Master of Hearts (13 page)

Looking at Carmelita Albrantes, and recognising her confidence and her faint air of being perfectly assured that she really was the most important guest—the most welcome guest—in spite of the slight insipidity of her appearance, Kathleen didn't want to be patronized by her employer. She didn't want favours bestowed on her, and her relatives invited just because she was proving herself much more useful than had been anticipated at the outset; and as the Conde continued to take very little notice of her she would have liked to slip away up to her room and take Peggy with her and persuade her and Shane to leave early.

Not that Shane, she thought, would need very much persuasion. He was never happy in a dinner jacket, and she was certain he was rebelling against the slight constriction imposed by a stiff white collar and a bow-tie, and the charms of Dona Inez were hardly likely to impress him. But Peggy looked perfectly happy as the deli-

cate porcelain cups of coffee circulated, and the atmosphere grew even more opulent with the scent of expensive cigars and specially blended cigarettes, and the French perfume of some of the ladies. Kathleen could feel her settling down to really enjoy the conversation she was having with an elderly dowager who couldn't think why they hadn't met before, and was likely to suggest further meetings before the evening ended.

For Peggy had to live in Amara, and she was a social soul. She would enjoy being invited out.

Carmelita returned to her straight-backed chair, and the host established himself just behind it, where he could talk to her across a very white shoulder and watch the diamond ear-rings flashing in her small, delicate ears. She certainly had a very delicate bone structure, and her mouth was undeniably lovely. Kathleen, watching from a seat near one of the several tall windows, had to admit that it was first and foremost a seductive mouth, and that when Carmelita was animated the pathetic droop vanished. She was animated tonight, and especially so when her brown eyes encountered Miguel's. When he lighted a cigarette for her she seemed to seize the opportunity to gaze right into his eyes. When his hand accidentally touched hers Kathleen knew she didn't really regard it as an accident.

And very likely it wasn't. Very likely he was trying to think up an excuse that would enable them to be alone together: after about half an hour they disappeared together into the deepening dusk of the garden.

Kathleen stood up the moment they left the room, and slipped upstairs to the Night Nursery to make certain her two charges were sleeping soundly. They were, the nightlight between their beds burning away gently, and there was not the smallest excuse for her to linger. Nevertheless, she stayed, feeling happier with the two small sleeping figures than she did downstairs in the magnificent sala, where any conversation that was addressed to her was of a purely polite order (or so she imagined).

After a time she began to be afraid that her presence might wake the children, so she went along to her own

room and, still with the idea of delaying her return downstairs, combed her hair and lightly powdered her nose. She was moving along the corridor which led to Dona Inez's apartments, and which would take her back to the head of the main staircase, when a figure emerged from a door at the end—Dona Inez's sitting-room door —and put a finger to his lips.

Kathleen was so surprised that she thought at first she was imagining things. Then Fernando Queiroz moved softly towards her.

"Senhorita," he said, in a compelling whisper. "Senhorita!"

She stood and waited for him to come close to her, and her eyes were wide with the astonishment she felt.

"Senhorita O'Farrell" He put a finger to his lips, in the same way and for the same reason that Jerry had done once before. "It is lucky for me that it is you and no one else! Maria swore you were all downstairs in the soda, but one cannot trust these maids. And Inez has already kept me waiting far longer than she promised not to do!" He glanced at his watch in the dim light of the corridor. "A full half hour! Surely she could have slipped away from the interminable coffee-drinking before this?"

"You mean—" Kathleen was afraid she gaped at him—"you mean that you are up here waiting for Dona Inez?"

"Why, of course!" She thought his eyes twinkled with confident audacity. "For whom else would I be waiting in Inez's own sitting-room? Although it is true that I also hoped I m
ight catch a glimpse of you, too!
"

Kathleen thought of the girl his friends expected him to marry, and a gust of pity swept over her.

"I think I understand why you were not invited to dinner," she said.

"I am very frequently invited to dinner, but tonight I was excluded—quite pointedly excluded! Inez made up for it by suggesting we should have a quiet talk in her room, and I can't really think why you should look at me in that big-eyed, reproachful way. They are extra-

ordinarily lovely eyes"—his voice softening into a caress

—"and their blueness makes me think of twin blue lakes.

But the coldness in your voice seems a little unmerited."

He moved even closer to her.

"I meant it when I said that I hoped I would see you, beautiful Irish Kathleen! You are Irish, aren't you?" She backed away from him.

"My father was Irish." The eyes he described as twin blue lakes regarded him with revulsion, however. "Have you forgotten that you are practically engaged to be married, Senhor Queiroz?"

He made a slight gesture with his hands and shoulders.

"In Portugal everyone is engaged to be married who has passed beyond the stage of adolescence," he told her, "and is not already married! These things are arranged in our cradles, as you probably know. For reasons —usually of finance!—we fall in with the arrangement, but the heart is something no one can school or order to incline itself in a certain direction! And my heart leapt quite violently in my breast when I first set eyes on you, and the smallest encouragement would result in it leaping right out of my breast and landing on the carpet at your feet!"

His audacious dark brown eyes merely aroused in her an increased feeling of revulsion and dislike, and she turned as if to retreat along the corridor, but he put out a hand and strongly grasped her wrist.

"No, no, don't go! Don't leave me up here to grow bored and infuriated waiting for Inez! She is the loveliest thing in widows I've ever met, but as I've already observed, there are other lovely young women in the world!"

He bent as if he was actually going to attempt to kiss her, but she resisted him so determinedly that he had to abandon the intention. Nevertheless, he laughed, softly and with amusement, as she struggled unsuccessfully to free her arm, and as footsteps sounded at the end of the corridor he altered his tactics and captured her free hand„ carrying it up to his lips.

"Such little white fingers!" he said, gently, and to the onlooker he was merely overcome by a desire to offer homage—and as Portuguese men do not normally kiss the hand of an unmarried girl, and Fernando Queiroz had a reputation for seeking rather than offering anything, the moment was one of sufficient unusualness to halt the approaching footsteps for a bare half second. And then they came on.

"What are you doing here, Fernando?" demanded the Conde, his face dark with a strange, black kind of rage.

Fernando looked guilty.

"Must I really offer an explanation . . .?" and he glanced at Kathleen as if loath to involve her more than she was already, if somehow or other he could spare her.

Miguel didn't merely bite his lower lip, he seemed to tear at it. His displeasure was like an icy draught in the corridor, and Kathleen stood appalled. Surely he didn't think .?

But he avoided even turning his eyes in her direction, and all at once the mantle of his usual calm, cool and disdainful aloofness dropped on him again, and he said with nothing more than a note of distaste in his voice:

"Not since the explanation is so very obvious! But as my sister's apartments are in this corridor, Queiroz, and it is possible she may be on her way up to them at any moment, I would recommend that you remove yourself without delay. And you, Miss O'Farrel—" persistently avoiding looking at her, while his handsome face had much in common with austere museum marbles—"unless you have a particular wish to say goodnight to your brother and sister-in-law I think you might retire to your room."

For one moment Kathleen felt angry.

"Of course I would like to say goodnight—" she began. Then a sudden, strange sense of futility rushed over her—of inevitability—followed by a sensation of flatness and meekness.

"Although, if you would be good enough to do so for me, there is no real reason why I should go downstairs again," she said in a colourless voice.

The Conde bowed very slightly.

"Of course I will convey your goodnights!"

Fernando's eyes were watching her with a kind of mournful regret, and she knew this and was secretly furious with him. If only she dared say outright what he was doing in the corridor! But would the Conde even pretend to believe her when it was his sister who was involved?

"And tomorrow morning I would like to have a word with you--early, miss O'Farrell" Her employer's voice was clipped and icy. "As soon after breakfast as you can make it convenient. . . . That is to say, get someone to take over the temporary charge of the children! In the library," he added.

"Very well, senhor!"

But as she turned away and left the two men she felt so humiliated that she wondered whether it would be a good plan to walk out that night. Slip down now and join Peggy and Shane, and say she was going home with them!

Then she decided that that would clear up nothing. And in the morning she would clear up something! She wouldn't let the despicable Fernando Queiroz get away with it altogether . . . or, for that matter, Dona Inez, who, as a widow and a mother, should have known better than to encourage him!

BUT the first thing she received in the morning, even before the arrival of her breakfast-tray, was a note from Dona Inez which made her realise that the Portuguese woman was far more capable of protecting her interests than she was herself.

The note said simply, in beautifully-penned English characters:

"I have had word with my brother on the subject of you and Fernando, and I have tried to make him understand that you are very young, and therefore impressionable! Fernando should not have arranged to meet you after dinner, but young people do things that we staider creatures would never dream of, and I do not forget that Senhor Queiroz was only a school-boy when I married!

Be a little more discreet in your meetings in future, and if possible avoid my sitting-room!"

Kathleen went through the morning routine of bathing and dressing with her hands shaking with anger, and her breakfast-tray was left practically untouched. When she joined the children, who were always given their breakfast by Maria, she was in no mood to cope with their wildly high spirits, and all she could think was that the ground had been wiped from beneath her feet, and the clever Inez had chosen the safest way out to protect herself.

Certainly her brother, reading that note, would never believe it was part of a subterfuge.

", .. I have tried to make him understand that you are very young, and therefore impressionable!"

Kathleen felt her anger die, and a feeling of unreasonable depression take possession of her. She was being implicated in rather a mean little affair that to Fernando meant nothing, for, as he had admitted,

there were many lovely women in the world, and apparently he liked them all! It was possible that he appealed to Inez f ar more than Inez appealed to him, but that didn't excuse him, and it made of Inez a very unscrupulous woman. Not merely because she was willing to involve Kathleen, but because she knew that Fernando was practically betrothed to be married, and the inexperienced young girl who was in love with him had none of the weapons a more mature widow possessed. An extremely attractive widow, moreover, who made that particular young girl seem extra colourless!

Kathleen felt a little sick with helplessness, sympathy for the girl who, according to Inez, she was trying to rob, and the difficulty to really credit that the twins' mother could behave in such a way. Without any regard, apparently, for truth or other peoples' feelings!

As soon as she had helped Maria clear the nursery table, and had seen the twins settle down to amuse themselves with various favourite toys, she went downstairs to the library, and knocked on the heavily panelled door with the feeling that when it opened she would feel still more sick, and almost painfully apprehensive. But there was no response to her knock, and the door didn't open. She tapped a little more loudly the second time, and still more loudly the third time, but nothing happened. The Conde was quite plainly not in his library, and although she had imagined he would be waiting for her he obviously wasn't.

She went back upstairs to the nursery wing, not conscious of any relief because she had escaped being reprimanded for the time being, and aware instead of a rather leaden disappointment because the evil moment had had to be postponed. The twins were growing restless and demanding to be let out into the garden, and as it was a particularly beautiful morning Kathleen knew she couldn't keep them cooped up indefinitely. Besides, they were her responsibility and their health was important, so she took them down to the quiet corner of the grounds where they usually disported themselves at this hour of the day, and then learned