Temptation of a Teacher Read online

“Then, when I became aware that it was Jacques who was making me hated and feared, not only by everybody in the Château and on my estate but in the world outside, I could not think of a way to stop him.”

  “Did you – speak to him – about it?” Arletta asked.

  “What would have been the point? He would only have denied being the originator of such tales. I suppose too I was proud, too proud to argue and plead with a man I utterly despised.”

  “I can – understand.”

  She thought that it was the Duc’s pride that had made his tongue so sarcastic and him look so cynical because he would not admit, even to himself, that he was being manipulated by his disreputable cousin.

  “Then you came,” the Duc said in a low voice, “and I was really frightened.”

  “Frightened?”

  It was a word that Arletta would never have imagined him using.

  He smiled before he answered very gently.

  “I fell in love with you, my alluring, fascinating little teacher, when I saw you dancing under the chandeliers in the ballroom and wearing very little to hide your exquisite figure.”

  Arletta blushed, but was too shy to look directly at the Duc as she asked,

  “Were you – very shocked?”

  “I was intrigued. At the same time I knew indisputably that I had found what I have been seeking all my life.”

  “How could you have – known that?”

  “You are not the only person, my lovely one, who is perceptive.”

  “I-I knew you were – but not – me.”

  “I am very very perceptive about you,” the Duc stated firmly. “But I realised that Jacques was watching us and, although I could hardly believe that he would destroy you as he had already destroyed two other women in my life, I was desperately afraid.”

  He gave a deep sigh before he carried on.

  “I blame myself for not, as I ought to have done, sending you back to England as being a very unsuitable Governess.”

  Arletta gave a little cry.

  “I was so afraid that you – might after you had seen – me in the ballroom. But I wanted to – stay here. I desperately wanted to – stay.”

  “So you stayed,” the Duc said, “but it might, if you had not saved us both, been a tragedy that nobody would ever have known the true explanation about.”

  The way he spoke made Arletta say,

  “We are safe, but promise me you will see that we remain so and he cannot – escape to – somehow try – again.”

  “I swear to you that will never happen and now, my darling, I am free to ask you if you will be my wife.”

  Arletta stared at him.

  Then she said,

  “Did you say – are you really asking me to – marry you?”

  “I love you, as I have never loved anybody before,” the Duc asserted, “and I think you love me.”

  “It – cannot be – true!”

  “It is true!” he insisted. “And, as I do not intend to risk losing you as I might have done tonight, I am determined to marry you immediately. Then I will be able to look after you a great deal better than I have done up to now.”

  There was a dazzling light in Arletta’s eyes.

  At the same time, because it was impossible for her to comprehend entirely what the Duc was saying to her, she faltered,

  “You cannot – it is not right for you – and you don’t even – know who – I am.”

  The Duc chuckled and it was a very happy sound.

  “I know that you are somebody I love and who is everything I want in a woman and who, although you may not realise it, is already part of my heart and my soul, if indeed I have one!”

  “B-but – I am not – Jane – Turner!”

  “I am well aware of that.”

  “You are? But – how?”

  “Because, my beautiful one, Lady Langley, when she persuaded me to engage a Governess for David, told me,

  “‘If you are worried that Miss Turner will disrupt your household in any way, let me assure you that she is a very sensible young woman of twenty-eight and rather plain, poor thing, so I am afraid that no man will ever look at her, but she is very competent and kind’.”

  The Duc smiled again as he remarked,

  “Only the last two adjectives apply to you.”

  “So you – guessed from the – beginning that I was not – Jane!”

  “To begin with by no stretch of the imagination could you be twenty-eight,” the Duc said. “How old are you?”

  “I am twenty.”

  “And your name?”

  “Is Arletta. That is true. It slipped out by mistake.”

  “I guessed that too,” he said, “and, although it makes no difference to me who you are, I shall have to know the rest of your name before I fill in the forms that are compulsory in a French marriage.”

  “My name is – Cherrington-Weir,” Arletta informed him shyly. “My father, who died only a few weeks ago, was the sixth Earl of Weir.”

  She did not wait for the Duc to comment, but went on,

  “What I have longed to tell you, because I felt that you would be interested, was that my mother’s mother was the Comtesse de Falaise, who came from Normandy, and I was called after her.”

  She looked at the Duc apprehensively as she spoke in case she had said anything wrong.

  Then he exclaimed,

  “I cannot believe it! The Falaises are directly related to my family and we are therefore, my darling, of the same blood as well as being united in every other way.”

  Arletta gave a cry of delight.

  “I am glad, so very very glad! I think Grandmère, whom I adored, would be pleased too.”

  “So will my grandmother.”

  “I am sure if I really had been Jane Turner,” Arletta replied, “she would have been shocked at her grandson making a marriage that could only be described as a mésalliance. She made it quite plain that she suspected that I had come here specifically to ‘catch’ you!”

  “That is exactly what you have done!” the Duc said. “Actually, Grandmère will be so grateful that you have saved my life that I think anything else about you would have paled into insignificance. But now she will, my precious precious, not that it matters, approve of you wholeheartedly.”

  “Can I – really – marry you?”

  “I have every intention that you shall,” the Duc insisted, “and, although I have a great deal to teach you, my adorable little twenty-year-old Teacher, you have so much to teach me.”

  She looked surprised and he explained.

  “I have already had a few lectures from you and now it is up to you to fill the Château with love and happiness and make certain that it is as beautiful inside as it is out.”

  Arletta gave a deep sigh before she said,

  “Can you – really mean to marry me when you – hate the English so ferociously?”

  She was too shy to look at him as she asked the question and she was suddenly anxious as he took his hand away from hers.

  Then he said,

  “I expected you to ask me that question and there is a lot of explaining to do as to why I hated your countrymen until you came and changed everything. Will you, however, answer one question that I am going to put to you?”

  “Yes, of course,” Arletta nodded.

  “Will you tell me,” the Duc asked, “that you are aware, as I am, that nothing really matters except the love we know exists between us and that it is different from anything else in this whole wide world?”

  Arletta was about to speak, but he went on.

  “Nationality, family, social importance, titles, money, can any of them compare with what you felt just now when I kissed you and what for me was an emotional experience that I have never had in all of my life?”

  “Is that – really true?”

  “I think you know that what I am saying is the truth,” the Duc said solemnly. “I adore you, Arletta, and I worship you because you are everything a woman should b
e and I thought I would never ever find you.”

  He spoke so solemnly with every word vibrating in her heart and Arletta put up her arms and pulled his head down to hers.

  She had the feeling as she did so that he had deliberately not kissed her when he came to her bedroom because he had thought that it might make her shy or even shocked.

  Now she pulled him close to her and his lips were on hers.

  Once again there was the rapture, the wonder and the ecstasy and, as he carried her into the sky, they were part of God.

  Then, when she wanted him to kiss her and go on kissing her, he deliberately moved and said,

  “You are not to tempt me, ma belle, until we are married. Then I can teach you about love without being afraid of frightening you or making you feel that you are doing something that your mother and your grandmother would think was wrong.”

  The way he spoke made her remember the Comte and Arletta sighed,

  “You are – looking after – me and – protecting me.”

  “That is exactly what I intend to do and now, my darling, I am going to tell you why I hated the English. But before I do so, there is one thing I want to say.”

  “What is – it?” Arletta asked a little nervously.

  They were talking, as they always had, in French, and now the Duc said quietly,

  “Je t’aime! I cannot say it too often and I will also say it in your language. I love you!”

  He spoke in English and Arletta stared at him in amazement.

  “You speak English?”

  “Almost as well as you speak French.”

  “Is that – true? I cannot – believe it!”

  “Then let me explain. The reason why I loathed the English was that my mother died when I was ten and two years later my father married an Englishwoman.”

  Arletta gave a little gasp.

  “An – Englishwoman!”

  “I should have said rather that she married him!” the Duc went on in a hard voice. “He was a sick man, broken in body and spirit because he had lost the wife he loved and she tricked him into becoming his wife.”

  “I am – sorry,” Arletta sympathised, sensing how much it had obviously hurt him.

  “She wanted,” the Duc went on, “not only to be the Duchesse de Sauterre but also to produce the next Duc, thus cutting me out. Because she was unable to do so, owing to my father’s bad health, she made my life a living Hell. She tortured me as only a small, rather oversensitive boy can be tortured with a mental cruelty that made me loathe her. In fact she was hated by everyone in the Château, including my grandmother.”

  “Why did nobody tell me – this?” Arletta asked.

  “When I was eighteen, just before my father died and I inherited the title, my stepmother had a fatal riding accident,” the Duc replied. “As her death was a relief and a deliverance, it was agreed that her name would never be mentioned again by those who had known her and her diabolical treatment of me.”

  “I am sorry – so desperately sorry.”

  “You can therefore understand,” the Duc carried on, “that, when my sister married an Englishman, I opposed it with every means in my power, thinking that we all might have to suffer again from the cruelty and spite of someone English.”

  His lips twisted in a faint smile as he resumed,

  “Actually Gerald was a very quiet unassuming character, but my stepmother’s treatment of me had gone too deep for me to forget or forgive.”

  “Now I can – understand,” Arletta murmured.

  “I knew you would and I confess that I was wrong, completely and absolutely wrong, to try to turn David against his own countrymen and prevent him from going to his father’s school.”

  Because he was naturally so proud, Arletta realised that this admission was a tremendous effort and so she said very gently,

  “You have made amends for all that. Can I really help you to – forget what you have – suffered?”

  She looked at him anxiously as she went on,

  “Suppose there is some – dark spot in our love – that I cannot – change and which – as the years go by – makes you – hate me?”

  The Duc laughed.

  “Do you really think, my darling, that I could possibly hate you?” he asked in English. “I have already told you that I adore and worship you and I know that you will bring me everything that is best in England, just as I will try to give you everything that is the very best in France.”

  “That is what I – want to – think,” Arletta said, “and I will do – everything I can to make you – happy.”

  “All you have to do is to love me,” the Duc asserted solemnly. “It is what I have missed since my mother died and what I need desperately for myself and then one day for my children.”

  “I will give it to you – I swear I will give it to you!” Arletta cried.

  Once again she held out her arms and the Duc kissed her.

  She thought as he did so that there was something Holy and reverent in his kiss that had not been there before.

  Then, when he raised his head, there was no longer any need for the light from the candles for the first rays of the sun were coming in through the East window, illuminating the whole room with a golden light.

  “Now I am going to leave you,” he said, “and you are to go to sleep. Dream of me and forget all the horrors that have happened, because they are of no consequence now.”

  “You will still be here in – the morning?” Arletta asked. “You will not vanish and I will find this has – all been a – wonderful – wonderful dream?”

  “I will be here not only tomorrow and the day after but for the rest of our lives together.”

  He kissed her hand and then he rose, blew out the candles and walked towards the door.

  “Good night, my perfect and most beloved wife-to-be,” he pronounced in English. “I love you!”

  Then he was gone and Arletta suddenly felt tears of happiness running down her cheeks.

  *

  The little Church outside the great gates of the Château was decorated with white lilies.

  Apart from the bride and the bridegroom and Monsieur Byien, who was the Duc’s best man, there was nobody else in the Church.

  The village Priest officiated with two Servers and Arletta felt that the empty aisles were filled with the spirits of those who had lived in the Château for so many generations and had worshipped there.

  They had left behind them their prayers and faith that she had been so vividly conscious of the first time she had prayed in the old Church.

  She had asked the Duc to see that all the candles were lit before the statue of Joan of Arc and, when he looked surprised, she had told him,

  “I lit one the first time I came here and I prayed that somehow the shadows over the Château would go away and I think too in my heart that I prayed for you.”

  “Then we must certainly be grateful to the Saint,” the Duc smiled.

  Because the Duc was of such local importance, the Mayor had come from the nearest town to the Château earlier in the morning and had married them according to French law.

  After he had left, the Duc had walked with Arletta across the great courtyard and into the Church.

  He had announced, because Arletta was in mourning, that there would be no guests at the Wedding.

  But he had added that the staff from the Château and everybody in the village would be entertained later in one of the huge rooms that were used for such occasions.

  And, as the Church was so small, the bride and bridegroom would be married quietly and alone.

  It was a slightly surprising arrangement, but the villagers would not think of disobeying the Duc and were appeased at being excluded from the Ceremony by the fact that David and Pauline waited just outside the door to shower them with rose petals.

  As soon as they realised what the children were about to do, the villagers picked the petals from every flower in their gardens.

  When Arletta and the
Duc came out through the great arched door, they were enveloped with clouds of petals so that their walk from the Church back to the Château was literally, Arletta pointed out with a smile, ‘a path of roses’.

  “This is what our life together will be,” the Duc smiled.

  The way he spoke and the love in his eyes made her feel as if she was still moving in the Fairyland that she had felt she inhabited ever since she awoke.

  The morning after the drama in the dungeon she had slept, as she had not expected to, until luncheontime.

  It was the housekeeper who had brought her a meal on a tray at one o’clock saying,

  “Monsieur le Duc’s explicit orders, m’mselle, and you’re to stay in bed until you’re really rested.”

  “But – it is so late,” Arletta protested. “I had no idea I could sleep for so long.”

  “It’s certainly not surprisin’, m’mselle,” the housekeeper told her in a repressed tone, “seein’ all you’ve been through. But you must be sensible and realise it’s been a real shock to the system.”

  Arletta knew then that the whole household of the Château would be aware of exactly what had happened.

  It was one of the reasons why the Duc wished her to stay quietly in her room so that she would not have to be involved in the explanations that would have be made or in answering innumerable questions if she was downstairs.

  She did as he wished and only when he suggested that, when she was dressed, he would like to see her at five o’clock did she eagerly go down to his study where he was waiting for her.

  As she entered the room, she stood for a moment just inside the door.

  Then, as he held out his arms, she ran towards him, feeling that there was really no need for her to hear what had happened.

  They were one and she loved him so overwhelmingly that nothing else mattered.

  They sat and talked for a long time.

  And then he suggested,

  “I am going to send you back to bed, my darling. You have been through an experience that would leave most women prostrate and I have so much to arrange that it is impossible to complete them all if you are beside me.”

  “You don’t – want me?” Arletta asked provocatively.

  “I will answer that question tomorrow after we are married,” he replied.

  “Tomorrow?”