“I am persuaded you exaggerate the risks, my lady.”
“I will not, in any event, allow you to proceed by yourself. I shall insist on your being accompanied by a maid at least – perhaps by a manservant as well. I have been thinking that I could promote Patience – not a particularly suitable name for a maid but, once she becomes your dresser, you will of course address her by her surname, as I do Dent. Would you like that, do you think? I believe she is quite an able seamstress and could perhaps occupy herself with letting out your riding habit and that dress you were wearing when we set off.”
Honoria, rather startled by this, could hardly prevent herself from laughing.
“What is so amusing?” the Countess asked.
“There could hardly be a more suitable name than Patience for a dresser, I should have thought. One can only hope she lives up to her name.”
“Why? You do not strike me as exigent and I do not believe that I am; indeed, a personal maid whose employer is handsome must surely consider her job entirely satisfactory. Almost whatever you wore, you would look delightful and she will take some of the kudos for that.”
“But can you spare her?” Honoria asked, beginning to think that it might be agreeable to have a maid of her own; she would certainly feel very grown-up and the girl could be useful, not only for altering and laundering her gowns but as a companion on the long road from Würtzburg to Vienna.
When they did stop – at another well-appointed establishment – the Countess was proved right: Honoria did not notice many differences. There was a slight but unmistakeable variation in pronunciation of the French tongue and the dinner was a little different, but on the whole unremarkably so.
The evening was passed in much the same way as the previous one except that the Countess seemed to have grown bored with reading and insisted on playing piquet instead.
The next morning and for several following days they proceeded as before. The scenery changed gradually from the flat plains of northern France to the more wooded hills and valleys of Bavaria and the language changed too. The Countess, who had spoken French during the early part of the journey with commendable fluency but a strong accent, spoke German with such apparent ease that she might almost have been a native of that country.
Honoria had learned French under the aegis of a succession of governesses but had no acquaintance at all with German, other than in the few songs whose music and accompanying lyrics had from time to time found their way into Lenham Hall. She did not know what the Countess was saying and was in no position to judge the level of her language skills; nevertheless, it seemed to her that her ladyship was quite as at home with this tongue as she was with English.
“Have you spent a great deal of time in Würtzburg?” she enquired one afternoon when they had finished their luncheon and climbed once more into the carriage.
“Over the years, yes. Are you wondering about my ability to speak the language?”
“Yes. I cannot, of course, tell with any degree of accuracy but it seems to me that you speak as though you were born here.”
“I was not; I was born in Northumberland as it happens, but I have been visiting this part of the world since I was a girl your age.”
Chapter 23
“Never having been married is nothing of which to be ashamed,” the Count pointed out gently but with a somewhat bewildered air.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I think it is,” Cassie countered. “In England, at any rate, the failure to attract a husband is considered proof not only of deficiency in looks, but also of character.”
“Is there something the matter with your character?” he enquired, “for there is certainly no fault with your looks.”
“Thank you; there was not until my nose was damaged. No, pray do not look so exceedingly conscious – I am jesting. It is almost perfectly restored to normality now and, even were it not, it has taught me a valuable lesson which I daresay I would never have learned otherwise.”
“What is that?”
“Something along the lines of all being vanity. I set such store by my looks and yet they have proved to be more of a curse than a blessing – although I daresay that is related more to the faults in my character than to the arbitrary arrangement of my features. Of course, I am quite old now, and they had already begun to fade, so that the injury to my nose merely hastened their departure. It is only since meeting you – and your son – and learning of your misfortunes, that I realise how fortunate I have been.”
He nodded but said, “I have refined too much upon my anguish; a great many women die in childbirth, as you pointed out, and the only thing that a man can – or should – do is to bear his loss with fortitude.”
“I was harsh,” she admitted, “but my own experience with romantic life has been so blighted that it is difficult for me to understand another person’s grief.”
The Count was silent for some minutes and Cassie waited, aware that it was not hearing her confession with which he was wrestling, nor whatever annoyance he might have been feeling at her failure to show the degree of sympathy he expected; it was his strong desire to confide battling with his natural – and no doubt deeply inculcated – reluctance to open his heart. She did not move for fear of breaking the thread between them. It did occur to her, a woman accustomed to hearing the secrets of men’s hearts, to wonder why she should wish to know what he felt about his dead wife. She had, over the years, listened to a great many confessions of thwarted love but on this occasion she was under no obligation to demonstrate spurious sympathy.
When he eventually spoke, she was quite as astonished as he had been when she confessed to never having been married.
“I did not love her.”
Cassie, understanding something of the difficulty which he had encountered in making this confession, did not reply.
He went on, “She was barely seventeen when I met her at a ball but she was already in love with a young man whom her parents disfavoured. He had nothing to offer in worldly terms but I believe that he loved her with all his heart and there was little doubt that she returned his feelings. I pushed him out of the way, brandishing my superior breeding and property; her parents, reluctant to let her marry a boy who, in addition to his other drawbacks, was her first cousin, jumped at my offer. They persuaded her, the cousin was banished and she and I were married.
“It was clear from the beginning that she was unhappy. She could hardly bring herself to smile at me and it was not long before I felt she viewed me as a species of dragon. We spent only a few months together and I am ashamed to admit that I left for battle with a feeling of relief. She was already enceinte and it seemed to me that she would almost certainly be as relieved to be spared my presence as I was to escape from hers.”
He stopped but, when Cassie still said nothing, he prompted, “You do not speak. Are you shocked?”
“Yes,” she admitted. “Shocked by the barbarity of parents who could force a young girl to marry a man she did not love, particularly when she had already given her heart to another. It must have seemed quite horrible to be obliged to submit to the caresses of a man for whom she cared not a button when she no doubt dreamed how different it would have been with the other.”
He nodded. “It was wicked of me.”
“I daresay you did not give much thought to the matter,” she said rather coldly. It was her experience that men were a good deal more free with their caresses than with their feelings. Very likely it had not occurred to him that the girl’s heart might be broken or that she might feel as though, with every touch from her husband, she was betraying her true love.
“No, I did not,” he admitted. “I promise you it has troubled my conscience since but that is not of the least help to her – or to her cousin, who, if he has not been cut down in battle, no doubt still mourns her loss.”
She said, “Sometimes it seems to me that women are merely a convenience for men; you rail against us if we do not love you when you wish to be loved, but you hav
e little sympathy with our feelings if they have already been bestowed elsewhere.”
“I am afraid you are right. You speak as though from bitter experience. Have men – or parents - treated you badly?”
Now at last he had turned the focus of his attention upon her and she knew that there was no longer any hiding place; she must tell him the truth about her past.
“Both,” she said succinctly. “When I was much the age of your wife, I was brought to London to find a husband. I thought I could have anyone I wanted because everyone told me how beautiful I was and I believed the popular notion that a beautiful girl can have what she wants. I fell in love with a man more than twenty years older than I who turned out to be almost as bad as it was possible to be. My parents tried to deflect my attention but failed to do so; indeed, every word of warning that they uttered only encouraged me to believe that he was misunderstood and to heap more of my love upon him. He was a rake and had ruined a number of girls. The upshot was that I defied my parents’ prohibition and ran off with him, believing that we were eloping and would be married a few days later. It transpired that he had been thinking along altogether different lines.”
Cassie retailed this story in an indifferent voice; she had told it in a hundred different ways over the years but none had been entirely unaccompanied by tears, self-pity or rage until today. It seemed that speaking to von Krems, who had just admitted to having himself acted in what she considered a typically male and horridly selfish manner, had robbed her own story of its pathos; she was just another woman, ill-used and damaged while he was just another man: callous and self-serving.
“What happened in the end?”
“He abandoned me after a few months – in France.”
“Which explains why you speak the language so well. Did you, though, have a period of great happiness before he behaved so badly?”
Cassie’s mouth fell open. “None. I had thought he intended to marry me; he disillusioned me of that the first night, forcing me to undergo what I must suppose he found enjoyable. I hated every minute of it. It was not many days later that he added to the catalogue of ill-usage by hitting me, infuriated, I suppose, by my constant whining and pleading.”
“My God!” the Count exclaimed, clearly horrified. It seemed that, by telling her story without self-pity, she had for the first time elicited it.
“Men can be cruel,” he said. “I apologise from the bottom of my heart for something of the sins committed by my sex.”
Cassie’s eyes did then fill with tears for it was the first apology she had received. “Thank you.”
“The truth is,” he went on, “that I did not force my young wife to undergo what she did at my hands; she submitted, but only because she knew that she must.”
She nodded, thinking that perhaps this man at least would think twice about marrying an innocent girl who was in love with another if the situation should arise again.
“Is that why you did not marry?” he asked.
“I could not; I was ruined.”
“Did your parents throw you out?”
“I did not – at first – give them the option. I was too ashamed and did precisely what my abductor told me to: I made my way to Paris and found another protector. It was horrid; I hated it but I was convinced that my parents would not have taken me back.”
“Did you verify that later?”
“Yes. I wrote to them from Paris and received a reply stating that they had no daughter by the name of Cassandra. I have continued in the demi-monde for more or less five and twenty years. It was only when my most recent protector gave me my congé that I decided to abandon that life. He was exceedingly generous towards me, in recognition, I suppose, of the years I had spent with him as well as my advanced age. I came to Vienna – a city I had not previously visited – because I wished for anonymity. I have never been married.”
The Count said, “You have suffered abominably.”
Cassie found herself blushing at this evidence of sympathy; all her life she had tried, and failed, to elicit even the smallest iota of this commodity from anyone. Not even her friend, Prue Farley, had shown any. Curiously, when it came, it was from an unexpected source: a stiff–mannered Austrian gentleman whom she had considered likely to be entirely lacking in understanding. She had not been altogether certain, until this moment, that a human heart beat within his breast; their exchanges had been along the lines of stilted observations on largely concrete matters.
She said, not wishing to receive more kindness than she deserved, “I have indeed suffered but not perhaps abominably. My looks have enabled me to live a great deal better than many women who find themselves in a similar situation.”
“Has it never occurred to you that you must have inspired affection in your most recent protector in any event – if not in any of the previous ones?”
“No; he did not care for me – at least no more than he would have done for a faithful dog - but felt, I suppose, responsible for my welfare when he cast me off. A woman of my kind drops further into the dregs of society with each passing year. Many, if they have not been able to make any savings during the years when they were popular, end up on the streets. He has spared me that at least.”
She spoke now with great bitterness and the Count said, his expression unreadable, “It sounds as though you feel you have cause to be grateful to him.”
“Yes,” she admitted. “I do,” and she told him the rest of her story.
When she had done, he said gently, “When we seek to alleviate our own pain, we often do so by attempting to transfer it to another. From what you have told me, you could not have won that particular game because you did not hold the right cards. That is painful to accept but we cannot order love or devotion and we cannot save ourselves from pain by inflicting it upon another.”
Cassie, as she tossed and turned beneath the vast feather-filled quilt which kept the Viennese cold at bay overnight, found herself wondering why her confession had somehow set her free from her bitterness and sense of disgust towards men - but it had. The longer she had spent in that room, facing the Count with his grave eyes, the more she had been drawn to him.
She had not felt this way since her abductor had destroyed her infatuation – for that was what it had been - by his cruel treatment. She had, during those few weeks when she had been his mistress and during which she had still hoped that he would marry her, retained something of her original attraction towards him, but it had vanished gradually, seeping away, drop by painful drop, beneath his scorn; she had learned not to value her beauty for any but commercial reasons, indeed she had learned to despise it – as he so clearly did; she had learned to be ashamed of being a woman, a contemptible creature little better than an animal. She had, since, often wished that she had had sufficient pride to have left rather than endure the beatings in the hope that he would eventually soften towards her.
She knew now, with her greater knowledge of the world and men, that he never would have done because he feared and despised women; she had often wondered why – whether it was as a result of someone misusing him as he misused her or whether it was simply a part of his character. She thought that, if she had known that his dislike was not confined to her, she might perhaps not have taken it so personally; after all, a man who does not care for fish can perfectly well remove it from his diet; no individual fish need take it as a slight. The fact that he had chosen to, as it were, have fish served every day at his table, only to exclaim in disgust and send it back, unfortunately by no means untouched, defied both reason and explanation.
The Count had insisted on walking her home. He had wanted to call his carriage but she had declined, saying that it was but a step. It had grown very late as they talked and she had no wish to wait while the coachman was roused from his bed and the horses put to.
“I will come with you,” he said. “You cannot walk alone at this time of night.”
“Why not? What is likely to become of me? If anyone should assume me t
o be a lady of the night, they would not be far wrong and I would only have to explain that this evening I do not seek a gentleman’s company.”
“Mrs Morley,” the Count said, evidently unwilling to let her leave while there remained some constraint between them. “It is clear that you are angry with me. I have failed you in some way and can only apologise. Can you tell me what I have done wrong?”
“You have done nothing wrong; it is only that, as I spoke, as I told you the story of my life, I heard for the first time the truth of what I have been and am not in the least surprised that you should disapprove.”
“Disapprove? Who said that I disapproved?”
“Your face told me so.”
“It lied – or you misread it. Yes, I did – do – disapprove but not of the way you have conducted your life; rather, I have been appalled at the way you have been used.”
“Yes, I saw that – and I thank you for it. Nevertheless, it was clear that you found fault with my conduct as well.”
“Yes, I did,” he admitted. “I cannot pretend that I condone such behaviour although I understand what prompted you to act that way.”
Two footmen brought in their coats and hats. The Count himself enclosed Cassie in her furs, even putting her hat – which she had taken off for dinner - upon her head although she could not leave it quite as he had placed it.
He smiled. “Have I done it wrong?”
“Not in the least.” She looked in the mirror and saw him behind her. “Only I did not quite trust you to have done it right.”
“Ah! I hope a day will come when you will not feel it necessary to check the angle in the mirror after I have put your hat upon your head.”
“Will there be another day?” she asked in a despairing voice.
“I hope so. Why should there not be?”
“Because, knowing my story, you must feel disgust when you look upon me.”
“By no means. Did you see yourself as a goddess – without fault - although, in point of fact, goddesses are often distinguished by their glaring faults and alarming propensity to harm their rivals?”
Honoria Or The Safety 0f The Frying Pan Page 19