A Knight in Paris Read online

  Author’s Note

  I feel sad when I see the great empty Châteaux in France whose superb furniture and paintings sold after the owners were either guillotined or had struggled into exile during the French Revolution.

  The English were by far the greatest beneficiaries of the Revolutionary sales. The Prince Regent, later George IV, and his boon companion, Lord Yarmouth, later the Third Marquis of Hertford laid the foundations of the magnificent and rich assemblies of French Eighteenth Century decorative art in this Country.

  This can now be seen in the Wallace collection and at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace.

  In March 1791, the Parisian Marchand-Mercier, Daguerre, held a large sale of French furniture at Christies.

  After the Battle of Waterloo, many of the newly impoverished Napoleonic aristocracy were forced in their turn to divest themselves of their possessions.

  Soon after the declaration of Peace, Lord Yarmouth hurried off to Paris. On his return journey he found it necessary to hire a yacht to cross the Channel.

  He divided his spoils on arrival back in London with the Prince Regent.

  He acquired at bargain prices among other things, the fine Boulle cabinets still to be seen at Buckingham Palace.

  Chapter One ~ 1802

  The Earl of Charncliffe, driving through the crowded streets with his usual expertise, was aware that everyone was turning and looking at him.

  It was not surprising.

  His four perfectly matched horses were all jet black and also his phaeton, which had only recently been delivered from the coachbuilders, was yellow.

  He prided himself on being different from his contemporaries.

  But he well knew that within a few months quite a number of the Bucks who modelled themselves on him would have phaetons in exactly the same colour.

  They would copy his phaeton as they copied the way he tied his cravats.

  They forced their tailors to emulate the cut of his coats and their valets the polish on his Hessian boots.

  The Earl was extremely fastidious about his appearance which, added to his handsome looks, captured the heart of every woman he met.

  He rather enjoyed being called a roué.

  Although he often thought cynically that he was more often seduced than allowed to be the seducer.

  Now for the first time he was courting instead of being courted.

  He had inherited his ancestral title and vast possessions at what his relations had called ‘an unfortunately early age’.

  Since then he had been begged, bullied and pressured to be married.

  Charn, the family seat, was the finest example of Italianate architecture of Elizabeth’s reign in the country. The materials had come from many different places and the Earl liked to recount them to his guests.

  “Timber from the estate,” he would say, “bricks from the local kiln, slate from Wales, glass from Spain and stone from a quarry near Bath!”

  He did not have to add to the story that stonemasons and carvers were brought from Italy to ornament the rooms inside Charn.

  The works of the greatest artists of every period comprised the collection of pictures that was one of the best in Britain.

  It was a fitting background for the Earl himself as he always looked as if he had stepped out of a picture book and was one of their heroes that maidens dreamed about.

  He then emerged through the traffic into the comparative emptiness of the roads leading towards the North. He thought it was a pity that he had not further to go.

  Elaine Dale, who had captured his elusive heart, was staying with her grandfather.

  The house was not ten miles from the centre of London, which, of course, to the Earl and his friends, was the famous St. James’s Street.

  Elaine was the daughter of Lord William Dale.

  Her father, being the youngest son of the Duke of Avondale, because of his subsidiary position in the family hierarchy, was invariably in debt.

  His older brother, as the heir to the Dukedom, had everything that could be spared from the family coffers. But the younger members had to survive on a pittance.

  It was, of course, very traditional among the aristocrats that this should happen and Lord William complained continually that his ‘pockets were to let’ and that he was most unfairly treated, but no one would listen to him.

  That was until he realised that he had a treasure of inexpressible value in his daughter Elaine.

  To say that Elaine Dale was beautiful was to underestimate her attractions.

  When, by pinching and saving, Lord and Lady William Dale brought her to London for the Season, she struck the Social world like a meteor.

  Her mother was Irish, which accounted for her blue eyes, and in the Dale Family Tree there was a Scandinavian who was responsible for the pale gold of her hair.

  She was a little older than the usual debutantes.

  She had been in deep mourning for a year, which had postponed her making her curtsey to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, therefore she had poise and was also exceedingly graceful.

  She had a pretty musical voice and was, if not well-educated, intelligent enough to hold the attention of every man she met.

  The Clubs of St. James’s hummed with excitement the moment she appeared.

  It was the fashion for the Bucks and Beaux of the time to like sophisticated women and ignore debutantes not only because they bored them.

  They were also afraid that by some mischance that they would find themselves married to one.

  Elaine was the exception to every rule and had been declared an ‘Incomparable’ the first week of her arrival in London.

  She had been pursued by quite a number of eligible Bucks who until now had preferred to preserve their bachelorhood.

  The Earl had at first been indifferent to what he had heard about Elaine.

  It was only by chance that he saw her when he attended a ball with his current fancy who was a very fascinating Ambassadress.

  In contrast to the flashing eyes, provocative lips and all of the erotic suggestions of the Ambassadress, Elaine looked like a drop of cool water in the heat of the desert.

  The Earl was introduced to her and succumbed as all his friends had done.

  What surprised him most was that Elaine treated him quite coolly and it might almost have been called with indifference.

  The Earl was used to having any woman he was introduced to for the first time stare at him. It was as if he had stepped out of her dream.

  Then she would make every effort to include him in her life.

  Elaine greeted him and then she continued her conversation with the gentleman who was standing beside her.

  The Earl next asked her to dance.

  She did not seem to understand that this was a rare privilege accorded only occasionally to some very exceptional beauties.

  She told him without any obvious signs of regret that her dance card was full.

  The Earl was intrigued and, if he was honest with himself, somewhat piqued.

  How was it at all possible that this girl, who he knew came from the country and whose father had not a penny piece to bless himself with, could be so offhand?

  He might have been even more perturbed had he but realised that she treated all the other men who were fawning over her in exactly the same way.

  It seemed incredible in anyone so young, yet she behaved like a star who had come down from the sky to bemuse mere mortals. But not to become too intimate with them.

  Because he was very mystified by such behaviour, the Earl had gone in search of Lord William. He was a member of White’s Club too although he could seldom afford to come to London.

  The Earl found him drinking in the Card Room, but unable to sit do
wn and play because he could not afford it.

  “I have just had the pleasure of meeting your daughter,” the Earl declared.

  “Pretty, is she not?” Lord William remarked.

  “I think that a more appropriate word would be ‘beautiful’,” the Earl replied. “But I have never heard you speak of her.”

  “What was the point,” Lord William asked, “when she was in the schoolroom?”

  He drank half a glass of champagne before he continued,

  “All I can tell you, Charncliffe, is that daughters are damned expensive and gowns do not last as long as a horse!”

  “That is true,” the Earl agreed readily.

  He would have asked another question, but he realised that Lord William was somewhat ‘foxed’. He was also obviously intent, because the champagne was free, to get more so.

  “What I have told the girl she has to do, Charncliffe,” he said in a thick voice, “is to get married and the quicker the better as far as I am concerned!”

  “Are you ‘below hatches’?” the Earl enquired sympathetically but knowing the answer.

  “The duns are hammering at the gate,” Lord William said gloomily. “Blast their eyes! They always kick a man when he is down!”

  As if in his bemused state he was suddenly becoming aware of who he was talking to, he said,

  “If you want to marry Elaine, Charncliffe, I will give you my blessing.”

  The Earl thought that this was going too far and too fast so he walked away.

  He knew as he did so that Lord William was relying on finding a rich son-in-law and, as he had said himself, ‘the sooner the better’.

  Because it amused him, the Earl watched Miss Dale.

  He guessed that she would play off her admirers, one against the other, until she finally found one rich enough to suit herself and her father.

  He knew if that was indeed the case there would be no better candidate for being first past the Winning Post than himself.

  The stories of his wealth were not exaggerated.

  He owned Charn with its five thousand acres of good Oxfordshire soil and he also had the largest and most distinguished mansion in Berkeley Square.

  He owned a house at Newmarket, where he trained his racehorses, and another at Epsom to which was attached a large estate with excellent farming land.

  Because he did not dance with Elaine Dale on that evening and, as the Ambassadress was most persistent, he did not think of her again until he then heard her being discussed at his Club.

  He thought that the way she was being eulogised by admirers was rather ridiculous and unnecessary.

  That evening he found himself sitting next to her at dinner at Devonshire House.

  He was surprised that she should have been elevated to what was usually considered an exalted position.

  He remembered, however, that Lord William had always been a very special friend of the Duchess.

  “Did you enjoy the Beauchamp’s ball the other night?” he asked.

  He was thinking as he spoke to Elaine that she really was lovely and it would be hard to express to anyone who had not seen her how she seemed to stand out amongst other women at any party.

  They were nearly all acknowledged beauties and yet this young girl just seemed to glow with a radiance that made every man in the room turn to gaze at her.

  The Earl, waiting for an answer to his question expected her to say exactly how much she regretted not being able to dance with him.

  To his astonishment, however, she replied,

  “Were you there?”

  For a moment he thought that he could not have heard her aright.

  It seemed just impossible that he, the most sought-after bachelor in the whole of Society, should not be remembered by a mere chick who had just come up from the country.

  “I was not only there,” he said sternly, “but I asked you to dance!”

  “Did you?” she asked lightly. “I am afraid I had to refuse so many invitations and it is so difficult now to remember them all.”

  Because it was a challenge that he could not resist, the Earl proceeded to impress himself upon Miss Dale.

  Incredibly he found that it was quite a difficult thing to do.

  She listened to him and she laughed at his jokes. And she made herself, he thought, very agreeable all through the evening.

  But at the end of dinner he was well aware that there was not the expression in her eyes that he expected to see and she did not try to draw attention to herself.

  Nor did she use any of the usual feminine wiles that he knew so well.

  There was certainly no need for her to do so yet it was what he expected and what he was receiving from the lady on his other side.

  *

  A week later the Earl walked into White’s.

  When he appeared, one of his friends asked him,

  “Have you seen the sweepstake, Darril? You are lagging behind Hampton.”

  “What are you talking about?” the Earl enquired.

  “I thought you must have known about it by this time, but they are betting on whether you or Hampton will win the Gold Cup, which is, of course, the ‘incomparable Elaine’!”

  “I don’t know what the devil you are talking about!” the Earl exclaimed.

  “It is quite simple,” his friend replied. “The Betting book is out and we are all taking our wagers as to whether you or Hampton will put a ring on Elaine Dale’s finger before the end of June.”

  The Earl turned and walked to where the famous Betting book of White’s was kept.

  Turning over the pages he soon found the names of quite a number of his friends and the amounts that they had bet on the contest.

  At the moment the Earl was in second place and he thought, as his lips tightened, that it was an insult.

  He was by far the richer of the two and for that reason any woman should find him more attractive. But he knew that it was important that the Marquis was the son of the Duke of Wheathampton.

  He was, however, a rather ugly young man with a habit of drinking too much and being somewhat rowdy when he was in ‘his cups’.

  At the same time he had had a certain amount of success with the fair sex.

  It was not only because of his title but because he rushed his fences and laid siege to any ‘Fair Charmer’ who took his fancy.

  ‘If that is what she likes, she can have him,’ the Earl thought.

  However, when he realised that some of his closest friends, who he had always believed admired him were betting on Hampton’s success, he was annoyed.

  *

  He called on Elaine Dale that afternoon.

  In the small and unpretentious house that Lord William had rented for the Season, she looked even more enchanting than he remembered.

  She greeted him with some surprise.

  The Earl had the strange feeling that she had forgotten about him. It had obviously never crossed her mind that he might care to see her again.

  “Are you visiting Papa or me?” she then enquired.

  She seemed so ingenuous that the Earl believed that she was indeed genuinely unaware of which one of them it was. Nor did he consider her rude to put him into the same age bracket as her father.

  He merely set out to make himself pleasant and she blushed a little at his compliments.

  When he rose to go, she did not ask when she would see him again.

  As he walked down the steps to where his phaeton was waiting, he then had the strange feeling that she would not think about him once he had gone.

  It was all so different from anything that had happened to him before that the Earl made up his mind that he would capture Elaine Dale’s heart.

  To be beaten at the post by Hampton was seriously quite unthinkable.

  He began to court her with flowers and an ardency that would have astonished the other ladies of his acquaintance.

  His secretary in Berkeley Square could bear witness to the large amount of letters and notes that the E
arl received every day of the week and mostly were from married women who should have known better.

  There always seemed to be a groom in different Livery at the door, handing over to the footman billets-doux that smelt seductively of gardenia, heliotrope or rosemary.

  Now the Earl was writing his own and the grooms who carried them to the small house in Islington laughed amongst themselves.

  “Real struck on ’er, ’is Nibs’ must be!” one of them said and the other stable lad replied,

  “I don’t blame ’im, ’er makes all the other women look like old ’ags!”

  The two boys laughed and the Earl would have been furious if he had overheard them.

  Three weeks after their first meeting the Earl realised that the moment had come when he must express himself more forcefully.

  It was rumoured around White’s that Hampton had already proposed marriage on bended knee and Elaine had replied that she must have time to think about it.

  ‘Time,’ the Earl thought cynically, ‘to see if I really come up to scratch.’

  He had been very attentive, but he was aware that his reputation would warn her that he was unlikely to be serious.

  When it came to a question of producing a ring, she would think that he would be likely to run out at the last moment.

  Because the members of White’s all thought that was what he would do, the odds against him had lengthened considerably and Hampton was now well ahead of him.

  Tossing and turning for most of the night, the Earl made up his mind.

  He really had no wish to marry and was thinking that his freedom was very precious.

  He was, however, well aware that it was his duty to produce an heir or two or three of them.

  It was unlikely that he would find a woman more beautiful, or indeed more suitable, than Elaine.

  Her blood was as good as his and there was nobody else in the whole of the Beau Monde who could grace the family collection of jewels as well as she would.

  He could well imagine her wearing the huge family diamond tiara that made every other woman who saw it green with envy.

  He had always liked the sapphire set in which the stones, of the deepest blue, were finer than those belonging to the Queen.

  Because he was extremely experienced in women’s dress, the Earl was aware that, while Elaine looked exquisite, she did not possess many gowns.