The Love Trap Read online

  She therefore smiled at him through her veil and he led her up the steps, through the hall, along a wide corridor hung with pictures and ancient armour, before in the distance she heard the sound of an organ being played very softly.

  The Chapel was in the oldest part of The Castle and the early morning sunshine was streaming through the stained glass windows.

  There was a profusion of white flowers and the fragrance of them combined with the music made it seem very beautiful to Janeta. She felt too, although it was difficult to put into words, an atmosphere of sanctity.

  She was sure those who prayed in this small place through the ages had left the vibrations of their faith behind.

  At the same time she was still afraid that she was doing the wrong thing and that she would not be able to make the overwhelming man beside her happy.

  As if he knew what she was feeling, the Duke, instead of taking her up the aisle on his arm, held her hand, and, as her fingers trembled in his, she felt the warm strength of him moving into her body like a shaft of sunlight.

  The Duke’s Chaplain, who was an elderly man, was waiting for them in front of the altar an, as he started the Service, Janeta stole a glance at the Duke and thought that he looked very grave, as if he was feeling that this was a decisive and irrevocable moment in his life.

  Almost passionately she prayed to God and her mother who was in Heaven to help her and at the same time she knew that what lay ahead of her would not be easy.

  Yet she must try with every nerve in her body and every thought in her mind to please the Duke after he had saved her from Major Hodgson and her stepmother.

  As she felt the ring go on her finger and heard the Duke’s quiet deep voice repeating after the Chaplain the words that made her his wife, she felt that no one could be luckier than she had been in not being forced to marry a man she loathed and from whom she shrank in terror.

  Then she and the Duke knelt and the Chaplain blessed them.

  As he did so, Janeta was certain that she heard in the silence of the Chapel the voices of angels and her mother saying as she had said to her before she died,

  “God is always with you, my darling, never doubt that. Trust in Him and you will always be safe.”

  She knew then it was her mother who through the Grace of God has saved her from taking her own life as she had intended to do and had brought the Duke into her life when she had thought that she was utterly alone and forsaken with no one she could turn to for help.

  ‘How can I ever be grateful enough?’ she asked herself and felt as they walked down the aisle that the angels were still singing.

  She also felt an irrepressible surge of happiness because now that she was the Duchess of Wynchester no one could hurt or frighten her anymore.

  She wanted to tell the Duke what she felt, but there was no time.

  Instead, she hurried upstairs and changed into her travelling dress.

  Her beautiful white wedding gown was packed into her trunk and a quarter of an hour after the wedding they were moving down the drive in the Duke’s travelling chariot drawn by six horses.

  Janeta was very conscious of the Duke as he sat beside her and, as she wondered what they should say, he said as he drew his watch from his breast pocket,

  “It is nine forty-five and we have exactly two and a quarter hours to be well out of reach before your father and stepmother learn what we have done.”

  The way he spoke seemed to break the dream that had encompassed Janeta like a golden cloud since the moment she had put on her wedding gown.

  With difficulty she remembered that the Duke was not the Prince Charming with whom she was identifying him.

  Instead, he was a man in the same predicament as herself, threatened by a cruel vengeful woman, who would rage with fury when she realised what had happened.

  Impulsively, because she was frightened, Janeta put out her hand and slipped it into the Duke’s.

  “You are quite sure,” she asked, “Stepmama will not – be able to – find us in Paris?”

  “If she does, what can she do about it?” the Duke asked lightly. “We have won, Janeta, we have defeated her!”

  There was a note of elation in his voice that Janeta found irresistible.

  “We have defeated her,” she repeated slowly.

  Yet, as she tried to feel as pleased as he was, she had an uneasy qualm in case her stepmother did not acknowledge that they were the victors.

  Chapter five

  By the time they reached Folkestone, Janeta was very tired.

  Because it was a cross-country journey, it had been impossible to do it by train and they therefore travelled by road, changing horses at Posting houses.

  As the Duke regularly made the journey there from Wynchester Castle, they were his own horses, so naturally the journey had been done in almost record time.

  Nevertheless, when the saw the Duke’s yacht moored at the quayside, Janeta was glad the journey was over.

  It had been impossible at the speed they were travelling to talk very much and she had in fact slept a little. She suspected that the Duke dozed too, even though when she woke she always found his eyes open.

  They went immediately aboard the yacht, a new acquisition he was very proud of. Every modern gadget was incorporated into the vessel and everything looked very spic and span.

  But Janeta was glad to go to her cabin and, at the Duke’s suggestion, undress and climb into bed.

  “When we reach Paris,” he said, “I will, of course, engage a lady’s maid for you, but until then I am afraid that you will have to look after yourself.”

  Janeta laughed.

  “That is something I have done all my life, so it will be no imposition!” she replied.

  Then she wondered if always having a lady’s maid would be somewhat restrictive and if actually she would prefer to manage on her own.

  The Steward brought her dinner on a tray and told her that the Duke was eating a good meal upstairs.

  “As soon as His Grace has finished, we’ll be moving out of harbour. The sea’s smooth and I don’t think Your Grace’ll find it unpleasant.”

  “I am sure I will not,” Janeta replied.

  She knew, because her father had told her, that in ships Stewards waited on ladies even in their cabins. She had expected to find it embarrassing, but the Steward who had brought her dinner was a middle-aged man with a sunburnt face and a twinkle in his eyes.

  Janeta did not feel the least shy that she was sitting back against the pillows in a frilly pink bed jacket over a diaphanous nightgown that the Duke had bought her in London.

  In fact, because it was all so different from what she had ever experienced, she felt it was unreal and talked to the Steward quite naturally as he took her tray away.

  Then, as she was thinking that she would now be able to sleep, the Duke came into her cabin.

  She smiled at him as she said,

  “I have been told you have eaten a good dinner and I can well believe it, because the food is delicious.”

  “I chose my chef with great care,” the Duke replied.

  He sat down on the side of the bed and asked,

  “How are you? Not too tired I hope.”

  “I thought I should be too excited to be tired,” Janeta replied, “but now I feel that the lap of the waves will soon rock me to sleep.”

  She spoke without sounding the least affected and after a moment the Duke said,

  “I am afraid that this must seem very strange for a wedding night and not the least what you expected yours would be like.”

  To his surprise Janeta gave a little cry.

  “I know from what you are – saying,” she replied, “that I should have dined with you! To be truthful I had – forgotten it was our – wedding night and was only thinking with relief that we had – escaped from Stepmama and that once your beautiful yacht had left harbour, there would be no chance of her or Papa – stopping us from leaving England.”

  For a moment the
Duke was surprised and then he thought with amusement that Janeta was certainly unpredictable and different from any other woman he had ever known.

  He could not imagine that any of the ladies to whom he had paid attention in the past would have forgotten for one second that she was a bride and he was her bridegroom.

  The wedding night would have meant something very special and he would have been expected to play his part with ardour.

  For a moment it flashed through his mind that, in spite of the decision he had made about it, it might be better to suggest to Janeta there and now that they should from the start lead a normal married life.

  Then he knew that it would certainly frighten her and she might look at him with the same fear in her eyes that had been there when he first saw her.

  ‘She is so young,’ he told himself, ‘that I must move slowly and not do anything disturbing until she accepts me as a friend and someone she can trust.’

  He therefore said,

  “You are quite safe now, Janeta. I promise that neither of us will be disturbed until we reach France and I am sure that your father will not think it worthwhile pursuing us to Paris.”

  Janeta took a deep breath.

  “Then we are – free,” she said, “and that is why l am feeling – happy.”

  “I want you to feel happy,” the Duke said. “Ever since we met, you have been frightened and agitated, which is something I shall dislike very much if it continues.”

  “I am not – frightened – anymore.”

  The Duke rose from where he was sitting.

  ‘Then I will leave you to go to sleep,” he said, “and, when you wake up, we shall be able to continue our journey without any worries to spoil what I hope will be a very happy honeymoon.”

  “I am sure it will be,” Janeta said, “and thank you more than I can ever say for bringing me here and making sure that Stepmama has no longer – any authority over – me.”

  Her voice had deepened over the last words and then she asked,

  “That is true, is it not? Now I am your wife, no one can order me about or make me do things that frighten me.”

  “No one except me!”

  He had the feeling as he spoke that he wanted to draw Janeta’s attention to himself and was not prepared for her to give a little laugh as she said,

  “You are much too kind and understanding ever to be an ogre like Stepmama and, if you give me an order, I shall want to obey it.”

  “That is a step in the right direction,” the Duke said, smiling, “and what every woman should feel where her husband is concerned.”

  “You should have told me,” Janeta said in a low voice, “that I ought to have dined with you tonight. It was thoughtless of me to let you dine alone.”

  “You were tired after the long journey,” the Duke said, “and I think, quite frankly, it would have been very unflattering and rather humiliating for me to find my bride yawning and perhaps even falling asleep while I talked to her.”

  Janeta gave him a quick glance in case he was being serious and not teasing her as she thought he was, and then she said,

  “I will make up for it on any other night. But I am more afraid, since you are used to lovely ladies who are sophisticated and, I am sure, very witty, that it is you who will be yawning, not me.”

  “The only answer to that,” the Duke said, “is that we must wait and see. Go to sleep, Janeta, and just remember we have both been very clever and have outwitted the enemy.”

  “I hope you are right,” Janeta said in a soft voice.

  Then she added,

  “Goodnight my very kind clever husband to whom I am very grateful.”

  She was obviously not expecting him to kiss her and the Duke went from the cabin, closing the door behind him.

  He went up on deck to watch the Captain take the yacht out of harbour.

  He thought, in the fading light with the last glow of the sunset vivid in the sky, that the world was a very much happier place than it had been for the last two days.

  He still found it hard to realise that he had escaped from the trap that Olive had set for him, in which, had it not been for a miracle in the shape of Janeta’s unexpected appearance, he would have been helpless and totally unable to extricate himself.

  He had the uneasy feeling as he thought of her that it would not always be plain-sailing in the future when they returned to England.

  He refused, however, to let these thoughts depress him.

  He went down to his own cabin thinking, as he got into the comfortable bed that he had chosen especially for his yacht, that his only problem now was how to make Janeta happy and make quite sure that her stepmother did not intrude on her.

  However, even as he assured Janeta that they had cleverly found a way of escape, he knew that in Olive they both had an unpredictable enemy who he suspected would, in some way he could not envisage, seek revenge upon them.

  ‘Damn it! I am being over-imaginative,’ the Duke told himself before he fell asleep. ‘It’s quite impossible for her to do anything now. All we have to do is keep out of her way, even though it will mean Janeta not seeing her father.’

  *

  They travelled by train to Paris and arrived there late in the evening.

  This time Janeta was not tired but excited and, when they drove from the Gare du Nord, she sat forward on the edge of the carriage seat so that she could look out of the window at the tall grey houses with their uniform shutters.

  She also saw, moving about the boulevards under the gaslights, people who looked, she told the Duke, exactly as she thought that the French should look.

  “What do you mean by that?” he enquired.

  “Very smart, very jolly and very much alive,” she replied.

  He thought that it was an amusing and apt description. He was to find in the next two or three days that Janeta had an original way of describing everything they saw which was different from what he had expected.

  Because she had been incarcerated in a Convent for the last four years and she had told him that they were very strictly secluded in it with practically no contact with the world outside, he had thought she would be astonished at a great many things they saw and perhaps even shocked by them.

  Instead, she found the beauty of Paris enthralled her. The Duke realised that she watched the smartly dressed women and the elegant men as if they were part of a stage show and had no relation to ordinary life.

  On their arrival Janeta had been thrilled with the Duke’s house, which he had actually bought only two years previously and which was situated on the Champs-Élysées.

  It had belonged to a French aristocrat who had been forced for economic reasons to retire to his château in the country and had offered it to the Duke lock, stock and barrel.

  “Only you, Wynchester,” he had said, “are rich enough both to pay the price I require and also to appreciate the treasures that have over the centuries been accumulated by my ancestors.”

  The Duke had enjoyed the compliment and had not hesitated, knowing that it was a fine house and its contents exceptional.

  He told himself at the time that it was exactly what he wanted for himself when he visited Paris, which he did frequently.

  It was also a place where he could enjoy his affaires de coeur without being afraid that the servants would carry stories to the lady’s husband or that he would be the victim of spiteful gossips who were to be found everywhere in London.

  He had actually played with the idea, although he did not like to think of it now, of taking Olive to Paris for the weekend when Lord Brandon was in Scotland.

  He had, however, decided that it was too arduous a journey for such a short visit and had not mentioned it to her.

  He was glad now that her presence would not haunt the beautiful rooms hung with tapestry and pictures by celebrated French artists.

  Also he had no qualms about installing Janeta in the exquisite Louis XIV bedroom with its painted ceiling of Venus rising from the wave
s.

  “It’s a dream house,” Janeta cried as they sat down for a late dinner.

  The chef excelled himself and Janeta said as they finished,

  “That was a meal that might have been served on Mount Olympus.”

  The Duke smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice.

  “Are you suggesting that we are one with the Gods?” he enquired.

  “Of course!” Janeta replied. “How could you be anything else? Do not forget that they were always coming down from Olympus to enjoy the delights of human beings and, of course, to bemuse and bewilder them!”

  “Are you suggesting that is what I have done to you?” the Duke asked.

  Janeta put her elbows on the table and he thought as she did so that she was looking exceedingly attractive in a gown he had bought for her in London.

  He had a feeling, however, that something was missing and he was suddenly aware that she was wearing no jewellery.

  He had never thought of it because every woman with whom he had associated in the past had always glittered like a chandelier. He now thought that it was rather remiss of him not to have been aware that being so young and unimportant, Janeta possessed no jewellery of any sort.

  Then he saw that she was considering him with her large blue eyes, almost as if he was impersonal, perhaps one of the pictures on the wall.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked her.

  “I am trying to put into words what – I feel about – you.”

  “You have already told me that I am kind and understanding.”

  “You are both those things to me,” she said, “but I was – thinking of you as a – man and I think it is – only now I realise how – exceptional you are.”

  The Duke raised his eyebrows, but did not interrupt as she went on,

  “I can understand why women fall – in love with you and why men admire you for all the – things you have done and for being so proficient at sport, but I think there is much more to you than – that.”

  “In what way?” the Duke enquired.

  “It is difficult to describe a magnetic personality in words, which often convey an unintended meaning. I am sure you have found already that you are a born leader, but I think perhaps you are not using that – leadership in quite the – right way.”