The Enchanted Waltz Read online

  “Let me go! Let me go!”

  She struggled wildly within his hold and knew that it was as ineffective as if she was a bird in the hands of trappers.

  “I will scream!” she cried, striving wildly to keep her head. “People will come. They will find you here!”

  “And how will you scream if I stop your mouth with kisses?” the Czar asked.

  She strove to evade him, but he was too strong for her.

  His mouth was on hers and his hands held her down. She could not breathe, she could not move. She felt as if she was being drowned in deep waters, as if she was lost, defeated and overwhelmed and there was nothing that she could do about it.

  She strove to free herself from his mouth. She could feel his hands wandering over her body and with every last remaining ounce of strength she strove to push him from her.

  She heard her dress tear, but she was utterly and completely helpless beneath him.

  And then, as her whole being cried for help soundlessly, yet with the desperation of despair, she heard voices.

  There were cries, followed by screams shrill and insistent.

  The Czar heard them too and lifted his head.

  “There is somebody coming!” Wanda gasped.

  He raised himself from the couch.

  “Fire! Fire!” she could hear the words distinctly.

  The noise and tumult was coming nearer.

  “Fire!”

  Dizzily she tried to sit up and as she did so, she heard the secret panel in the wall close.

  She put her hand to her mouth and found that her lips were bleeding.

  She smoothed down her dishevelled dress and, with a supreme effort, managed to rouse herself from the couch, only to sink down again and drop her head between her hands.

  The room was swimming around her.

  She felt faint and sick from the horror she had encountered and the desperate ineffective striving of her imprisoned body.

  The Czar was gone. That was all she could remember at the moment, but she knew that the terror and misery in her heart had not gone with him.

  Then, as if the full horror of what she had been through, of what she had feared, swept over her so that she could not face it, could not bear to acknowledge the truth of it, she felt herself falling.

  She made no effort to save herself, dropping forward – down – down – into the darkness.

  Chapter 11

  Richard had been restless all day.

  It was not Katharina’s anger and jealousy that was perturbing him, it was his own feelings.

  He could not determine exactly what he felt about Wanda.

  In what seemed an incredibly short time she had encroached upon his life so that he felt himself thinking of her continuously, in fact it seemed to him to be every minute of every hour.

  Her little face haunted him, her steadfast blue eyes stood between him and his relationship to everything and everybody.

  He found himself searching for her wherever he went, watching the crowds to see if she was amongst them.

  Amid the dancers in a ballroom, the women riding to a hunt, people wandering down the Prater, there was always someone who reminded him of her.

  A glimpse of a red-gold curl, a movement of a sweetly curved cheek, a gesture of a little hand would recall her so vividly that he felt at times that she had become an indivisible part of himself.

  And yet, although his lips were prepared to say, “I love you”, some cool critical logic within his mind questioned what his heart asserted so forcibly.

  He had been infatuated with a pretty face before and he had known so many women and found them attractive only to be disillusioned and very quickly bored. Could it be possible that here was a woman who was entirely different from those who had passed through his life and had so easily become forgotten?

  Wanda was young, she was unsophisticated, she was immature. He knew all the arguments against this being a love different from all others and yet even while he repeated them to himself his whole being vibrated with the conviction that it was different.

  He was unable to sleep the night after the ball and, after lying wakeful for some hours, he rose, dressed and went out into the gardens of the Hofburg.

  It had been snowing since dark, the world was white beneath a rising moon and the gardens had an unreal ethereal beauty that made him think instantly of Wanda.

  Perhaps, he told himself, it was because she had never been enough with other ordinary people to be like them. He could visualise her living a detached, almost spiritual life in the fastness of her mountain home.

  She had at times an ethereal unsubstantialness, and yet her lips beneath his had been mortal lips and her body trembling in his arms had been warm and pulsating.

  Was Wanda different in any way from the other women he had kissed?

  He remembered how infatuated he had been with Lady Isobel Manvers when he had first gone to London. She was the toast of St. James’s, ‘The Incomparable’, the bucks of the town called her and yet she had let him kiss her one night in the gardens of Devonshire House.

  He could still remember his elation when her lips clung to his. The fragrance of her hair, the quick rise and fall of her breasts beneath her gown of silver gauze had changed him from a callow untried youth into a man.

  “I am crazed with your beauty.”

  He heard his voice deep and husky with reverence as if it was the voice of a stranger.

  “Tomorrow I drive to Guildford to stay with my Lord Sutton,” she whispered. “Come with me!”

  He had gone, humble with gratitude because she had invited him and only when he reached the huge ancestral mansion of the Earls of Sutton did he understand all that the invitation implied.

  The wild raffish house party of old roués and young rakes, with a number of what his father would have called ‘fast-stepping ladybirds’, would not have shocked him if Isobel had not been completely at home amongst them.

  The fact that he was accepted as Isobel’s partner did not have any particular significance until he found that his bedroom communicated with hers and that she was waiting for him in her nightgown with outstretched arms.

  He had enjoyed that visit, but a young dream died and an ideal of womanhood toppled from its pedestal into the mud. Were all women like Isobel if they were given the opportunity?

  He began to believe they were, as they melted into his arms too easily and he discovered that his infatuation of the moment was deceiving him with his best friend.

  “Kiss them and leave them,” his grandfather had advised. And the old reprobate lived up to his advice until he had a stroke at the age of eighty from chasing a pretty little opera dancer up the stairs after a heavy dinner.

  Yet Wanda’s purity seemed to radiate from her, as if the lamp of truth shone within the transparency of her body. He would have staked his life that he was the first man who had touched her lips.

  There was a lovely reawakened immaturity about her, as fragile and elusive as the dewdrop trembling on the first flower of spring, but unmistakable and irrefutable.

  Richard walked through the snow until dawn broke, and then at last he went back to his bedroom and slept dreamlessly until it was nearly noon.

  It was because he was late in waking that he had lost the opportunity of seeing Wanda in the morning.

  He had meant to call on her before luncheon and tell her the truth about himself.

  The time had come, he decided, when he could no longer play the Czar’s game of pretence.

  He was not, and never could be, cut out to be a spy or intriguer. It was utterly and completely foreign to his nature and to his English upbringing.

  When in his youth he had stayed at various times with his grandmother’s Russian relatives, he had not realised how overridden they were by informers and espionage.

  He had suspected from time to time that things that were said were repeated, that movements were noted and catalogued and that men and women were often afraid to speak what they be
lieved to be the truth, but not until he came to Vienna with the Czar’s entourage did he realise to what terrible proportions this habit of check and counter-check had grown.

  He knew now that he should never have let himself be inveigled into playing a part in the Czar’s intrigues against Metternich and he knew that, at whatever cost to himself and his popularity with his Royal host, the time had come to call a halt.

  He would tell the Czar what he had decided, he thought, but Wanda should know first. She had been the one deceived and he owed her that, if nothing else.

  By the time he was dressed and ready to go out, he was informed that the Czar was waiting for him and he was forced to accompany the Emperor Alexander on his morning round of calls made by Sovereign to Sovereign when the happenings and gossip of the previous day were exchanged and commented upon.

  There was a sleighing party that afternoon at which he had also to be present.

  The early snow of the night before had been followed by a sharp frost and an immense crowd had gathered in the Josefplatz where the sleighs were to meet.

  Those intended for the Emperors and Sovereigns were decorated in the brightest colours picked out with gold. They had cushions of emerald-coloured velvet and the silver harnesses of the horses, decorated with the escutcheons of the Imperial House of Austria, were hung with tinkling silver bells.

  As soon as the sleighs were occupied, a blast on the trumpets was blown and the procession began its march.

  There was a detachment of Cavalry to lead the way and a huge sleigh drawn by six horses contained an orchestra of kettledrums and trumpets.

  After the procession had moved slowly down the principal streets of Vienna amid cheering crowds, the horses started off at a gallop on the road to the Schönbrunn Palace.

  The first sleigh contained the Emperor Francis of Austria with the Empress of Russia, who wore an aigrette of diamonds in her toque and was wrapped in a coat of green velvet lined with ermine. All the ladies wore velvet coats or cloaks of the most glorious colours trimmed with rare furs.

  Richard had half-expected to find himself in the same sleigh as Katharina, but instead he found that his companion was the Comtesse Sophie Zichy, who, the gossips had already reported, was making a dead set at the Czar.

  The Czar had, however, been so busy pursuing her sister-in-law that he had hardly noticed Sophie, apart from christening her ‘La Beauté Triviale’, which was hardly a compliment after the celestial title that he had given to Julia.

  She had, however, been included in the Imperial Party and, as she chattered away vivaciously and with a charm that was undeniable, Richard found himself thinking that the Czar would be foolish to waste his time running after Julia, whose affections were already engaged, when the pretty Sophie was here for the taking.

  He found, however, that his attention was wandering when the sleighs, on arrival at the Schönbrunn, formed a circle round the frozen lake, which was covered by skaters wearing national costumes of the countries of Northern Europe.

  As always, he found himself unconsciously looking for Wanda and he was angry that it should become such an obsession with him.

  Servants in livery brought round hot drinks to those in the sleighs who did not join the skaters on the lake.

  The Comtesse Sophie took a glass in her hand.

  “Shall we drink to your thoughts?” she asked softly.

  Richard started and realised that he was being rude.

  “You must forgive me,” he said. “I am preoccupied with my own troubles instead of trying to entertain you.”

  “You must be in love,” she replied. “I know the signs only too well.”

  “Strangely enough, that is the question I am asking myself. Am I in love? How can I be certain?”

  “Only your own heart can tell you that,” she replied.

  “I am afraid that I don’t trust my heart,” Richard said.

  “Then trust me,” she smiled. “My intuition tells me that you are in love, perhaps for the first time in your life.”

  “Why should you think that?” he enquired.

  “Perhaps at times I am a little clairvoyant,” she answered, “and there is too an expression on your face and an aura about you that tells me you are on the threshold of something so wonderful that you feel it cannot be anything but a figment of your imagination.”

  Richard raised his glass to her.

  “I drink to your charming eyes,” he said. “At the same time I am wondering if you are making things better for me or worse.”

  Light though her words were, they had an effect on him and by the time the sleighing fête was over and a blast of trumpets gave the signal to return to Vienna, he was longing, as he had never longed for anything in his life before, to see Wanda.

  He was sure now what he had to say to her, almost sure, and yet that cool calculating mind at the back of his brain still questioned the fire that seemed to be rising within him.

  ‘I want her, I can’t live without her!’

  His body seemed to burn at the thought and yet his mind continued to laugh at it.

  It was difficult to remain cool and detached about anything when, as dusk fell, the horses galloped back towards the City, their bells ringing across the white snow-covered fields, the cold air seeming to have something heady and intoxicating about it as it whipped the cheeks of the fur-covered occupants of the sleighs.

  “I, too, am in love,” the Comtesse Sophie confided in the darkness as she and Richard travelled homewards.

  “Be careful,” he warned her, “love can be a dangerous emotion when it is given unwisely.”

  She laughed at that.

  “One cannot choose whom to love,” she said. “It just happens. Have you not learned that?”

  He nodded his head, remembering the first enchanted waltz and that moment when Wanda had taken off her mask and he had seen her face for the first time.

  Yes, love happened, the Comtesse Sophie was right, and when it came there was no denying it.

  It was too late when they got back to the Hofburg for Richard to visit Wanda before dinner and, while he was changing his clothes and planning to see her late in the evening, the message came that the Czar and his personal suite would dine at the Razumovsky Palace.

  “Keeps you busy, don’t they, Guv?” Harry remarked. “You’d think some of them nobs’d want to put their feet up and ’ave a quiet evenin’ at ’ome once in a while.”

  “It would certainly be a change,” Richard agreed.

  “If you asks me, all this ’ere dressin’ up and kissin’ of ’ands ain’t good for you, Guv,” Harry continued. “You’re lookin’ tired, and your visage is sallow. What you want is a day out after the pheasants or a rattlin’ run after a fox that ain’t afraid to stretch ’is legs.

  “Be quiet, damn you!”

  It wasn’t often that Richard swore at Harry, but the words came out vehemently now.

  The valet’s words had conjured up a nostalgia that was almost unbearable. He had a sudden yearning for the empty, shuttered house that he called home.

  Pheasants would be roosting now in the woods, there would be a hunter in the stable, which would be wondering why he did not come, stirring restlessly in his box when the morning came and there was the baying of the hounds across the fields and the sound of the huntsman’s horn.

  Was his whole life going to be spent worrying about women, drugging himself into a complacency with other people’s champagne and other people’s hospitality?

  Richard felt that he wanted to groan at the hopelessness of the position, instead of which he finished dressing in silence, scowled at his reflection in the glass, and went slowly down the corridors to the salon where they were to assemble before proceeding to the Razumovsky Palace.

  That the Czar did not accompany them at the last moment was to Richard’s mind somewhat of a relief.

  Although, when Alexander was in a good mood his charm could make people believe that they were enjoying themselves however much th
ey might have anticipated the contrary, his presence always imposed a certain stiffness and formality on the gathering.

  The Empress was also at her very worst in his presence, while without him she was inclined to expand and even at times make an effort to be amusing.

  Dinner, therefore, with the Count Razumovsky playing host, was a comparatively informal meal and the excellent food and wine managed to make Richard feel in better spirits than he had been all day.

  After dinner they sat round talking and though once or twice Richard looked at the clock, hoping there would be a chance of seeing Wanda, he knew as the hours ticked by that such hopes were fruitless.

  He was in process of stifling a yawn when at length the Empress rose to her feet.

  “We must thank you again for a very pleasant evening,” she said graciously to the Ambassador.

  Count Razumovsky bent over her hand.

  At that moment there was a sudden shout outside the door. There was another cry and everyone stiffened as the door of the salon was thrown open.

  “Fire! Fire! The Palace is on fire!”

  A servant stood there, his gold-laced uniform disarranged, one side of his face blackened and dirty.

  “We must get the ladies outside,” Richard said quickly.

  He offered the Empress his arm as he spoke, forgetting all precedence, taking command naturally without for a moment thinking that, as a quite unimportant guest at the Palace, it was presumption on his part.

  As he hurried down the marble stairs with the Empress at his side, he realised from the clouds of smoke belching into the hall and the crackle of flames in the distance that the fire had already got a firm hold of the ground floor.

  Having taken the Empress and the ladies who accompanied her out into the garden, Richard ran back to the Palace to see who else was to be rescued.

  The secretaries, servants and guests were already pouring out of the building from a dozen different doors and the Count was giving instructions to his staff to try to save some of the art treasures and the furniture before the flames reached them.

  At the moment Richard was more concerned with animate than inanimate objects, however valuable.