The Glittering Lights (Bantam Series No. 12) Page 4

  “No,” Cassandra answered. “I was only interested because, as you know, Papa and the old Duke did a lot of racing together, and I was just wondering if the new holder of the title had kept up the stable.”

  “If he has, I expect he will soon have to sell up,” her friend replied.

  “Why?” Cassandra enquired.

  “I believe he is badly dipped.”

  ‘If this was so,’ Cassandra asked herself, ‘why then did not the new Duke of Alchester fall back on the arrangements which had been made before his father’s death and push ahead with the marriage which would bring him, through his wife, an enormous fortune?’

  She could find only one reasonable explanation.

  It was that, despite everything her father might say, the Duke was in love and had no wish to make an arranged marriage.

  By the time the winter of 1885 come and there was no word from him, she was convinced that her father’s plans had finally and completely gone astray and that they were unlikely to hear any more from the Duke.

  But Sir James was optimistic.

  “There could be no question of your being married while Alchester is in deep mourning,” he said. “He will wait the conventional year. Then I am sure we shall take up the negotiations where they were left off.”

  ‘I will not be treated in such a manner!’ Cassandra told herself, although she did not say the words aloud to her father.

  Every month that passed strengthened her determination. She would not marry a man whose heart was given elsewhere, and who wanted her for one reason and one reason only, that she was rich!

  She saw now how childish her expectation had been that because she was pretty he would fall in love with her.

  She might have far more brains and certainly be far more cultured than the women with whom he associated in London, but that was not to say that he would prefer such qualities.

  She took to studying the photographs published of the actresses who were beguiling London audiences.

  It was hard not to see that they certainly looked far more attractive and indeed more amusing than the stiff portraits of the society girls with whom they competed for the gentlemen’s affections.

  There were exceptions of course, if one compared them with the beautiful young Lady Warwick or the goddess-like Countess of Dudley.

  ‘But who,’ Cassandra asked herself, ‘looks as attractive as Nelly Farran of whom the theatre critics say, “The Gaiety without Nelly is unthinkable,” or Connie Gilchrist who has found fame with a skipping rope?’

  Instead of cutting out from the newspapers pictures of the Duke of Alchester, Cassandra began to collect reproductions of the photographic beauties.

  Photographs of them filled the shop-windows and were in many of the illustrated papers.

  There had been loud criticism about one of the poses assumed by Maud Branscombe who was the first of the photographic beauties. She had figured in a study which portrayed “The Rock of Ages.”

  “Can you imagine that woman daring to display herself clinging to the Cross?” Aunt Eleanor had asked. “I cannot think why the Bishops do not protest about it!”

  There were a great many other lovely smiling actresses whose photographs could be bought for less than a shilling.

  Cassandra had been amused when her father, protesting about the photographs that had been taken of her in York, produced from a locked drawer in his desk some pictures of Mrs. Langtry.

  “This is the sort of pose that I want,” he said.

  He showed her a picture of “The Jersey Lily” leaning gracefully on a high table, the shadow of her perfect features portrayed upon a plain wall behind her.

  “She looks very lovely, Papa,” Cassandra agreed.

  Her father had shown her several other photographs and then he said:

  “There is no need to mention to your mother that I keep these. It is just that I was trying to explain to you the way I want you to appear.”

  “I quite understand, Papa.”

  Sir James put the photographs away in his drawer.

  “Photography may be a new art,” he said, “but that is not going to stop every half-witted fool who can afford a camera thinking he is a photographer.”

  Turning over the pages of the Album which now covered no less than fourteen years of the Marquis of Charlburys life, Cassandra told herself the whole thing was hopeless.

  How could she marry a man who was interested in her only because she owned a fortune?

  Her father might talk of a mariage de convenance. He might say it was usual in society, but there were still a large number of people who married for love, and she wished to be one of them.

  She had been thinking about it for a long time—in fact for all the months that her father had been eagerly awaiting a letter from the new Duke. She had felt certain it would not arrive.

  She had been wrong!

  But she was sure that it had eventually turned up, not because the Duke wanted to see her, but because he had reached the stage where he needed money too desperately to procrastinate any longer.

  She stared at an article giving a long description of Alchester Park which had appeared in the Illustrated London News.

  It was not hard from the description to imagine the splendour of what was one of the most famous houses in England.

  Covering several acres of land, the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Alchester, it had been built in the reign of Elizabeth I and had housed at some time or another almost every reigning Monarch.

  It was magnificent, it was splendid, a little over-powering, and yet Cassandra could understand it was a suitable back-ground for the young man of whom the newspapers had written such glowing accounts even when he was a mere boy.

  She turned the pages of the Album again. His face looked out at her from every one.

  He was not so thin and so sharp-featured as he had been when he captained the Eton Eleven, but his hair still grew back in a straight line from his forehead.

  Even in the rather harsh photograph sketches which were the nearest the illustrated papers could get to reproducing photographs, his eyes still seemed to hold that curious searching look she had noticed when she first saw him.

  She had loved her memories of him, she had loved every scrap of information she could glean about him. But now she realised she no longer wanted to marry him.

  Cassandra gave a little sigh.

  ‘I would rather marry a man for whom I had no feelings at all,’ she told herself.

  That was indeed true.

  It might be unpleasant, even a little frightening, to marry someone she hardly knew and for whom she had no affection, but to marry someone with whom she thought herself in love would be sheer unmitigating hell if he had no feeling for her except one of duty.

  It would be his duty to touch her ... it would be his duty to kiss her ... it would be his duty to make love to her ... to give her children...

  Cassandra, like all her contemporaries, was very innocent and was not quite certain what that entailed. But she knew it must be something close and intimate.

  “Mama, why do people who sleep in the same bed have babies?” she had asked Lady Alice once, when she was very young.

  Lady Alice had hesitated before she replied:

  “When you are married, Cassandra, your husband will explain such things to you.”

  Cassandra would have asked again, but sometimes she puzzled over it.

  Now she knew she could not sleep in the same bed with a man she loved, as she loved the Marquis, but who did not love her.

  “I couldn’t bear it!” she said aloud.

  She closed the Albums with a bang and put them back in the bottom drawer of her bureau.

  Then she drew from the same secret drawer where she hid the key another book bound with leather, and started to write.

  Ever since she had been quite young, Sir James had encouraged his daughter to keep a diary.

  “You are growing up,” he had said, “in a world of change—a wo
rld where everything will be very different from what we knew in the past. There are new inventions and new discoveries every day and new thoughts which should be recorded.”

  He smiled at Cassandra.

  “You will also meet new people and have many contacts with those who are famous. Put it all down. If nothing else, you will have the history of your own life to read when you are old. I have always regretted more than I can possibly say that I never recorded mine.”

  Obediently, because she always did as her father wished her to do, Cassandra kept her diary.

  She wrote in it every evening before she went to bed, until there were already a number of volumes locked away, while the current book was kept at hand in her secret drawer.

  She showed it to no-one, not even to her father, although occasionally when something happened which she had anticipated she would read him extracts.

  Then he would admire her perspicacity and the fact that what she had expected had occurred, almost exactly as she had predicted.

  Cassandra wrote now for only a short time, then put the book back in the secret drawer and shut it. Moving from her Sitting-Room she went into her bed-room.

  As she walked across the thick carpet to the mirror over her dressing-table, she stared at her own reflection but she was thinking of something very different.

  “I must see him first,” she said aloud. “I want to be sure that I am doing the right thing before I upset Papa.”

  As if her thoughts moved from her inward preoccupation to her visual appearance, she looked critically at herself.

  Her red-gold hair loosened by Hannah had been brushed until every strand, shining vividly in the lights of the dressing-table, seemed to dance tempestuously over her head.

  Her blue eyes in vivid contrast stared back at her from between their long dark lashes.

  “It is most unfair!” one of Cassandra’s friends had exclaimed petulantly. “I spend hours trying to think how I can darken my eye-lashes without Mama being aware of it, and yours are as black as ink.”

  “They are quite natural, I assure you,” Cassandra said laughingly.

  “I am aware of that,” her friend had replied. ‘That’s just what makes it so unfair! If your white skin, your dark eye-lashes and your red hair owed their appearance to artifice, they would be easier to bear. As it is, Cassandra, you look deliciously, flamboyantly theatrical, without making any effort to do so.”

  Cassandra could hear the touch of envy in her friend’s voice, but now she remembered the words. “Flamboyantly theatrical!”

  ‘It is true,’ she thought and knew it was the same criticism which the older generation levelled against her.

  “She is pretty, very pretty,” she had heard one Dowager say disagreeably, “but far too theatrical for my taste!”

  “Flamboyantly theatrical!”

  Cassandra had often repeated the words to herself, and because she was given to telling herself stories and imagining situations which intrigued her just before she went to sleep, she had invented one in which she had become a Gaiety Girl.

  Losing all her money, she had gone to London and approached George Edwards with a request that she might be in the chorus.

  “You are too pretty for that, my dear,” he would reply. “I will give you a part, and let us see if the audience will appreciate you as enthusiastically as the ‘Stage-door Johnnies’.”

  Of course in Cassandra’s imagination, she had been a success over-night.

  She had been applauded until the Gaiety Theatre had shaken with the noise of it, and there had been a queue of ardent admirers in their top hats, white ties and tails waiting to take her out to supper.

  And naturally in her dreams the one upon whom she had bestowed her favour was the Duke of Alchester.

  ‘A child’s imagination,’ she had told herself during the last six months, when despite every resolution the dream had returned to her.

  Why should she not compete with the Gaiety Girls? Why should they have all the fun and collect all the men? Or was she worrying about only one man in particular?

  There were a million questions which presented themselves and to which she could find no answer.

  Now she knew that in some subtle and insidious way her adolescent dreams had become so much a part of her thinking that they were assuming reality.

  It was mad! It was crazy! It was a recklessness that would excel anything she had ever done before, and yet she was determined to meet the Duke on his own ground.

  She would see him as he was when he was not pretending, when he was not putting on an act for her father’s benefit and for hers.

  ‘I have to do it,’ she told her own reflection in the mirror. ‘I must do it! I cannot go on allowing Papa to live in a Fool’s Paradise, thinking that I shall agree to his plans when I have no intention of doing so.’

  She had been so sure ever since Christmas that the Duke would not write, and that sooner or later Sir James would have to realise that for once in his life he had lost a race.

  It was just her father’s proverbial luck, Cassandra thought, that now his horse should romp home at the last moment. It was the sort of thing that always happened to Sir James!

  ‘But this time,’ she told herself bitterly, ‘there is going to be no gold cup for the winner.’

  She walked across her bed-room restlessly, knowing it would be impossible for her to go to bed and sleep until everything was settled in her mind.

  ‘Supposing,’ her brain said to her, ‘when you see the Duke you fall crazily in love with him—more in love than you have ever been?’

  ‘I still will not marry him if he cares for someone else,’ Cassandra answered.

  Even as she spoke the words beneath her breath she wondered if they were true.

  Would she be strong enough to refuse to marry the man she loved, to turn away from him, even if he was willing to marry her, because she could not endure the humiliation of loving where she was not loved?

  ‘How could I be fool enough to think he would come to care for me in time?’

  She knew she had more pride than that.

  If she was convinced in her mind that he really loved someone else then she would be strong enough to say “No.”

  ‘I shall never be sure whether he is telling me the truth or not unless I see him when he is off his guard,’ Cassandra said to herself.

  She had in fact thought this all out quite a long time ago, and whilst she dismissed it as sheer nonsense, she knew that like her father she was merely planning ahead. All she had to do now was to translate her thoughts into action.

  She would go to London. She had already decided that. And it was a genuine excuse for her to wish to buy clothes.

  Somehow she must meet the Duke, not as Cassandra Sherburn, but as an actress, as the type of woman in whom he was interested.

  She would be gay, amusing, sparkling with a joie de vivre which he could not find among simpering young girls or even the sophisticated society women who sought his company because he was the bearer of a noble title.

  Almost like a puzzle, the pieces fell into place, making a complete picture that Cassandra could look at and know that, in its own way, it was faultless.

  She had already told herself a long time ago that Lily Langtry would be a passport to the glittering world she was determined to enter.

  To Cassandra her father’s friendship with the Jersey Lily implied only a discreet flirtation. She had no awareness of physical passion, which had never intruded upon her sheltered life.

  She thought she understood that her father, so handsome, so attractive to women and so masculine, must find it hard at times, to be tied to her injured mother.

  He would in consequence occasionally escape from the conventional role he played to perfection to enjoy himself in London, to take a pretty woman out to supper and dance with her, as her poor mother could never dance again.

  Sir James’s love affairs never encroached upon his home.

  There were numerous wom
en in the County who pursued him quite shamelessly. He flattered them and paid them compliments, but he made quite certain that as far as he was concerned that was the beginning and the end of their association.

  It would have violated his principles to go any further.

  In Yorkshire he was the devoted husband, a man of integrity and responsibility, who had built up an impregnable position of authority in the County and was respected by all who knew him.

  What he did in London was in fact nobody’s business.

  On his periodic journeys which involved attending race meetings and Tattersalls Sales, buying pictures and furniture, there were evenings when Sir James was certainly not dining in Park Lane with his Step-sister, nor was he at the Banquets, Dinner Parties or the Royal occasions graced by the Prince of Wales, to which he was invited.

  If on his return home there was a flood of tinted envelopes, jauntily perfumed, and impetuous telegrams, neither Lady Alice nor Cassandra was aware of them.

  But sometimes when her father was away, Cassandra thought her mother seemed a little more restless, and very occasionally she would protest against the fate which kept her tied to a wheel-chair.

  At other times Lady Alice never complained. Never in front of her husband by word or deed did she ever draw attention to her helplessness or invite his sympathy.

  Instead she made herself so attractive that when people stayed in the house or were entertained at The Towers, they would often say to Cassandra, afterwards:

  “You know, I keep forgetting that your mother is confined to a wheel-chair. She is so unbelievably brave and never makes anyone embarrassed by referring to it, that I always think of her as living quite a normal life.”

  “My father and I feel like that too,” Cassandra would reply, and it had in fact been the truth.

  But there was no disguising the unutterable gladness on Lady Alice’s face when Sir James returned from London! Her arms would go out to him with a cry of welcome which to Cassandra was more moving and revealing than any words.

  “Have you missed me, my darling?” Cassandra heard her father say once as he bent to put his arms around his wife.

  “You know that every moment when we are apart seems like an eternity of emptiness,” Lady Alice replied.