This had been one of Isabella’s more disreputable adventures and one that had gained her the censure of all the more respectable Dowagers in Society.
She gave a cry at Hugo’s words and put her hands up to her cheeks.
“Pray don’t ever remind me of that race, you are making me blush. It was disastrous and yet at the time I enjoyed it immensely. Now you can feel less perturbed about me, for I am getting old. I no longer want to race, I no longer want to do any of those things that caused so much scandal last year and the year before. The truth is, I seem to have done everything. Can it be that I am becoming blasé?”
“Merely sensible. Try reading a little for a change, you might even find that Greek mythology still has the power to thrill you.”
“You are a strange person, Hugo. Without being vain I counted you as one of my most sincere admirers. I find instead that you are one of my harshest critics.”
“Let me change the adjective,” Hugo answered. “One of your most admiring critics.”
“Thank you!”
Isabella dimpled at him and picked up the invitations again.
“You have not solved any of my personal problems, although perhaps I can only solve them myself by falling in love.”
“With whom?” Hugo asked.
“I wish I knew the answer to that. Sebastian is the most obvious person, but it is quite impossible for me to compete with Amé when it comes to being in love with him.”
“You have never been in love with him,” Hugo responded. “It was but a pretence even to yourself.”
Isabella laughed.
“I refuse to admit that you are right. I love Sebastian and I want to marry him. I should make a charming Duchess and well you know it.”
“He will not marry you,” Hugo declared decisively. “I believe that at heart he is a sentimentalist and wants to be in love before he swears away his freedom.”
“Even then one can be mistaken,” Isabella said pensively. “I loved Charles to distraction when I married him, or I thought I did, and yet now I am certain that, had he lived, our marriage would not have been a happy one. We had so little in common. He worshipped me, but he was, in many ways such a boy and so childish that I always felt immeasurably older than he.”
“That tiresome inconvenient brain of yours! Perhaps you are right. What a disadvantage it is to be able to think as well as to be able to feel.”
Hugo would have answered this, but at that moment Amé came into the room.
She was wearing a riding habit of blue satin and a little tricorne hat set on her hair was trimmed with a long curling feather of a lighter blue. Her eyes were dancing and her cheeks were flushed with the exercise.
She ran across the room, kissed Isabella affectionately and then held out her hand to Hugo.
“Bonjour, madame. Good morning, dear M’sieur Hugo,” she said. “What a pity you did not join us, it was so lovely in the Bois de Boulogne and Monseigneur and I raced each other!”
“Who won?” Isabella enquired.
“Monseigneur, of course. He is a much better rider than I am. Mais ecoutez, I have great news for you. While we were riding, we came upon a small Château. It is quite exquisite, set in the very midst of the wood with a garden full of flowers and a little stream running through it. It was so enchanting that we stopped to look and Monseigneur asked an old gardener who it belonged to. It was then that we found it was for hire.”
“What of it?” Isabella enquired.
“That is the surprise. Monseigneur has gone to arrange for it to be ours while we are in Paris. We can drive out there on Saturday or Sunday. We can even stay there if we wish and avoid the stuffiness of the City.”
“Stay there?”
The question was almost a cry and dramatically Isabella picked up the invitations that lay in her lap.
“Have you seen these?” she asked, “and there are dozens more upstairs.”
“What are they?” Amé enquired curiously.
“Invitations,” Isabella replied. “Invitations to balls, dinners, masques, Receptions, parties of every sort and at many of which you are to be the Guest of Honour. All these are pouring in and now you and Sebastian take a house in the woods. You must both be demented.”
“No, madame, we are not, and please don’t be angry,” Amé said coaxingly. “It is just that even I tire of so many parties. We have been out every night and I think it would be a lovely change for us to stay at home.”
“By us, of course, you mean you and Sebastian,” Isabella stated.
“And you too, madame,” Amé added swiftly. “Not that we would wish to deprive you of the parties if you wish to go to them.”
Isabella laughed at that and yet there was no rancour in the sound.
“Listen to her, Hugo,” she cried. “She would not deprive me of a party. Very well, Amé, you and Sebastian can have your house in the woods if you want it, but I warn you, half Paris will go into mourning if you don’t turn up at all these fêtes that have been arranged for your special amusement.”
Amé sat down on the arm of Isabella’s chair.
“I don’t want to be ungrateful,” she said seriously, “but sometimes I cannot help thinking that everyone who is so kind to me might behave very differently if they knew who I was. Supposing I stood up at one of these big Receptions and said, ‘mes amis, I am honoured by all you have done for me, but I must be truthful. I am not really the Ward of an English Duke. I am Amé, who is a nobody and does not even know the name of her own parents.’ What would happen then, what would they say?”
“Hush, hush, child, how can you breathe such things?” Isabella cried warningly. “You don’t know who is listening. In Paris these days even the walls have ears. Why the very flowers in the garden may be in the pay of the Cardinal!”
“Lady Isabella is so right,” Hugo said. “One should not speak of such things. For my part I endorse your suspicions that much but by no means all of the adulation you are receiving is not to be taken too seriously.”
“M’sieur Hugo has so much good sense,” Amé said admiringly. “Sometimes, when I come in late from a party at which I have danced with Princes and Ducs and where people have said such charming, though often very silly things to me, I go upstairs to my room and I open a drawer in my dressing table that is always kept locked. Do you know what is in there?”
“No, what?” Isabella asked.
“The clothes I wore when I left the Convent. The white dress and dark cloak, the things I had on when I climbed over the wall and crept through the open door into Monseigneur’s coach.”
Isabella gave a little shudder.
“Throw them away and forget them,” she urged. “All that is past.”
“"No. I like to remember them and to look at them. They are a part of me, perhaps more truthfully a part than those lovely gowns you have bought me but in which I have to act a lie.”
Isabella looked uncomfortable.
“’Tis best not to consider such things too seriously. Come on, we must make plans for this afternoon. This evening we are all attending, now where is it we are dining?”
“The Princesse de Frémond’s,” Hugo replied. “It is a big dinner party and I imagine that there will be some entertainment afterwards.”
“Yes, the Princesse de Frémond, I remember now,” Isabella said. “I cannot recollect that I have met her, but I thought that the Prince looked a dead bore.”
“Must we go?” Amé asked.
“I am afraid Sebastian will insist on it,” Hugo replied. “He is anxious to be friendly with the Prince.”
“Why?” Isabella enquired. “He looked a tiresome creature.”
Hugo knew the reason well, but he thought it politic not to say too much.
“I assure you that Sebastian wishes to go to the party,” he informed her briefly.
“Then, of course, there is no question of our doing anything else,” Amé agreed.
“No, of course not,” Isabella said with a faintly sarcast
ic note in her voice.
She looked at the clock over the mantelpiece and gave an exclamation.
“It is nearly noon and I am not dressed! Leonard will be waiting to do my hair. Really the hours fly by too quickly to be endured.”
She had risen to her feet as she spoke and now, still clutching the invitations, she hurried from the room, leaving behind the faint fragrance of some lovely exotic perfume. Hugo had opened the door for her and now he closed it. As he did so, he saw that she had dropped her handkerchief, a tiny square, edged with pretty lace and embroidered with her initial surmounted by a coronet.
He picked it up and stood for a moment looking down at the small wisp of femininity.
Then very slowly his fingers closed over the handkerchief, crushing it hard against the palm of his hand. Suddenly he started guiltily. He had forgotten that Amé was still in the room, balanced on the arm of the chair, her eyes on his face.
“Isabella has dropped her handkerchief,” he remarked needlessly.
“You love her,” Amé almost whispered.
Hugo started again and the blood rose in a tell-tale wave of crimson into his cheeks.
“What do you ‒ mean?” he stammered.
“You love her,” Amé repeated. “I guessed it a few days ago when I saw you looking at her and then just now, when you picked up her handkerchief, I was sure.”
“You have not spoken of this?” Hugo interrupted. “You have said nothing to her?”
“Of course not,” Amé replied. “It is your secret.”
Hugo sighed.
“I have loved her since the first time I saw her,” he admitted, “but no one must ever know.”
“Lady Isabella might be proud and glad to have the love of such a man as you,” Amé said softly.
“Proud!” Hugo gave a hollow laugh. ‘Proud!’ he repeated. “Do you realise her position? There are dozens, no, hundreds of men in love with her. Rich men, powerful men. Why, it is well known that last year she refused the Duke of Seville, the Marquis of Staverley and Richard Yardlay, who is the heir to the Yardlay millions. For me to love her could only be a joke, the kind of thing they write lampoons about over here.”
“I just don’t think that love is ever a joke,” Amé answered. “I don’t think either that Lady Isabella would laugh at you.”
“I would not risk it. You must promise me by all you hold sacred that you will never breathe a word to her.”
“I promise,” Amé said, “though, M’sieur Hugo, I don’t think you understand, Lady Isabella is not happy. She seeks love and cannot find what she wants. Perhaps yours is the love she is seeking, although she does not yet know it.”
“My love!” Hugo laughed again. “What do I have to offer her? I am penniless except for what I receive from the Duke. My father shot himself after he had incurred gambling debts amounting to over one hundred thousand pounds. You don’t know who your father is, but I can assure you it is better to be parentless than to know yourself the son of a spendthrift and a wastrel, a man whose infatuation for the cards had made him completely inhuman and utterly without affection for anyone, even his wife and family.”
“Poor M’sieur Hugo, how you must have suffered,” Amé sighed.
“Not as much as I might have,” Hugo replied. “I was, it is very true, denied many of the interests and amusements of my contemporaries and yet I have had in many ways much more than they in that no one can take from me my books, the learning I acquired at school and at the University and the happiness my studies brought me. It is perhaps because I value these things so much that the Gods who like to mock us all sent Isabella into my life to show that I am just as stupid as the most nit-witted of my friends.”
“You must not give up hope,” Amé tried to encourage him.
“I cannot give up what I have never had,” Hugo answered. “I am content to worship her from afar, to treasure each word she speaks and each movement she makes, so that when we part I can remember them as clearly as if they were happening again and again. Sometimes she talks to me as she has done this morning and, fool that I am, I am in Heaven because I believe that for those few moments at any rate I am of use to her. Pity me, Amé, for I am a pedant caught with the noose of his own pedantry. I have believed that books and learning and cleverness were enough in life, only to find myself as empty as the merest dullard.”
“That is not true,” Amé said, “for because of your learning you have learned to control yourself. You may suffer, but at least your sufferings are disciplined. It is because of that you may ultimately gain what a sillier or lighter-brained man would lose.”
In answer to these words Hugo sat down in a chair and put his hands up to his face.
“Don’t tempt me into believing that there might be some hope for me,” he pleaded. “I am a fool, but not so foolish as that.”
I know the truth. I know Isabella. She would no more consider me as a suitor for her hand than she would consider one of the linkmen outside in the streets.”
Hugo sighed deeply as he finished speaking and felt a wave of misery sweep over him as if in a flood tide and then he was conscious of a soft hand on his shoulder and a voice saying with a throbbing intonation,
“I as well feel like that, so at least we are together, you and I, in the wilderness.”
Hugo took Amé’s hand then and carried it to his lips and, before he could rise to open the door, she had gone from the room and he was alone.
It was extraordinary, he thought later on that day, how much comfort she had brought him. His love for Isabella had eaten into his heart for so long that he had almost forgotten what life could be without the pain of it and yet, because his secret was shared and because he no longer suffered alone, he felt more light-hearted than he had felt for many years.
He had always had the suspicion that she thought him a bore and yet that night, as they walked towards the coach that was to carry them to the Prince de Frémond’s house, Isabella laid her fingers on his arm and said,
“I am glad you are coming with us, Hugo. It is ridiculous for you to sit at home night after night adding up figures and writing all those tiresome letters.”
“Somebody has to write them,” Hugo smiled, finding it hard to keep his elation in check because Isabella was glad that he was there.
There was no hiding, however, Amé’s gladness at being with the Duke. She was wearing a new dress tonight, of the palest green, the colour of the buds in spring, its only decoration a cluster of snowdrops at her breast. It was exceedingly becoming and the Duke admitted that it was one of Madame Bertin’s finest creations.
“We are all very chic tonight,” Amé said as they drove off in the coach. “Your coat is not as fine as the one of cloth of gold, Your Grace, but I am not certain that it does not become you better.”
“I shall be getting vain if you pay me so many compliments,” the Duke replied humorously.
“All the same, I wish we were driving towards the Bois de Boulogne,” Amé went on, “to our little house in the woods. You have promised, Your Grace, that we shall go there on Saturday.”
“Yes, I have promised.”
“And I suppose you have forgotten that we have been invited to a picnic by the Princesse de Polignac?” Isabella questioned.
“No, I have remembered that,” the Duke replied, “and we will still go to the house in the woods.”
“Sebastian, you are hopeless,” Isabella exclaimed. “As to the house in the woods, I can well guess what the gossip will be about it.”
“Why, what could they say?” Amé enquired. “What gossip could there be about having a house which one can retire to quietly and be at peace?”
The Duke met Isabella’s eyes and she obeyed the command in them.
“Indeed, no one could say anything,” she said hastily, “except that you are neglecting your social duties. But that really is of no consequence.”
“No, of course not,” Amé agreed. “I think perhaps at heart I am not very social. One ball
is like another. What I really look forward to is driving back with you, Your Grace.”
The Duke said nothing and surprisingly Isabella did not tease Amé for forgetting to add that both she and Hugo were usually present.
There was no time to say much more for the Prince de Frémond’s house was not far away and already they were turning in at the courtyard. The mansion was an imposing one with many footmen to assist the guests to alight.
As they entered the front door, they saw ahead of them a wide staircase curving upwards to the Reception rooms on the first floor. There were several other guests preceding them as they went up the staircase to where, blazing with diamonds, the Princesse stood to receive them.
The Duke was expecting someone much older, but it was obvious at the first glance that the Princesse was many years junior to her husband. She was exquisitely gowned, her hair arranged by an artist, but the Duke thought, as he kissed her hand, that the Princesse looked ill.
She was very thin and there were lines under her eyes. But she smiled very charmingly at him and said,
“I am delighted to meet Your Grace. My husband has spoken of you.”
There was something about her which seemed to remind the Duke of someone he had met before and yet for the moment he could not think who it was.
“It is very kind of you to invite us here tonight, madame,” he said formally. “May I present my cousin, Lady Isabella Berrington, my Ward, Miss Court, and another cousin, Mr. Hugo Waltham.”
“I have admired Lady Isabella for a long time,” the Princesse said, “and this is the beauty who all Paris is talking about.”
Isabella and Amé swept deep curtsies, Hugo kissed the Princesse’s hand and they moved further into the room, greeting the Prince, who looked more sardonic than ever tonight, his beetling eyebrows seeming almost to meet over his hooked nose. But the Duke was determined to be friendly and after a few moments’ conversation the Prince’s expression appeared more genial. He even laughed at some sally and paid Isabella a compliment.
Every enquiry that the Duke had made confirmed what he had already heard, that the Prince decided the foreign policy of France. He and the Princesse had only recently come into prominence in Court circles. Unlike most other Court favourites, it was the King who had introduced them to the Queen, rather than the other way about. But it appeared, so gossip said, that Marie Antoinette had taken an instantaneous fancy to the Princesse and had singled her out for very special attention and favours.
Love Me Forever Page 13