It was a matter of seconds for the Duke and Amé to walk across the courtyard and into the road. They took the first turn on the left into the Rue de Roi and there found the coach waiting for them.
They climbed into it and then, as soon as the footman had shut the door, Amé threw herself into the Duke’s arms.
“Let’s get away quickly, Monseigneur,” she said. “I was afraid, sitting there listening to the Prince and the Comte, that we might be discovered. It would have been terrible for my mother had the Prince guessed that she was deceiving him and that she was intriguing with us.”
“Terrible indeed,” the Duke agreed. “We leave for England tomorrow and all this will be forgotten.”
“I have a favour to ask of you, Monseigneur.”
“What is it?” the Duke enquired.
“I want you to take me now and at once to our little house in the woods. We have never been there and I know that I should be sorry all my life if we did not stay there tonight.”
“It is a good idea,” the Duke smiled. “We will drive there right away.”
Amé thought for a moment.
“We will stop at the house and tell Dalton to bring our things in the other coach. I want to go with you alone. Would it be rude to ask Lady Isabella and M’sieur Hugo to come with Dalton?”
“I have an idea that they would like to be alone as much as we like it,” he said. “Make what arrangements you wish. I think you are entitled to that on your last night in Paris.”
“Merci, Monseigneur,” Amé said. “Will you really leave it to me? I don’t want to miss one second of our little house. We will go there just as quickly as your horses can carry us. When we stop, you will stay here while I run in and tell the others what is expected of them. Then before they can make difficulties or arguments, before there can be any chatter as to whether it is or it is not the right thing to do, we will be on our way, you and I.”
“You are getting extremely efficient,” he grinned. “I don’t think you will find it too difficult to manage Melyn.”
“I have thought about that,” Amé said. “I would love to see your home and to see you there among your own things, your own people and in your own land.”
“Another twenty-four hours and then we will be on our way. Now I have everything I came to Paris to find and so much more besides.”
“Are you glad of that?” Amé asked.
“Glad?” the Duke echoed. “I am the happiest luckiest man in the whole world. Indeed I am half-afraid of my own good fortune.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Duke awoke to the sound of birds singing outside in the garden.
He opened his eyes and then shut them again against the brilliance of the sun shining through the windows of his bedroom which he had left uncurtained the night before.
He lay there and was conscious of a happiness pervading his whole being, a happiness that he had never known before in his life.
It had been very late when he and Amé had come in from the garden. They had walked in the moonlight in an enchanted world of their own amongst the sleeping flowers.
He had known then just what he had missed all his life.
He had thought that he knew so much about love only to find himself completely ignorant of what real love could mean and the feelings that it could arouse, so different and so utterly unlike the emotions that he had felt in the past. It was Amé who had taught him, Amé who had awakened him to a loveliness not of this world.
It seemed to him as if a light shone through the transparency of her body, a light that was Divine in its very beauty and in its very simplicity.
She loved and that in itself transformed her, because her love was so very huge and overwhelming that everything else bowed its head and was forgotten beside the majesty of that love.
“I always knew that love would be like this,” she told the Duke as they stood beneath the shadows of the great trees that bordered the garden.
“Like what?” he asked, his arm tightening a little around her.
“So beautiful, so perfect and so much a part of God,” she answered.
He had thought then for a fleeting second of the other sorts of love he had known, of the women who had enticed and tempted him, of those he had pursued, those who had surrendered themselves and those who he had forgotten. How different, how very very different from this. There had been nothing Holy, nothing God-sent in his relationship with them.
It was then, for one fleeting instant, he had been afraid.
“Then you must not expect too much of me,” he said humbly. “The day might come when you would be disappointed, when I might hurt you and when love would seem to you not beautiful and perfect but something very different.”
At this she had turned her face up to his. In the moonlight he could see the tenderness and understanding in her eyes.
“Still you don’t understand,” she said. “This love of ours is not something that has just happened and that has just come into being. It has been there always in the past, just as it will be in the future. It is Eternal.”
Obstinately some cynical part of the Duke’s brain hesitated to accept this.
“How can you be so sure?” he asked. “How can anyone say that we have lived before or that we shall live again? We are only certain of this moment, the present.”
“Can you really credit anything so miserable?” Amé cried. “Why, to believe in that is to be completely without hope and without faith.”
She suddenly withdrew herself from the Duke’s arms and took a step forward into the garden.
“Look at all this,” she said with a gesture of her hands towards the flowers, shrubs and great overhanging trees. “Look at it and see then how stupid our humble doubts can be. Winter comes, the leaves will fall and the flowers will die. In the spring they will all be back here again. If that is true and you know it is, why is it more difficult to believe that our love is Eternal and that we can never lose each other?”
She turned then and held out her arms to the Duke.
“Oh, Monseigneur, believe in this,” she pleaded softly.
The Duke stepped towards her.
“If you tell me that it is true, then I must believe it,” he said, looking down into her eyes and then his lips sought hers.
For a long time they clung together and later with Amé’s hands clasped over his arm they walked on across the garden.
“I want you to tell me about Melyn,” she said. “I want to know just what it is like.”
He talked to her then of his home. He told her of the exquisite artistry of the building itself, which dated back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth. He told her of the great square courtyard round which it was built and in which fluttered white fantail pigeons. He told her about the peacocks proudly parading the terraces and of the portraits and art treasures, which in themselves rivalled many of those in the National collection. He spoke of the Long Galleries, of the great Banqueting Hall where over two hundred people could sit down to a meal and not seem in the least crowded.
“In a few days we shall be home,” the Duke said, “and then I can show you these things and they will be yours, darling, just as they have been mine. In the years to come they will belong to our children.”
She hid her face for a moment against his shoulder, but he put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to his so that he could kiss her lips once again.
“There is something else at Melyn that I shall show you and which will be yours,” he went on. “Those are the family jewels. They are magnificent, Amé, and since my mother died I have often wondered who would wear them. I had never met anyone whom I wished to put in my mother’s place as Chatelaine of Melyn until I met you and now I know that I have been keeping the jewels for you.
“There is a great tiara almost like a crown of blue-white diamonds and there is a necklace and earrings to match and many other pieces, set not only with diamonds, but with sapphires and emeralds and when we go to Court or the Opening of
Parliament you shall wear them and everyone will be envious not only of your beauty but also of your jewels.”
“I have one jewel, which matters to me more than all of them,” Amé responded, “and that, Monseigneur, is your love. I was afraid for a long time that you would not love me and yet I think instinctively in my own heart I was sure you would. You thought that I loved you because I had seen so few men, but that was not the reason. I love you because we belong to each other. There is a pattern in everything – there is no such thing as chance acquaintance in this life. It was meant from the beginning of time that I should be brought up in a Convent and that your coach should stop outside at the very moment I climbed the pear tree and looked over the wall.”
“You must teach me to have faith in such things,” the Duke remarked.
“I don’t think it is a question of my teaching you. Faith has always been there hidden perhaps or forgotten, because you have been so busy with other things but it is a part of you that you cannot lose.”
It was when they were dining together in the small white-panelled dining room of the little Château that Amé confessed to the Duke that she had left a note for Lady Isabella asking that she and M’sieur Hugo would not come to the house in the woods until it was very late.
“I think that they would not mind my asking this of them,” Amé said, “for when I returned to the house after we had been so long at my mother’s they were still in the arbour. I decided not to disturb them. Instead I wrote a letter and told the butler to give it to them later in the evening.”
“If Isabella was as concerned as she should be with her duties as chaperone, she would come out here post haste,” the Duke teased, but his smile told Amé that he was only joking.
“When Dalton brought our things, he told me that he thought Lady Isabella and M’sieur Hugo would not be here until about three o’clock in the morning,” Amé retorted. “He had seen them before he left and they had talked of going to a masked ball that is being given at the Opera House.”
“Then we certainly need not worry our heads about them,” the Duke said. “I cannot conceive why Hugo should wish to accompany Isabella to a ball, especially a masked one, but I daresay he has some reason for it.”
“I think, perhaps,” Amé replied, “that they are so happy that they want to dance and I think too that Lady Isabella would like to be at a ball with M’sieur Hugo because it is the first time she will be considering him as partner, as someone with whom she cannot only dance but coquette. They will be very gay, it will all be like a strange new game because they are in love.”
At her words the Duke suddenly stretched his hand across the table to her.
“Put your hand in mine.”
She obeyed him although her eyes asked him why.
“I am frightened of you,” he now commented, as if in answer to her unspoken question. “You are so wise and so perceptive. You know so much more than I do about people.”
“I think it is only because in loving you I have discovered that the whole world yearns for love, love such as we have found.”
“I believe you are right,” the Duke smiled and raised her fingers to his lips.
“The poor unhappy Queen loves Count Axel de Fersen,” Amé said. “They can never be alone together, they must never reveal what burns so fiercely within their hearts and because of it life is very lonely.”
Amé spoke of the Queen again later when they were in the garden. They had been silent for some moments and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she said,
“I have thought so much of the shadow that hovers behind the Queen. I can understand why my mother is afraid for her.”
“I cannot quite understand your apprehensions,” the Duke remarked, “nor indeed those of the Princesse. Marie Antoinette has a reputation for being gay and frivolous. We have perhaps seen her when her mood was not quite so exuberant and yet she seemed to me happy enough the other evening when we talked to her in the garden of the Trianon.”
“I wish I could explain what I feel,” Amé sighed “and yet it is something I cannot put into words. My mother found it hard to express the danger that she sensed, but it is there, you can be sure of that, Monseigneur, it is there.”
“How long are you going to continue to call me ‘Monseigneur’?” the Duke asked. “I have another name, you know but you have never used it.”
“You will always be ‘Monseigneur’ to me or even ‘Your Grace’ in English,” Amé replied. “It is somehow difficult to say ‘Sebastian’. It is perhaps because I have so much respect for you. You seem to me so very wonderful and so very honourable, a person to be admired, someone to be approached in many ways humbly.”
The Duke laughed almost shyly at that and then suddenly he snatched her up in his arms, lifting her high against his chest.
“My sweet, ridiculous little love. I talk to you so gravely and then I forget that you are only a baby, a child compared with me, and yet you hold all my happiness within your tiny hands, my heart within your heart and all that I ask of life is the feel of your lips on mine.”
He kissed her tenderly.
Then with a passion which grew fiercer and more possessive he kissed her eyes, her hair, the soft pulse beating in her neck and again her mouth, feeling her quickening response, knowing that she trembled within the fierceness of his arms.
“My love, my darling,” he muttered and kissed her again and again until she cried for mercy.
“Monseigneur, I beg of you!”
It was only a whisper and yet instantly she was free.
“My beloved, have I frightened you?” the Duke asked.
His breath was coming quickly between his lips and his eyes were very dark from the tempest which raged within him. In answer Amé had sped once more into his arms. He held her close. But this time his lips were gentle and his hands tender.
They wandered across the lawns again until behind the house, at the entrance to the wood, close to where the stream entered the garden, they came to a little stone grotto. Cunningly contrived out of the rising ground, hollowed from a rock and ornamented with stones, it made a half-natural half-artificial niche in which was set a figure of the Madonna.
It was a very old figure, exquisitely carved, the face and hands having lost none of their beauty with the passage of centuries. Fresh flowers had been laid before the little shrine and there was also a flickering light roughly contrived by a candle protected from the wind by a piece of broken glass.
“Look, Monseigneur, someone comes here to pray,” Amé pointed as they approached the grotto.
“The gardener, I should imagine,” the Duke replied, “and perhaps his wife and family.”
“There are shells set among the stones. A child might have done that and the flowers have not only come from the garden, look, there are wild orchids and fresh field flowers amongst them.”
Quite simply she knelt down before the shrine and said a prayer.
The Duke stood watching her and, when she had finished, she rose and put both her hands into his.
“It feels to me,” she said, “as if our happiness here tonight in this garden has been blessed because we have found this holy place dedicated to Our Lady.”
“I hope our love will always be blessed in such a way,” the Duke answered.
For a moment his voice was very deep and grave.
Amé looked up at the sky.
“It is getting very late, Monseigneur, and I don’t wish to see Lady Isabella when she arrives or M’sieur Hugo. I love them both, but I want tonight to have been ours alone – I want no one else to have any part in it.”
“We will go back to the house,” the Duke replied. “You have a long journey in front of you tomorrow and you are already tired.”
“No, I am not tired,” Amé contradicted him. “I am only happy. It seems almost as though my whole body tingles with it, this wonderful and perfect happiness.”
Slowly they walked towards the house, both of them reluctant to go in. As they drew ne
ar the door that led to the garden, Amé flung her arms round the Duke.
“Tell me once again you love me, Monseigneur,” she pleaded, “tell me that you will love me forever.”
“I will love you all my life,” the Duke answered, “and if, as you ask me to believe, there is a hereafter, then I will love you for all Eternity. You are mine, Amé, as I have told you already. I will never let you go.”
“I am yours for Eternity, Amé whispered. “I love you – now and forever.”
She reached up her arms to draw his head down to her lips. She held him close for a long, long moment and then, before he realised her intention, she had slipped away from him.
She entered the house and he heard the door close behind her, shutting him out in the garden.
He understood then with a perception that was new to him that she did not wish to spoil the wonder of their evening by having to say ‘goodnight’ in the light of the candles.
It would seem an anticlimax after the almost unearthly beauty of the garden so, obedient to what he knew was Amé’s wish, the Duke walked for a little while on the lawn before he entered the house.
He heard Isabella and Hugo arrive nearly an hour later and then he fell asleep with a smile on his lips, with a throb of excitement in his breast which made him feel as if he was a boy again as young as Amé.
And he thought now, as he awoke, that one of the most difficult tasks that lay ahead of him was not to let Amé be hurt or disillusioned by the world she would live in as his wife. He knew only too well the shallowness of it, the disappointments and heartbreaks that might seem trivial enough to those who had always known that such things must be, but which might assume very different proportions to someone who expected always only the best from people and who had never yet learned to accept the tawdry and second rate.
“She believes in me, I must not fail her.”
The Duke found himself saying the words aloud.
*
Now he opened his eyes again and sat up in bed. His watch told him it was nine o’clock, an extraordinarily late hour as far as he was concerned, for invariably he breakfasted early.
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