Who Can Deny Love Read online

  “It will make me happy to have you with me, Cyrilla. You may, however, find me difficult to live with, for I have grown set in my ways and I find it hard to make changes.”

  “I will try not to ask for – any,” Cyrilla promised, “and now I know that Hannah was right and I – belong with – you.”

  “I am glad you think that,” the Duke said. “You have grown very lovely in these last years. In fact, you look exactly like your – ”

  He broke off as if he could not bear to say any more and Cyrilla rose to her feet to stand beside him.

  “It is difficult – not to talk of – Mama,” she said, “and ever since I have seen you, I have had a feeling – a very strong feeling – that she would want us to be – together – just as Hannah was sure – that that was what she – would want.”

  “I had better see Hannah,” the Duke said. “It appears to me that she is the only person who has shown any sense in this whole regrettable affair.”

  Cyrilla gave a little smile.

  “Hannah is always sensible and, when I am with her, I feel I have never grown up. She is still thinking I am in the nursery and should be quietly playing with my toys.”

  A faint smile twisted the Duke’s lips.

  Hannah had been maid to his wife when he had married her and the only thing that had prevented him from worrying over the well-being of his daughter all these years was the knowledge that Hannah was there to look after her as she had always looked after his wife.

  The Duke was not a violent man and all his life he had been self-controlled and had found it difficult to express his inner feelings.

  Yet, when his wife had run away with an obscure and unknown artist, he had hated the man with a ferocity that was almost murderous.

  Most other men would have challenged Frans Wyntack to a duel and, having either killed him or brought him near death, would then have forced his wife to return to him.

  But the Duke was acutely conscious of his position and the scandal that such action would evoke.

  He was thinking not only of himself but of his son when he decided that the best thing he could do was to ignore what had happened and not even admit that his wife had left him for another man.

  For a long time he answered all enquiries about the Duchess by saying that she was staying abroad with friends.

  When the war with France made this impossible, he said instead that she was in Ireland because she enjoyed the hunting there.

  Because the Duke was a very unapproachable person, no one was prepared to challenge such a statement, but at the same time there was, amongst his relatives and friends, a great deal of speculation as to what had happened.

  No one knew the truth, although there were a great number of people who said that because the Duchess was so many years younger than her husband, it would not be surprising if she had lost her heart to a younger man.

  But the fact remained that no one knew the truth and gradually, because there were other more interesting things to talk about, people stopped speculating about the disappearance of the Duchess and her daughter.

  When the older ladies of the Holmbury family were brave enough to ask the Duke point blank how long the Duchess intended to stay away and shirk her responsibilities, they received no answer.

  Instead they felt only that they had antagonised their formidable relative, which was something that must not happen again.

  The Duke put out his hand towards the bell-pull.

  “I will see Hannah now,” he said. “And I imagine the first thing you will need is some new clothes.”

  “That is true, Papa,” Cyrilla agreed, “but please do not let me be – seen anywhere in – London.”

  “If you are afraid of meeting the Marquis of Fane,” the Duke replied, “I can put your mind at rest by telling you that the circles in which I move would not accept such a scallywag, even though his horses do win the best races!”

  There was still a look of anxiety on Cyrilla’s face and he went on after a moment,

  “To set your mind at rest, Cyrilla, we will return to the country. My attendance at Court is not really required and there are always plenty of other people to take my place.”

  “I would not – want to upset your – plans, Papa.”

  “It will certainly not upset me,” he said. “I dislike London as I always have. As soon as you are dressed as befits your position as my daughter, we will go to The Castle. I think you will find it very much as you remember it.”

  “I hope so! I hope it has not changed!” Cyrilla cried. “I cannot tell you how often I have dreamt of riding on my pony in the Park, climbing up the tower to look at the view from the battlements and feeding the goldfish in the herb garden.”

  The Duke smiled and put his arm round her shoulder.

  “They are all just the same,” he said, “and we will look at them together.”

  “I would love that, Papa.”

  The door opened and Burton stood there.

  There was a smile in his old eyes when he saw father and daughter standing together.

  “Bring Hannah in to me, Burton,” the Duke ordered.

  “I’ll do that, Your Grace, and may I say it’s a real pleasure to have Lady Cyrilla back with us.”

  The Duke did not reply and Cyrilla made a little sound that was not unlike a sob.

  “I had – forgotten I was ‘Lady’ Cyrilla! Oh – Papa – ”

  She stopped herself from saying any more, because impulsively, almost forgetting to whom she was speaking, she had been about to say that she wondered whether the Marquis would have offered her marriage if he had known who she really was.

  She thought it was the sort of question that she ought not to ask herself and yet it persisted all the time that the Duke was talking to Hannah.

  She was taken upstairs to one of the best bedrooms while a footman was sent post-haste to Bond Street to instruct the best dressmakers, from whom her mother had bought her gowns in the past, to call first thing in the morning.

  Cyrilla looked round the bedroom and thought that she had forgotten how comfortable and attractive a room could be in one of her father’s houses.

  She had very seldom come to London as a child and so she recalled very little about Holm House, but she had felt it was unlikely that she would be disappointed when she saw it.

  Hannah and the housekeeper, rustling in black silk, were fussing over the things she required.

  “There’s no need to fetch anything tonight from where you’ve been living, Miss Hannah,” the housekeeper was saying. “I can find her Ladyship a nightgown and tomorrow it’ll be easy to purchase everything she requires.”

  “I’m sure that will be a pleasure, Mrs. Kingdom,” Hannah said.

  When the housekeeper left the room, Cyrilla said,

  “When you go back to the house, Hannah, I will make a list of what I want you to bring me.”

  “There’s nothing there you’ll want in the future, my Lady,” Hannah said determinedly.

  “There must be some things,” Cyrilla replied. “Perhaps a painting – ”

  “Forget those paintings!” Hannah snapped. “They’ve brought nothing but trouble and misery. If I had my way, I’d make a bonfire of the lot!”

  “Hannah!” Cyrilla exclaimed. “I had no idea you felt like that!”

  “What was the point of saying so when we had enough to worry about as it was?” Hannah retorted. “But it was pictures that brought that man into your mother’s life, pictures which would not sell and which brought us near to starvation, pictures that made his Lordship come a-knocking at the door!”

  “And a picture of me,” Cyrilla said in a very small voice. “I did not tell you, Hannah, but Frans Wyntack painted me in two – fakes which the dealer took to the Prince of Wales. Of course, it was obvious he would think it strange that two artists one hundred fifty years apart should have painted the same model.”

  “That’s just the kind of stupid thing that would happen!” Hannah snapped. “W
ell, it’s all over now and you’ve just got to forget all about it. Those years have been a penance for me, I can tell you, thinking of everything that your mother was missing, and you.”

  “You were very kind to us both,” Cyrilla said softly, “and now that I know how terribly you hated it, I am sorry, Hannah. And I am glad for your sake that it’s over.”

  “Yes, it’s over, my Lady!” Hannah said firmly. “There will be no going back, no regrets and no hankering after his Lordship. You know as well as I do that His Grace wouldn’t stand for that.”

  “Papa said some very – unkind things about – him,” Cyrilla said, almost as if she spoke to herself.

  “And with good reason,” Hannah snorted.

  “You did not tell me you disapproved of him when he came to the house.”

  “I thought he meant to help us,” Hannah replied. “All I can tell you, my Lady, is that you’ve had a lucky escape, a very lucky escape!”

  As Hannah busied herself arranging a bath for Cyrilla and having the gown in which she had arrived pressed because she had nothing else to put on for dinner, Cyrilla stood at the window looking out over the grey roofs.

  Twilight was falling and the sky was grey too and she suddenly felt an intense longing to hear the Marquis’s voice talking to her in the garden where they would sit together and in the little house where they would be alone.

  Then she told herself that, as Hannah had said, she had to put all that behind her.

  She loved him, but what he had asked of her was impossible, and she knew only too well that it was a life in which she would be ostracised by Society, a life in which everything was sacrificed for the love of a man.

  Looking back, she could remember how it had been when her mother first ran away, how she had been afraid to leave the house just in case she should meet someone she knew and be recognised.

  “No one in this place will be expecting to see the Duchess of Holmbury,” Frans Wyntack had said to her mother.

  “One can never be too sure.”

  “I am sure! And what do you think I feel, my darling, when I know I have made you ashamed of your very existence?”

  “I would never be ashamed of you,” the Duchess had replied. “It is just that I am afraid that if he knew where we were, my husband would take his revenge on you.”

  “That was the risk I took when I asked you if our love meant more than rank and wealth and all the other things he could give you.”

  “Yes, but suppose he wounded you or even killed you? Then my life would be over too.”

  She had not realised that Cyrilla was listening and watching as Frans Wyntack put his arms round her mother and drew her close against him.

  Then, as he began to kiss her passionately, she had slipped away, hurrying downstairs to the kitchen where Hannah would talk in her sane sensible voice of ordinary things.

  Always they had to be surreptitious and careful and, when her mother took her to Church she wore a thick veil over her face.

  “People will think it strange that you hide your face in such a way, Mama,” Cyrilla had said.

  “Perhaps they will think I am so ugly that I am afraid for anyone to look at me,” her mother had said with a smile, “or that I have bad skin.”

  “But you are beautiful, Mama, and it gives people pleasure to look at anything lovely.”

  Her mother had not answered and Cyrilla had been well aware that people looked at them curiously when they sat in the small obscure pew in the back of the Church and slipped out the moment the Service was over.

  It was Hannah who went shopping with Cyrilla.

  “Where shall we deliver the goods, ma’am?” the shopkeepers would ask.

  “I’ll take them with me,” Hannah would reply firmly.

  Cyrilla knew that they thought it was strange and that their estimation went down because they did not require the ordinary service that everyone expected.

  There was not one but a thousand little pinpricks to make her acutely conscious that they were outcasts.

  If people came to the door asking for money for charity, or even on one or two occasions calling because they were new to the neighbourhood, her mother would rush upstairs and hide in her bedroom and Hannah would say firmly that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Wyntack was at home.

  Occasionally, after they had been living in the house for a year or so, Frans Wyntack would bring home some fellow artists.

  It was then, as Cyrilla grew older, that she sensed something which shocked and humiliated her. These men, because they either knew or suspected that Frans Wyntack was not married, spoke to her mother with a familiarity that her father would not have tolerated for one second.

  They were not rude, for they would certainly never have been that to anyone so beautiful, it was just something in the way they spoke and the tone of their voices and most of all in the look in their eyes that Cyrilla detested.

  It was a lack of courtesy and certainly of the awe with which her mother was approached when she lived in The Castle as the Duchess of Holmbury.

  People’s attitude to a Duchess was very different from what it was to a woman who was living in an artist’s house and had a daughter who was not his.

  “Never, never, never,” Cyrilla had said to herself over and over again, when one of these little incidents had hurt her, “will I put myself in the same position. One day I will be married and I will be respectable.”

  She did not add that she never would run away, but she thought it and, although she could understand that the love her mother felt for Frans Wyntack was for her overwhelming and compelling and in a way irresistible, to Cyrilla it was an emotion which she would never feel but which if she did she would suppress and behave conventionally.

  Sometimes she missed her brother in a manner that made her long to suggest that she go home and see him.

  “Edmund will be seventeen today,” her mother had said when Cyrilla was fifteen. “I would like to see him and wish him Many Happy Returns of the Day!”

  “I expect that is what he is longing for you to do, Mama,” Cyrilla replied.

  There was a faraway look in her mother’s eyes, which Cyrilla knew meant that she was thinking of her son, whom Cyrilla had often thought her mother loved more than she loved her.

  Because she wanted more than she dared express to be with Edmund on his birthday, she had left her mother’s bedroom and gone downstairs to Hannah.

  “What do you think Edmund is doing today, Hannah?” she had asked.

  “Counting his presents, I shouldn’t wonder,” Hannah retorted. “And that’s more than you were able to do on your birthday.”

  “Mama says that she will give me something very nice as soon as we have some money.”

  “And when will that be, I’d like to know?” Hannah questioned, rolling out some pastry in an aggressive manner which told Cyrilla that she was annoyed.

  “I expect Edmund will have a new horse for his birthday,” Cyrilla went on, following her thoughts. “He always wanted horses more than anything else. I used to love riding with him when he would take me. I wish I could ride with him today!”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride!” Hannah said. “And that’s what we are – beggars! It’s something I never expected in all my born days!”

  It was not much consolation talking to Hannah after all and Cyrilla had gone into the sitting room to think about Edmund and imagine him galloping over the Park on a new horse.

  His fair hair would be blowing in the wind, because as usual he would forget to wear a hat and he would be teasing her because she could not keep up with him on her pony, which had always been smaller than his.

  ‘What fun it used to be!’ she thought with a little sob.

  Then she had been ashamed of herself because, as she told herself every day and every night, she was so lucky to have Mama all to herself while Edmund had been left with Papa.

  She was well aware that she was fortunate, as Frans Wyntack had always been very kind to her and
she had called him ‘Papa’ because it had pleased her mother.

  “He is your father now, darling,” her mother had said. “It makes him happy to think you are his little daughter when he is unable to have one of his own.”

  “Why is he not able to have one, Mama?” Cyrilla had asked.

  It was several years later that she realised that because her mother and Frans Wyntack were not married they would not think of bringing children into the world when they could not give them a name.

  This was another reason that made Cyrilla know that never in any circumstances would she put herself in the same position as her mother had.

  ‘I would like lots of sons like Edmund,’ she thought when she was alone in her little room at night, ‘and it would be nice for me if I had sisters I could play with.’

  But she knew, because she was hypersensitive, that those who came to the house were very careful not to talk to her about her real father.

  In some way they knew that she was not really Frans Wyntack’s child and it gradually became clear that they thought that her father, whoever he might have been, did not acknowledge her.

  Therefore, as she had been born out of wedlock, they considered it best not to speak of him, but to refer to Frans Wyntack as her father.

  In a way it was the final humiliation of her position and her mother’s.

  ‘How could they think such things of Mama?’ she had asked herself.

  Then, because Hannah had taught her a little of her own common sense, she knew it would have been strange if they had thought or done anything else.

  “I hate it! I hate this life!” she would say sometimes in the secrecy of her bedroom.

  And yet it was the very same life that the Marquis had asked her to share with him.

  “We will be together, my darling,” he had said and it was something she had heard Frans Wyntack say often enough.

  “What does anything matter, as long as we are together? Why should we worry about tomorrow when we are together today? We must forget the past. All that matters is that we are together, you and I.”

  She could hear him saying such words over and over again in his attractive voice, which still had a foreign accent and always her mother responded, always her eyes lit up, because she loved him.