The Magnificent Marquis Read online

  He was thinking as he drove away of the pathetic girl he had overheard crying out in her childlike voice as her vicious father tried to beat brutally her into submission.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Marquis drove for about three miles away from Lord Durham’s house.

  Then he turned off the road into a small wood and up a rough track running between the trees.

  He pulled the horses to a standstill, as they could go no further.

  He fixed his reins, climbed out and walked round to the back of his chaise.

  The fragment of blue ribbon he had noticed on his departure was still hanging out of the box that was there to hold luggage or extra rugs for cold weather.

  He pulled open the door and said quietly,

  “You can come out now.”

  A small frightened face looked up at him.

  He recognised that it was the face of someone very young yet exceedingly beautiful.

  She stared at him.

  Then she asked in a soft childlike voice,

  “How – did you know – I was here?”

  “Before I got into the driving seat, I saw a piece of your sash sticking out.”

  There was no reply.

  “It must be extremely uncomfortable in that box, I suggest you come and sit in the front of the chaise with me and tell me where you want to go.”

  She looked at him and her eyes searched his face as if to ask if she could trust him.

  Then she stammered,

  “You are not – taking me – back?”

  “Not unless you want to – ”

  She crawled forward and the Marquis then helped her onto the ground.

  “I suggest we sit more comfortably in the chaise.”

  She did not answer but climbed onto the seat beside him.

  “Now tell me where do you think you are going?”

  “I have run away from Papa,” the girl murmured.

  “I do realise that. nIn fact I heard you crying when I was waiting to see him.”

  “Did you hear – why I was crying?”

  “I understood that your father wants you to marry someone you have no intention of marrying. But I do not think running away will really solve your problem.”

  “It will – if you will take me to London – ”

  He had noticed as he was talking to her that there was a red bruise on her cheek where her father had hit her.

  “I will take you to London, if you have any friends there you can stay with.”

  “What I really want,” the girl said hesitatingly, “is a – Convent.”

  “A Convent!” ejaculated the Marquis.

  “Yes, because if I become a nun – Papa will not be able to marry me off to some terrible man like – the one he has chosen for me.”

  The Marquis, who was sitting sideways so that he could look at her, stared at her in disbelief.

  It seemed incredible that this young and very lovely girl would prefer to become a nun in a Convent rather than marry anyone however unpleasant.

  She looked at him beseechingly, as her eyes filled with tears until finally he suggested,

  “Let’s start at the beginning. You very likely know that I am the Marquis of Harlington and that I live nearby at The Priory, but I don’t know your name.”

  “It is – Delisia.”

  The Marquis smiled.

  “A very appropriate name, but certainly not suitable for a Convent!”

  “What else can I do?” Delisia asked spreading out her hands.

  “You must have some relatives. Surely they will be pleased to see you.”

  “The only relatives I have are scared of Papa and he gives them allowances so they certainly would not quarrel with him.”

  The Marquis found it difficult to know what to say next and finally he enquired,

  “How old are you?”

  “I am eighteen.”

  “Well, you look much younger.”

  She did not answer immediately, but then she said,

  “Please find me a Convent – or somewhere where I can hide. But, as you will understand, I came away just as I was when I saw your chaise – and I have no other clothes or money with me.”

  “I can easily provide that, Delisia, but I want to be quite certain you are doing the right thing in defying your father.”

  He glanced again at the mark on her cheek while he remembered the loud scream she had given when her father struck her.

  “What I wish to find out is if there is anyone who could talk to your father and make him understand that you cannot marry this man you have taken such a dislike to.”

  “He is horrible! Horrible!” Delisia cried. “He is a Comte with a large château in France which has impressed Papa, but he is also half Egyptian and I am sure – he has a harem somewhere in the East!”

  “What on earth makes you think that?”

  Delisia looked away from him, before answering,

  “I was reading about Sultans in the East – and I am quite certain, although Papa will not listen to me – that the Comte is more Eastern in his ways – than any Frenchman.”

  The words came hesitatingly from her as if she felt embarrassed at having to say them.

  The Marquis was wondering what on earth he could possibly do.

  After all, this child – she was nothing more – was exquisitely beautiful.

  But he had heard her father threatening to beat her.

  How could he take her back to him to suffer as she had suffered already from the merciless blow to her cheek?

  Then he picked up the reins and started to back his horses out of the wood.

  “Please, please – you are not going to take me back to – Papa?” Delisia pleaded in a terrified voice.

  “Of course I wouldn’t do that without your agreement,” the Marquis assured her. “But I am wondering what I will do with you and which of my many relatives could possibly take care of you.”

  She did not answer and he continued,

  “When your father finds out that you are missing, he will undoubtedly suspect me of spiriting you away. There was no other carriage at the house and you obviously came away with just the clothes you stand up in.”

  “It was my only chance, my Lord, as the Comte is coming this evening – to stay for a night or two with Papa – and arrange the marriage.”

  “Tell me, why do you dislike this Comte so much?”

  By now they were on a straight piece of road and the horses had increased their pace.

  “As I have said, he is not really French at all and although Papa thinks he is a friend, I heard him say to his valet, ‘that old man is a stupid fool’.”

  “You heard him say that!” the Marquis exclaimed. “Was he speaking in French?”

  “No, he was speaking in Arabic and the valet replied in the same language, ‘I agree with Your Highness, but all Englishmen are exactly like that, stupid and puffed up with their own self-importance’.”

  “You heard the valet speak in Arabic as well?” the Marquis asked her in a surprised voice.

  “He went on saying a lot more, but I crept away in case they should realise that I had overheard them, not that they would think for a moment that I understood them.”

  “Are you really telling me,” the Marquis enquired, “that you speak Arabic?”

  For the first time Delisia smiled.

  “Does it seem so very strange to you? As it happens I just love learning languages and I speak French, German, Italian and Greek. Then, when I was at school in Paris last year, a girl came from Egypt and she was the daughter of a businessman in Luxor and spoke very little English.”

  “So you learnt Arabic from her?”

  Delisia nodded.

  “We shared a room and so I taught her English and she taught me Arabic. It was a fair exchange.”

  “And you are really fluent in the Arabic language?” the Marquis asked her keenly.

  “I found that it was easy to learn and I could soon understand everything Em
ili said to me. Actually she was very slow in learning English.”

  It struck the Marquis that this was an extraordinary coincidence – one that perhaps had been sent to him as a gift from Heaven.

  At the same time and for his own sake, he had to be cautious.

  “Are you absolutely certain, Delisia, that you have nowhere to go to in London and that I cannot take you to a friend or a relative who could hide you from your father?”

  “If there was one – I promise you I would tell you. But my relatives, who live mostly in the country, are, as I have already said, terrified of Papa and under an obligation to him. If I went to them tonight, Papa would undoubtedly arrive to fetch me away tomorrow morning and the Comte – would be waiting for me.”

  There was terror in her voice that the Marquis could not misunderstand.

  Yet he had to be certain.

  “So your only possible plan is to become a nun?”

  “I don’t really want to be shut up in a Convent,” Delisia admitted, “but anything would be better than to be married to that horrible beastly man. I would much rather – die than let him – touch me.”

  The Marquis was silent.

  They drove for quite a long way before he spoke,

  “I have been thinking over your predicament and I have a proposition to put to you. But it involves taking a risk not only by you, but by me.”

  He was aware as he spoke that Delisia had turned towards him eagerly.

  She looked at him almost as if he was coming down from the sky in a chariot of fire to rescue her.

  ‘She is incredibly lovely,’ he thought warily, ‘and lovely women always cause trouble.’

  At the same time she was not really a woman – it was not only her voice that was childlike, but she did not look at all grown-up.

  Her hands were very small and he found himself using the word again – childlike.

  He realised Delisia was waiting for him to speak, so he carried on,

  “By some strange coincidence I am leaving tonight in my yacht and I am sailing to see the new Canal which is being built in the Suez Isthmus. What I have asked for, but have not been able to find, is an interpreter.”

  He glanced at Delisia.

  Her eyes had now opened so wide that they seemed to fill her whole face.

  They were not the same shade of blue as Silvia’s, which were the darkest of blue that could only light up in passion.

  Instead Delisia’s eyes were the very pale blue of the early forget-me-not or the sky in the early morning when the sun was just breaking through.

  “Are you saying, my Lord,” she asked in a voice he could hardly decipher, “that you would take me with you to Egypt?”

  “I certainly would find you useful, but equally we would both be taking great risks.”

  He knew that Delisia was listening and he went on,

  “I am running away for almost the same reason as you are!”

  He could appreciate that she did not understand him and so he explained,

  “There is a woman in my life who wants to marry me and I have no wish to be married.”

  “Then you understand what I am feeling, my Lord.”

  “Of course I do. No one who has any intelligence wants to be pressured into marrying someone they don’t love – when they know instinctively, as you and I do, that the marriage would be an utter disaster.”

  “Naturally – it would,” she agreed. “To be married one must really love someone – otherwise it would all be a complete misery.”

  She spoke with pain in her voice.

  “That is why we must both now escape!” the Marquis exclaimed.

  “Then you will really take me with you, my Lord?”

  “I am just thinking how it could be possible. You do realise, because you are intelligent, that if it is known that I have a beautiful young woman with me on my yacht, many will assume that we have a certain relationship with each other? And, when we finally return back home, to save your reputation, I will surely be forced to marry you.”

  There was silence and then Delisia murmured in a very different voice,

  “Are you saying – you cannot take me?”

  “No, what I am saying, Delisia is that we have to be very clever about it all. To begin with, it would be most reprehensible of me, if I am on a special mission, to arrive with a beautiful woman who is not chaperoned.”

  “Perhaps when we actually arrive in Egypt, I could – hide myself, my Lord?”

  “A better idea has come into my mind, but you may not like it.”

  “I would like any plan that will take me away from Papa at this moment – and the dreadful man he has chosen for my husband.”

  “You told me just now you are eighteen, but you certainly look much younger. What I am going to suggest, although you may not like it, is that you travel with me as my niece and you will behave and dress just as if you were a girl of fifteen. It should not be too difficult.”

  Delisia clasped her hands together.

  “That is wonderful, wonderful of you! If you take me with you, I swear I will help you and do everything you ask of me, my Lord, however difficult.”

  “The problem is that no one must find out you are not my niece.”

  “Then you – will take me with you, my Lord? Oh, thank you! Thank you! How could you be so marvellous? How could God have sent you to me when I was feeling so desperate and – thinking I must die?”

  “You must never think of anything like that again,” scolded the Marquis. “You are young, beautiful and have your whole life in front of you.”

  “I know that,” Delisia replied, “but I ran away from Papa, because he threatened to beat me and I am sure he would have hit me again if the butler had not come to say that you had arrived. I felt I would much rather jump into the lake – than have to marry that Comte.”

  “Life is very precious,” the Marquis counselled her, “and however bad it becomes, you must never again think of taking your own life.”

  “I know it was wrong of me, my Lord. Then I saw your chaise outside the front door and I remembered there was a hiding-place in the back of chaises, which I had once used when I was playing hide-and-seek.”

  “So you climbed in, Delisia, and I am only hoping that the groom who was holding my horses’ heads was not aware of it.”

  “Ben is a stupid boy. He loves horses and is always talking to them instead of getting on with his work. He was talking to your two leading horses and I don’t think he would have noticed if a firework had gone off in the garden or in front of the house!”

  The Marquis laughed.

  “Are you quite certain no one else saw you?”

  “Just in case they did, my Lord, please drive a little faster, so that if Papa is coming behind us, he will not be able to catch us up.”

  This, the Marquis thought, was sensible.

  His team was a splendidly fast one and as far as he could recall, Lord Durham’s horses were usually rather fat and slow.

  They drove much faster for a little while before the Marquis commented drily,

  “I suppose you realise, Delisia, that you have no clothes to wear.”

  “I was just thinking of that myself, but I thought it would annoy you if I reminded you of the problem.”

  “Well, you can scarcely travel with me to Egypt in what you are wearing and, as I am determined to leave this evening, you will have to find a shop very rapidly.”

  “I will be as quick as I can, but have you any idea where there is a shop where we can buy clothes suitable for a girl of fifteen?”

  The Marquis thought.

  “What we really need is a shop where you can buy everything.”

  “You do realise,” Delisia added a little hesitantly, “that I have no money?”

  “You need not worry about money. I will be quite prepared to dress my interpreter, whether it is a man or a woman!”

  “If I was really your niece aged fifteen, my Lord, I would be neatly and quietly dressed.”r />
  “Quite right. You must not be at all eye-catching or even smart. In fact the less people notice you, the better.”

  As he spoke, he realised how lovely she was and he knew that it was no use pretending that she would not be noticed and admired wherever she went.

  It was then that the Marquis saw that her hair was drawn back into a bun at the back of her head.

  “When you were fifteen,” he enquired, “you did not wear your hair pinned back as it is now.”

  Delisia gave a little cry.

  “How very clever of you, my Lord, and how stupid of me not to think of it. Of course my hair was long and I did not tie it back until I was a year older.”

  She pulled at her hair and then took out a number of hairpins.

  Then he could see that her golden hair was indeed long and fell down in cascades over her shoulders as far as her breasts.

  It waved naturally and, as it caught the sunlight, he thought that no girl could look quite so innocent and yet so alluring.

  At the same time it made her seem much younger.

  He was astute enough to know that no one glancing at her would think she was a day over fifteen years of age.

  As they drove on, he thought of his past adventures – there had been a great number of them – but this was one of the most extraordinary and perhaps the most foolish.

  But equally it went against every grain in his body to abandon this young child to a horrible fate.

  She would be beaten by her father and forced into marriage with a man much older than herself who was not even of the same nationality.

  If she really could speak fluent Arabic, she would be exceedingly useful to him.

  Who would ever suspect for a moment that a child would be his interpreter?

  They drove on for a little while as the Marquis was thinking out his plan of campaign.

  Only when they had not spoken for nearly twenty minutes did Delisia pipe up,

  “You are not changing your mind, my Lord?”

  “No, of course not. I was just thinking things out. We must make it clear to everyone including the crew and the Stewards on-board that you really are my niece. There is just one exception as there is only one person who will do everything I want and who I would trust with my life.”