Real Love or Fake Read online

  Author’s Note

  When I was in Amsterdam, I found that the portraits in the Rijksmuseum were beautifully painted by Rubens and Rembrandt, but the Dutch appear never to have had their portraits done until they were old and Burgermasters.

  It is therefore a joy to see in the Mauritshuis – Head of a Young Girl by Jan Vermeer, who he was one of Holland’s most brilliant seventeenth century painters whose style was copied so cleverly in modern times by a man called Tom Keating.

  After World War II the paintings that Herman Goring had stolen from all European countries were returned and no one would believe that the Vermeers were not genuine until Keating confessed that he had painted them.

  Head of a Young Girl was acquired in 1882 for only two guilders thirty cents by Destombe, a collector, and was left to the Mauritshuis Museum in 1903.

  I loved the canals in Amsterdam with the exquisite old houses that I have described in this novel.

  It is indeed a City of a thousand and one bridges.

  Chapter One ~ 1903

  The Marquis of Kyneston drove into London in a good temper.

  He was driving his four-in-hand and his team of chestnuts was the admiration of everybody he passed on the street.

  He felt that he had to describe to somebody his success in what had been one of the most difficult races that he had ever entered a horse in.

  He therefore drew up outside White’s Club and handed the reins to his groom.

  “Take the horses home, James,” he ordered, “and send back my closed carriage. I will be ready to leave in under an hour.”

  “Very good, my Lord.”

  The Marquis walked into the Club with a swagger.

  He had not only won an outstanding race but he had also broken his own record for returning to London.

  There were, he knew, many of his friends who now preferred to travel by train or, even more adventurous, in the new motor cars, which had an inconvenient habit of breaking down after only a few miles.

  He, however, was determined to stick to his horses.

  There were a number of other gentlemen like himself who claimed that, if horseflesh was doomed, they were too.

  He walked into the morning room to find, as he expected, a number of his friends congregated there.

  He saw first Willy Melivale, who was one of his closest contemporaries and he had been at school with him.

  He walked to the far end of the room, where Willy was sitting, to find that there was an empty chair beside him.

  “Hello, Carew,” Willy exclaimed. “You need not tell me! I know by your face that you have won again.”

  “I have indeed,” the Marquis replied. “I only wish that you had been there. It was such a close finish that both Crayford and I held our breath.”

  “But actually you were the winner,” Willy commented with just a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

  “Yes, I won,” the Marquis nodded with satisfaction.

  He ordered himself a drink and then sat back comfortably in the leather armchair, thinking that it had been one of the best days he could remember.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Willy asked. “I thought we might dine together.”

  There was a moment’s pause and then the Marquis answered,

  “I would have liked to, but unfortunately I am engaged.”

  He thought as he spoke that to be with Daphne Burton as he intended would be a fitting climax to his triumph on the Racecourse.

  He had met Lady Burton for the first time four weeks earlier and he thought that she was without exception one of the most attractive women he had ever seen. There was something fascinating about her that was more important than mere beauty.

  He had watched her at a large dinner party at Apsley House and was not surprised when the gentlemen joined the ladies in the drawing room to find her at his side.

  “I have heard so much about you, my Lord,” she began in a soft caressing voice.

  “All, I hope, to my advantage,” the Marquis remarked.

  He was amused by the questioning look in her dark eyes and the touch of mockery on her perfect lips as she replied,

  “But, of course. How could it be anything else?”

  He laughed and he knew that they were both thinking that, while he was distinguished in many ways, his love affairs occupied the minds and tongues of the gossips.

  ‘Heaven knows I try to be discreet,’ he told himself.

  Unfortunately, however, he was too well known and too successful for both men and women not to talk about him.

  The King had set the fashion when he was the Prince of Wales of flaunting his love affairs and it was difficult for the Marquis to do anything different.

  He was, however, apart from being an exceptional horseman, a conscientious landlord, giving much of his time and attention to his estates.

  He was at the moment attending in great detail to his ancestral home, Kyne, in Huntingdonshire.

  It was a magnificent example of Palladian architecture.

  Later generations had made a few modern improvements and had neglected the State rooms until now they were in urgent need of redecoration.

  The Marquis had also tried to buy back some of the Georgian furniture, which had been replaced with what he considered ‘Victorian horrors’ at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s long reign.

  One important step was to enlarge the Picture Gallery and he had added to it a number of paintings by artists who had not been appreciated by his forebears.

  He had recently acquired a painting of Venus, which had delighted him until he saw Lady Burton and decided that she would have been a noteworthy applicant for the title.

  He pursued her at first somewhat languidly and then more determinedly as he was finding it difficult to see her on her own.

  “My husband is very jealous,” she told him, “and you will therefore understand that, although I want to see you, it would be a mistake.”

  “What do you mean a mistake?” the Marquis had demanded and now he felt even more ardent than before.

  There had been snatched moments in the afternoons, which he had always thought, even though it was fashionable, a tiresome time to make love.

  When they had met at a house party given by the Earl of Doncaster, Lord Burton had been with his wife and was obviously very possessive about her.

  The Marquis had then thought despairingly that he would have to give up the chase.

  Unexpectedly Daphne Burton had told him two days before that her husband was going to Paris.

  “He will be away from Wednesday until Friday,” she said.

  The Marquis waited.

  “I thought,” Lady Burton went on, “that perhaps you would dine with me on Thursday night, just a small party.”

  It was not what she said, but the look in her eyes that told the Marquis exactly what was intended.

  They would dine conventionally with friends and he would linger after they had left, being the last to go.

  “You know I will be looking forward to it,” he said in his deep voice.

  “So shall – I,” she whispered.

  There was no chance to say anything more, but the Marquis had found on the following two days that his thoughts were quite frequently going towards Thursday evening.

  He was certain that Daphne Burton would be everything a man could desire in a woman, feminine, yielding, fiery and very exciting.

  ‘It is just my good luck that Henry Burton should go to Paris when everybody else is in London for the Season and unlikely to go anywhere else,’ he told himself.

  At the same time he knew that he would have enjoyed dining with Willy when he could tell him every detail of the race and they could discuss what horses he should enter for Ascot this year.


  Then, as he was thinking about it, Willy asked,

  “Are you dining with Daphne Burton tonight?”

  “Yes, I am,” the Marquis replied, “and I suppose you too are a guest?”

  “No,” Willy answered, “I have not been invited!”

  There was something in the way he spoke that made the Marquis look at him curiously.

  He knew Willy so well.

  They had been so close all their lives that it was difficult for either of them to keep secrets from the other.

  Now the Marquis was perceptively aware that Willy was not looking at him, but turning something over in his mind.

  He had no idea what it could be, because even with such a close friend as Willy he never discussed his love affairs.

  He thought therefore that what was worrying him could not concern Daphne Burton.

  He finished his drink and was just about to look at the time when Willy said,

  “I saw Henry Burton this afternoon!”

  The Marquis was suddenly still.

  “You saw Henry Burton?” he repeated. “But that is impossible. He is in Paris.”

  “I saw him when I was driving back from Ranelagh,” Willy said. “I took a wrong turning somewhere in the suburbs and distinctly saw him going into what appeared to me to be a rather sleazy-looking hotel.”

  The Marquis was staring at his friend incredulously.

  “You are quite sure it was Burton?”

  Willy nodded.

  Then after a silence he said,

  “I would not otherwise have told you, but Daron Haughton lost a lot of money to him about twelve months ago.”

  “Daron Haughton?” the Marquis asked.

  “He met the Burtons in the country,” Willy explained.

  The Marquis remembered Daphne Burton telling him that this was the reason why they had not met before.

  She had been living in the country as she was in mourning for her mother.

  Lord Haughton was, the Marquis knew, a very rich man to whom it would not have mattered particularly to lose large sums of money.

  But it seemed strange that Burton, whom he knew to be hard up, should have been the recipient of it.

  He sat back in his chair and said in a voice which his friend knew could be very authoritative,

  “You had better tell me the whole story, Willy.”

  “Very well,” Willy nodded lowering his voice. “It’s quite simple. Burton came home unexpectedly and Haughton paid up!”

  The Marquis’s lips tightened and, without saying anything more, he rose and walked towards the door.

  Willy watched him go, then he sighed and signalled to a Club Steward to bring him another drink.

  *

  The Marquis’s carriage was just pulling up outside the Club as he walked down the steps,

  As he climbed into it, the expression on his face was very different from what it had been when he arrived.

  When he was in a rage, he did not lose his temper in the way most men did, becoming aggressive, shouting or swearing and in many cases having a rush of blood to the head. Instead the Marquis became icily calm.

  Those who knew him well found his silences more intimidating than anything anybody else could have said.

  As he walked through the front door of his house in Park Lane, his footmen, all over six feet, stood more stiffly to attention than usual.

  The butler’s voice was very respectful as he asked if his Lordship had any orders for the evening.

  The Marquis considered for a moment.

  “My carriage at seven-thirty he responded and then walked up the stairs.

  He was silent while his valet helped him undress.

  After he had stayed in his bath for a long time, he dressed himself in his elegant evening clothes.

  He was thinking bitterly as he did so how much he had looked forward to this evening.

  ‘Perhaps it’s just a mistake,’ he reflected.

  Then he knew that Willy would not have said that he had seen Burton unless he had been absolutely certain of it.

  The Marquis had been pursued all his life by women who had found him irresistible from the time he left school.

  He was in fact a very handsome man.

  Because he was an exceptional rider and indulged in every possible form of outdoor sport, he had an athletic figure that he was justly proud of.

  He drank very little unlike his friends.

  He was a deliberately small eater compared to King Edward VII and those who had surrounded him at Marlborough House and now at Buckingham Palace.

  The Marquis could not remember a time when there had not been women eulogising over him and telling him that he looked like a Greek God.

  It was something that he was only too willing to believe.

  He found it difficult to accept that of all the women he had bestowed his favours on, Daphne Burton should be interested in him simply because he was rich.

  He knew exactly how a man like him could be trapped if a husband and wife were collaborating and playing their cards cleverly.

  If Willy was right, Daphne’s plans for tonight were for her other guests to leave early while he stayed behind.

  She would take him up to her bedroom.

  They would be in bed when the door would open and Henry Burton would come rushing in.

  Daphne would scream in horror while he would stare at her as if he could hardly believe his eyes.

  There would then be a scene with accusations and recriminations.

  Burton would aver that, having caught them red-handed, he would immediately sue for divorce.

  Daphne would plead with him pathetically to spare her the scandal and ostracism that would ensue.

  This, the Marquis knew, would be his cue to intervene.

  To save himself and, of course, the woman whose reputation he had ruined, he would be expected to offer the affronted husband a large sum of money to assuage her pride and the slur on his name.

  It would all take time and would be extremely humiliating.

  He would be naked, while Burton was fully dressed in the clothes that he was supposed to have travelled from Paris in.

  It was the sort of situation that would make a good melodrama at The Playhouse, but not so funny when one was actively involved oneself.

  He could see all too clearly how Haughton had been caught with nothing he could do in the circumstances but pay whatever Burton demanded.

  He would be in the same predicament, except that, as he was richer than Lord Haughton, he would find the settlement more expensive.

  ‘How can I possibly have been such a fool?’ he asked himself.

  He thought now that he might have guessed that the Burtons were extremely hard up and they had doubtless already spent most of what they had obtained from Daron Haughton by the time they had encountered him.

  Burton enjoyed gambling, while his wife wished to move in the Social world in a way that would inevitably incur heavy expenditure.

  Their house was not large, but it was in fashionable Mayfair. They had a carriage and horses and the Marquis had heard that Burton had hunted with the Leicester pack of hounds last winter.

  There was no doubt at all that they would be running short of money by this time.

  Who better to supply them with it than himself?

  His lips were set in a hard line as he walked down the stairs just before seven-thirty to where the butler was waiting with his evening cloak lined with red satin.

  One footman handed him his top hat, another his cane and a third his gloves.

  Without speaking he went out through the front door and stepped into the carriage.

  A footman in the Kyneston livery was holding the door open.

  Yet another footman placed a linen rug over his knees and the carriage moved off.

  It was not far to the Burtons’ house, which was in one of the narrower streets a short way from Shepherd Market.

  As he entered the house, he noticed for the first ti
me that the carpets in the hall were slightly threadbare and the arrangement of flowers halfway up the stairs was not of the most expensive Malmaison carnations.

  As the butler opened the door to the drawing room and announced his name, the Marquis forced a smile to his lips.

  “The Marquis of Kyneston, my Lady.”

  Daphne Burton turned from the man she was talking to with a little cry of delight.

  She moved towards the Marquis with a grace that made him think that she floated over the ground.

  There was an expression of pleasure in her eyes and on her fascinating face that he could not believe was assumed.

  “I am so glad to see you,” she said softly as he took her hand and felt her fingers tighten on his.

  She introduced her other guests, who were, as the Marquis had expected, quite elderly.

  There was one man who had retired several years earlier, having been a distinguished Diplomat, with his wife and another couple neither of whom would ever see sixty again.

  It was almost, he thought, as he went in to dinner, as if he was reading a chapter from a book that he had read before and knew exactly what would happen next.

  The dinner was good, although it did not compare with what his chefs produced at any of his own houses.

  The wine was drinkable, but not, as he guessed, particularly expensive.

  The conversation would have been dull except for the expression in his hostess’s eyes when she looked at him and the way that she touched him almost accidentally with her fingers.

  And there was, he reckoned, a deliberate double entendre in many of the things she said to him.

  When the gentlemen left the dining room, the Marquis was not surprised when an elderly Diplomat said,

  “Will you forgive us, my Lord, if we leave early? My wife is not in good health and we are both growing too old to really enjoy these late nights.”

  “I am sure you are wise,” the Marquis added conventionally.

  “I am careful, which is very much the same thing,” the Diplomat replied.

  The Marquis thought that the wisdom of taking care applied to him also.

  As two couples were leaving together, he waited until they had proceeded down the stairs and were putting on their coats in the hall.

  Then he said quietly,

  “I too must be on my way.”