effort to make herself face reality. Then something in the Duke’s eyes compelled her to change what she had been about to say.

  “It would be – safest in the – garden.”

  “Whereabouts?” he enquired.

  Aleta thought quickly.

  “If you walk across the lawn,” she said, “at the end, through the yew hedge, you will find stone steps, which will lead you to the top of the cascade.”

  “You will come there?” he asked.

  She hesitated a moment and he said,

  “If you don’t, I shall come back here. I am determined to see you and nothing shall stop me.”

  “I – will come,” Aleta said in a very low voice, “but perhaps it would be – too much for you. You are supposed to rest.”

  The Duke smiled and she thought it made him look younger and even more handsome than he was already.

  “Finding you,” he said, “has swept away any tiredness I might have felt and it’s a far better tonic than the doctor could prescribe or Mrs. Ab
bott could force me to swallow.”

  Aleta gave a little chuckle and he thought that it was the sound a child might make and just as endearing.

  Then she said hastily,

  “Mrs. Abbott must not – find you here. Please – please – go now.”

  “I will go as you ask me to,” the Duke said, “but you must promise me that you will come to the cascade?”

  His eyes held hers as he spoke and she said, hardly above a whisper,

  “I – will – come.”

  He turned back towards the door and, when he reached it, he said,

  “Your nursery is just like mine, but I deprived my rocking horse of his tail when I was six years old!”

  He left without waiting for a reply, but he heard her laugh, a laugh that somehow was as musical and as lovely as her voice.

  It was only as he descended the stairs and passed through the green baize door that he began to feel triumphant.

  ‘I have found her!’ he told himself as he walked down the marble hall. ‘I have found her and I swear I will not lose her again!’

  *

  When the Duke had gone, Aleta put her hands to her face feeling that her cheeks should be burning while in fact they felt quite cold.

  How could it have happened? How could she have dreamt for one moment that he would find his way up to the nursery? And yet he had done so and had revealed as soon as he spoke who he was.

  ‘How could I have guessed, how could I have thought for one moment,’ she asked herself, ‘when I was standing by his bedside that he would be the man I was always thinking of? Who was in my thoughts almost every night and a dozen times a day?’

  She had known as she tried in vain to despise the Duke for marrying for money that he was somehow different from other men.

  ‘What I am thinking is nonsense,’ she told herself, ‘and I have to remember that he is a Duke and he is to marry Miss Wardolf and her millions of American dollars.’

  Just for a moment she hesitated.

  ‘If I had any sense,’ she thought, ‘I would stay here and not join him. What are we to talk about? What are we to say?’

  Then she remembered the determination in his voice and the look in his eyes when he had said that, if she did not come, he would return to the nursery. And she knew that was exactly what he would do.

  And if Harry found him there, there might be a row, or worse still, the Duke might tell Mr. Wardolf who they were.

  If that happened Aleta was quite certain that it would be impossible for them to stay on at Kings Wayte and they would have to go and live in some cheap hotel or lodgings. Harry would eat his heart out worrying about what was happening at home and there would be no splendid horses for him to ride or improvements to supervise.

  ‘I must beg the Duke to keep our secret,’ Aleta thought to herself.

  Because the idea that he might reveal the truth frightened her, she hurried down the backstairs and out through the garden door.

  From here she could take a winding path through thick shrubs until she could move behind the yew hedge that effectively hid that part of the garden from even the highest windows in the house.

  She was well aware that if any of the gardeners saw her they might tell Mrs. Abbott and Mrs. Abbott would tell Harry and he would be annoyed that she was running unnecessary risks when everything was built on their anonymity.

  ‘I must be very very careful what I say to the Duke,’ Aleta told herself.

  Her thoughts seemed to carry her irrepressibly more quickly so that she could be with him and talk to him again.

  She arrived at the cascade before he did, climbing up the rough stone steps until where the water came from a hidden spring there was an ancient stone seat on which generations of Waytes had sat and looked at the house below them and thought how beautiful it was.

  The long low Elizabethan building with its pointed roofs and strangely shaped chimneys seemed almost like a precious jewel protected on one side by the ancient oak trees of the Park and on the other where she was sitting by a fir wood that rose on the steep incline.

  In the heat of the day the flowers seemed to glow with a vivid intensity that was accentuated by the lake, golden in the sunshine, and the glimmer of hundreds of diamond-paned windows.

  As Aleta seated herself on the stone seat she thought, as she had all through her life, that no place could be lovelier or be a closer part of herself.

  Then, as she looked down and saw the Duke beginning to climb the step below her, she told herself that whatever happened she must prevent him from being instrumental in sending Harry and her away into what would amount to an exile from everything they loved.

  The Duke reached the top step with an agility that belied the fact that he had recently been an invalid and Aleta saw his eyes light up as he saw her there waiting for him.

  “You have come as you promised,” he began and it was obvious that he was not in the least breathless from his climb.

  “I-I have – come.”

  He sat down on the seat beside her and she expected him to look at the house below them and exclaim at its loveliness as everyone always did.

  Instead he just looked at her.

  Because his eyes seemed so penetrating and almost as if they were searching for something, she felt the colour come into her cheeks.

  “Are you really here?” he asked, as if he spoke to himself. “I thought that I should never find you again, my little Goddess of the Temple.”

  Her colour deepened and she remembered not only what he had called her, but how he had kissed her.

  “I have – come,” she said, “because I want to – ask you – to beg you if need be – not to tell anyone – who I am.”

  She saw the puzzled expression on his face and realised that she had almost betrayed herself.

  She had forgotten that the Duke, finding her living in the house, would not expect her to be Aleta Wayte but Aleta Dunstan as the servants had been instructed to call her.

  Hastily, because she had to extricate herself from her own stupidity, she said,

  “Mr. Wardolf does not know I am here – that I am staying at Kings Wayte, but I have – nowhere else to go.”

  “I am sure that he would not wish you to leave any more than I would,” the Duke said. “But if it worries you, then I promise you that no one, and I mean no one, will know of your existence from me.”

  Aleta gave a little sigh of relief.

  “Thank you, It’s – important – ”

  “I am not interested in why you are here,” the Duke said, “but only that you are. You see, Aleta, that night we met in Berkeley Square completely changed my life and I have you to thank for that.”

  “You have – thought about me?”

  He smiled.

  “A great deal and I think perhaps you have thought of me too.”

  Now there was no mistaking the colour that flowed from her chin up to her eyes and she turned her head away to gaze at the cascade.

  “You are very lovely!” the Duke said in a low voice. “In fact you look exactly as I expected you to look, as I imagined you in my mind and in my heart.”

  Aleta did not speak and after a moment he went on,

  “I know without either of us having to put it into words that the enchantment we both found that night in the Temple could never be forgotten, but I was afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “That I would never find you again and if I did, I should be disillusioned and you would not be as I remembered you.”

  “You – you never – saw me.”

  “I saw you in my heart, where you have been ever since.”

  The Duke gave a sigh.

  “I did not mean to say this and I did not come here to say it, but now I have to tell you. I fell in love with you that night in Berkeley Square!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was almost a frightening silence and then Aleta said in a voice that he could hardly hear,

  “It – cannot be – true, you can
not have – said that!”

  “I have said it,” he answered, “although I had no intention of doing so and did not really know it was true until I saw you. Then somehow my lips spoke for me.”

  “It’s wrong – and you must not – say it again.”

  “Why not?” the Duke asked.

  A thousand reasons flashed through Aleta’s mind, but she knew as she thought of them that they were not important, not even the fact that he was to marry Lucy-May Wardolf.

  He was there and in some strange manner that she could not explain the enchantment she had felt that night two years ago in Berkeley Square enveloped them both.

  It was as if the words they spoke were not real words but a totally inadequate reflection of what they were saying to each other in their hearts.

  And yet even that was not the real explanation.

  They had been caught up again in the enchantment they had felt that night under the trees when the nightingales had sung, the magic moment when they had not been real people but perhaps she had really been the Goddess the Duke thought her to be and he himself had come down from Olympus or one of the planets.

  What did it matter where, except that he was not, nor was she, part of the difficult perplexing world they had lived in until they had met each other?

  The Duke, as if it was an effort, turned his face away to look out with unseeing eyes at the beauty of the house beneath them and the lake beyond.

  Then he said in a very different tone,

  “I am in love! I love you, but I am not sure what I should do about it.”

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Aleta said quickly.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s the truth.”

  “I suppose, living in the house,” the Duke said, “you heard that I am supposed to marry my host’s daughter.”

  “Yes, I have heard that.”

  “I have not proposed to her and actually I have little desire to do so. In fact I have been manoeuvred into a position from which it would be difficult to extricate myself simply because there will be many repercussions if I do.”