A Nightingale Sang Page 9

  As he passed his coat lying on the ground, he picked it up and slipped it on.

  Lucy-May stood where she was, watching him with an inexpressible pain in her large eyes.

  When he came back leading both the horses Harry made no effort to help her into the saddle.

  He knew that she was quite capable of mounting by herself and, when she had done so, he swung himself into his own saddle and they rode off without speaking.

  The rain had stopped and a pale sun was coming through the clouds.

  Lucy-May felt that there was really nothing more she could say and nothing she could do.

  It took them a very short time to reach the front of the house and Kings Wayte looked more imposing and more beautiful, Harry thought, than he had ever seen it.

  Yet in a way it was like a dream from another world – a world of unreality, a world that most people thought had now been lost, destroyed by the war.

  ‘Because you are mine,’ he told himself, ‘I have to go on fighting for you, whatever the cost.’

  It flashed through his mind that if he married Lucy-May then her money would save Kings Wayte and he would know a happiness that he had never expected he would find.

  Then he told himself that such a fantasy could never be realised.

  Lucy-May belonged to a new hard commercial world that demanded value for money and what her father expected for his millions was a Ducal title that he had already arranged.

  Lucy-May wanted it too. Yet like all women, she wished to have her cake and eat it, which was something he had no intention of allowing.

  Everything that was fine in Harry shrank from the idea of making love in a secretive manner to a woman who belonged to somebody else and who undoubtedly thought him inferior not only because she was to marry a Duke but also because he was poor enough to be nothing but a servant in the employment of her father.

  ‘I hope I have enough pride left to prevent myself from sinking to that level,’ Harry told himself savagely.

  At the same time he realised that pride was cold comfort.

  *

  As Harry and the horses clattered away towards the stables, Lucy-May walked slowly up the steps into the hall.

  Absent-mindedly she handed her riding whip to one of the footmen and then without speaking went up the stairs.

  She felt as she did so that her whole world had somehow fallen about her ears and she had no idea what she could do about it.

  It was a long time since Lucy-May had felt unsure of herself, lost and afraid of her own feelings, but that was how Harry had left her.

  He had said that he was bewildered and bewitched, but she was bewildered too, but in a very different way.

  She knew now that she had fallen in love that she had not realised it would be so painful or that it would present a million problems that she could not find an answer to.

  ‘I want Harry, I want him!’ she told herself, as she walked towards her own bedroom.

  Then she thought of the Duke and her father’s determination that she should be a Duchess.

  All her life Lucy-May had been adored by her father and there was a closeness between them, which, after her mother’s death, had intensified to the point where they were almost inseparable.

  It had not really surprised Lucy-May when her father told her that he had chosen a husband for her.

  It had somehow seemed inevitable and the fact that the Duke was both good-looking and charming made it seem just like one of the stories that her father used to tell her when she was a little girl and he came to her bedroom to kiss her goodnight.

  She was the Princess and the Prince had come to her from a far-off country and offered her his hand and his heart and, of course, they would live happily ever afterwards.

  Lucy-May had been feted and made a great fuss of in America from the moment she had emerged on the social scene.

  She had been very much younger than the age at which any English girl would have been permitted to appear, but Mr. Wardolf wanted to have her with him.

  Before she was sixteen, Lucy-May had accompanied him to many huge social functions, besides travelling in his special train across the prairies and being received with him in many strange and rough places in the Western part of the country.

  When she grew older, there were men who pursued her not only because she was a great heiress but also because she was very pretty.

  It had never meant anything to her, except that she liked men because she was used to being with her father and found them easier to talk to than women, the majority of whom disapproved of her.

  Then, when she had first seen Harry, she knew that something strange had happened to her heart that had never happened before and after the first day when they had gone riding she found herself counting the hours until she could see him again.

  “I love him!” she told her reflection in the mirror. “I love him!”

  She was sure as she spoke, that there was no argument about that, but what could she do about it?

  She imagined her father’s anger when she confessed she had no wish to marry the Duke because she had fallen in love with a man who was very different from the son-in-law he had been envisaging.

  Although her father was prepared to give her the moon and stars should she want them, she knew that he expected to have his own way in everything else that concerned her and most especially her marriage.

  “These young American men are too brash and too uncivilised for you, my Poppet,” he had said often enough. “They’re civilised on the surface, but still uncultured underneath. Frenchmen are too insincere and Italians over-passionate.”

  He paused.

  “I want to see you married to an Englishman. They make the best husbands in the world and, although we chucked them out of our country, the English still have a great deal to offer us and it would be stupid not to appreciate the fact.”

  Lucy-May knew that he was talking about culture and she realised that her father was unique among his contemporaries in that he had a great appreciation of the arts, which were centred in Europe and were very little understood by the average American.

  She was not surprised that when he reached London he had spent any spare time he had at the National Gallery and the British Museum.

  “What do you find so interestin’ there, Poppa?” she had asked and he replied,

  “It’s places like this that make the English what they are. The Galleries teach me a great deal about art, also about the race who have collected and treasured them.”

  It was an aspect of her father that she had not considered before and she respected and admired him for being so frank and admitting, influential though he was, that there was a great deal more for him to learn.

  She had known how thrilled and in a way triumphant he had been when Tybalt Hampton, who had worked for him for a year and whom he liked and trusted, suddenly overnight became a Duke.

  At first she had found it hard to accept when her father had said with a glint in his eyes,

  “Hampton is a man I trust and would like to have had as a son. Now I can envisage him in a position very near to it, as my son-in-law!”

  “But – Poppa!” Lucy-May had cried in astonishment.

  “We are fortunate,” her father said, “but then I’ve always had my lucky streak. Hampton is now the Duke and I want to see you, my Poppet, as a Duchess by his side.”

  The new Duke had left New York in a hurry to attend his uncle’s funeral and Lucy-May had learnt that his inheritance had been as great a surprise to him as it was to them.

  The previous Duke, Tybalt’s uncle, had had two sons of whom one had been killed in the very last days of the war and the second had been wounded but not dangerously.

  He became engaged to a very charming girl he had known all his life and it was thought that the continuity of the family was safe.

  Then quite unexpectedly, it appeared, a very heavy cold had turned to pneumonia and, because he had already been weakened by his wounds, the young
man died.

  Tybalt Hampton had received a cable telling him to return to England immediately to take up his position as Head of the Family.

  Lucy-May had known, when he was explaining to her father what had happened, that he could hardly believe the whole thing was the truth and not a dream.

  He had actually been so incoherent in his explanations that Mr. Wardolf had asked,

  “Are you telling me, Hampton, that now your uncle is dead you come into his title?”

  “Yes, sir. I am now the fifth Duke of Stadhampton.”

  “I can hardly credit it!”

  “Nor can I, sir, but the cable is quite explicit. My uncle died yesterday and, although I was not aware of it, his son, my cousin, died last week.”

  “A double tragedy,” Mr. Wardolf murmured.

  “It is indeed, sir.”

  “But not to you, Hampton. I imagine that you are now a rich man.”

  “That is very unlikely, sir. The war has depleted most big estates and there are also Death Duties to be paid, which on my uncle’s estate will be quite considerable.”

  “But you will be a Duke!” Mr. Wardolf pointed out.

  It was in that moment that Lucy-May knew that he had decided not only Tybalt Hampton’s future but her own.

  ‘Do I really want to become a Duchess?’ she asked herself now.

  It had seemed a very exciting and rather lovely thing to be when she had first thought about it.

  The leading social hostesses in New York were all incredibly snobbish.

  Any visiting aristocrat from England or France was always feted, quarrelled over by those who wished to entertain them and inevitably, if they were bachelors, had every important debutante of the Season paraded before them as if they were cattle in a show.

  Lucy-May realised that, as her father always wanted to win every race, every business venture, every gamble he took part in, he would also wish his daughter to obtain for him a son-in-law who would eclipse everyone else in rank.

  It seemed as if the Duke of Stadhampton had fallen into his lap like a golden apple from a mythological tree.

  “One of the most important Dukes in England – that’s who Stadhampton is!” Mr. Wardolf said over and over again. “Every door of any importance in the world will be open to you.”

  “Any door is open to me now as your daughter,” Lucy-May replied.

  Her father had smiled at her affectionately.

  “Only in America, my dear. I cut no ice on the Continent of Europe. I am well aware of that, unless, of course, I am prepared to pay for it, which is a very different thing.”

  Lucy-May was astute enough to understand exactly what he meant. She thought herself that it would be very nice to make her father so happy and Tybalt Hampton was an extremely handsome man.

  She would also, she was sure, be clever enough not to make too many mistakes when she was a Duchess.

  What she had not anticipated was that she would fall in love. And with one of her father’s employees!

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Now that Tybalt is better,” Mr. Wardolf said, “We can give the much talked about ball.”

  “Yes, of course,” Lucy-May replied.

  She did not sound very enthusiastic and her father looked at her in surprise before he went on,

  “I’ll arrange the band and you must remind Dunstan to send out the invitations. I believe they were all ready a week ago.”

  The Duke said nothing.

  He thought that Lucy-May’s friends did enough dancing without having a large ball.

  They seemed to think of little except fox-trotting and one-stepping and he had already come to the conclusion since coming downstairs after his accident that it was difficult to distinguish one from another.

  They all looked so much alike, the girls all had bobbed or shingled hair, short dresses with low waistlines and the young men had a kind of artificial gaiety about them, which he knew expressed not only their joy at being alive after the horrors of war, but also an effort to escape from the problems that faced them in civilian life.

  They certainly seemed carefree enough, but he was perceptive enough to know that underneath a superficial veneer to most of them the future was a frightening problem that they had no idea how to solve.

  None of that worried Lucy-May, he thought, with her huge fortune, an adoring father and the knowledge that she had only to lift her little finger to have everything she wanted in the world placed at her feet.

  It struck him as rather surprising that he had seen very little of her since he had come downstairs. He had felt rather groggy about the knees and apprehensive in case overdoing it in any way should start one of the blinding headaches that the doctor had told him he was likely to suffer from for some time.

  “You were lucky, Your Grace, to get off as lightly as you did,” he had said. “I had a patient last week who had the same sort of collision and he had a broken nose, required nine stitches in his forehead and lost two of his front teeth.”

  The Duke had smiled.

  “I am very grateful that did not happen to me.”

  “Another time I would choose your driver more carefully,” the doctor went on. “The trouble with the young men today is that they are all obsessed with speed.”

  “That’s very true,” the Duke agreed. “And I am thinking that aeroplanes at least will have plenty of room to fly in without colliding with each other.”

  “I should not be too sure of that,” the doctor answered, “if all the young fools take to the air!”

  They both laughed.

  The Duke knew that a number of men who in the war had found the aeroplane a fascinating machine and would undoubtedly soon be trying to fly the Atlantic or reach Australia.

  Lucy-May’s guests, however, seemed to wish to do nothing more adventurous than twirl their partners over the parquet flooring to the new tunes, which seemed to the Duke to be very appropriate as far as the English were concerned.

  Those who had left the dining room where he was talking to Mr. Wardolf had already put the gramophone on and he could hear the words quite clearly,

  “Not much money. Oh, but honey,

  Ain’t we got fun – ”

  He looked across the silver-laden table at Lucy-May and was just about to make some joking remark when he saw an expression in her face that surprised him.

  She definitely looked unhappy and he wondered what in the world she had to be unhappy about and if it had anything to do with him.

  But, before he could say anything, she rose from the table and walked out of the room.

  Mr. Wardolf looked after his daughter with an air of perplexity and the Duke thought uncomfortably that he was going to question him. However the servants, fortunately, were still in attendance and after a moment the American rose to his feet and the Duke followed suit.

  Mr. Wardolf put his hand on his guest’s shoulder as they moved towards the door, saying,

  “Now don’t you do too much, my boy. It takes time to get over an accident of that sort and if you take my advice you’ll rest while you have the chance. I’m goin’ ridin’.”

  “I’ll be happy to join you tomorrow,” the Duke said, “but today I’ll listen to your advice and take it easy.”

  “That’s sensible!” the American agreed. “If it’s not too far for you, I’d like you to visit the stables and tell me what you think of the horses I’ve bought. I consider myself a good judge of horseflesh and I find them exceptional.”

  “I would certainly like to look at them,” the Duke replied.

  Thinking that there was no time like the present, he walked across the hall and, as his host went upstairs to change into his riding clothes, the Duke made his way towards the stables.

  He did not walk at all quickly, nevertheless he found it quite an effort to reach the very fine stable buildings, which had been added, he realised at a glance, by Inigo Jones, in the early part of the seventeenth century.

  They were, in fact, so exceptional that h
e stood for some time admiring them, appreciating the architecture and the way that the red brick had mellowed over the centuries into a warm pink.

  As he walked on, he found himself thinking that at least this sort of beauty was something American money could not transport across the Atlantic.

  An old groom appeared and saluted him respectfully.

  “I think you must be Hitchen,” the Duke said, holding out his hand, “I hear that you have some fine horses to show me.”

  “We ’ave indeed, sir,” the man replied, “the best we’ve ever ’ad in these stables and I feels real proud of ’em.”

  After inspecting the first two horses the Duke knew that they were animals any sportsman would be proud to possess and he told himself that he must compliment Mr. Wardolf not only on his stable but on the excellent advice he had been given in acquiring such superlative horseflesh.

  He moved from stall to stall finding himself running out of adjectives and merely thinking that he would like to own such animals, but knowing, for the moment at any rate, that he could not afford to do so.

  Remembering the horses in his uncle’s stables, he knew that they compared in no way with these.

  Then the thought came to his mind that in the future he would be able to buy what horses he liked and that price would be no object.

  For some strange reason the idea brought a frown to his forehead and abruptly he said to the groom,

  “Is there anyone at Kings Wayte with the name of Aleta?”

  He was watching the old man as he spoke and he saw that he was about to reply spontaneously to the question and then quite obviously checked himself.

  There was silence for a moment and the Duke sensed that Hitchen was choosing his words as he said,

  “I don’t think so, sir,” and quickly, too quickly for it to be natural, started to talk again about the horses.

  This only added to the Duke’s conviction that there was a very definite mystery about the woman who had nursed him on the first night when he had been concussed.

  He had heard her voice distinctly and realised that he had heard it before, but it was not until Lucy-May mentioned the word ‘nightingales’ that he knew that it was the same voice he had last heard two years ago in the little Temple in the garden of Berkeley Square.