Royal Purple (3 page)

As he watched her walk away, with a friendly but cool nod of her head, he called after her:

“I wouldn’t go above pearls if I was you, miss! Pearls is cheap nowadays
...
Ha, ha!”

And he let in his clu
t
ch and swung his taxi round and was way like a streak of light to collect a new fare.

Lucy found the shop door held wide open for her. A beautiful-looking young man in a dark suit and striped silk tie asked her, with a slight bend of his head, what he could do for her.

Lucy, who had received her coaching from the Countess, asked to see the head of the establishment, and produced the brooch from her bag. After that there was no end to the bowing and scraping, and she was ushered into a kind of inner sanctum where the business of providing the brooch with a new owner was entered into.

Before the door of the sanctum closed behind her Lucy noticed a rather austere-looking man who was not very old examining a tray of tie-pins at one of the counters. He too wore a beautifully cut suit, and his tie was much more restrained than that of the jeweller’s assistant. He carried a pair of soft suede gloves in one hand, and his hat in the other. His face was dark and interesting, and there were a few threads of grey in the blackness of his hair at the temples.

Lucy found the man who was holding the door open for her looking at her rather oddly, and she stumbled forward with a sudden rush of colour into the room. But before she did so the man at the counter looked up at her, and their eyes met.

In the middle of a thick carpet, surrounded by glass cabinets displaying costly treasures, and with an urbane gentleman rising from behind a polished walnut desk, Lucy paused to reflect how vastly dissimilar eyes, and their expressions, were.

The man who was choosing a tie-pin had eyes of an extraordinary, almost opaque darkness. Yet at the same time there were lights in them, like the lights in cairngorm. And his eyelashes were almost feminine.

CHAPTER III

THE next ten minutes or so were afterwards a mere period of confusion in Lucy’s mind.

She knew that she was provided with a chair, and the gentleman who had risen from behind the walnut desk had a most ingratiating smile, and was very polite to her. She was quite certain that he eyed her a little curiously at first, and was afraid the worn condition of her suit was largely responsible. But when she mentioned the Countess von Ardrath, and produced the brooch, it apparently didn’t matter whether the condition of her suit was worn or not. The urbane gentleman began to beam, and from beaming he arrived at being positively effusive.

The brooch was scrutinised through a specially constructed magnifying glass, and a lot of excited comment passed between the elderly jeweller and his assistant. Lucy caught expressions of admiration like ‘superb’ and ‘extraordinary depth of colour’, and gathered that it was not every day in the week that a brooch of that quality came into their eager hands, and began to feel more confidence in the Countess’s prediction that they would not jib at a couple of thousand pounds in exchange for it.

As a matter of fact, the question of price arose so simply and naturally that she had merely to shake her head at their first figure. One thousand seven hundred and fifty guineas
...

“Not enough,” she said.

The two men exchanged glances, and they each smiled a little.

“Two thousand.”

“Guineas?” Lucy probed, anxious to have the position clarified.

The elderly jeweller assured her that he meant guineas. Lucy felt the blood rush up into her face, and her eyes glowed. She felt every pulse in her body quicken with excitement, and for a moment she could hardly believe that the transaction had been so simple. One moment she had been quaking at the roots of her being, afraid that they would find some flaw in the Countess’s cherished possession, or that the old-fashioned setting of the stones would lower its value, and the next both the butcher and the milkman who had been worrying the life out of Augustine for their money were as good as paid, and they would be able to bury the remains of the tin of black treacle in the garden. The dogs could be provided with an outsize marrow-bone to sharpen their teeth on, and if they had grown tired of gravy-beef they might have a slice of rump steak cut up between them. Garnished with a few mushrooms if they fancied them!

She felt so light-headed with relief that she could have giggled at the thought, and the one thing her mind didn’t dwell on was the Countess’s promise that if she got two thousand guineas for the brooch she would receive an entire new outfit of clothes. In addition—presumably—to her arrears of salary!

What was an outfit of clothes compared to the sheer joy of knowing that, for the next few weeks, at least, there would be no more heavy suet puddings for lunch, and Augustine would have no excuse for looking dour every time she entered the kitchen?

“In cash?” she got out eagerly, in a slightly husky voice.

The two men exchanged glances again, and apparently this was not entirely usual. But it so happened that a customer had just paid cash for a particularly costly trifle that would no doubt adorn a lady’s neck that night, and they had the cash in the safe. If the young lady didn’t mind waiting a short while while they made certain that this was the case...

The young lady didn’t mind waiting at all, and rid their minds of any doubts with one of her breathlessly attractive smiles. Then she wandered round the room and examined the contents of the glass
c
ases on the walls, and the elderly jeweller came up behind her and half
-
jokingly suggested that he might interest her in taking a closer look. Lucy answered quite seriously that it would benefit no one if she took a closer look, and then exclaimed impulsively at the beauty of a sapphire necklace—not dull and clouded, like so many of the pieces in the Countess’s
jewelbox
, but alive with every gradation of blueness, and sparkling as if every separate stone was an unsullied blue star.

The jeweller lifted it off its bed of velvet and clasped it about Lucy’s neck. Afterwards she wondered whether he had some idea that she was a slightly eccentric heiress, going about in her threadbare clothes, but when he turned her gently towards a mirror and she got the full impact of herself with the sapphires hugging the slender column of her throat she could only gasp. By some extraordinary trick of the light—or as the result of some strange metamorphosis—her eyes were as blue as the sap
p
hires, and they blazed with the same excited blue fire. Her mouth with its soft pink curves—generous curves, for it was not really a small mouth—was parted in amazement, and her teeth gleamed like flawless pearls between her lips.

“You should always wear sapphires,” the jeweller said softly in her ear. “They do something for you
...
and pearls,” he added, “will do the same!”

The door behind them opened, and a slightly impatient voice spoke apologetically.

“Forgive me for intruding, but I haven’t a great deal of time
...”

“Of course, of course,” the jeweller said swiftly, transferring the full blast of his urbanity from Lucy to the newcomer, so that it washed over him like a wave. “I’ll be with you in a moment
...
you shall have all my attention
!”
Then he res
c
ued the sapphires from Lucy’s neck and returned them to their case, and the man, who by this time had probably made his purchase of a tie-pin, stared hard at Lucy. He stared so hard, in fact, that Lucy was suddenly acutely embarrassed, and under the concentrated regard of his extraordinary dark eyes she felt like a swimmer who had been striking out strongly and then suddenly realised that there was nothing but fathoms and fathoms of water beneath her, and she wasn’t such a good swimmer after all. In fact, she could no longer swim a stroke.

She managed to say something to the jeweller, to thank him for allowing her to try on the necklace, and then, grappling with the most amazing confusion she had ever experienced in her life, she turned to the young man who had two thousand guineas in crisp banknotes waiting to be stowed away by her in a compartment of her commodious handbag, and thanked him jerkily for simplifying the stowing-away process.

He tested the clasp of her bag to make certain it wasn’t faulty, and the elderly jeweller suggested calling a taxi for her.

“Oh, no,” Lucy said quickly. “I’ll walk.”

“But with all that money
...
?”

“I’ll pick up a taxi if I want one,
”
she said breathlessly, and they bowed her out of the shop, the young assistant going ahead to open the door, the elderly man bowing from the waist until she was off the threshold.

And the man who had interrupted stood watching the procedure, and another customer—rather a rough-looking individual, wearing a loud suit, and with a flower in his buttonhole, who said he wanted to buy a present for a lady—watched also.

Outside the shop Lucy felt as if she was walking on air. For the first time in her life she had a large sum of money not merely in her possession, but in her handbag, and for the first time in her life a man had looked at her in such a way that she wondered whether she would ever completely forget him.

She couldn’t say that he had looked at her in admiration; she couldn’t even say that he had looked at her with a tremendous amount of interest. He had just looked at her, and her bones had seemed to dissolve, as if they weren’t really bones at all, and she had experienced a deep and most curious breathlessness and unsteadiness, so that her hand shook when she crammed the banknotes into her bag; and when she walked out of the shop she had known that he was following every one of her movements, and it was like having eyes in the back of her head.

She walked on without realising where she was going, or why she was walking, and the only thing she had the sense to do was to clutch her handbag up against her breast, so that no one could possibly snatch it from her.

Who is he
?
Who is he
?
she asked herself. And
why
did he look at me like that
?

A taxi crawled past her, and she thought vaguely that she ought to hail it. She was looking round just as vaguely for another that might be following it when someone seized her arm and walked her down a side street.

“Keep going,” said a voice very close to her ear—a harsh, grating voice. A most unpleasant smell of garlic and inferior tobacco filled her nostrils, and she was about to protest when the voice warned her icily: “Try making a scene, sister, and it’ll be the worse for you! One scream out of you and this little chap”—she felt something digging into her ribs—“will see to it that it’s your last. So be sensible and just keep on walking along naturally. This is a quiet street, but a cab’ll be along any minute, and we’ll take it.”

But what he actually took was a sudden plunge into the gutter, and Lucy stood watching while a pair of slim but astonishingly powerful hands plucked him out of it again, stood him up against the wall, and then sent him sprawling back into the gutter again with a badly bruised jaw and a dazed look in his eyes. The man who had been filling Lucy’s thoughts to such an extent that she had allowed a situation to develop which might not have ended so satisfactorily ordered him to remove himself with all speed, and he crept way without uttering a sound. After which Lucy found her arm taken firmly for the second time in a matter of minutes, and she was marched peremptorily back to the main thoroughfare, a cruising taxi was halted and she was deposited inside it—and the dark
-
eyed man got in beside her.

“Where to?” he asked, with such curtness that he sounded as if he was speaking between his teeth.

She told him: “Twenty-four Alison Gardens.”

He transmitted the address to the driver, then sank back and asked her another curt question.

“I hope you’ve got that bag of yours safe?” he regarded it as if instead of being made of unoffending leather there was something noisome about it, and he disliked it extremely. “I suppose you realize that it’s a very unwise thing to saunter about London with all that money in your possession and apparently no sense of direction?”

Lucy drew a long breath, and she suddenly realized that she was trembling rather badly. She was not unappreciative of the fact that she had been saved from something very horrible
...
And she owed her escape to him. It would never do to let him know that, but for
him,
she might never have been in any danger at all—might have allowed a taxi to be called for her before she left the jeweller’s—but it was such an indisputable fact that she couldn’t deny it herself.

She felt bewildered, both by her stupidity and by the thing that had just happened to her.

“Oh, I wasn’t merely sauntering along without knowing where I was going,” she tried to reassure
him
a little feebly. “I—I intended to take a taxi.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he remarked.

“But it’s such a lovely morning, and I’ve never had so much money in my possession—not all at once!—before.”

“Then it is your money?”

“Oh no. It belongs to my employer, the Countess von Ardrath.”

“I see,” he said, and lay back in a more relaxed fashion in his corner, and studied the passers-by. He had rather a firmly set mouth, and to Lucy it was distinctly grim at the moment, and his chin had a squareness and a strength about it that would have pleased her very much indeed if she hadn’t been afraid that he was very much annoyed. She supposed he wasn’t exactly handsome, for his face was too thin, and the eyes were too brooding, but those extraordinary eyelashes she had noticed before were quite unusual in a man, and so was the beauty of his
w
ell-cared-for hands.

He was—as she had also previously noted—impeccably dressed, and every detail of his appearance hinted at someone who was intensely fastidious. His hair was beautifully barbered, and he was almost
exquisitely shaved. There was a faint aroma of expensive cigarette smoke about him, and a rather more exciting one of after-shave lotion. Lucy judged him to be either in his late twenties or early thirties. She suddenly got out with a rush:

“I—I haven’t thanked you yet for—for coming to my rescue as you did. But for you—”

She felt herself go cold as she wondered what would have happened to her if he hadn’t come to her rescue. “You must have followed me
...
”
she suggested.

“I did.” He continued to keep his face averted, as if the people on the pavements fascinated him. “I realised you had all that money on you, and you didn’t appear to me to be behaving very sensibly.”

“The—the man who tried to take the money from me, he had a—gun. He might have shot you!”

He shook his head, and for the first time she saw him smile slightly.

“Not he. He had no gun. That was merely a piece of bluff. He was what I would
c
all a natural-born opportunist who, when he took one look at you emerging from old Halliday’s office with your bag clutched underneath your arm, thought that the fates were being especially kind to him. You weren’t merely a sitting target, you were as good as plucked
...
and I’m quite sure he’s reviling me in no uncertain terms at the moment because I interfered with a gift from the gods.”

Lucy glanced shyly at his hands.

“You gave him an awful bashing.”

“I hope he has a sore jaw for weeks.”

“The Countess will be—will be very grateful when I tell her.”

At that he turned his face towards her sharply. “The Countess ap
pe
ars to be as impractical as you are, and I think she should be publicly rebuked for allowing a young woman like you to undertake the task of selling jewellery for her. Why couldn’t she
sell it herself if she wanted it sold? Or why couldn’t she send someone else?”

“Because there is no one else.”

He studied her openly.

“You mean that you and she live alone?”

“Not quite alone, because we have Augustine to look after us
...
and Augustine has been with
madame
for years. But
madame
is old, and so is Augustine—it’s as much as she can do to climb the stairs nowadays—and I am the only one who is capable of running errands.”

“But—” She had already decided that there was something foreign about him, and he uttered an exclamation that sounded very foreign to her, and which she quite failed to translate—“selling jewellery is not running errands! It’s a job for an expert, or someone at least who understands the value of stones. Old Halliday is completely honest, but you could have been defrauded badly
...”

Lucy shook her head, and this time it was she who smiled a little smile of amusement.

“Not
when I had already received my instructions from
madame.
She knows the value of every piece of jewellery in her
jewelbox
—every bracelet, necklace, ring, right down to a pair of small diamond studs—ear-studs.”

His dark eyebrows elevated themselves.

“Then your
‘
madame
’
is by way of being a wealthy woman, if she has all this jewellery?”

But Lucy hastily corrected any false impression she had made.

“Oh no, no! It’s all for Seronia. That’s to say, it’s for the restoration of the monarchy in Seronia.
Madame
only consented to sell this one piece today because—because we needed the money.”

“I see,” he said again, and one
corner
of his mouth turned down somewhat bleakly. “It is to be hoped that Seronia acknowledges such generosity once the monarchy is restored; although so far as I know it is going along very nicely at the moment without a monarchy.”

The taxi was drawing up outside No. 24 Alison Gardens, and Lucy prepared to alight. She clutched hold of her handbag and looked at the man who was so strangely reserved although he had been of the greatest possible assistance to her that morning. She attempted to thank him again.

“I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for keeping
madame’s
two thousand guineas intact for her. It would have been awful—in fact, it would have been a disaster!—if we had lost the money.”

“It would have been a disaster for
madame
if she had lost you, I would say,” he remarked.

He assisted her to alight, and he also insisted on paying the taxi fare.

“If you attempt to open that bag of yours we’ll have a fresh catastrophe,” he observed.

He smiled with a flash of beautiful, hard white teeth, and held out a hand to her.

“Take care of yourself,
mademoiselle,
and if you take my advice you will look for a nice safe job in the country, exercising pet dogs, or something of the sort. Believe me, I think you are more cut out for that sort of thing than getting mixed up in the weighty affairs of Seronia.”

Lucy realised that he hadn’t even told her
h
i
s
name—he hadn’t even asked for hers—and he was about to depart out of her life.

“The Countess has three dogs, which I exercise daily,” she told him for something to say. Then, as she felt his long firm fingers clasping hers, “Won’t you come inside and meet
madame
?
Just for a moment,” she pleaded. “Let her thank you and offer you a glass of sherry.”

A twinkle invaded his eyes.

“If your employer has been forced to start selling her jewellery in order to meet expenses I wouldn’t wish to deprive her of her sherry,” he replied. “Be
sides—”