Master of Hearts (16 page)

And then she looked at Kathleen.

"At least they have a terribly attractive uncle! He made us so very welcome the other night, and could not have behaved more charmingly! Don't you agree with me now, Kathie, that he's everything I once inferred he could be?"

"You said he had charm," Kathleen recalled.

Peggy's eyes twinkled a little.

"I'm beginning to think that's rather an inadequate word! Shane agrees with me, tool"

"Oh!" Kathleen said.

Peggy nodded vigorously.

"Did you know he actually paid a call on us the morning after the party?"

"He did—what?" Kathleen looked completely unbelieving. "What—what on earth for?"

Peggy seemed suddenly to become concerned about a parcel that appeared to be missing, and conducted an anxious search which was rewarded after a second or so by the discovery of it reposing beneath a couple of English library books at the bottom of her basket.

"Well, as a matter of fact I'm not altogether certain . . ." She took up the thread of the Conde's visit where she had left it off. "His ostensible reason was that he wanted to have a look at some of Shane's pictures—they had talked about them the night before, and he thought that several of his friends might be

interested in them as well. He did actually buy a whole half-dozen, and you can imagine how that pleased me! Several of Shane's efforts have been cluttering up the spare room for months, and although of course I know they're good I'd rather see the money for them. The Conde wrote out a cheque that took my breath away when I saw it, and part of it has already been expended on some new curtain material for the dining-room."

Peggy beamed happily.

"You know how shabby they were! The new ones are going to give the place an entirely new `look'."

"How nice," Kathleen commented mechanically. But she was thinking, so the Conde didn't spend the whole morning with Carmelita! Her heart started to thud a little. "What else did the Conde talk about?"

Peggy became interested in her basket again, which was certainly filled to overflowing.

"I'll have to get something more sensible than this when I go shopping!" She looked quickly at Kathleen and away. Kathleen's leaping pulses slowed a little. "He talked very pleasantly of several things . . . The changes that will take place at the quinta when he marries, and his sister leaves. He is buying a villa for his sister farther along the coast." Again the odd, quick look at Kathleen. "The boys won't go to school yet, however."

Kathleen felt as if something within her grew limp and quiet.

"He—he actually talked to you about marriage? His own marriage!"

"Oh, nothing precisely specific." Peggy looked down at the white toe of her sandal, and drew patterns in the dust with the cork sole. "I think he's really contemplating marriage, but at the moment he's planning alterations to the house. He wants a part of the grounds re-laid out, and he's got ideas about a new wing being built on to the house itself. That's probably where he's going to hang Shane's pictures." She grinned rather feebly. "It's probably going to be an English wing."

"Do you think Carmelita Albrantes will want an English wing?" Kathleen asked quietly, and Peggy quite noticeably avoided her sister-in-law's eyes.

"I couldn't say. But then I don't know very much

about Carmelita. And we none of us know for certain

that it's Carmelita the Conde's going to marry!" Kathleen turned away.

"I don't think there's very much doubt about it," she said.

The children were growing restless, and she was glad of the excuse to move on. She seized their hands, and tried to smile naturally at Peggy.

"Well, it's been nice running into you like this. Tell Shane I'm pleased about the pictures. I expect the next time I visit you you'll have the dining-room curtains hanging up and looking very splendid! I'll probably think I've come to the wrong house!"

Peggy tried to look as if she was thrilled at the thought of her home being thus transformed, but there was no doubt that she was anxious about Kathleen. The girl's smile was fixed and strained, and it was quite easy to understand what had happened to her. She had started off by quite violently disliking the Conde, and now she was . . . In love with him? Almost any girl could fall in love with the Conde, Peggy thought. Any susceptible girl most certainly would. Kathleen, however, wasn't susceptible, but she had reached an age when it would be a disaster for her if she fell in love with the wrong man!

"I make it a rule never to listen to gossip," Peggy said quickly, as if that might offer a grain of comfort. "Carmelita has never struck me as the ideal wife for Miguel de Chaves! In a few years she will not merely be quite plain, but she'll be dull, also! I should like to see the Conde married to someone rather more —more suited to himself!"

"Perhaps he considers Carmelita is very well suited to himself," Kathleen returned, and then added quickly that they must hurry, because the children's tea would be overdue, and it was the maid's evening off.

Peggy watched her hasten away through the blazing afternoon sunshine with her charges, and then turned and started on the remainder of her own walk home. She was not quite certain what that accidental meeting had achieved.

Kathleen handed over the children to Maria when she got indoors, and then went off to her own room to wash her hands and slip into a clean, crisp dress. But everything she did was purely mechanical, and she kept remembering the way Peggy had looked at her ... a vaguely uneasy look at first, and then a definitely sympathetic look.

Peggy knew very well that the Conde was planning to marry Carmelita, but she more than suspected that her sister-in-law had done the one thing she ought never to have done. The one thing no sensible employee ever did, and that was fall in love with her employer.

Peggy was probably wishing very hard that she had never brought her into contact with such a danger, but the damage was done now, and only Kathleen herself knew how irreparable it was. But at least she could look to her defences and make certain no one else guessed how completely she had succumbed to the fascination of the man who paid her her salary.

And the fact that it was such a good salary made the whole thing seem rather worse. It underlined the difference between them, even if there had been no Carmelita. He was rich, and she was grateful for the careless generosity that made the post she now held a valuable one. When she had to give it up she would be poorer in more ways than one. She would be financially less secure, and she would probably never see him again.

But it was the last thought that shook her. One could always get another job, but in the whole wide world there could be only one Miguel de Chaves.

Which proved how completely she had changed in her ideas about him since that first bleak interview in the library.

ANOTHER couple of weeks passed away, and Kathleen saw rather less of the Conde than she had done up till now. He was seldom in to lunch, and when he was Carmelita occupied the guest of honour's place at the table. That is to say she sat on his right hand and chattered to him as if Kathleen was not in the room with them, and sometimes it was a little embarrassing because she had a habit of slipping a hand inside his arm, and appealing to him in a very feminine way. And he rewarded her doe-like glances with a marked attentiveness that was even more embarrassing to the English girl, who had no one to prepare her peach for her or select a few of the choicest grapes from the great silver basket of fruit and place them on her fruit-plate.

It was true that she always refused dessert — not because she wasn't tempted by it, but because she was so anxious to leave them alone together. And she frequently scalded herself by drinking her coffee while it was too hot with the same purpose in mind.

For she was sure Carmelita heaved a sigh of relief when she was on the other side of the dining-room door.

She was also reasonably certain that Carmelita, in her pretty, plaintive way, had asked more than once why it was necessary for a governess to have her meals with her employer. But she didn't dare to try and convince herself that the Conde appeared surprised by such a question. He probably merely said that she was English, her people lived in the district, and it didn't seem quite right to confine her altogether to the nurseries.

Very occasionally Dona Inez lunched with them, and once
Carmelita
came early, driving herself in a small cream-coloured car, and spent the whole of the

morning with the twins' mother. When Kathleen had occasion to knock upon the sitting-room door in order to consult Dona Inez about a matter in connection with the children, she was invited to enter and found the two occupants of the room bending enthusiastically above a bale of heavy white satin damask on a side table, and fingering it appreciatively. Near them on a chesterfield couch was a pile of exclusive fashion magazines, one of which appeared to be a bridal number.

Inez looked rather vaguely at Kathleen as she put forward her request for permission to make a dental appointment for Jerry, and then nodded casually.

"Of course, if you think it's necessary." Then she lifted an end of the wonderful material and held it up against herself. "It's exquisite," she said, dreamily. "That faint golden thread that runs through it gives it an extra richness. I would like a wedding-gown of this material myself."

"Then you must get married again," Carmelita said gently, and smiled at her.

Inez made a slight shrugging movement with here shoulders, and dropped the satin.

"Perhaps I will one day," she answered. "When I am quite sure that I am behaving wisely!" She frowned, and Kathleen was sure she was thinking of Fernando, and that she was very certain her affair with him was anything but wise. "But, in any case, white is for very young and innocent brides, and I will never be that again."

She turned to Kathleen, as if suddenly recollecting that she, too, was young and might one day be a bride, and invited her to come and make a closer inspection of the shimmering beauty that was lying draped over the table.

"Do come and have a good look at this, Miss O'Farrell Isn't it quite gorgeous? And won't Senhorita Albrantes make a perfectly enchanting bride?"

For one moment Kathleen felt as if a rude hand actually caught at her heart and squeezed all the

life out of it, and her limbs refused to obey her as she tried to move forward to the table. She was dimly aware of Carmelita turning rather a delicate pink, and Inez with over-bright, faintly mocking eyes fixed on her own face, as if she perfectly understood how she was feeling — although this was so unlikely that afterwards Kathleen recognised that it was her agonised imagination that was playing her tricks. But her imagination had not conjured up that bridal silk, or put words into Inêz's mouth that she would have given anything not to hear.

"Senhorita Albrantes is getting married soon, and we are trying to select designs for her wedding-gown. My own dressmaker in Lisbon is going to hurry the thing through, and I can assure you it will be the most wonderful wedding-gown in all the world when it is finished!" She looked rather condescendingly at Carmelita. "You will owe me a debt of gratitude when you see how much skill has gone into the construction of this all-important robe! Senhora Araujo has few rivals, and even in Paris you would not do any better!"

"I am quite sure I would not," Carmelita agreed flutteringly, and flushed much more deeply, and considerably less attractively. "I am deeply grateful to you for putting me in touch with her, Inez."

Inez shrugged again dismissingly.

"Naturally, in the circumstances, I could not do anything else! We all want you to appear at your best, and very soon now you will be a close relative of mine." She smiled as if something about the other girl touched her suddenly. "It will be nice having you in the family, Carmelita!"

Kathleen withdrew from the room, carrying with her Inez's permission to have two of Jerry's upper teeth stopped, and if couldn't be avoided a lower one pulled. But as she walked blindly back to the nurseries she wasn't thinking about teeth and the importance of getting Jeronimo to a dentist as quickly as possible, but the final conclusive proof she had received that

morning that for once gossip hadn't lied, and the Conde de Chaves' future bride was a girl he had known all his life.

Carmelita Albrantes was the reason why he had been able to state so decidedly that he was in love — irrecoverably in love!

That afternoon several people came to tea, and Carmelita was joined by her aunt, and the Conde drove them home after they had stayed for an informal cocktail-party on the terrace.

Kathleen received an instruction from Dona Inez to bring the children down to the sala for tea, and Carmelita attempted to insinuate herself into their good graces, but although on their best behaviour neither Jerry nor Joe were attracted by her overtures. They clung determinedly to Kathleen's hands, and although she used every endeavour to persuade them to leave her side neither cream cakes nor crystallised fruits would woo them away from her. The Conde glanced at her a little oddly once or twice, she thought, and she wondered whether he was vexed because Carmelita's efforts went unrewarded.