171. The Marquis Wins (The Eternal Collection)
The Marquis Wins
I visited Baden-Baden first in 1933 and thought it one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen.
Now, when I have travelled all over the world, I still think the same.
There is something magical about the ancient town and the glorious casino, all gold and crystal.
The gardens slope down from the fairy-tale Bremer Park Hotel to the slow-moving River Oos with its tinkling cascades and romantic bridges.
In A Gamble with Hearts, my first novel set in Baden-Baden and my second, The Marquis Wins, the heroine stays in the Stephanie Hotel, which was named by the Grand Duchess Stephanie who in 1806 made Baden-Baden famous.
A niece of the Empress Josephine, it was Napoleon who married her to the Grand Duke Karl Frederick of Baden.
Unhappy in the marriage, Stephanie made Baden-Baden the centre of her life and, as the elite of Europe were entertained in her salon, the town became known as ‘Stephanie’s Capital’.
The Stephanie Hotel soon became too small to accommodate so many visitors.
Today it has become the Bremer Park, but one can still feel the glamour and beauty that the lovely Grand Duchess left behind.
She still touches the heart of all who stay in Baden-Baden.
Chapter One ~ 1867
“Faites vos jeux, Messieurs et Mesdames.”
There was a quick movement round the Roulette table to put on the chips, many of which were to the value of two thousand francs.
There was then the usual anxious silence until the croupier’s voice rang out,
“Vingt-neuf – noir, impair et passe.”
There was a little gasp for the Marquis of Crowle had won again.
The huge pile of chips on vingt-neuf increased.
As the croupier pushed it towards him, its progress was watched with envy and greed.
The Marquis, his face impressive and cynical, collected his winnings and rose to his feet.
“You are leaving, monsieur?” a very attractive Frenchwoman asked who had been sitting beside him.
“I never push my luck,” the Marquis replied in a bored voice.
He walked away from the table and changed his winnings, which were considerable, into banknotes.
He was deciding what he should do next.
It had certainly been an auspicious day so far.
His horse had won at the races and he had certainly won the cost of coming to Baden-Baden just now at the tables.
Actually he had come on an impulse. Having bought two outstanding horses in Paris, he had, after amusing himself there with one of the more notorious courtesans, intended to return to England.
She informed him that she was going to visit Baden-Baden.
He thought that he would like to try out his new horses first on the Continent before they joined his outstanding stable at Newmarket.
Cora Pearl had obviously believed that his sole reason for coming to Baden-Baden was to follow her.
One of the most successful and certainly one of the most exotic of the great courtesans of Paris, she was in fact English.
She had been born Eliza Emma Crouch, the daughter of a Plymouth music teacher.
She had been seduced by a middle-aged diamond merchant when she was only twenty.
Spirited, with an exquisite figure and glossy red hair, she had been taken by the merchant to a drinking den near Covent Garden.
After she had accepted the drink he had offered her, she found herself recovering from unconsciousness beside him in bed.
This experience had left her with a hatred for men that remained with her for the rest of her life.
She held them spellbound, fleeced them, used them, hurt them and then invariably left them.
She never felt in her whole life any tenderness or love for any man.
It was because of this unusual twist to her character that she had attracted the Marquis.
He felt very much the same as her about women.
Because of his indifference and also because he was exceedingly rich, handsome and a success at everything he undertook, women never left him alone.
He would have found it surprising to meet an attractive woman who did not attempt to capture him and in the Social world he would have been a recognised feather in her cap.
The same applied to the other world of the Demi-Monde both in England and in France.
However fair the charmer and however hard she tried, the Marquis was inevitably bored after a very short while.
Despite her pleas and however many tears she shed, he left her.
Cora’s tough attitude to life amused him.
It was perhaps her piquancy, her English accent, her ruthlessness and her outrageous behaviour that proved as seductive as her perfect figure.
She had begun what she called her ‘Golden Chain of Lovers’ with a Duke and a Prince.
She added to her list the Prince Orange, heir to the throne of the Netherlands, but the most intelligent, distinguished and gifted of her lovers, however, was the Duc de Morny, half-brother of the Emperor of France.
The Duc had all the qualities that Cora Pearl respected, toughness, intelligence, wealth, extravagance and rank.
He also occasionally showed her what she found an endearing loyalty.
Once, when she had been turned away from the casino at Baden-Baden, he offered her his arm.
She next entered the casino in triumph, escorted by the son of Queen Hortense.
The Duc was now dead, and she had embarked on an affair with the Prince Napoleon, who was renowned for his many notorious liaisons.
They were certainly two of a pair and Cora Pearl had said to her friends,
“The man is an angel to those who please him, but profligate, unmanageable, insolent and a devil to everyone else.”
Because much the same could be applied to the Marquis, it was not surprising that he and Cora should have found much in common.
She was one of the sights of Paris that the Marquis found difficult to ignore.
She had reached her dazzling zenith and was so rich that her jewels were worth a million francs. She hosted stupendous entertainments, grand dinners, masked balls and impromptu suppers.
At the suppers the peaches and grapes did not rest on the customary vine leaves but on fifteen hundred francs’ worth of Parma violets.
She had come to Baden-Baden without the Prince Napoleon, but she was never content with only one lover.
Victor Massena, the third Duc de Rivoli, was her protector.
He paid her chef, Salé, who sometimes spent thirty thousand francs on food in a fortnight, and he gave her money to lose at the Baden Casino.
He was furious when he found that Cora was giving her money to the young Prince Achille Murat.
Victor Massena had given Cora her first house and she rode like an Amazon and she was known as being kinder to her horses than to her lovers.
She had, the Marquis discovered, bought sixty superb saddle and carriage horses and in the last three years spent ninety thousand francs with one horse dealer alone.
On one thing he was determined.
He would not give Cora either of his French horses, one of which had today carried his colours first past the Winning Post.
A few years earlier visitors to Baden-Baden had been surprised to find that a new theatre, made from two-coloured sandstone, had been built in the City.
It was the creation of the Parisian architect, Derchy, and it was a huge success from the moment it opened and Cora could not resist an invitation to appear on the stage.
She had, as Cupid, created a sensation in Paris at the Théâtre les Bouffes-Parisiens.
“I remember very little of the performance,” one of the Marquis’s friends had said to him when he arrived in Paris, “except that Cora Pearl plays Cupid with great self-possession. She wears very few garments, but the buttons of her boots are large diamonds of the purest water.”
The Marquis had laughed.
“I have already been told,” he said, “that in one last extravagant gambol she throws herself on her back and flings her legs up in the air to show that the soles of her shoes are one mass of diamonds!”
After that it was obvious that Cora Pearl would be amused when the Marquis on meeting her presented her with a box of marrons glacés.
Each marron was separately wrapped in a one thousand franc note.
As the Marquis moved through the crowd round the Roulette tables, several attractive women greeted him and put a restraining hand on his arm hoping to hold his attention.
He passed them by with a look of indifference. The disdain on his face was so characteristic that few people, having seen him once or twice, bothered to comment on it.
The casino in Baden-Baden was not only the oldest casino in Germany, but indisputably the most beautiful.
The walls of the Salle Louis Quatorze with its exquisitely painted ceiling and huge chandeliers were unique. But it was rivalled by the Louis Treize Hall with its delightful murals.
The whole casino exuded an atmosphere that was different from any other that the Marquis had ever visited.
He thought also that the company was more distinguished and the women lovelier than he could remember anywhere else.
But it was a hot evening and for the moment, as he had no more desire to play the tables, he needed air.
He stepped out into the garden at the back of the casino.
There were fairy lights along the paths, and Chinese lanterns in the trees. It had a magical appearance that was somehow part of the stars overhead and a new moon was rising over the mountains.
There were only a few people in the garden for who could resist the tables where fortunes were changing hands?
Besides there was the sight not only of the great aristocrats of Europe but of a number of the most beautiful and most notorious courtesans from Paris.
The Duc de Joinville was at the side of the beautiful Madeleine Brohan, the star of the Comédie Française.
The light opera diva, Hortense Schneider, had come on from the stage of the Casino Théâtre.
The Marquis, however, walked alone into the garden and felt that the soft clear air was a considerable relief.
He was not thinking of women, but of the way his horse had passed the Winning Post a full length in front of the other runners.
This was to the fury of several French owners who had been confident of winning the very large prizes that had been offered to tempt the best horses in Europe to Baden-Baden.
The Valley of Oos was not spacious enough for the fabled Sport of Kings and Jacques Dupressoir, the organiser of the Casino Hunts, had found the most splendid location near the village of Iffezheim.
The Parisian Jockey Club had taken over the direction of what was to be a Badenian Longchamps.
It had cost the lessee of the casino, Edouard Benazet, three hundred thousand francs for the track and the three spectator stands and he had found that as an investment it was worth every sou.
The Marquis was thinking that it was a great achievement to have beaten the French owners.
And he thought that it would be even more satisfactory if tomorrow he could win the principal race.
He supposed that Cora would expect most, if not all, of his winnings to be spent on her.
He wondered somewhat cynically what he could give her that which she had not already received from her endless stream of admirers.
He had learnt in Paris that actual money meant little or nothing to her.
She was by now a wealthy woman and Prince Napoleon was extremely generous.
He gave her twelve thousand francs a month and she regularly spent twice as much.
She already owned two or three houses, furnished quite regardless of expense.
It was difficult to know what sort of present would be original and different from what she had received from anyone else.
The Marquis knew, because she was so unpredictable, that if she was not pleased with what she was given, she would not hesitate to refuse it.
Prince Paul Demidoff, a Russian of untold wealth, had insisted just to annoy her on wearing his hat at the restaurant Maison d’Or.
Cora had smashed his cane over his head, an incident that she told the Marquis she regretted because the cane was a good one.
When the Prince in revenge claimed that her pearls were not
real, she threw her necklace on the floor where it broke and the pearls rolled away in all directions.
“Pick up the pearls, my dear,” she said scathingly. “I will prove that they are real and give you one for your cravat.”
The Prince sat transfixed, but the Nobility who were dining at the Maison d’Or went down on their hands and knees to salvage the pearls.
The Marquis had laughed at the story.
He remembered that four years earlier Cora had fought a duel in the Bois de Boulogne with another courtesan, Marthe de Vère and they were quarrelling over a handsome Armenian Prince.
Both women had used their riding whips freely and slashed each other’s faces.
They did not appear in public for the following week, during which time their Adonis vanished and all Paris had laughed uproariously.
‘Now what can I give her?’ the Marquis asked himself.
Then unexpectedly he decided that it was too much trouble.
Making one of his characteristic quick decisions that invariably stunned his friends, he decided that immediately after the races he would return to England.
He did not suppose that Cora would mind nor did it matter to him if she did.
For no apparent reason, and he had no intention of trying to find one, he had had enough.
He would go back to Crowle Hall where there were a dozen matters awaiting his attention.
He was quite certain too that there would be a huge number of invitations for balls and dinner parties from London requesting his presence.
‘I will go home,’ he decided.
There would be no regrets for anything he might leave behind.
It was then that a small, soft, nervous little voice came from beside him,
“M-may I – speak to you – my Lord?”
He looked up from where he was sitting and saw in the light from one of the Chinese lanterns above him that a young girl was standing at his side.
She was small, slender and he saw two very large eyes that seemed to fill her pointed face.
She was speaking in English and he was sure that she had just seen him win a good deal of money and was going to petition him.
It was something that constantly happened in a casino. Usually the women offered themselves in exchange and were surprised when he refused.
Because he did not answer, the girl then said,
“I-I know it is – incorrect for me to – bother you, but I-I am – desperate. I can only – beg of you – because you are English – to help me.”
“I presume by that,” the Marquis replied in a disdainful tone, “that you require some money!”
“N-no – my Lord – I want something – very different.”
This was certainly a surprise.
Then the Marquis, almost against his better judgement, proposed,
“I suggest that you sit down beside me here and explain yourself.”
He saw the girl give a glance over her shoulder towards the lights of the casino before she moved past him to sit down.
She did not, as he had expected she would, sit near to him, but as far away as it was possible to be.
Now she was facing the
lights of the Gaming Room and the Marquis could see that she was very young and, unless he was mistaken, very lovely.
She had fair hair that seemed to glitter as if it was touched by the stars.
She had huge eyes and a small straight nose beneath which her perfectly shaped lips were, he thought, trembling a little with fear.
Because she was so obviously upset, he said in a kinder voice than he generally used,
“Now what is worrying you? Perhaps first you should tell me who you are.”
“My name – is – Daniela Brooke,” she replied.
“Brooke?” the Marquis murmured almost to himself and was thinking that he knew a number of Brookes.
“My father was – Lord Seabrooke and I have heard him speak of you – and your horses.”
“I remember meeting your father at Newmarket,” the Marquis answered, “but that was some time ago.”
“Papa is – d-dead,” Daniela went on, “and that is why I am asking – you for your – help.”
“In what way?”
“Could you – possibly help me to – escape back to – England?”
The Marquis looked at her in surprise.
“Escape?” he questioned. “What do you mean by that?”
Daniela looked again towards the casino.
“Please,” she begged, “listen to me – but – could we go a little further away – if they look for me– I shall have to – go with them – and I may not get the chance to – speak to you again.”
Again the Marquis made one of his quick decisions. Instead of arguing or asking any more questions he rose to his feet.
“I am sure that we shall find another seat a little further from the lights where we will not be disturbed.”
Daniela rose with the grace of a young fawn and they moved over the soft grass until the lights of the casino were almost out of sight.
Then, as the Marquis expected, they found another seat conveniently placed under a tree and flanked by concealing shrubs.
It was a place made for lovers, but he noticed that Daniela sat, as she had before, at the far end of the seat from him.
Crossing his legs he asked,
“Now, what is all this about and when did your father die?”
“Four – weeks ago.”
The Marquis stared at Daniela in astonishment.