Seek the Stars Read online

  She felt sometimes, as she had with Lord Granton, that he was rather like a father to her and at other times a rather strict schoolmaster.

  Then she began to assert herself and she soon had very different ideas of what interested her and what she desired from her life.

  She was, however, in no hurry.

  The Marquis after a long honeymoon had come back to an endless series of official duties, which occupied him every day when he was in London.

  In the country he was also busy with his estates.

  Again, as if history was repeating itself, Daphne found herself alone.

  She was therefore in a position to choose her own interests, her own amusements and, more importantly, her own friends.

  These included men, men whom she entertained and who she danced with and flirted with.

  Because she was intelligent, she was very careful not to neglect her husband in any way.

  When she finally took her first lover, she was terrified.

  She had been concerned about her reputation when she was widowed and now she was frightened in case the Marquis should somehow suspect that she was being unfaithful to him.

  The Marquis was often very tired in the evening as he was so busy during the day that, as long as he could see his wife at the end of the dining table, he was quite happy.

  He did not realise that she was coming into bloom like a rose and, as a woman rather than a girl, she now required more attention.

  She was, moreover, still terrified of doing anything that could damage her name or reputation socially.

  Daphne, therefore, had amorous affairs with unimportant young men who remained unnoticed by the gossips.

  Only occasionally was the Marquis slightly jealous of her and she would laugh at his suspicions.

  “I want only you to admire me, my darling,” she would then say. “But if other men do so, then that is indeed a compliment to you.”

  She revelled in becoming ‘a public beauty’ and she was delighted by the admiration that she evoked and the publicity she received in the newspapers and magazines despite her husband’s strictures.

  Then she met the Earl.

  For the first time in her life Daphne fell in love.

  And the Earl of Kensall turned out to be a very much more ardent lover than any man she had known in her life.

  He was what she had always craved for, a conqueror and she had secretly despised the men who pleaded for her favours.

  The Earl, like ‘a Monarch of all he surveyed,’ swept her off her feet. He made her surrender to him and took it for granted that he would capture her heart.

  He assumed as if by right that she would fall wildly and inescapably in love with him.

  He gave her new sensations that she had never known before and, when he left her, she counted the hours until she could see him again.

  *

  Now when he came into the study where she was waiting for him, she was aware that he was very angry.

  He was angry that she should have done anything so indiscreet as to call on him so early in the day.

  The Earl closed the door firmly behind him.

  Then he said in a sharp voice,

  “Daphne! What are you doing here?”

  “I had to – come! I had to – see you, Norwin,” she cried. “Something terrible – ghastly and devastating – has happened!”

  There was no doubt that she was feeling agitated and the Earl thought that to reveal her problems was a mistake.

  He had no wish for the servants to talk and he fondly believed that his affaires de coeur, and there were a great number of them, were not of interest to anyone in the servants’ hall.

  He walked slowly towards the Marchioness.

  He appeared not to notice that she put out her ungloved hands towards him.

  “What has happened?” he demanded. “You know as well as I do that it is a dreadful mistake for you to call on me at this hour.”

  “I know, I know,” Daphne admitted. “But I had to see you and this was the – only way I could do so. Arthur thinks I am in Church.”

  The Earl looked surprised.

  “Arthur?” he repeated. “Are you saying he has returned?”

  “He came back – unexpectedly last night,” the Marchioness replied. “As you know, I thought he would be away for – another week in Paris, but he – returned because he has had me – watched.”

  The Earl was startled.

  There was silence before he said in a voice that he found hard to recognise as his own,

  “Did you say – he has had you watched?”

  “Y-yes,” Daphne answered with a little sob. “He set a detective on me before he went off to France and, when he received the man’s report, he came back without telling anybody what he was doing.”

  The Earl thought that it was indeed fortunate that he had not visited Daphne last night as he might well have done.

  He had attended his Regimental dinner in the Officer’s Mess in Whitehall and, when it was over, it was very late and he was tired.

  He had been with her the night before and the night before that.

  Almost as if she followed his thoughts, Daphne said,

  “I was asleep in bed and, of course, alone when Arthur came in. He raged at me, telling me that he had been sent a detective’s report of all my movements since he had left England for France.”

  The Earl drew in his breath.

  He knew that, if this was true, he was heavily involved in what could turn out to be an appalling scandal.

  Daphne sank down on the sofa and put her hands up to her eyes.

  “He read out the report which included all the times when you came to the house and when – you left.”

  The Earl thought that he had been extremely stupid and he should have realised that there was a man watching him when he left and on some occasions this had been after dawn had broken.

  Before he could ask the question, Daphne said in a broken voice,

  “Arthur – says he intends to – divorce me!”

  “I don’t believe it!” the Earl exclaimed.

  “He says – that is what he – intends to do – and you know how obstinate he is and how it is – impossible to ever make him – change his mind.”

  “But you tried to explain – for God’s sake, say you tried!” the Earl insisted.

  As he spoke, he thought with horror of the position that he was now in.

  A suit for divorce, which was very difficult to obtain, would have to go through the House of Lords and every word of the action would be published fully in the newspapers.

  What was more, it meant, before the Marquis obtained his divorce, that there would be many months of negotiations between the lawyers.

  If the Marquis was successful in the case, as undoubtedly he would be, he, the Earl, as a gentleman, would have to ask Daphne to be his wife.

  They would then be expected to go abroad and it would be at least five years before it would be possible for them to return to England.

  Even then, while he would be more or less accepted in the men’s Society, Daphne would be ostracised for the rest of her life. And no social hostess would ever permit her to cross her threshold.

  Then they would be confined to knowing only the ‘ragtag and bobtail,’ people like themselves, who had caused an unforgivable scandal, or people who were prepared to go anywhere and know anyone for a free drink.

  To the Earl it seemed as if he was facing a hell on earth and thought that he would rather die than spend the rest of his life living like that.

  “Surely you argued with him?” he quizzed her at length and his voice seemed to come from a long distance away.

  “I not only – argued with him,” Daphne replied, “I told him it was – not true.”

  “Did you expect him to believe that?”

  “I told him that, when you came to the house it was – not to see me but Sadira.”

  The Earl stared at her in puzzlement and for a moment he could
not think what she meant.

  Then he remembered that the Marquis had a daughter by his previous marriage and he had seen her once disappearing down the end of a corridor.

  Now that he thought about it, he might have met her at an ‘at home’ that her stepmother had given in her house. It was early in their acquaintance, when he was still no more than curious about Daphne.

  He had no memory now of what the girl had looked like or even the colour of her hair.

  “I don’t think he is any more likely to believe that,” he muttered.

  “I told him,” Daphne explained, “that – now he had come home you would be calling on him to ask for Sadira’s hand – in marriage.”

  As she said the words, they seemed to tremble on her lips.

  “Marry her?” he asserted sharply. “How can I marry a girl I have never spoken to or even met?”

  “But you have to – do you not see? You – have to!” Daphne almost shouted desperately. “And that is what I have come to – tell you. I don’t think Arthur really believes – you are interested – in Sadira, but however much he may threaten me with – a divorce – he will not want a Society – scandal.”

  “I am sure – ” the Earl began.

  “Listen, you must listen!” Daphne interrupted him urgently. “He will accept you as his son-in-law simply because you are so important – and that is the – only way we can save – ourselves.”

  She threw out her hands as she went nervously on,

  “You know what Arthur is like – or perhaps you don’t. He is above all extremely proud. He cannot bear to think that – you have made a fool of him.”

  She paused a moment and then continued,

  “The only way we can save ourselves is for you to marry Sadira and Arthur can save his own face at the – same time.”

  The Earl stared at Daphne as if he could not believe what she was saying.

  He tried to protest that it was quite impossible and that the whole idea was seriously ridiculous, yet he found that the words would not leave his lips.

  He could see vaguely, like the light at the end of a very dark tunnel, that this might just possibly be the only way out.

  It would be, however, at a cost to himself that was utterly and completely intolerable.

  He walked across the room to stand at the window and he gazed out with unseeing eyes at the sunshine that bathed the garden.

  ‘There must be some other way,” he insisted at last.

  “No! There is none! I lay awake the rest of the night after Arthur had raged at me until three o’clock. He called me appalling names, which is something that – he has never done before.”

  She drew in her breath before she went on,

  “You must see, Norwin, that it has been a terrible shock to him. He is old – but he likes to think of himself as young. He has sometimes been a little jealous, but has always believed that I was – absolutely and completely faithful to him.”

  Without turning round the Earl replied,

  “You have been extremely clever in the past. Surely you can do something now?”

  “I have done something and that is what I came here to tell you,” Daphne answered, “When he returned last night, he was determined to throw me out of the house and start divorce proceedings against me and citing you as the co-respondent.”

  She gave a deep sigh before she went on in a more practical tone,

  “I pleaded and begged him – to believe me! I swore on the Bible and on my mother’s head that I was telling him the truth.”

  She looked at him and then carried on,

  “I said it was Sadira who you were interested in and it was Sadira you were courting. You stopped at the house telling me how much in love you were with her until the early hours – of the morning.”

  “And he believed you?” the Earl asked sarcastically.

  “He wants to believe me, but he will permit himself to be sure that I am unblemished and still faithful to him only if you will do what I have said you will and that is to call on him this morning to ask permission to marry his daughter.”

  “And if I refuse?” the Earl asked.

  “Then, because Arthur is so obstinate, I know that he will start divorce proceedings immediately, as he had threatened to do so fiercely last night.”

  She rose from the sofa and walked across the room to put her hand on the Earl’s arm.

  “Please, please, I beg of you – save us both,” she pleaded. “I love you and it would be Heaven to be with you always – but you know as well as I do that the humiliation and misery would kill us.”

  Her fingers tightened on his arm and she asked,

  “How can I be – sneered at and – spurned by the women who have – been my friends?”

  The Earl did not reply and she battled on,

  “How can I be deprived of my position as Lady of the Bedchamber to – Her Majesty the Queen?”

  She gave a little sob before she added,

  “How could we – go abroad to live in some sleazy French town? We should hate it there – because of what we would be missing in England.”

  The Earl recognised that this was certainly true.

  He was well aware that that it was what a divorce would entail and he was thinking too of how much it would hurt his family.

  If the Marquis was proud, so were the Kensalls.

  Every Earl had played his part in the magnificent history of England and there had, of course, been some spendthrifts, some incompetent Statesmen and some extremely tiresome characters.

  But there had never yet been a Society scandal in the family.

  Certainly not to the point where the reigning Earl had been dragged through the Divorce Courts.

  Nor, for that matter, had a Kensall been executed in the Tower of London.

  To suffer execution at the Tower, the Earl thought, might indeed be preferable to facing the rest of his life with Daphne in exile away from everything he possessed and the life that he enjoyed.

  There was a poignant silence until Daphne wailed,

  “I must go at once. I managed to get here only by pretending that I wished to attend a Service in the Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street. ”

  “Alone?” the Earl queried.

  “No, of course not. My maid came with me, she is a fervent Methodist and disapproves of what she looks on as Popish ritual. So she sits on a chair at the entrance and will not enter the Chapel itself.”

  She looked at the Earl to see if he was listening to her.

  “I slipped out by a side door and, as I will return by the same route, my maid will not be aware that I have visited you.”

  “I sincerely hope not!” the Earl exclaimed. “If this information was passed on to the Marquis, it would make things even worse than they are already.”

  Daphne wiped her tears from her eyes.

  “Only you can save us both,” she said. “I am sure that Arthur will be at home all the morning, but don’t leave it too long or he may go to his Solicitors. Then he will refuse to see you and it will be too late.”

  The Earl felt as if he was dreaming and all of this could not in any way be true.

  “And what about your stepdaughter?” he managed to ask. “Supposing she knows that I have been with you and tells her father that she has never even met me?”

  “You can leave this to me,” Daphne assured him. “All you have to do is to convince Arthur that you wish to marry his daughter.”

  As she spoke, Daphne glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

  “I must go!” she exclaimed. “You had better let me out through the garden entrance into the Mews. It would be quicker than going out by the front door.”

  The Earl did not argue.

  He merely opened the French window as Daphne pulled her veil back over her face.

  Without speaking they walked quickly through the garden to where there was a door behind a clump of rhododendrons.

  It could be opened without a key only from the inside.
r />   The Earl opened it.

  As he did so, Daphne looked up at him.

  “I am so sorry, Norwin, that this has happened, but we have to save ourselves and this is the only way.”

  She did not wait for an answer, but turned from him and walked away.

  The Earl could hear her footsteps as she ran down the cobbled surface of the Mews.

  It was only a short distance to the Grosvenor Chapel and he thought that with any luck the Service would not be over before she arrived there.

  As he shut the garden door and returned to his study, he wondered if he had imagined what he had just heard.

  It could not be true! This could not really be happening to him!

  But it had happened and he was committed because there was no other way out.

  He had to ask the Marquis for his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  He did not even know what the girl looked like.

  It was either that or what to him would be condemnation to an intolerable and unbearable existence.

  Then, as he looked up at the sky, he said fervently as so many other men had before him,

  ‘How in the Devil’s name did I get myself into this horrendous mess?’

  chapter two

  The Marchioness of Langbourne slipped into the Grosvenor Chapel and found that the Service was just finishing.

  The congregation was moving towards the West door and she joined them and then saw her lady’s maid waiting in the porch.

  Without speaking she started walking as quickly as she could to Langbourne House in Park Street.

  As she went in through the front door, the hands on the grandfather clock pointed to nine o’clock.

  She had given orders before she went out that, since his Lordship was tired after his journey home from Paris, he was not to be called until nine o’clock with his breakfast.

  She ran up the stairs and went to her stepdaughter’s bedroom at the end of the corridor.

  She entered the room without knocking and Sadira was standing at the window dressed in her riding habit.

  She turned round as her stepmother entered and asked,

  “Why was I told not to leave my room until you had spoken to me? I hear that Papa is back from France and I want to see him.”

  “Your father was very tired last night,” the Marchioness replied, “and he has only just been called.”