A Hazard of Hearts Read online

  “This is the girl,” the Marchioness said tersely and then to Serena, “This, Miss Staverley, is Madame Roxana. She is a great astrologer. We are privileged to have her as a guest in this house and we have found her advice often most profitable.”

  “The young lady would like me to tell her cards?” Roxana asked.

  Serena drew back a little.

  “No, thank you. I would rather not know the future.”

  “What nonsense!” the Marchioness exclaimed. “Everyone wants to know their future. Let Roxana tell the cards for you?”

  “No, really,” Serena replied. “If you will excuse me, ma’am, I would rather remain ignorant of what is likely to occur. So much has happened to me in the last few days that I would rather not be conversant with what further adventures are awaiting me.”

  The Marchioness was annoyed.

  “Is not that just like a country girl? Here is Madame Roxana straight from Bond Street, having been consulted by all the elite and all the greatest people in the land. Why, the Prince Regent himself has honoured her, hasn’t he, Roxana? And a young lady from, what is the name of the place? Staverley, is not interested.”

  There was so much indignation in the Marchioness’s voice that Serena felt abashed.

  “I am sorry. ma’am, but if it gives you any pleasure I shall be glad for Madame Roxana to read my cards.”

  “There, that is better,” the Marchioness approved.

  “Take them in both your pretty hands,” Roxana said, holding out the pack to Serena. “Shuffle them and wish for your heart’s desire. Wish, don’t forget to wish.”

  Serena did as she was bid, feeling unaccountably repulsed by the worn cards with their weird designs and greasy backs.

  She held them out to Roxana, who took them from her and laid them out on the floor.

  “You wished?” she asked.

  Serena nodded.

  “’Tis strange, but you don’t yet know what is your heart’s desire. That is the truth, little maid?”

  “I suppose so,” Serena responded.

  “But you will know,” Roxana went on, staring at the cards. “One day you will know your heart’s desire and you will gain it!”

  “What do you see?” the Marchioness interrupted.

  For a moment there was no answer from the gipsy crouching on the low stool and bending over Serena’s cards as she laid them out in a half circle. Her eyes were half-closed and her shoulders were moving a little from side to side.

  Then finally she spoke, but her voice was low and hesitating and quite unlike the glib tones she had spoken to the Marchioness in.

  “I see danger,” she said, “but you will save yourself, always you are saved when you follow your own heart, other people’s desires, other people will press upon you – I can see them crowding in, men and women – there is danger there – follow your heart, it will lead you truly – you will not be harmed – but death is not far from you – you stand beside it – there is blood – ”

  The gipsy’s voice trailed away and suddenly she gave a little start. Her head came up with a jerk and she stared at Serena.

  “You are lucky,” she said, “very lucky. No, it is something better than luck, it shines around you – it is a white light, pure and – ”

  “Don’t sit there burbling,” the Marchioness said. “Give us facts, Roxana. What is all this talk about lights? I cannot understand you. Will she marry? That is what we want to know.”

  The gipsy gathered up her cards.

  “She will marry.”

  “But whom? Can you say who it is?” the Marchioness enquired.

  The gipsy smiled provokingly.

  “We must look another time, now I am tired.”

  Her eyes wandered towards the brandy bottle. The Marchioness picked it up and thrust it into her hand.

  “Take it,” she said. “You have not told me half I wanted to hear, but it is enough to know that I shall win tonight.”

  “A little, remember,” Roxana chided, “only a little.”

  The cards disappeared into a pocket of her dress, the bottle was tucked under her arm, hidden by the folds of the beaded jacket she wore and now she shuffled from the room, the door closing so softly behind her that Serena was not certain if she had really gone or was still lurking in the shadows.

  “Now,” the Marchioness said briskly, “we have to see about your clothes.”

  “My – clothes?” Serena echoed in a bewildered voice.

  “Your clothes,” the Marchioness repeated. “You are my guest here and I want you to be a success. There are young men coming tonight and every night. You must dance with them and you must enjoy yourself. Lord, child, but smile at the thought. You are only young once.”

  “Yes, but I don’t understand,” Serena said. “I am afraid that I have only a few garments.”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that,” the Marchioness said, “and that is exactly what we are going to see about. Martha, open the chest.”

  In front of one of the windows was a big velvet chest, braided and jewelled. It was fitted with a gold lock and key.

  Martha opened it and inside Serena saw that it was packed with materials of all sorts and kinds.

  “Yvette will make you something for tonight,” the Marchioness said.

  “Where is that silver net, Martha?” she asked impatiently. “But I had best see for myself.”

  She climbed out of bed and Martha hurried forward to wrap around her a white velvet pelisse trimmed with ermine.

  “You will get cold, my Lady. Let me close the windows.”

  “Nonsense, woman, it is stifling in here.”

  Martha paid no attention to the protest, but closed the three long windows while the Marchioness, going to the chest, pulled out materials one by one.

  “Here is a silver net,” she said. “It is the very latest from Paris and should be worn over dove-grey satin, but perhaps that is a little old for you. What about this gauze spangled with silver stars or this shell-pink satin sprigged with pearls?”

  She picked up a great roll of material and flung the end of it over Serena’s shoulder.

  “That is enchanting,” she exclaimed. “Look, Martha, at the sheen against her white skin. And this batiste will make a delicious robe for the afternoon. Quick, quick, call Yvette. We must decide which she must make first.”

  “It is – so – kind of you,” Serena stammered, realising at last that the Marchioness intended to have dresses made for her, but wondering why her attitude of the night before had suddenly changed.

  “Kind? Of course I am kind,” the Marchioness said, “and why should I not be? Look how lovely this is.”

  She held up a roll of white velvet.

  “You will not find velvet like that in the whole breadth of England.”

  “I have never felt anything so soft!” Serena exclaimed.

  “It is from France,” the Marchioness said, “and it would cost a fortune in Bond Street. But we will have it made up for you. You will look exquisite in it.”

  “Oh, but, ma’am, you must not part with anything so rare,” Serena cried.

  “Why not?” the Marchioness asked lightly, and lowering her voice, she said surprisingly, “Don’t be in a fidget, my dear, there is plenty more where this came from.”

  Chapter Six

  Serena came slowly down the Grand Staircase.

  It was the sixth night since her arrival at Mandrake, but she was still unable to conquer her shyness and it swept over her in a full flood tide as she reached the Great Hall and saw a large company of guests through the open door of the Silver Drawing Room.

  The Silver Drawing Room and the ballroom opening out of it, which had been designed by Robert Adam, were in themselves awe-inspiring, but Serena felt that she would have become used in time to the magnificence and exotic luxury of Mandrake if it had not been for the people who visited the place in such numbers.

  Yet, although they were so many, it seemed to her that they were in many respects so
similar as to be individually almost unidentifiable.

  The men were nearly all middle-aged, rich, raffish and heavily flirtatious, while the women with their glittering array of jewellery, their painted faces, dyed hair and fashionable affectations might all have been related and they certainly had that similar antipathy to each other that relations so often display.

  Men and women bearing distinguished names linked with the history of England met at Mandrake for one reason and for one reason only, to gain money. The mere thought of the cards brought a flush to their cheeks and made their hands stretch claw-like over the green baize tables.

  Few of them could control their feelings enough to hide their triumph when they won or their chagrin when they lost.

  Serena could hardly believe her ears when she first heard the magnitude of their stakes and, as she watched she thought that the players had lost every human emotion save a consuming hungry passion for money and yet more money.

  She was beginning to learn, however, that there were other passions that might be aroused in those gilded salons. For the first time in her life she found herself fêted and courted as a lovely young woman.

  She was well aware that her new gowns had much to do with this.

  The first night she had been almost unnoticed in the splendidly dressed glittering throng. Few people had time for a pale-faced girl in an unpretentious muslin dress, but, garbed in silver net or resplendent in satin, she aroused a new light in dull eyes that had seemed satiated with beautiful women and interested only in the turn of a card.

  Earnestly and with an effort that cost her far more than she would have admitted, she attempted to do what was required of her and to make herself charming to the men the Marchioness introduced her to with a marked air of insistence.

  Serena was not stupid and she soon realised what was the Marchioness’s intention. It only took time and the quickness of sharp ears for her to realise that to all and sundry the Marchioness murmured before the introduction,

  “An heiress! She will have eighty thousand pounds the day she weds and such a sweet girl. I know you will like her.”

  Old men, young men, middle-aged men, paunchy or crippled, gross or pockmarked, so long as they were unattached, the Marchioness hurried them up to Serena and then left her to fend for herself as best she could.

  She grew used to ponderous compliments from senile gallants who were old enough to be her father and to rather embarrassed pleasantries from elderly Officers and local country Squires who seemed somewhat out of countenance among the haut ton.

  She had the good sense not to accept invitations ‘to look at the pictures in the Long Gallery’ or seek out a quiet anteroom ‘where one could talk’. She kept with the crowd and, as early as she dared and when she thought that the Marchioness was paying no further attention to her, she would slip away upstairs to bed.

  All the time she had a feeling of being alien, almost a foreigner in a strange unexplored country. She knew that the women talked about her amongst themselves and were jealous of her youth, for she encountered many a spiteful word and not once but a thousand times intercepted glances which were anything but friendly.

  Luckily Serena was used to being alone and she was not as lost without family companionship as another girl of her own age might have been, but she was often desperately afraid of the men. More than once during the evening she would glance round the room to see if Lord Vulcan was there, feeling somehow that his quiet detached attitude was in itself a rock of refuge.

  She disliked him and had no desire to seek his company, but compared with the other people who thronged the rooms he was sane and controlled.

  As the days went by, she grew more and more afraid of the Marchioness. She told herself that it was ridiculous to feel so tongue-tied and so embarrassed in anyone’s company, whoever it might be, yet she could not conquer either her feelings of fear or her shyness where the older woman was concerned.

  There was something so overwhelming about her that the moment she appeared Serena felt submerged and lost, even as someone might feel when drowning beneath swirling waters.

  “She is doing me no harm, she is in her own way being kind,” she confided to Eudora, “and yet I cannot like her.”

  “Your instinct is right,” Eudora said sharply. “I knew the moment I saw her that she was bad.”

  “Yet why do we say that?” Serena said, arguing as much with herself as with Eudora. “She is beautiful. She has given me those lovely gowns and she has made no further bother about my staying here and yet – ”

  “It is there,” Eudora said darkly, “hanging over us. There is never a night when I go to sleep but I do not wonder if I will wake up in the morning.”

  “Oh, that is ridiculous,” Serena laughed and yet her laughter somehow held a false note. “All the same it’s obvious that the Marchioness does not wish me to marry her son. You should have seen the men she produced for me last night. I swear one of them was not more than seventeen, while another must have been well over sixty and his leg was swathed in bandages for he was suffering from the gout.

  “‘Did you like Sir Cuthbert?’ she asked me later in the evening.

  “‘Is that the old gentleman with the gouty foot?’ I questioned.

  “‘Old gentleman!’ the Marchioness exclaimed in horror. ‘Why, my dear child, Sir Cuthbert is in the prime of life and has the most entrancing mansion not far from here. He is a fine catch!’

  “‘Indeed, ma’am,’ I said demurely, ‘and I hope he finds an elderly spinster to angle for him’.”

  Eudora laughed and Serena remembered that someone else too had laughed at her repartee.

  She had not known that Lord Vulcan was standing beside her when she was speaking with the Marchioness, but when she heard his laughter she turned to see who it was and realised that it was the first time she had ever heard him laugh. He was genuinely amused and it made him seem younger, much younger, until his habitual mask of cynical boredom crept over his face again.

  “Touché, ma mère,” he said softly.

  The Marchioness looked at him with a glint in her eye. For a moment it seemed to Serena that everyone in the room faded away and the three of them were alone – she, the Marchioness and Lord Vulcan – and that something tense and vibrating was passing between them. It was beyond expression and beyond her comprehension and yet it invaded her consciousness, making her heart throb a little faster.

  Serena was aware in that moment of being drawn or rather compelled into some dark depths, into a queer entanglement that she could not escape from.

  As quickly as it had come the moment passed. With a shrug of her white shoulders the Marchioness turned away. Someone came up to speak to Lord Vulcan and Serena was alone again, her heart returning slowly to its normal beat.

  She wondered if she had imagined the whole thing, but the impression of what had occurred remained so that she had thought of it and wondered about it not once but a dozen times.

  That afternoon the episode returned to her mind vividly and insistently as she walked through the flower-filled gardens and stood alone on top of the cliffs looking out over the restless sea.

  Lord Vulcan had been right. Mandrake was lovely!

  Serena wanted to find fault with it, to discover flaws, to compare it unfavourably with Staverley, but she was forced to admit that it was beautiful beyond the conventional meaning of the word.

  There were the gardens blooming to the very cliffs’ edge and above them, silhouetted against the changing sky, swirled and shrieked the wide-winged gulls. There was the Park, stretching away to the East and West until it joined the untamed uncultivated downland and to the North the woods, green and verdant despite their exposure to the force of the winter storms, sheltered the house.

  With its wide vistas of land and sea, its far horizons and undulating country it was very different indeed from the sheltered gentleness of Staverley. Serena felt now that her world at home had been a very small one. The contrast with Mandrake was the
difference between a summer’s breeze and the rough strong winds blowing over the white-crested waves.

  She had expected to shrink both from Mandrake and from the sea winds, but surprisingly she responded to them, feeling invigorated and excited by their strength, and knowing a new and odd emotion within herself that reached out towards their compelling loveliness.

  Then there was the house itself. It could never have been conceived in the imagination of one man. It had to be the building of centuries, the amalgamation of generation after generation. There was the Norman tower, grey and stolid, joining the warmth of Elizabethan bricks and blending harmoniously into the Charles II additions of dark timber. The new façade and the additional rooms added by Robert Adam had already, it seemed to Serena, blended in with the rest of the building so that they did not seem new or in any way garish.

  The whole was so perfectly proportioned, so lovely in itself, that where she had come prepared to hate she could only stand lost in admiration.

  High brick walls enclosed the gardens to shelter them and one could wander for hours finding new beauties, new perfections maintained not only by a small army of gardeners, but also by the natural surroundings of the house. It was cultured and yet there was a wildness about it, a lovely untamed wildness that no artifice could keep controlled.

  At night Serena usually pulled back the curtains from her window and crouching on the window seat would look out to sea. She had never imagined that the sea would have such a fascination for her, a great expanse of water stretching away to the hazy horizon, changing its appearance hour by hour, sometimes stormy and sometimes gay, molten silver, emerald green, sapphire blue or pearly grey, fluctuating, mercurial, mobile and invariably entrancing.

  Once she surprised Eudora by saying,

  “I am glad I have seen all this.”

  “Glad to have left Staverley?” Eudora asked in horror.

  Serena shook her head. She could not explain. She ached for Staverley and yet Mandrake drew her.

  She was often alone in the daytime and she was glad of it. With Torqo at her heels she was content to wander freely, disturbed only when she returned to the house to find that the Marchioness had asked for her or that more guests had arrived.