Lovers in Lisbon Read online

  It was then that she became aware that a man had pulled in his horse behind her on the sands.

  She turned round and thought at once that he must be an apparition from another world.

  No human man could look so exciting, so majestic or so overwhelmingly handsome.

  She stared at him and for some unknown reason she had been unable to look away.

  The man rode his horse a little nearer to her so that he could ask in his deep compelling voice that was somehow magnetic,

  “Please tell me what is your name?”

  “Inès.”

  “A very pretty name for a very lovely person!”

  She had blushed like a pretty rose in the gardens.

  She was suddenly aware of her windswept hair, her bare feet and that she was holding her skirts with one hand so that they should not get wet.

  “I was playing with my dog,” she said unnecessarily.

  “So I see and he is surely very lucky in his choice of a Mistress.”

  That was the beginning.

  Inès had next walked with him over the sand and they had sat talking on a grass-covered hillock.

  The Marques had asked her about herself and she told him that her parents were away because her father was seeing a firm in Oporto. He wanted to design the new buildings that they were erecting in the centre of the town.

  “Your father is an architect?” the Marques questioned.

  “He has designed several buildings in Lisbon and Oporto, but at the moment things are difficult, as I expect you would know. People do have not the money for the sort of buildings that my Papa likes creating.”

  The Marques had seemed interested in her father’s expertise, at least she thought so.

  Then they talked about themselves.

  Somehow, although she knew that it was something she should not do, she agreed to dine with him later that evening.

  It was a candlelit meal of sheer enchantment.

  When the Marques drove her home in his luxurious carriage, he kissed her.

  She had known incredibly there and then that she was very much in love with the most fascinating and enthralling man she had ever imagined.

  Fascinating was the right word, the Duchesse had thought to herself.

  No one, unless they were made of stone, could have resisted Juan.

  “We are here, madame, Felicita said a little nervously.

  She broke a silence that had continued for what seemed a long time.

  “Yes, of course,” the Duchesse nodded. “Now, you go and fetch the work you promised to show me. I will wait for you.”

  Felicita smiled and it made her look even lovelier than she had before.

  “I am half-afraid madame, that you will – vanish like – Cinderella’s coach and her – Fairy Godmother!”

  “I promise I will not,” the Duchesse replied rather sternly.

  The footman opened the carriage door and Felicita seemed to fly out of it almost as if she had wings.

  The Duchesse could sense her excitement as she ran up the narrow stairs and the sound of her footsteps came vibrating back through the open door.

  Felicita obviously felt as she had felt when she had run home the afternoon when she had met the Marques.

  She turned everything out in her bedroom to find a gown that she would look lovely in for him when they dined.

  ‘Juan! Juan! Why did this girl, like Lisbon itself, bring you back quite so vividly?’ she murmured to herself.

  It was almost as if he was right sitting beside her.

  Then she remembered the agony, five years later, when he had told her that he was to be married.

  She recalled how she had woken that morning, thrilled and excited because today he was returning from England.

  He had gone to attend the Race Meting at Royal Ascot and he had entered his best and most superb horse for the Gold Cup.

  She had prayed, as he had asked her to do, that his glorious stallion would win the most prestigious race of the English Classics.

  She had also prayed that he would not be away for very long and, when he had returned, they would be as happy as they had been before he left.

  She was waiting for him in the attractive house he had bought for her on the outskirts of Estoril. He had thought that the house near The Palace was just too small for the times when he wished to stay with her.

  Moreover they had both found it a considerable inconvenience when she had to move in and out from The Palace when he was obliged to entertain a constant stream of visitors.

  Instead she now had a comparatively large and comfortable house with four servants to wait on her.

  Her garden was almost as delightful as the one at The Palace.

  Before Juan had taken her away from her home, he had been most generous to her father.

  He employed him as a special architect on his several estates in Portugal.

  Therefore at first her parents had to close their eyes to just what was happening to their daughter.

  They had been shocked and horrified when Inès had been determined to leave them. And yet there was nothing they could do but accept the inevitable.

  Her mother had cried. At the same time Inès had been aware that they were impressed and even overawed by the Marques.

  They did not feel that it was such a terrible disaster as they would have done had it been any other man.

  While she lived with the Marques ‘in sin’, to her he had always been her husband and the man she belonged to.

  That he was returning home made her feel as excited as she had been the very first time he had become her lover.

  ‘Tonight,’ she had told herself as she dressed, ‘I shall be in his arms and I shall tell him how much I love him and how empty the days have been whilst we were apart.’

  ‘I love him!’ she had said every day to the sunshine and the waves beating on the shore.

  “I love him!” she had exclaimed as she walked in the garden.

  She picked roses that would scent the drawing room and their bedroom.

  She so wanted everything to be beautiful as a perfect background for their love.

  He had returned, as she had expected, at about six o’clock in the afternoon.

  When he came in through the drawing room door, she stood still for a moment.

  She was staring at him intently because he was so handsome and because she loved him so overwhelmingly.

  Then she flew into his arms quicker than she could move her feet.

  “Juan!”

  Her voice seemed strangled in her throat by her excitement and the rapid pounding in her heart.

  His arms went round her, but, as he kissed her, she just knew that something was wrong.

  It was not that his lips did not give her the ecstasy which she always experienced when he kissed her.

  It was just that she knew the fiery insistence that she was so familiar with was no longer there.

  “Darling, you are back!” she cried.

  It was a paean of thankfulness because she felt that she had waited for too long without him.

  But, as she looked up at his eyes, she asked him and her voice was frightened,

  “W-what – is wrong?”

  He took his arms from her and walked towards the mantelpiece.

  He stood with his back to the fireplace in a position that she knew all so well.

  “Why should there be anything wrong?” he asked.

  “There – is! I know there is,” Inès had insisted. “Oh, darling, what has – happened while you have been away?”

  There was a silence, a silence in which she felt that she could hear her own heart beating.

  “I had not intended to talk about it tonight,” the Marques replied after a long silence.

  “Talk about – what?”

  “But I suppose,” he went on, as if she had not spoken, “because we have been so close to each other for so long, it would be impossible for either of us to pretend.”

  Inès had drawn
in her breath.

  “I – I don’t – know what you are – saying.”

  The Marques had smiled, but she felt that it was a forced smile as he said in a different tone of voice,

  “Let’s talk about you. What have you been doing while I have been away?”

  “I have been – thinking of you all the time and now I – want you to tell me what has – happened to make you – different.”

  “What do you mean by ‘different’?”

  “You know exactly – what I – mean! Oh, Juan, how can you – hide anything from – me – what is it?”

  She remembered then how he had drawn in his breath and it was almost as if he squared his shoulders before he said,

  “It is because we have been so incredibly close to each other for so long that I must tell you the truth. I could not bear it that you should hear it from anybody else.”

  “The – truth about – what?”

  Inès had felt as if her voice came from a long way away. It was almost as if they were already separated and she was talking to him from another country or even from yet another Universe.

  “I am to be married!”

  Five words and her whole world was instantly shattered and it collapsed in ruins around her.

  Just five words and they destroyed her –

  “I have brought them, madame!”

  It was the eager little voice of Felicita.

  The Duchesse woke from her daydream to see that the child had climbed back into the carriage and was once again sitting opposite her.

  On her lap there was a chemise of white satin. It was exquisitely appliquéd with a white lace that was as delicate as the blossom of the trees. The other garment was a petticoat with a lace inset from hem to knee.

  The Duchesse was well aware that they would both have cost an astronomical amount in Paris.

  She smiled.

  “You know without my telling you, Felicita, that you are a brilliant needlewoman. I will buy not only these garments from you but anything else you will make for me.”

  Felicita gave a little cry of sheer joy and, clasping her hands together, enthused,

  “Thank you – thank you – madame. How can I tell – you how – grateful I am?”

  She drew in her breath and then she said in a rapt little voice,

  “I want to go down on – my knees and say my – prayers to you as if you are a – Saint!”

  She gave a little sob and went on,

  “Perhaps that is what – you are and Mama has – sent you when I was so – desperate that I thought I must – throw myself into – the sea.”

  “How can you think of anything so wicked when you are so beautiful?”

  The Duchesse did not hear her own voice say the words.

  It was the voice of the man who had saved her, the man she owed her life to.

  “I wish I was beautiful – as beautiful as you,” Felicita was saying.

  “I am not beautiful now,” the Duchesse replied, “but I was when I was your age.”

  Yes, she had been so beautiful and not only when she had turned eighteen. She was even more beautiful when she was twenty-three because she had blossomed like a rose.

  It was not only Juan who had told her that, it had pleased him that he was envied while she wanted no one’s love but his.

  “The Prince told me that you were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen,” Juan had said one night when they were staying in Paris, “and I am sure, if I was not here, he would have tried to take you from me!”

  Inès had laughed.

  “No one could do that – no one! I am yours! Yours completely – and for all – Eternity!”

  Prophetic words – words that she often thought were written all over her heart.

  Perhaps it was the price one paid, she thought, for being beautiful, that she should love one man and one man alone.

  Then when he had left her she was without a heart.

  It would never beat again as it had for Juan. Sometimes she would think that she was no longer made of flesh and blood.

  She was like a picture on the wall or a statue carved of marble.

  She could smile, she could laugh, she could feel irritated and angry, but the ecstasy that Juan had aroused in her was missing.

  So too was the rapture that he had evoked with his kisses.

  Gone were the little flames that no other man could light, however hard he might try.

  Yet once, the Duchesse thought, she had looked like the girl sitting opposite her.

  Her whole body had pulsated with the emotions of life that came fundamentally from her heart.

  Without meaning to, simply because she was following her own thoughts, she asked,

  “Have you ever heard of the Marques de Oliveira Vasconles?”

  Felicita smiled.

  “Yes, of course, madame, everyone in Lisbon has not only heard of him but talk of him all the time. My landlady says he is the most handsome and the most exciting gentleman in the whole of Portugal.”

  “She knows him?” the Duchesse asked.

  “Her niece, who is a very pleasant girl, is a housemaid at the Palace da Azul.”

  The Duchesse could well understand then how everything that happened in The Palace was immediately relayed to the maid’s family and then to her relations.

  The Portuguese loved to talk, no one knew that better than she did herself.

  They made their aristocrats into heroes, just as in olden times they had worshipped their Kings and Queens.

  Because she had to know, she asked Felicita,

  “And what do they say about the present Marques?”

  “That he is handsome, dashing and many beautiful women are in love with him!”

  “He is not married?”

  “Oh, no, madame, not at the moment.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not at the moment’?”

  “He was married when he was still very young. It was an arranged marriage and it was a disaster. The Marques and his bride were both very unhappy.”

  “What happened?”

  “His wife, they say, against all his instructions, took out one of his most spirited horses, which was not fully broken in. And it threw her when taking a high fence and her neck was broken in the fall!”

  “And there were no children of – the marriage?”

  “No, madame, they had been married for only a few months and so, it was said, although perhaps it is untrue, that since they quarrelled so that The Palace rang with the sounds of their angry voices, the Marques was glad to be free of her.”

  “And he has never married again?”

  “No, madame. When the old Marques died, it is said that the whole family begged him to marry if only to have an heir, but he has always refused.”

  “Why does he do that?”

  “Because he enjoys himself so much with many ladies rather than one and also he is very proud.”

  “What has pride to do with it?” the Duchesse asked in surprise.

  “My landlady, who hears so much about him, says it is because he thinks no one is good enough for him. They say in the City that he has looked at all the young women of noble birth and says they are all too plain and too stupid to reign in his Palace.”

  There was a hint of laughter in Felicita’s voice and the Duchesse said,

  “I can see his difficulties.”

  She was thinking as she spoke of just how Juan had told her when he was to be married, almost apologetically,

  “I am engaged to the daughter of the Duke of Cumbria. Her mother was a Royal Princess and her blood is therefore the equal of mine. You must have been aware, Inès, that sooner or later I must have an heir to inherit my title and my possessions when I die.”

  “Her blood is the equal of mine – ”

  The Duchesse could hear his voice saying it.

  It made her realise for the first time that even though he had loved her, she could never be in his eyes anything but somebody inferior and somebody who could
not bear his name or his child.

  It was then, as she looked across the carriage at Felicita’s strange blue eyes, that an idea came to her.

  An idea of revenge for her lost heart.

  Chapter Two

  The Duchesse sat thinking in silence until she suddenly said,

  “I want you, Felicita, to go back now to your lodgings and have something to eat. I can see that that you have been starving yourself and that is not becoming.”

  Felicita blushed and responded,

  “It has – been very – difficult for me – madame.”

  “That I can well understand,” the Duchesse replied, “but now you are going to feel rich. I have a plan for you, which I will tell you about later. So do as I say and now go back into the house.”

  She then opened her handbag and then took out a large number of Portuguese escudos, which she pushed into Felicita’s hands.

  She stared at them incredulously.

  Then she exclaimed,

  “This is – too much, madame.”

  “It is for the beautiful embroidery you have done and also for the other things I expect you to do for me later.”

  “You know – I will do – anything,” Felicita insisted earnestly.

  “That is what I want you to say,” the Duchesse approved. “And because I want you to feel strong, well and look very lovely, when you do as I shall ask, you must now eat.”

  She recognised as she spoke that it was going to be difficult for her to eat a great deal since Felicita had obviously been hungry for some time.

  Next the Duchesse said,

  “Ask the woman you are lodging with to give you the best meal she has and, when I pick you up later this evening, bring all your clothes with you.”

  “Bring my – clothes?” Felicita exclaimed in astonishment.

  “I want you to stay with me,” the Duchesse replied, “and I think it is something you will enjoy. At the same time you will have to work very hard.”

  “Oh, madame – can it be – true?”

  The words came from Felicita in a broken little voice and her blue eyes filled with tears.

  The Duchesse smiled.

  “It is true and things will be very different for you in the future.”

  “I find it – hard to – believe,” Felicita replied. “I have been so – unhappy without – Papa and Mama and – so frightened because I am alone.”