The Goddess and the Gaiety Girl Read online

  “What is your real name?”

  The Marchioness seemed to shoot the question at her and because it was unexpected and Larentia was already nervous, she replied before she could stop herself,

  “Larentia.”

  As soon as she had spoken she realised what she had said, and added quickly,

  “But I dance under the name of – Katie King.”

  “Is King your surname?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you think that ‘Katie King’ sounds better for the stage?”

  The way the Marchioness uttered the two names made them sound ludicrous and Larentia merely inclined her head in acknowledgement.

  “His Grace tells me you have come here purporting to be married to my brother, the late Duke of Tregaron.”

  “Yes – that is – right.”

  “You have brought a Marriage Certificate and a letter. Have you no other evidence that this marriage really took place?”

  “I do not know what other evidence you would want,” Larentia replied.

  “When two people are to become man and wife,” the Marchioness said sharply, “usually a large number of letters pass between them which would substantiate their relationship.”

  There was silence before Larentia said,

  “I thought – that would be all – that you would require.”

  “So you do have other documents at your home – and where is that? What I am asking for is your address.”

  This was a question that Harry Carrington had told Larentia she might be asked, and he had said,

  “You’ll have to be careful. They mustn’t make enquiries either at your house or at Katie’s lodgings. Tell them you’ve been moving about and staying with friends, and have no permanent home at the moment.”

  Painstakingly, almost word for word, Larentia repeated what he had told her to say.

  She hoped the Duke and his aunt would think that because she had been ill and was not earning any money, that she had moved into cheaper and still cheaper lodgings, until finally on the Duke of Tregaron’s death she had come to the Castle because she had nowhere else to go.

  Then she remembered she had said she was looking after somebody who was ill and before the Marchioness could ask the next question, the Duke said,

  “Last night you told me that you wished to return to London quickly because you were nursing somebody, but you did not say who it was.”

  With difficulty Larentia prevented herself from saying it was her father, recalling that Katie King’s father and mother were dead.

  “It is my – uncle,” she said. “He is alone in the world – as I am – and I have to keep house for him and now he is ill, I must be there – to l – look after him.”

  “I understand,” the Duke said.

  “What does your uncle do?” the Marchioness enquired.

  “He – is a writer.”

  She was unable to think of anything but the truth. She was not prepared, however, for the look of horror in the Marchioness’s face as she asked,

  “He is not a journalist?”

  “No, no. He writes books.” She knew as she spoke that the Marchioness had been afraid that the story of her secret marriage would somehow appear in the newspapers.

  ‘They are almost as frightened of me as I am of them,” Larentia thought, and knew the situation could be funny if she were not so nervous of making a mistake.

  “What sort of books?”

  Again it was easier to tell the truth.

  “My – uncle is an – historian.”

  “So that is why you know so much about mediaeval times!” the Duke said, “and you have certainly come to the right place to learn more.”

  The Marchioness gave him a look, which showed Larentia that she thought he was being far too pleasant and getting away from the point of the conversation.

  “His Grace tells me, Miss King,” she said, “that you are asking for the enormous sum of £5,000 in return for keeping your marriage a secret. There is of course a very unpleasant word attributed to such a request. It is ‘blackmail’!”

  It was, Larentia knew, what she had thought herself, but because of the way it was said, she felt it was an insult, and one she resented.

  She thought how good Katie had been in keeping her sacred word of honour and it made her reply most angrily,

  “I did not blackmail His Grace after he – left me, and I have no wish to blackmail you, my Lady, or – anybody else. All I am asking for, is the money which I was promised, and I have suggested it would be more convenient if the debt was paid off once and for all, rather than month by month.”

  “We have first to establish of course, that the ‘debt’ as you call it, is real, and that your marriage to the Duke actually took place.”

  “Why should you doubt it?” Larentia asked. “When I have brought you the Marriage Certificate?”

  She tried to speak defensively, but even to herself her voice sounded weak and fearful.

  “I am sure, Miss King, you understand,” the Duke interrupted, “that we not only have to ask questions, but also to reassure ourselves that the late Duke, who is no longer with us, actually married you in such a surprising fashion.”

  “Why he – did so was made very – clear in the – letter,” Larentia said.

  “Letters have been forged before now,” the Marchioness remarked.

  The words startled Larentia and for the first time she wondered if the letter was a forgery.

  Then, as she thought about it, she became aware that the paper on which it was written was not very impressive nor, as might have been expected, was it surmounted with an elaborate crest or coat-of-arms.

  One thing she had noticed while going round the Castle was that the Tregarons were proud of their heraldic quartering’s.

  On almost every picture either the arms of the Caron of the time were painted on his shield or he stood beside them.

  There were shields on the stone staircase, on the mantelpiece in the Library, on the ceiling of the room in which they were now talking, and on every tomb in the ancient Chapel she had visited with Mr. Webster.

  It seemed strange that the Duke should therefore have written to Katie on plain paper and what was more, Larentia thought, the paper itself, while of a good quality, had not been particularly creased or dirty in any way.

  Katie must have kept it for six years, but even if she had wrapped it up or locked it away in a writing-box, surely it would not look so fresh and unsullied?

  These thoughts raced through her brain, then she told herself that even if the Marchioness had made her slightly suspicious of the letter there was still the Marriage Certificate and Harry Carrington had said the marriage had been inscribed in the Register of Southwark Cathedral.

  She lifted her chin and said quietly,

  “If Your Ladyship is in any doubt it would be wisest for you to visit Southwark Cathedral and see the evidence in the Marriage Register, as that was where the wedding took place.”

  “What I am trying to understand,” the Marchioness said, “is why you consented to keep the marriage a secret? Surely you must have felt very proud that you, who are of no importance and on the stage, should become a Duchess?”

  “I did it because it was what His Grace asked me to do,” Larentia said quietly.

  The Duke, listening, thought she had certainly scored a point not by what she had said, but by the way she had said it.

  The Marchioness glanced at the Duke as if she was asking him to help her in what she wished to ask next.

  “I think, Miss King,” the Duke said, after a moment’s slightly uncomfortable silence, “that it would be best to wait while we investigate your claim and discuss what arrangements should be made for the future when they are completely substantiated.”

  He saw the look of horror that came in Larentia’s eyes.

  “Are you – suggesting– Your Grace that I am to – wait perhaps for quite a – long time while you visit the Cathedral to inspect the Marriage Re
gister and make other enquiries?”

  “That and I suppose there must be people who have seen you and the Duke together and were aware of your relationship?”

  “You cannot – make me wait so long! “ Larentia cried. “I have already told you I have to return to London to be with my uncle. It may take days– perhaps weeks for you to find out what you want to know – and by that time he may – die without me.”

  “If he is really as ill as that,” the Duke remarked, “how were you able to leave him?”

  “He is being looked after temporarily,” Larentia said quickly, “but I have to go back. Please – if you will not give me all the money I have asked for – could I have the – money for my – debt?”

  “If your claim is substantiated, Miss King, you will certainly be entitled to the £5,000 that you have demanded, or perhaps, it depends upon what the Lawyers decide, a monthly settlement will be made available to you. But until we have more proof than what you have provided with these two documents, then I am afraid there is nothing we can do but wait.”

  “But I have told you that is – impossible!” Larentia said. “Please, Your Grace, let me have the smaller amount of money. It cannot matter so very much to you – but it matters more than I can possibly explain – to me.”

  As she spoke she saw the face of Isaac Levy quite clearly, and his mean, greedy eyes.

  She knew that if he was defrauded not only of the money he had loaned them, but also of his exorbitant amount of interest, he would take his revenge in a way she did not dare contemplate.

  Supposing he should hurt her father when he came out of the Nursing Home? Supposing he seized their house and all their possessions?

  Larentia had not lived in a poor neighbourhood without knowing how cruelly the impoverished could be treated when they owed money to their landlords, to a publican, or even to their neighbours.

  Men were beaten up or even murdered for what seemed a trifling sum, and from what she had seen of Levy she had the feeling he would stick at nothing when it came to losing his money.

  “Please – please,” she pleaded now, “help me and I – swear I will not make any trouble for you or – do anything you do not – wish me to do.”

  The Duke rose abruptly to his feet.

  “I think, Aunt Muriel,” he said, “there is nothing to be gained by Miss King upsetting herself any further. Perhaps we are all a little overwrought by the surprise of this news, and later in the day we should again talk quietly and calmly and see what can be done to the advantage of us all.”

  “I really do not think there is anything to discuss, Justin,” the Marchioness replied. “Miss King may be in a hurry to receive her money, that of course is understandable and there may be a good explanation for it. At the same time, we have to safeguard ourselves against fraud and trickery. But as you suggest, we will leave things as they are until later this afternoon. I, for one, feel extremely upset at what has transpired.”

  The Marchioness rose and without looking again at Larentia she turned and walked with great dignity towards the door.

  The Duke opened it for her and only when he had shut it behind her did he look back to see that Larentia, having risen from the chair in which she had been sitting, standing looking at him with such an expression of tragedy in her eyes, that it was infinitely pathetic.

  There was too, he thought, as he walked back towards her something very helpless in her attitude.

  It struck him that she was not a hard-boiled, scheming Gaiety Girl as the Marchioness would argue, but instead somebody young and bewildered and quite unequipped to know how to cope with the situation in which she found herself.

  Then he told himself he was being ridiculous.

  She was an actress and why should he expect she would not be able to act?

  Then as he stood beside her, she looked up at him, her eyes met his, and she said in a broken little voice that was hardly above a whisper,

  “Help – please – help me – I do not know-what to do!”

  Chapter Five

  Larentia was sitting in the sunshine on a grass incline that led up to the keep.

  Because the sun was so hot, she had taken off her bonnet and the shawl that she had put over her shoulders, and Tennyson’s poem of the Holy Grail was on her lap.

  She was reading the words carefully, feeling that somehow they held a message for her, but she was not certain exactly what she would find.

  She only knew that the words created pictures in her mind somehow linked with the beauty of the Castle and the atmosphere of mysticism, which was inescapable wherever she went or looked.

  For the moment she had forgotten her own troubles and difficulties and was swept away into an ancient land of the past where Arthur’s Knights rode out to save and rescue the women who were menaced by evil in any form, whether that of a dragon or a sorcerer.

  ‘That is what I need to save me,’ Larentia thought and saw the Duke walking towards her over the green grass. She had known when she appealed to him in the morning room that although it was against his common sense he wanted to help her.

  For a moment she thought he was going to reply that he would give her the money she had asked for and let her return to London.

  Then he had said,

  “May I think about what you have asked me, and let you know later in the day? I do appreciate your sense of urgency and the reason for it, but I also have to do what is right and fair towards my family.”

  “Yes, of course you must.”

  She knew what he was saying was wise and, in fact, just, but rather irrationally she was disappointed.

  She realised when she ate her luncheon alone in the room where she had breakfasted that the Marchioness was refusing to associate with her.

  She told herself it was what she should have expected, instead of believing, as she had, that perhaps an older woman would be sympathetic because Katie King was young and ignorant.

  Thinking back into the past Larentia was aware how bitterly her mother’s relatives had disapproved of her marrying her father because he was poor and had nothing to recommend him except his academic distinction, which, in their eyes, did not count for much.

  Her mother’s family lived in the North of England and could trace their ancestry back for hundreds of years. Although they were certainly not the social equals of the Garons, they were gentlefolk and had their roots in an estate that had been theirs for many centuries.

  Larentia could remember her grandfather, a very autocratic old gentleman, who barked out orders to his children and to his servants in the same way that he had ordered about the Regiment he commanded.

  Her mother’s two brothers were at the moment in India, serving their country as their father had done before them but Larentia had not seen either of them for over seven years.

  When her grandfather had died most of the estate had been sold and the money went to his sons. His daughter, Larentia’s mother, received a very small allowance and the capital was held in trust for Larentia when she came of age.

  It brought in a little over a hundred pounds a year, which was all she and her father had to live on when his books no longer sold and his publishers would make no further advance towards the next one.

  Larentia was well aware that there was no use appealing to her father’s Lawyers to let her have more than they sent her every quarter, because they would merely reply that she must wait until she came of age before she touched any of the capital.

  Before Harry Carrington had made the suggestion that she could earn the money for her father’s operation by pretending to be Katie King, she had wondered despairingly what, when he was dead, she would do, and where she could go.

  She had a number of cousins living somewhere in the North of England, but her mother had always said they were poor and she was quite certain they would not wish to add to their own families already living with them.

  She had told herself she must find employment of some sort, but she had no idea what she could
do, having no saleable qualifications except that of being able to run a house fairly competently for her father.

  The way the Duke lived was a revelation and the extravagance of the food alone made her keep thinking that the money she had asked for to save her father’s life and Katie King’s was merely a ‘drop in the ocean’ compared to his annual expenditure.

  At breakfast she had been offered a choice of six different dishes, and there had been a bowl of the hothouse fruit on a side-table besides the silver coffee set, which appeared to Larentia to be the epitome of luxury.

  At luncheon course succeeded course until it was impossible to eat any more.

  Once again as the crested silver dishes were removed by two footmen she thought how little £8oo actually meant to the Duke, and how easy it would be for him to give it to her and let her go.

  When she had finished her meal she had walked through the corridors looking at the priceless pictures, the fine furniture, the carved console tables and the chests inlaid with ivory and priceless marbles.

  The contrast between all this and the life where she must count every halfpenny for fear that she would not be able to get another one, seemed ludicrous.

  By the time she walked out into the sunshine she was praying desperately that the Duke would be generous and she could return to London free from the menace of Isaac Levy.

  Then when she had opened Tennyson’s book of poems she forgot for the moment everything but the music of his words.

  “A way by love that waken’d love within, To answer that which came...”

  Speaking the words aloud, she saw the Duke walking towards her and waited for the answer that she felt he was bringing her.

  She did not move and the sun dazzled her eyes so that she thought, as she had before, he was ‘arrayed in silver-shining armour, starry clear’.

  He reached her side and looking down at her head silhouetted against the dark stone of the keep, he said,

  “I somehow expected to find you here.”

  “I thought it was an appropriate place to read the book you lent me.”

  “I brought it to the Castle for the same reason.”