A Hazard of Hearts Read online

  But with wakefulness she could no longer forget and she reached out her hand to pull the silken bell rope that hung beside her bed, groaning again as the movement jarred her head into a fresh agony of pain.

  The door opened a few seconds later and Martha came in. She began to pull back the curtains, but a hoarse voice from the bed commanded her,

  “Let not the light shine on my face, fool. I could not endure it this morning.”

  Martha looked towards the Marchioness and snorted.

  She knew that tone only too well and there was no need for her actually to see the laudanum bottle standing on the dressing table, she was so certain that it would be there.

  She drew the curtains of the windows furthest away from the bed, but left the others closed, then she picked up the silver dress which lay in tipsy untidiness half on a chair, half on the floor and collected the scattered undergarments that were like little islands of frippery on the wide expanse of blue carpet.

  The Marchioness’s jewels were thrown in a tangle on the dressing table as though she had taken them off in great haste. There was a stocking on the hearthrug, one shoe under a stool and the other at the foot of the bed.

  Martha sniffed again and furiously a voice from the bed said,

  “How much longer am I to wait for brandy, you fool? You know ’tis what I need.”

  Martha’s thin lips tightened, but she said nothing and went to the door. A moment later, as if he had been just outside and awaiting the summons, the black boy entered with his silver salver bearing a decanter of wine. The Marchioness, lifting herself on her pillows, groaned audibly and raised her hand to her forehead as if to support her head.

  Martha hurried to her side with a bed jacket of velvet and swansdown and set lace pillows behind her.

  “I feel cursed ill this morning,” the Marchioness muttered.

  “Is your Ladyship wise to take more brandy?” Martha asked.

  “More?” the Marchioness snapped. “You think I was foxed last night, woman, but you are mistaken. ’Twas not strong wine that made me turn to the laudanum bottle, I assure you.”

  Martha said nothing, but looked unconvinced. It was usual, when the Marchioness had taken too much to drink for her to swallow a sleeping draught when she retired.

  The Marchioness reached out her hand for the glass of brandy and sipped it and then she set it down again.

  “Faugh, but it makes me feel sick,” she said. “Fetch me a small enamel box that stands in the top drawer of my dressing table, the one I have always forbidden you to touch.”

  Martha moved across the room to find it. She pulled open the drawer and, carrying the snuffbox gingerly in her fingers as if it was something that she was not anxious to come into contact with, she brought it to her Mistress.

  The Marchioness opened the box with hands that trembled. Inside was a smooth white powder. She looked at it for a moment and then, taking a pinch in her finger and thumb as if she was taking snuff, she applied it to her left nostril. She sniffed once, then twice and repeated the action. Breathing shallowly she lay back against her pillows with her eyes closed.

  A moment or two later she took a deep breath and looked around her. Already she seemed better, her eyes were no longer partially closed, heavy and lustreless, but brighter, the pupils beginning to dilate. A faint colour seemed to be creeping into her white cheeks and into her pale lips.

  Martha held out her hand.

  “Shall I put the box back, my Lady?”

  “No, let it be,” the Marchioness snapped. “I may need it again.”

  “No, my Lady! No!”

  The Marchioness stared at her.

  “You heard what I said, woman, leave it where it is.”

  Martha went away and there was a look of consternation in her face.

  The Marchioness smiled to herself. A delicious feeling of well-being was creeping over her, dispelling the heaviness and depression of the sleeping draught.

  She could feel life seeping through to her brain and she could feel energy and a sense of power coursing through her blood, reviving and revivifying her. She was better. Nay, more than that, she was well.

  She put out her hand again, took the glass of brandy and drank it off. Then she gave a little laugh. Now she was herself again. Thank God that the powder was hers to use when she wished. She thought of the man who had given it to her.

  He was a Russian, a Prince of the Royal blood, and he had made love to her for one ecstatic and entrancing summer when he was on a visit to England. They had loved each other madly and with a recklessness that even at times threatened to sap their strength.

  It was then that he told her of a magical powder that could be used when the body failed to keep pace with the desires of the brain.

  “Give me some, give me some,” Harriet had said greedily and amused at her insistence he had initiated her into the art of sniffing a very little of what he called jokingly ‘the snuff of passion’. It took her a long time to persuade him to give her some into her own keeping.

  “’Tis dangerous for those who like you, my beloved, are reckless and impetuous,” he said, “and it should be used with the greatest care and only very occasionally.”

  “I understand,” Harriet whispered. “It should be kept for moments such as this.”

  She had flung back her head and her flaming red hair, unbound, had fallen over her neck and shoulders. He bent forward to press a kiss at the base of her white throat.

  “For moments such as this, my beautiful love,” he echoed softly.

  Later they had spoken of it again and he had repeated his warning.

  “The powder is mixed by a very learned apothecary in the Court of the Czar. There are very few people to whom he will entrust even a tenth of an ounce because it is so potent and an overdose, a misjudgement in sniffing the powder, will result not in renewed strength but in madness. Yes, madness, Harriet. I cannot warn you too strongly. If you take it, you must be exceeding careful. It intensifies everything you feel. If you love and you sniff the powder, then you will love with an ardency that surpasses the highest flights of imagination. If you hate and you take the powder, then you will hate equally fiercely.”

  “I shall take it for love,” Harriet said softly.

  He had looked down at her as she lay there, the diaphanous material that she wore barely covering her perfect figure. He had looked at her eyes half-closed with the languor of love, her crimson lips parted as if in invitation and then with a smile on his lips he held out the box of powder that he had spoken about.

  For years Harriet had kept her promise. She had used the powder sparingly only when the occasion was romantic enough to justify her need of it. There was so much superstition within her that it was in things like this that she could be utterly punctilious about while she was careless over other more solemn promises.

  But this morning, she told herself, there was every justification for her using the powder. Never in her memory had she felt so ill and never had she needed her wits more about her. She had to think, it was imperative that she should do so.

  This was not a moment to be squeamish about anything that would clear her mind. She needed the full use of all her senses.

  “Will your Ladyship take a little something to eat?”

  Harriet looked from the shadows of the bed at Martha and considered the question.

  “Maybe it would be wise,” she said. “What is the hour?”

  “’Tis near noon, my Lady.”

  “Then order me something tasty, not too much. Tell the chef he must tempt my appetite.”

  “Very good, my Lady. And to drink?”

  “A bottle of champagne and bring it here to me swiftly.”

  Martha made one of her sounds denoting disapproval, but the Marchioness took no notice of her. She slumped back against the pillows, not even bothering to pick up the hand mirror that Martha had put beside her and in which she usually regarded her face first thing in the morning. There was no time to waste in tit
ivating.

  She had to think and to think quickly.

  It was fortunate that at this moment her brain had never been clearer and what was better still, the powder had dispersed that sickening sense of fear, a fear that had driven her last night when she had come to her room to seek consolation from the bottle of laudanum.

  And yet who should blame her? For Justin would have inspired fear in anyone, however courageous and however stalwart.

  The Marchioness reconstructed the events of the night before.

  Slowly what had occurred passed before her mind in procession and she examined every detail and every aspect, seeking arduously and with a sharper precision than she had ever employed before for some loophole, some escape or if not that, for some flaw in the indictment against her.

  She had been so certain that her plan would succeed. In fact, as she had watched Serena hurry from the drawing room after the lackey had spoken to her, she had felt a sudden elation and excitement as though the ten thousand guineas that Harry Wrotham had promised her were already within her grasp.

  She had been playing écarté with a rich and rather stupid young man, who had been brought to Mandrake by the Countess of Forthampton. It was the first time for weeks that the Marchioness had found herself winning, not small sums, but large ones. Two hundred guineas, four hundred and then a thousand.

  She had been so excited that it was impossible for her to conceal her satisfaction.

  ‘The stars have changed in their course,’ she said to herself. ‘I knew that I must be successful tonight and now everything will go right.’

  Ten minutes later she saw the black boy come back to his position in the corner of the room. She looked across at him and he nodded his head.

  Triumphantly she staked again and hardly noticed that she lost.

  “You are in amazing good looks tonight, dear Harriet,” a beau at her elbow remarked.

  She laughed up at him, raising her glass to toast him with sparkling eyes.

  It was not difficult in such a mood to gather admirers around her. The Marchioness found herself being scintillatingly witty and knowing once again that admiration which was even more heady than an excess of wine. She lost another five hundred guineas and rose from the table with an exclamation.

  “Faugh, but my heart is not in the game tonight.”

  “Come and talk to me instead,” an old admirer suggested and laughingly acquiescent she linked her arm in his and allowed him to draw her aside into a secluded alcove where he made somewhat ponderous love to her.

  But she was too restless to remain with any one person for long and soon she was amongst the gay crowd again, darting from table to table and from game to game, making a bid here, laying a stake there, swift, excited and like something mercurial in her silver dress and glittering gems.

  The hours passed, but the Marchioness was untiring. She drank a great deal, but the wine itself had no effect on her. Her inner excitement was far more potent and intoxicating and then, while she was surrounded by a group of men amused by her jokes and vying with each other in paying her extravagant compliments, Justin crossed the room and stood at her side.

  Before he spoke, the Marchioness was aware that something was wrong. Even before he opened his lips she felt as though a heavy hand, cold and commanding, was laid upon her.

  She looked up into her son’s face and what she saw there made her heart throb with a frightened, apprehensive violence.

  “I wish to speak with you, Mother,” he said quietly. “Would you oblige me by coming with me to the library?”

  The Marchioness was sophisticated enough not to reveal her feelings.

  “La, Justin,” she said, “what a time of night to choose to approach me! Is the house on fire? Are there thieves about? ’Tis obvious that you are a bearer of ill tidings.”

  “Fie on you, Vulcan,” someone said, “for taking your mother from us at this moment. I declare that she has never been in better spirits. She has set us all laughing.”

  “I regret my inopportuneness, gentlemen,” Lord Vulcan said, but there was a note of cold determination in his voice that Harriet knew only too well meant that he would have his way and that she must accompany him whether she willed it or not.

  “I will go quietly to the guillotine,” she said jestingly and, taking Justin’s arm, she allowed him to lead her from the drawing room, across the hall and down the passage that led to the big library.

  The moment they were out of earshot of her guests, the Marchioness looked up into his face anxiously.

  “What is it, Justin?” she asked and now there was a note of irritability in her voice. “Could not that which you have to impart to me have waited until the morning?”

  He did not answer her, neither did he quicken his pace. They moved slowly across the marble hall and then, as he opened the library door so that she might precede him into the room, the Marchioness felt a sudden spasm of fear.

  What could this be about? Had Padlett brought the guinea boat through the secret channel without her instructions? Had Justin discovered the murder of the drunken smuggler? Or worse still, had – no, she hardly dared to suggest even to herself that her plan with Harry Wrotham had gone astray.

  The library was a vast gloomy room, which the Marchioness had never liked. She hated books. They had in her married life stood for something infinitely boring. The library walls lined with them from floor to ceiling gave her, as she phrased it to herself, “a sense of the creeps”.

  It had been her husband’s favourite room and now Justin had taken it for his own. All his work for the estate was transacted there and she seldom if ever crossed the threshold, preferring when she desired her son’s presence to send for him to come to her own newly decorated and colourful apartments in the recently built parts of the house.

  The fire was not lit in the grate and the Marchioness shivered.

  “’Tis odiously cold in here,” she said. “Hurry, Justin, with what you wish to impart, for I desire to return to my guests.”

  Lord Vulcan closed the heavy door behind him and it seemed to the Marchioness that there was something ominous in the very deliberation with which he saw that it was secure before he walked across the room to the hearth. There he faced her.

  Despite her apprehension she could not help but admire him for his looks and his handsome presence. He was so big, so strong, and the Marchioness had always admired strength in a man.

  She was well aware that Justin’s great strength could be put to good use. She had seen him tame and train a wild horse when no one else would go near it and the grooms had shrunk away in terror.

  She had seen him too knock out two footpads who had held up her sedan chair one night in the darkness of Berkeley Square and on another occasion she had seen him rescue three women from drowning when their pleasure boat overturned in the sea.

  He had brought them safely to the shore while a company of men had stood by helplessly shouting instructions and making no effort to effect a rescue. Yes, Justin was strong and he was outstandingly handsome as well for all his face now was set sternly and there was a steely quality about his eyes, which made her afraid.

  Even as she was conscious of her fear she chided herself for it. After all he was her son, the little boy who had once adored her, who had followed her about because, as he had said,

  “You are so beautiful, Mother. The angels must be all like you.”

  She had laughed at the remark and had made much of it, repeating it at dinner parties and recounting it even to the Queen herself. But she had little use for a child around her in those days. Justin had been assigned to the care of Nannies and Tutors. She believed that he spent long hours with his father, but she never made it her business to enquire closely into how he passed the time.

  Then, as he grew older, a slim attractive boy, it had been amusing to know that he adored her, still thought that she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. She would call him to her and pat his cheek, delighting in the admirati
on they aroused as mother and son.

  But it was very different if Justin wanted to see her when she was engaged with a lover. Then she would send him a curt message telling him that he must amuse himself as she was otherwise engaged. It was unfortunate that he discovered the truth about those times when she was not available.

  She would never forget how angry he was, that young idealistic Justin who had set her on a pedestal of his own making. He had been both angry and hurt, but it had not worried her unduly.

  Children, she had thought, were part of oneself. They must accept their parents as they were and not wish them to live up to some storybook standard that was obviously incompatible with real life. A smile and a few kind words, an occasional moment of tenderness, why should a son ask more of his mother?

  Harriet truly believed that she had treated Justin well. She was also equally sure that she could hold him and do what she wished with him. He loved her. She was as certain of that as she was of the admiration she could command from any man who looked long and deeply into her eyes.

  Justin was hers, a possession as personal and as intrinsically a part of herself as were her jewels, her diamonds or the many other attributes that fêted her vanity.

  Dear Justin. She was fond of him so long as he did not interfere with her wishes, so long as he was co-operative and not obstructive in her little world where she reigned supreme.

  As he crossed the room towards her now, she smiled. She was thinking how much she had done for Mandrake and how proud Justin should be of his mother.

  “Well?” she questioned. “Say what you have to say to me and be swift about it. I have no desire to catch my death of cold in this gloomy mausoleum when there is light and laughter elsewhere.”

  “I wish you to tell me the truth,” Justin said, “the exact truth, for I will be content with none other, about your arrangements with Lord Wrotham to abduct Serena.”

  The Marchioness gave a little cry of astonishment. It was admirably acted and would have deceived nine people out of ten.

  “Heavens above, Justin, but what are you talking about? That Harry Wrotham should abduct Serena? I declare ’tis an amusing hum, but ’tis the first I have heard of it.”