65 A Heart Is Stolen Page 6

  “I certainly hope not.”

  Again there was a pause and the Marquis had the idea that he was expected to leave.

  Because he was intrigued, he asked,

  “May I look at your garden? And perhaps the rest of the house. I admit to being extremely curious after so many years of being forbidden to cross your threshold.”

  Ivana laughed.

  “As I was forbidden to cross yours. I cannot tell you how tantalising it was to see Heathcliffe in the distance, to have glimpses of magnificent horses and fine coaches going up and down the drive and imagining the parties inside the house to which I would never be invited.”

  “I can see that it must have been infuriating,” the Marquis laughed.

  “Being a woman, I think it made me more miserable than angry.”

  “Well, if you have never seen Heathcliffe, its owner will now be able to show it to you,” Anthony said eagerly.

  The Marquis glanced at him and realised that he was looking at her with admiration and was aware that Anthony had not missed the fact that she was extremely pretty. In fact, the Marquis told himself, lovely was the right word.

  As if he knew it was expected of him, with just a touch of amusement in his voice, he said,

  “I should, of course, be delighted to show you Heathcliffe and its contents, even if my father’s snuffboxes are no longer there.”

  “But there are lots of other things worth seeing,” Anthony added, “especially the pictures.”

  He looked at the Marquis and asked deliberately,

  “Why should not Mrs. Wadebridge dine with us one evening? We have, as it happens, not many engagements.”

  “Yes, of course,” the Marquis agreed. “What evening would suit you?”

  He looked at Ivana as he spoke and had the idea that she was considering the invitation before she replied to it.

  It struck him as strange that she was not more eager and, because she was reluctant, he decided that it might be because of the old feud and the sooner that was laid to rest the better.

  Aloud he said,

  “I think if you agree to dine with me, Mrs. Wadebridge, we could then be quite certain we had ‘buried the hatchet’ for all time. Would tomorrow night suit you? I will send a carriage to pick you up at half-after-seven.”

  “That is very kind of you, my Lord, and I shall be very pleased to dine at Heathcliffe.”

  The Marquis noted that she did not say, ‘to dine with you’, but he supposed that her choice of words was of no significance.

  Surely she could not wish to identify herself after all these years with the childish animosity that had existed between two old men.

  He rose to his feet.

  “I shall look forward to showing you my house,” he said, “and now may I see yours?”

  He thought she hesitated, but was not sure. Then, moving ahead of him, she remarked,

  “There is really not very much to see.”

  The Marquis and Sir Anthony followed her out into the hall and she showed them the dining room where the old oak furniture that matched the period of the house was polished like the stairs and the brass handles were so brilliant that they seemed to mirror everything around them.

  She then took them into the study, over the mantelpiece of which was a portrait of her grandfather in his Admiral’s uniform and beneath it in a glass case a long row of his medals and decorations.

  He looked a belligerent old man with a beard and had an aggressive air about him as if he was permanently on guard against the enemy.

  “An excellent likeness,” the Marquis commented, “and when you see my grandfather you will see that they were well paired!”

  “You certainly do not resemble him,” Anthony said to Ivana with a caressing note in his voice.

  “I am told I take after my mother,” Ivana replied, “whose family came from Ireland.”

  “I was sure of it!” Anthony exclaimed. “Blue eyes set in dark hair! That is very Irish!”

  Ivana laughed.

  “So I am often told, but I have never been fortunate enough to visit the Emerald Isle;”

  She would have led the way from the study, but the Marquis had walked to the window to look out at what he knew was the back of the house.

  To his surprise he saw not a garden as he expected, but what was a courtyard and beyond it a huge and ancient barn.

  “That seems a strange building to have attached to the house,” he said. “A tithe barn!”

  Ivana smiled.

  “I see you are not aware, my Lord, that before your grandfather bought Heathcliffe, most of the estate was Wadebridge land.”

  “I had no idea!” the Marquis exclaimed.

  “The Wadebridges who lived here for several hundred years were rich and important,” Ivana explained, “but over the centuries they spent so much time at sea that gradually they had to sell their possessions ashore.”

  “Now I can understand why you hated the Veryans,” the Marquis said. “May I look at your barn a little nearer?”

  Again Ivana hesitated and he had the feeling that she was longing for them to leave.

  Obstinately he determined that he would not be hurried.

  “It’s not possible for you to go inside it as everything is locked up,” she replied. “But you can, of course, look at it from the outside.”

  She led the way with almost a bad grace to a door that lay on the other side of the study and which took them straight out into the courtyard.

  From this angle the barn seemed almost to dwarf the house.

  As the Marquis looked at it, he realised that it was very old, the bricks between the ships’ beams from which it was built were small and narrow and were he knew, either Elizabethan or earlier.

  He looked at it for some minutes and then glanced around the courtyard.

  He saw on the other side of it there were a number of the white stones like those which decorated the flowerbeds at the front, but which here were arranged in patterns of Naval symbols.

  There was an anchor, life-size, gleaming white against the ground on which it had been fashioned, there was a Union Jack, the stripes making it not so effective as the anchor and there was a more ambitious project in the shape of a sailing ship.

  “I see you have very nautical tastes, Mrs. Wadebridge,” the Marquis remarked.

  “Those were done a long time ago by my brother and his friends when they were at home on leave.”

  As Ivana spoke, she turned as if she would re-enter the house, but Anthony gave an exclamation.

  “Look!” he said. “What is that?”

  He pointed as he spoke to a large lime tree that stood in a corner of the courtyard.

  The Marquis followed the direction of his finger and saw to his surprise a flash of brilliant colour amongst the leaves.

  For a moment he could not think what it was. Then he quizzed,

  “Surely it is a parrot?”

  “A parakeet to be correct,” Ivana replied.

  “There is more than one,” Anthony said. “Are they tame?”

  As if she was amused by his astonishment, Ivana walked towards the tree, then made several low sounds that were the exact replica of a parakeet’s call.

  As she did so, she held out her arms and from the tree came fluttering down towards her a number of the small brilliant birds with their crimson and green plumage, which seemed strangely out of place in the English sunshine.

  Two settled on her hands, two more on each of her arms and another on her shoulder.

  With her green gown she made a strange but very lovely picture as she stood holding them with her head thrown back to look at several other parakeets that were now circling overhead.

  Both the Marquis and Anthony stared entranced until she shook herself free of them saying as she did so,

  “It’s too early for food. You will have to wait.”

  They flew away back into the tree they had come from and the Marquis said,

  “If I had not seen that wi
th my own eyes, I would not have believed it!”

  “Nor would I,” Anthony agreed. “You must have had them for a long time for them to come when you call them.”

  “I think they know I love them,” Ivana said simply.

  Now she walked determinedly back into the house and, when they reached the hall, she waited for the Marquis to make his farewells.

  “I shall look forward to tomorrow evening,” he said politely, “and I am extremely relieved, Mrs. Wadebridge, to know that so far, you have not been troubled by highwaymen. At the same time I would advise you to keep your doors locked.”

  “I will do so,” Ivana replied.

  She walked to the door and waited politely as the Marquis and Sir Anthony mounted their horses.

  As they drove them towards the drive, the Marquis looked again at the neat flowerbeds.

  ‘It must have taken a lot of work to keep them in such perfect condition,’ he thought.

  Then, lying beside the stones he saw a strange object.

  For a moment he wondered what it was. Then he realised it was a wooden leg, the type that was worn by a man who had had his own limb amputated.

  It was lying on the small grass path and it struck the Marquis that it had been thrown down hastily and forgotten.

  He did not speak and, when they were through the gates, Anthony exclaimed,

  “Good Heavens, Justin! Who would have thought that we would have found anything so lovely, so exquisite in the wilds of Sussex? I have never seen such eyes! I cannot imagine why you did not ask her to dinner this evening instead of our having to wait until tomorrow night!”

  “For God’s sake, Anthony, you know she is married,” the Marquis replied. “You have just tumbled out of one mess with Lucy Bicester. You cannot make a fool of yourself for a second time!”

  He spoke so aggressively that Anthony looked at him in surprise.

  “Really, Justin, I have never known you behave like a spoilsport before! Here are you and I with nothing to do except worry about some highwayman we are never likely to catch. We see the prettiest girl we have seen in a month of Sundays, and you say it is ‘hands off’ because she has a husband!”

  The Marquis did not reply and Anthony continued,

  “I cannot think what is the matter with you. Husbands have never worried you before, unless they were pointing a pistol at your heart.”

  The Marquis still made no answer, but merely spurred his horse forward and Anthony had some difficulty in keeping up with him.

  As they neared Heathcliffe, the Marquis asked,

  “Did you notice how neat and tidy the garden was?”

  “Of course I did!” Anthony replied. “In fact, I thought only a sailor could have kept it so spick and span.”

  “Exactly!” the Marquis agreed. “But the only sailor we saw was the one who held the horses, and that is another thing – why should he be waiting for us when we arrived? And the door opened the moment we knocked on it.”

  Anthony looked at him.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “It seemed strange,” the Marquis answered, “but I am quite certain that Mrs. Wadebridge knew that we were arriving.”

  “How on earth could she have known that?” Anthony asked.

  The Marquis suddenly remembered the man he had seen riding away from the house as they arrived.

  He tried to remember more clearly what he had looked like and he was sure that from his clothes he had not been a gentleman, in which case he must have been a groom or a servant and who else would have good horse flesh except himself?

  “What are you thinking?” Anthony asked curiously.

  “I am not certain I can put it into words,” the Marquis answered, “but I am becoming more and more convinced there is something going on that I cannot explain, but it is definitely out of the ordinary.”

  “I should jolly well think it is!” Anthony remarked. “It is not ordinary to find amazingly beautiful women who can call parakeets out of an English lime tree and have them sitting tamely on their hands and arms.”

  He gave a sigh.

  “I have never seen anything so beautiful as that girl looked.”

  “Woman!” the Marquis corrected.

  “I bet you she is not a day over eighteen,” Anthony said, “and she cannot have been married long. Once a woman is married, she looks married.”

  He paused as if searching for the right words and then went on,

  “She loses something, the innocence that had made her appear untouched.”

  The Marquis looked at him with undisguised astonishment.

  “You never cease to surprise me, Anthony,” he said, “but I am rather inclined to agree with you, although, as it happens, I have known very few young girls.”

  “There are very few as pretty as – what was her name? Ivana Wadebridge,” Anthony replied.

  “Well, you will see her tomorrow evening,” the Marquis said. “In the meantime I intend to look further afield for our highwaymen and I have no intention of letting a pretty face and a covey of parakeets divert me from tracking them down.”

  Anthony did not argue, but the Marquis had the feeling that he thought it was a forlorn hope.

  *

  The next day the Marquis and Anthony drove miles in their efforts to find anyone who had seen the highwaymen.

  Despite Mr. Markham’s discouraging information that they had few neighbours, the Marquis made enquiries in the neighbouring villages and personally visited a number of people living on small farms or on the outskirts of hamlets, who were both astonished and gratified to be called on by the owner of Heathcliffe.

  They had all heard of his father, they all admired Heathcliffe and they fawned on the Marquis in a manner that Anthony told him was extremely bad for him.

  “It’s all inflating to your ego,” he said when they were going home after a fruitless day on which the Marquis had gained no information, but had collected a great number of admirers.

  “I thought they were very pleasant,” the Marquis said. “The only trouble is that none of them have heard of the highwaymen.”

  “I begin to think they don’t exist,” Anthony muttered. “The wine was too good and we just dreamt the whole incident.”

  “In which case I would like my watch and my snuffboxes back,” the Marquis said sharply.

  “Well, we can forget highwaymen for tonight and concentrate on the blue-eyed beauty. As she had a magic way with parakeets, she might be clairvoyant enough to tell us where they are hiding.”

  The Marquis laughed.

  “She might be hiding a dozen or more in that huge barn of hers.”

  Even as he spoke he stiffened.

  He was remembering something; something that he had not thought about until this moment.

  “What is it?” Anthony asked.

  “Do you know,” the Marquis said, “when she had those parakeets fluttering all around her, I am convinced that we were not the only people watching them.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Anthony asked.

  “Now I think of it I am almost sure, although it made no impression on me at the time, that I saw a face at one of the windows in the barn.”

  “She said it was locked up.”

  “I know. She also said that she and her old nurse were alone in the house. If that is true, where was the man to whom the wooden leg belonged?”

  “He was obviously a gardener,” Anthony suggested.

  “Maybe, but one gardener could not have kept that garden as tidy as we saw it to be. What is more, I don’t believe her old nurse, who must be over sixty, could have polished those stairs, the furniture, the floors and the brass. I could see my face in them.”

  “You are concocting a good story,” Anthony laughed. “But at the same time, if you ask me, you are making mountains out of molehills. Ivana is a simple, charming, open country girl with blue eyes and if you think she has highwaymen locked up in her barn – ”

  “It is as likely as if she
had parakeets in a lime tree!” the Marquis finished before Anthony could end the sentence himself.

  “All right, you can cross-examine her tonight and I bet you ten sovereigns she will not give you a single clue.”

  “Taken!” “If we are taking sides,” Anthony warned. “I shall align myself with Ivana against you and you will certainly get nowhere.”

  “That is a challenge!” the Marquis smiled, “and you know I can never resist one!”

  *

  Dressing for dinner in the best gown she had which was a very simple one, Ivana listened to Nanny saying over and over again that she had been foolish to accept the Marquis’s invitation.

  “Why do you think he has asked you except to make trouble?” the old woman enquired.

  “It would seem very unfriendly if I had refused,” Ivana replied.

  She sat down suddenly on the stool in front of the mirror and, looking at her reflection, she said,

  “Perhaps it was wrong – but at the time I could think of no plausible reason for refusing.”

  “We could send a message to say you be feelin’ ill.”

  Ivana thought of the Marquis’s firm mouth and had the feeling that if he wanted her to dine with him he would go on asking her until she had run out of excuses and there was nothing she could do but accept.

  “I will go and get it over with,” she said. “After all, it will be an ordinary social evening with doubtless both fine gentlemen yawning with boredom by the time we reach the dessert.”

  “I hopes that’s what’ll happen,” Nanny snapped. “Equally, if you asks me, it’s too much to hope for!”

  Ivana laughed.

  “It is no use being faint-hearted now, Nanny, when we have been through so much,” she said, “and it’s not like you to be afraid of anyone, even the Marquis.”

  As she spoke, Ivana thought she personally was, in fact, rather frightened.

  She had heard about him all her life, but, although she had known that he was good-looking, dashing, raffish and also brave, she had not expected him in the flesh to be quite so overpowering or indeed to be so outstandingly handsome.

  As many women had thought before her, the Marquis and Sir Anthony together were almost breathtaking.

  Never had she imagined two men could look so elegant, almost dandifiedly smart and at the same time be so unmistakably masculine.