A Very Special Love Read online

  Author’s Note

  Girls are usually accepted into a Convent at the age of eighteen.

  A girl first becomes a Postulant for nine months, then a novice for two years and it is then, if they still feel that they have heard ‘The Call’, they take their final vows at a mystical Religious Ceremony.

  Vowing to forsake all others, they become a ‘Bride of Christ’ and are given a gold Wedding ring often shaped like a crucifix.

  Once they have taken their vows they rarely leave the Order that they have committed themselves to.

  But a few who have done so have married, had children and written a book about their experiences.

  Chapter One ~ 1869

  The Marquis of Okehampton felt sleepy.

  It was not surprising considering that he had for two hours with an insatiable expertise been making love to the beautiful Yasmin Caton.

  She was, he thought, one of the most passionate women he had ever met, besides being one of the loveliest.

  At the same time enough was enough and, while he thought that it would be an effort to move, he had a sudden longing to be on his way home to his house in Park Lane.

  He stirred preparatory to climbing out of bed and Yasmin, who was close against him, said in a low voice,

  “I have something to tell you, Rayburn.”

  The Marquis made a sound that was hardly a question and she continued,

  “I heard only this afternoon from Paris that Lionel has collapsed with a very severe stroke.”

  The Marquis stiffened.

  “This afternoon?” he exclaimed. “And you entertained me here at dinner tonight?”

  “I told nobody and I was so looking forward to seeing you.”

  The Marquis was silent in sheer astonishment.

  Lord Caton was an extremely distinguished man who was of great importance to the Queen and had gone to Paris on a special mission to meet with the Emperor of France.

  He was, although it seemed incredible, forty years older than his wife.

  All the more then, if he had suffered from a stroke, as Yasmin had just told him, she should undoubtedly now be at his side.

  As if she guessed what he was thinking, Lady Caton said,

  “Naturally I am leaving for Paris first thing tomorrow morning, but I had to see you, Rayburn, I had to!”

  “Then, if you are leaving early – ” the Marquis began.

  He would have moved away from her, but she put her hand on his chest to prevent him from doing so, saying as she did,

  “I have something else to tell you.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I am going to have a baby!”

  The Marquis was stunned into silence.

  “What we have to do, dearest,” Yasmin Caton went on, “is to wait until Lionel dies, which according to the letter I have just received will not be long, then be married secretly perhaps in France.”

  The Marquis thought that he could not be hearing her aright, as she continued,

  “Then we can go on a long, long honeymoon before we announce that our marriage has taken place several months previously. Although the child will be born prematurely, there will be no question of it not being yours.”

  The Marquis was still speechless as she moved closer to him and said in a caressing voice,

  “Then we will be very happy, dearest, and when I am your wife all my dreams will come true!”

  The Marquis was aware that a great number of women had thought that if they could marry him it would indeed be the dream of their lives.

  But he had no intention of marrying anybody, least of all a woman who he was having an affaire de Coeur with.

  There had been many women in his life, which was not surprising, considering that he was not only extremely handsome and attractive but one of the wealthiest men in England.

  Ever since he had left Oxford University he had been pressured towards marriage.

  His relatives had almost gone down on their knees to beseech him to settle down and have an heir.

  He had been absolutely determined that nobody, definitely nobody, should choose his wife for him.

  He was not at all sure exactly what he wanted, but it was certainly not a woman who in becoming his mistress had been unfaithful to her husband.

  His contemporaries in the smart Social world that he lived in and relished would have laughed at him for having such ideas.

  It was the Prince of Wales who had made easy it for the first time for a gentleman to have an affair with a woman of his own class.

  His Royal Highness’s interest in the Princesse de Sagan and other beautiful women had naturally caused a great deal of comment. It had altered the rules of Society, which, while unwritten, were invariably obeyed by those who were accepted socially.

  The Marquis had therefore made love to the lovely women who attracted him without his behaviour being considered in any way outrageous.

  He had thought that Yasmin Caton was one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen.

  From the very first moment when they had been introduced, there had been a vibration between them that made it inevitable what the outcome would be.

  At least that was what he had thought, but now it appeared from what Yasmin had just said that the story was by no means at an end.

  He was not only astounded by what she had told him but horrified.

  The Marquis had been in many dangerous situations in his life, but it flashed through his mind that this was more dangerous than anything he had ever encountered before.

  Bullets had missed him by a hair’s breadth and by a miracle his life had been saved at sea.

  He knew now that another miracle was needed if he was to escape from a trap that he would be a prisoner in for the rest of his life.

  The Marquis was astute and very quick-witted, but for the moment he felt as if his head was filled with cotton wool and he was finding it difficult to know what to say or think.

  How could he have imagined for one moment that Yasmin Caton would contrive to force him to marry her?

  She had put him in a position where it would be impossible for him to refuse to make what the servants called ‘an honest woman’ of her.

  His first thought was that perhaps things were not as bad as she had thought and Lord Caton would not die.

  Then he knew, if he was honest, that the last time he had seen his Lordship at Windsor Castle he had thought that he looked drawn and tired and even older than he actually was.

  The Marquis strove wildly to find words to answer Yasmin with, but before he could do so she said,

  “I love you, Rayburn, I love you with all my heart and, as I know that you love me, what could be more wonderful than that I should give you a son?”

  She spoke in a gushing voice that he thought now he had heard her use before on several occasions and had considered it far too effusive.

  Then, almost as if he was being helped by some power beyond himself, a conversation came back to him.

  It had taken place soon after he had first met Yasmin Caton.

  He remembered sitting in White’s Club in St. James’s with one of his special friends whom he had served with in the same Regiment.

  His name was Harry Blessington and they had been discussing the next house party that the Marquis was to give at Oke Castle, his magnificent ancestral home in Sussex.

  He seldom gave a party without Harry being present, especially when it was one that included the London beauties who they were both interested in.

  Slowly, as if he was feeling his way through dark clouds, the Marquis made himself recall what had been said.

  “I suppose you are asking Yasmin Caton?” Harry Blessington had asked. “I saw you with her last night.”


  “She is unusually beautiful,” he had answered.

  “I agree with you and my mother, who knows her family well, has often claimed that it was a crime to make a girl who was so lovely marry a man old enough to be her father.”

  “I suppose, as Caton is rich and prestigious, they considered that was all that mattered,” he replied cynically.

  “Of course,” Harry agreed, “and they rushed Yasmin up to the Altar before she was even eighteen and obviously had no idea what a crashing bore Caton could be!”

  “I have hardly ever spoken to him.”

  “I had him next to me for two hours the other night at a dinner at Windsor Castle,” Harry grumbled, “and he droned on until I thought I should go mad!”

  “In which case,” he recalled saying with a twist of his lips, “I must obviously console his wife.”

  “He married again to have an heir,” Harry had told him reflectively, “as his first wife only produced daughters, but my mother told me that once again he has been frustrated.”

  The Marquis had not been listening to Harry with much attention, but now he was sure that Harry had finished by saying,

  “The beautiful Yasmin had a bad fall out hunting a year after they were married and that apparently put paid to any hopes she might have of producing a son!”

  While giving only one ear to Harry’s story, the Marquis was thinking just how beautiful Yasmin Caton was.

  He was also planning how he would have the opportunity of telling her so very much more eloquently than he could do in words.

  Now, like a light in the darkness, what Harry had told him came flooding back.

  He knew now that Yasmin was trying yet another trick on him and, God knows, he had encountered quite a number of them to force him up the aisle.

  The numbness that had encompassed him and muddled his brain now vanished.

  He could think clearly, he was after all not trapped, and his one idea was to get away without a scene.

  Aloud he said to her,

  “I think you are looking too far ahead. What you have to do now, Yasmin, is to leave for Paris and hope that nobody is ever aware that I dined with you after you received the letter telling you of your husband’s sudden illness.”

  “I have locked it away in my jewel case,” Yasmin replied.

  The Marquis only hoped that her lady’s maid would not have any opportunity of reading it.

  Aware how servants always gossiped, he recognised that a story like this would circulate round Mayfair quicker than the North wind.

  “You are very sensible,” he said to her, “but now I must leave you.”

  Yasmin tried to hold onto him, but he rose from the bed and started to dress.

  As if she thought that it was necessary for him to recognise how beautiful she was, she lay back against the pillows her body looking, as he had told her earlier, as translucent as a pearl.

  As the Marquis adjusted his tie in the mirror over the mantelpiece, he could see her very clearly behind him.

  He was thinking now that she was not beautiful but merely dangerous.

  He had never been foolish enough to think that she was a clever woman, but he had not realised that she was such a determined one.

  He could now understand that, if she was debarred from enjoying all social activities for a year while she was in mourning for her husband, she would realise that she might easily lose him.

  She had therefore thought out the only way that she could make him feel completely and absolutely beholden to her.

  If, as she was planning, they were married within a month or two or perhaps even sooner, there would be no reason for him to learn until some time later that the baby was just a myth of her over-active mind.

  The Marquis shrugged himself into his long-tailed evening coat as he walked to the side of the bed.

  Yasmin held out her arms, but he knew if he kissed her that she would pull him down on top of her and once again it would be hard to escape.

  Instead he took both her hands in his, kissing first one and then the other.

  “Take care of yourself, Yasmin,” he said in his deep voice.

  “You will think of me, dearest wonderful Rayburn?” she asked. “You know that I will be counting the hours until I see you again.”

  The Marquis did not answer.

  He only moved towards the door and, as he opened, it Yasmin cried,

  “Wait! I have something else to say – ”

  She was too late.

  The door closed before her sentence was half-finished and she could hear the Marquis moving quickly down the thickly carpeted stairs to the front door.

  Outside his carriage was waiting and, as soon as he appeared, the footman jumped down from the box to open the carriage door.

  He was a little earlier than usual and he had been half-afraid that his carriage might not yet have arrived.

  Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was extremely considerate towards his servants.

  If he knew that he was not likely to be leaving the house where he was dining much before two o’clock, he would order his carriage accordingly.

  It always irritated him to know that his coachman and his horses were waiting outside and resenting the fact that they were kept out so late.

  Now, as he stepped into his carriage, the footman put a light rug over his knees.

  The Marquis thought to himself as he did so that like a fox he was running to ground and there were just a very few seconds to save himself from being torn to pieces by the hounds.

  How could he have imagined that Yasmin Caton would sink so low as to try to deceive him with the oldest trick in the world?

  If it had not been for Harry Blessington’s mother, he would be in an impossible position.

  He would have had to agree to Yasmin’s insistence that he should marry her the moment she was free.

  A lesser man might have refused to do so because the child was her husband’s in the eyes of the Law.

  But that, the Marquis knew, would be at the expense of betraying his every instinct of how a gentleman should behave.

  It was something that would make him ashamed of himself for being what the members of White’s would undoubtedly call a ‘bounder’.

  Women could cheat and no one thought the worse of them. In fact as one wit had said,

  “No lady has to be a gentleman!”

  But the unwritten laws of being a gentleman were very strict and any man who broke them was liable to be thrown out of his Club and ostracised by his friends.

  At the same time, when he reached his house in Park Lane, the Marquis had to face the fact that he was not yet entirely out of the woods.

  If Lord Caton died, and it seemed inevitable that he soon would, Yasmin would surely continue to try to deceive him.

  Although he had avoided a scene tonight by not telling her what he suspected to be the truth, there would inevitably be scenes and flaming rows in the future.

  The whole scenario made him shudder.

  If there was one thing that the Marquis really disliked it was tears and recriminations from a woman he was no longer interested in.

  It always meant cries of ‘why do you no longer love me?’

  ‘What have I done to lose you?’ and

  ‘How can you be so cruel?’

  It made him feel as if he would never be able to show any interest in a woman again for the rest of his life.

  And yet inevitably a few days later he would see another lovely woman and be aware of the invitation in her eyes and the provocative pout on her lips.

  Then he would feel once again the first warmth of desire and know that sooner or later she would end up in his arms.

  “The real trouble with you, Rayburn,” Harry had said to him once, “is that you are too damned good-looking!”

  The Marquis had laughed.

  “That is hardly my fault!”

  “Your father was one of the best-looking men I have ever seen,” Harry had gone on, “a
nd your mother was lovely. I can understand how he found it difficult to find anybody to take her place although there must have been plenty of applicants.”

  ‘That was true,’ the Marquis thought now.

  When his valet had helped him undress and, when he had climbed into bed, he found himself thinking of his mother rather than Yasmin.

  When she had died, she was still beautiful even though her hair was white and her face was lined.

  As a young girl she had been breathtakingly lovely, but it was not only her beauty that mattered, the Marquis thought, it was because she was so sweet, gentle and loving.

  What was more he was quite certain that the only man who had ever touched her had been his father.

  She would no more have thought of being unfaithful to him than of flying to the moon!

  ‘How could I possibly contemplate marrying someone like Yasmin, beautiful though she is?’ he asked himself, ‘and have to wonder how many men sitting at my table have been her lovers or are likely to become so?’

  At the same time the debutantes he had met, and there were not many, seemed gauche, plain and usually painfully shy.

  They had, of course, been paraded in front of him whenever their ambitious Mamas had the chance at balls and house parties where the hostess had an unmarried daughter and even at dinner parties too.

  He would find himself seated next to a girl of eighteen and know exactly why she was his dinner partner.

  How could he ever marry someone, however suitable from a worldly point of view, who would bore him stiff from the moment he put a ring on her finger?

  His thoughts were once again on Yasmin and before he went to sleep he made up his mind if possible never to see her again.

  He was quite certain that she would bombard him with her letters, but that was nothing unusual.

  If and when Lord Caton died, they were not likely to run into each other at any party because for a year, following the example set by Queen Victoria, she would have to forgo all social activities.

  *

  When the Marquis was called at eight o’clock the following morning, he felt as if, after a terrible nightmare the night before, that the sun was now shining.

  He went down to breakfast in a buoyant mood.

  Then, almost as if the ghost of Yasmin was still haunting him, he had a sudden longing for the country.