The Incredible Honeymoon (Bantam Series No. 46) Read online

  “How extraordinary!” Antonia exclaimed.

  “It was sensible, if slightly unconventional,” Labby remarked.

  The following day Labby was taken by Antonia into the Duke’s bed-room. She had already related to him how kind the English journalist had been during the long, frightening weeks of his unconsciousness.

  She thought the Duke was slightly sceptical—or was it suspicious—of the warm manner in which she had described Henry Labouchere.

  But when she brought him into the bed-room he had held out his hand and said in his most pleasant tone:

  “I hear, Labouchere, I have to be very grateful to you.”

  “There is no reason for you to be grateful, Your Grace,” Henry Labouchere replied. “It has been a very great pleasure to be of service to the Duchess.”

  He smiled at Antonia as he spoke and there was an expression on his raffish face which made the Duke look at him sharply.

  What he had suspected was confirmed during the conversation which followed.

  Even a less experienced man than the Duke would have noticed the gentleness in Henry Labouchere’s voice when he addressed Antonia, and the manner in which he found it hard to take his eyes from her.

  “We must leave Paris as soon as I am well enough to travel,” the Duke remarked abruptly.

  “I am afraid that will not be for some time,” Labby replied. “As Your Grace must know by now, you have been very ill indeed.”

  He smiled at Antonia again as he added:

  “I shall be giving away no secrets if I tell you, now the danger is over, that your doctor told me it was a ninety percent certainty that you would die.”

  Antonia drew in her breath.

  “I ... did ... not realise it was as bad ... as that,” she faltered.

  “You were saved by two things,” Labby told the Duke. “The first that the bullet missed your heart and by a miracle did not shatter any bones, and secondly that you were outstandingly fit.”

  “I am glad you did not tell me until now,” Antonia said.

  “Do you imagine that I would have distressed you more than you were already?” he asked gently.

  The Duke listened to this exchange looking first at Henry Labouchere, then at Antonia.

  “I would be grateful, Labouchere,” he said after a moment, “if you would tell me exactly what the position is at the moment. As you can imagine, I have a great deal to catch up with and women are never very good at describing the horrors of war.”

  “Her Grace will have told you that there is a new Government,” Henry Labouchere replied. “The Second Empire has ended ignominiously and France has been humiliated. King William has reached Rheims.”

  “It is hard to believe!” the Duke exclaimed.

  “But France still has an army of sorts, all of which General Trochu, our new leader, is concentrating in Paris.”

  “Is that wise?” the Duke enquired.

  “He has little choice,” Labby conceded, “and the enrollment of 350,000 able-bodied males in the National Guard is encouraging, while at the same time it reveals the inefficiency of France’s war mobilisation.”

  “I should think that the fortifications will certainly make Paris impregnable,” the Duke remarked.

  “A visit to the fortifications is rapidly replacing a drive in the Bois as the smart Parisian Sunday afternoon entertainment.”

  “Good God!” the Duke exclaimed, “do they never take anything seriously?”

  “What seems to me extraordinary,” Labby went on, “is that no effort is made to get the useless mouths out of the city. The Duchess will have told you of the vast concentration of animals in the Bois. But I should have thought that it would have made more sense to move people out rather than in.”

  “So should I,” the Duke agreed, “but I suppose the last people anyone is likely to listen to are the English.”

  “That is certainly true,” Henry Labouchere agreed, “and it is essential that the Duchess should not attempt to walk in the streets. Spy-mania has led to situations which are far from comic.”

  “I have warned Tour,” Antonia said, “and he assures me that now when he goes out he wears his oldest clothes and looks more French than the French themselves!”

  “You need not worry about Tour,” the Duke replied, “’but you, Antonia, will stay here with me.”

  There was an accent on the last word that Antonia did not miss.

  After Henry Labouchere had gone she came back into the Duke’s bed-room. He looked at her and said:

  “I gather you have a new admirer.”

  “Shall we say my only ... admirer,” Antonia replied.

  The Duke’s eyes seemed to rest on her speculatively and she flushed a little under his scrutiny.

  He realised that she had lost some weight these past weeks when she had been nursing him, but it had not affected the perfection of her figure.

  As he looked at the exquisite line of her breasts, and at the smallness of her waist, he wondered what other young woman would have been content to be cooped up indoors, nursing an unconscious and delirious man, without finding herself restricted or apparently bored.

  He raised his eyes to her face and realised she was watching him apprehensively.

  Her eyes looked very green because the gown she was wearing was the green of the creeper climbing over the balcony of the bed-room.

  It had taken Worth, the Duke thought, to realise that only deep vivid or clear colours could make Antonia’s skin appear dazzlingly clear and white.

  They brought also, both to her eyes and to her hair, strange unpredictable lights that had a fascination all of their own. He had learnt that Antonia had dismissed her lady’s-maid, but he saw that her hair was as elegant and as fashionably arranged as it had been when she had joined him at the Cafe Anglais and he had not recognised her.

  “It is a very dull honeymoon for you, Antonia,” he said in his deep voice.

  As if she had expected him to say something else the flush which came to her cheeks seemed to bring an expression of happiness to her face.

  “It is at least ... unusual, and if we are ... besieged in Paris it might last for a ... very long time!”

  “We must prevent that from happening,” the Duke said.

  “How can we do that?” Antonia asked.

  “By getting out of the City as soon as possible and returning to our own country.”

  Antonia gave a little cry.

  “There is no chance of your moving for weeks! You must not think of it! The doctor has been very insistent that you must take things very quietly and build up your strength gradually.”

  “I will not have you put in any danger,” the Duke said obstinately.

  “How can there possibly be any danger when we are English?” Antonia asked. “I told you Mr. Labouchere says that English and Americans are pouring into Paris to have a view of the events from the front row of the stalls!”

  “He said men were coming,” the Duke replied, “not women.”

  “I shall be safe enough,” Antonia insisted, “and have you forgotten that I am not a very feminine woman? In fact you said yourself I am a tomboy.”

  “That is the last thing you look at the moment.”

  Antonia glanced down at her exquisitely made gown.

  “If we are going to be here a long time I shall regret that I asked Monsieur Worth to deliver to me in England nearly all the garments I had ordered.”

  “I have a feeling that was a very wise instruction,” the Duke said. “For the time being neither of us will be attending smart Balls or anything that appertains to victory celebrations.”

  “At the same time I want to look nice for you.”

  “For me or your admirer?” the Duke asked, and there was a sharp note in his voice.

  There was a little pause and then he saw the colour rise in Antonia’s cheeks.

  “For ... you,” she said quietly.

  She had the feeling in the days that followed that the Duke was watc
hing her.

  She could not understand why sometimes, when she thought he was asleep, she would find in fact that he was awake and that his eyes were on her.

  She sat in the window of his room or just outside on the balcony in case he should need anything.

  There were fortunately some books in the house and Labby brought her more. She became acquainted with the works of Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Dumas and many other romantic authors whom she had never had the chance of reading in England.

  Sometimes she found that the excitement the written page held for her was interrupted by the feeling she was being watched, and then she would find the Duke’s eyes on her.

  She wondered to herself if it was in approval or indifference.

  She longed to ask him if he missed the Marchioness; but the frankness with which she had been able to talk to him when they had first been married seemed to have vanished since the duel and his long illness.

  She knew the answer to that herself and she only prayed that he would never realise it.

  When she had seen him fall to the ground and when she had thought as she reached his side he was dead, she had known that she loved him.

  As she and Tour, assisted by the Duke’s seconds, had carried him to the carriage and he had been laid on the back seat, his head in her lap, she admitted that she loved him agonisingly.

  She had done so, she thought later, from the first moment when she had gone to his house to ask him if he would marry her rather than Felicity.

  How, she asked herself, could any woman have resisted that strange, attractive, mocking expression in his eyes and the faintly cynical twist to his lips.

  Now she could understand all too vividly what the Marchioness, the Comtesse and what doubtless every woman he had met, felt for him.

  No wonder, when a whole world of beautiful women could be his, that he did not wish to tie himself to one dull, unattractive girl with no knowledge of anything except horses.

  “I love you! I love you!” she whispered to him in the long nights when she nursed him.

  He had cried out deliriously, sometimes talking gibberish she could not understand, but at other times speaking of things that had taken place in his life.

  Gradually, after questioning Tour, she could understand what had actually happened.

  He had fallen from a tree when he was a small boy and very nearly dislocated his neck.

  He had been unconscious for a long time and forced to lie on his back so that the injuries he had done to himself would not become permanent.

  He had thought in his delirium it was happening to him again, and as Antonia had held him in her arms, he had cried out for his mother.

  When she tried to prevent him from throwing himself about in case he should injure the wound in his chest, Antonia had felt as if she was his mother and he was her child.

  “You are all right, darling,” she had murmured to him. “You are safe. You will not fall again, see, I am holding you close against me, and you cannot fall.”

  She felt gradually that her voice got through to him and that he understood.

  Then he would turn his head against her breast as if seeking the comfort which only she could give him. She knew, at these times, that she loved him with her whole being as she had never thought she could love anybody.

  Another night the Duke had thought he had had a fall hunting. When Antonia questioned Tour, he remembered when he had broken his collarbone and it had been very painful for some time.

  He had cried out then for someone, but Antonia suspected that although he mentioned no name, it was not his mother he sought but another woman who he imagined would comfort him.

  “It was not possible for me to be in his thoughts,” Antonia told herself, “but lucky I am that he should turn to me and need me as I have never been needed before.”

  Gradually, as her love grew within her day after day, she understood that this was what she had always wanted, someone to love, someone to whom she was important and not just a nuisance and an irritation.

  Someone also she could care for not only physically but with her whole heart.

  ‘Even if he does not love me,’ Antonia thought, ‘I can love him. But he must never know of it!’

  Sometimes now when the Duke was asleep she would creep to his bedside to look at him. Then she would feel that her breasts ached because she could not hold him any more in her arms and know that he would turn to her like an unhappy child.

  She decided that when the Duke was well enough she would ask him to give her a baby. It would be a part of him which she could love and she was no longer afraid of the idea.

  She thought of how foolish she had been not to let him make her his wife the first night they were married.

  She wondered now why she had ever thought it important that they should get to know each other first. What really mattered was that she could have given him the heir he wanted and she would have had his child to love.

  “When we get back to England,” she told herself, “he will go back to the Marchioness, but nothing and nobody can take this time away from me! He is mine ... mine now and there is no other woman to distract him.”

  She felt herself quiver with a sudden ecstasy as she whispered:

  “I have held him in my arms and ... kissed his cheek ... his forehead and his ... hair.”

  She schooled herself in the day-time to be very circumspect, so that the Duke would not suspect for one moment how much it had thrilled her when he asked her to lift him lip against his pillows, to arrange them behind his head.

  She even found herself, as the Duke got better, growing jealous of Tour because he asked so much more from him than he did from her.

  She wanted to serve him, she wanted to be useful to him.

  But when she had made him well, she remembered he would make love to the Marchioness!

  She felt the pain of it strike at her like a dagger in her heart.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “How are you feeling?” Antonia asked.

  “Well enough to go home,” the Duke replied.

  He was sitting in an armchair in the window, and Antonia looking at him thought that he did in fact seem much better.

  At the same time both she and Tour knew that he was still far from being himself.

  Thanks to Labby, who had found a Chinese masseur, the Duke was in fact not as weak in the body as he might have been after such a long time in bed.

  At the same time Antonia knew it would be a great mistake, at this stage in his convalescence, to over-tax his strength.

  There were however many more difficulties arising from the situation in Paris than they had dared relate to the Duke, because they knew it would worry him.

  They had not even told him that the Germans were approaching nearer and nearer day by day.

  He had given her an answer and now, when the Duke said much the same thing she had the reply:

  “We are British,” he said, “so there is no need to think that we cannot leave whenever we might wish to do so.”

  Antonia hesitated.

  “We are, as a Nation, very unpopular.”

  “Why?” the Duke enquired.

  “According to Mr. Labouchere, French opinion has been scandalised by the unfriendly attitude of the British Press.”

  The Duke made an exasperated sound which she knew meant he thought little of the press one way or another.

  “Once Paris was threatened,” she went on, “it was widely assumed that Britain would enter the lists to rescue the Fount of Civilisation.”

  She paused before saying with a nervous note in her voice:

  “Now, the feeling against us is so intense that Les Nouvelles even proposed that all the British in Paris should be shot at once!”

  “Good heavens!” the Duke exclaimed.

  “When the street names of Paris were changed after the fall of the Empire,” Antonia went on, “the French press demanded that the Rue de Londres should be renamed on the grounds th
at the name of Londres was detested even more than Berlin.”

  “I cannot believe this is any more than gutter journalism,” the Duke said sharply. “I shall myself call at the British Embassy to-morrow!”

  Antonia said nothing for a moment and then changing the subject she asked:

  “I can see you have a headache. Will you let me massage your forehead? You know it helps you.”

  She hoped as she spoke she did not sound too eager. To touch the Duke was such a delight that she found it difficult to hide her feelings in case he should guess how much she loved him.

  “Perhaps it will help,” he said a little grudgingly.

  She rose to stand behind his chair and placed her two hands very gently on his forehead, soothing away the tension in a way he remembered her doing when he had been ill.

  “How did you learn to do this?” he asked.

  “Ives found that it helped your horses when they had a sprained fetlock,” Antonia replied.

  The Duke gave a short laugh.

  “I might have guessed it was connected with horses!”

  “I do not think I should have been allowed to practise on a man,” Antonia said with a little smile.

  “I am grateful that I can be the first in that field at any rate,” the Duke remarked.

  There was a slightly cynical and mocking note in his voice, and she wondered why.

  Recently he had seemed almost to resent her attentions—or perhaps that was not the right word. It was as if he challenged her in some way which she could not understand.

  “We must get away,” he said suddenly. ‘We must get back to England and a normal life. I am sure that is what you want as much as I do.”

  With difficulty Antonia prevented herself from crying out that it was the last thing she wanted.

  “Or perhaps,” the Duke went on, as if he was following the train of his own thoughts, “you would rather be here receiving the attentions of your journalist admirer.”

  “Mr. Labouchere has been very kind,” Antonia said, “and when you are ready to leave I know he will help us.”

  “I very much doubt if I shall need his help,” the Duke said loftily. “As I have already told you, I will go to the British Embassy to-morrow and arrange with Lord Lyon, our Ambassador, our safe conveyance to Le Havre where the yacht will be waiting.”