Master of Hearts (17 page)

She managed to attach the children to their mother for a while, and went back to her own room in order to give them no excuse for being awkward. But after a bare quarter-of-an-hour a maid requested her to collect her charges, and Dona Inez was obviously thankful to be rid of them when she entered the room.

Carmelita observed in an unusually clear voice that the children seemed to be very fond of their governess, and the Conde held open the door for them when they set off to return to the Nursery.

"You will join us on the terrace when these small people have been handed over to Maria?" he said to Kathleen, his unfathomable dark grey eyes seeking and holding hers.

But Kathleen was so surprised by the pointedness of the invitation that she flushed and refused at once.

"Thank you, senhor, but Maria has had a slight accident to her hand, and tonight I am putting them to bed and giving them their supper."

"I see," he said quietly, and as he lowered his glance and bent his sleek dark head — the merest suggestion of his slight, perfunctory little bow — she was glad that the excuse was not an invention, for Maria had actually sustained an injury to her hand, and for a day or two she would have to be relieved of some of her duties.

But two nights later there was a birthday dinner for Dona Inez, and Kathleen made the excuse that Jerry was still being afflicted by toothache to absent herself from it. And the following afternoon the local elite turned up in force to attend a garden-party in the lovely grounds, and Kathleen accepted the offer of one of the younger maids to take charge of Jerry and Joe while she slipped out to spend a couple of hours with Peggy and Shane.

She didn't dare to ask for a car so she once more walked, and the explanation she offered to her relatives was the sudden violent need she had felt to see someone of her own kind. Peggy looked dubious, particularly as the quinta garden-parties were far-famed. Apparently she and Shane had received an invitation which they had had to decline because Shane was working hard on a special commission and couldn't spare the time, and if the Conde found out that they had entertained Kathleen it might look a little ungracious. Doubly ungracious since Kathleen obviously preferred to seek her diversions away from the house.

Shane drove her back, but she insisted on him putting her down outside the gate of the quinta — in fact, well away from the ornamental gateway — and stole in by a side entrance as if she had a guilty conscience. But she need not have bothered to screen her movements, for apparently no one observed her or was interested in looking out for her, and that night when she entered the great dining-room it was to find that she

was to have her meal in solitary state, for the Conde and his sister and Carmelita and several of their friends had gone dining and dancing at a popular night-haunt in Amara.

Kathleen felt like someone who had been finally abandoned, and for the first time since she had fingered the material of Carmelita's wedding-gown she stopped pretending to herself that this was a phase she would get over. Alone, and lapped about by misery in the silent dining-room, she knew that she would never recover from the loss of a man who could never have been hers.

Which was a paradox she didn't recognise, so great was her misery.

She saw nothing of the Conde during the whole of the next day, or the day after that, and then Dona Inez let drop the information that he was leaving for Lisbon in another week. From Lisbon he was proceeding to Paris, partly in connection with business and partly in order to be able to act as escort to Senhorita Albrantes and her aunt, who were visiting the French capital to indulge in an orgy of highly important shopping.

Kathleen felt so stunned by this news that she decided to keep out of the Conde's way altogether — or, at any rate, as much as it was possible — for the next few days, until the lovely quinta no longer had its master beneath its roof. If the torment of knowing that she had to live without the sight of him, and the knowledge that he was nowhere near to her, had to be faced up to within a matter of a week, then the sooner she did so the better! The torment wouldn't be any the less, but at least it would be immediate, and not something deferred.

So when she and the children were walking in the grounds she was careful to keep out of range of the library windows, and the first note of the luncheon gong saw her in the dining-room so that she could leave before the Conde had sometimes barely taken

,

his seat. Her excuse was that Maria's hand was not quite well yet, and she didn't like to leave the children with her for any length of time; and at night the same excuse was most useful, particularly as Joe had lately taken to having nightmares and it was as well for someone like herself to be on hand.

Dona Inez smiled in her cool, detached way, and remarked that Kathleen was unusually conscientious, but she would be the last to quarrel with conscientiousness. But Miguel looked down his beautifully straight nose and tightened his lips occasionally, as if he didn't altogether approve of such an excess of zeal.

The night before he left for Lisbon he insisted on Kathleen drinking a little wine, although she normally emphatically refused, and offered as explanation of his insistence the fact that she was looking rather pale.

"You mustn't take your duties too seriously, Miss O'Farrel," he said. "You are employed here as a governess, not a slave!"

Inez looked at him with amusement in her eyes.

"Our little Miss O'Farrel likes doing the job she is employed to do thoroughly," she said. "You should be thankful that it is so, and that we can place so much reliance in her. You can go away from here tomorrow knowing that the house will not be wrecked in your absence!"

"That, at least, is something," he said.

"You and Carmelita can have quiet minds," Inez remarked a little drily. "And in return I promise you that during your absence I will not permit our little Irish girl to listen too frequently to the blandishments of Fernando Queiroz! Although of course I can't prevent her seeing him if she wants to!"

She looked at Kathleen with deliberately indulgent eyes, and Kathleen — realising that if Fernando came to the quinta it would be to see Inez, and not her —felt suddenly strongly revolted by the other woman's pretence, and rose to leave the table.

"If you will excuse me, I would like to go upstairs now," she said.

But the Conde rose also.

"Certainly you may go upstairs and look at the children if you wish," he agreed. "But once you have done so I would like you to return downstairs and join me in the library. There are one or two things I would like to say to you before I leave here tomorrow!"

Kathleen felt her knees tremble suddenly, not merely with nervousness, but with the sudden delight of knowing that she was to see a little more of him before he left. The delight made her feel weak, incapable of immediate response or action of any sort, but she realised that he was waiting to hold open the door for her, and she moved towards it at last with the sensation that she was walking temporarily on air.

All through dinner she had been dreading the moment when she must make that request to leave the table — her throat dry with secret agony, because time was running out, and she would probably not see him at all in the morning. But now, all in a moment, she had received a small reprieve, and she was to see him in the library! Whatever it was he had to say to her —probably some instructions about his nephews, or possibly a caution about Fernando Queiroz — didn't much matter, because the important thing was that for a brief island of time they would be alone together, without even Inez's cynical, watching eyes to mar the dearness of those moments.

And, she thought, with a catch in her breath, even if he did caution her about Fernando they would be dear!

He watched her walk across the hall before he closed the door of the dining-room, and she thought she heard Dona Inez say something in a bright, amused voice. before the door finally clicked. And she even thought she heard him answer his sister, a trifle sternly.

WHEN she entered the library in response to his quiet "Come in" he was standing before the open window, looking out into the night. All the exquisite scents of the garden were flooding into the room, and the atmosphere seemed almost heavy with the many and conflicting perfumes. A great bowl of waxen blooms on the desk added their incense to the already highly charged atmosphere.

The Conde turned and looked at Kathleen. She was wearing a simple black dress with little or no ornamentation, and her fair hair was coiled neatly on her neck. The man frowned, noting that she looked older — and somehow wiser — than when she first came to the Quinta Cereus, less than a couple of months before. Her blue eyes were not as straight gazing, and they seemed underlined by shadows — and there was a resigned look about the set of her lips.

The Conde asked abruptly:

"You are not happy, Kathleen?"

He had never called her Kathleen before, and she

wondered whether her ears were playing her tricks. "I am perfectly happy, senhor!" she answered. Miguel frowned again.

"Must I always be senhor?" Then he turned back to the winodw, and the set of his shoulders seemed strangely impatient. "I suppose that is how you will always think of me!"

Kathleen felt her knees begin to tremble again, but before they could affect her whole body with weakness the elegant black-and-white shape in the window wheeled and put her hastily into a chair, and he apologised for his tardiness rather curtly.

"You must forgive me, Miss O'Farrel! I have been somewhat preoccupied all day today, and now there are several things I want to say to you — ask you!" He offered her his gleaming cigarette-case because he

knew she smoked occasionally, but she shook her head. Speech seemed to have dried up in her throat, and it was such a white and slender throat that his eyes seemed attracted to it as if by a magnet when she swallowed noticeably. "You will not? Then perhaps a small glass of wine? You are not quite yourself tonight, are you?"

"I am perfectly all right, senhor," she assured him with slight huskiness. "Perfectly all right!"

But there was a definite crease of anxiety between his brows as he accepted her assurance.

"In that case will you please tell me why you have been avoiding me so much lately?"

"Avoiding you?" Her eyes swept up to his face, and in the softly-lit library she was quite unable to conceal the fact that he had startled her. "But, why should I avoid you, senhor?" she prevaricated. "Surely that is entirely your imagination? You are my employer .. . You have been — kind! — to me! . . . There is absolutely no reason why I should avoid you . . ." her voice trailing off.

"None that I, personally, can think of," he agreed drily. "In the beginning I was perhaps a little harsh with you . . . I gave you a certain amount of cause to dislike me! But I had hoped that we had got beyond that early misunderstanding and were now capable of appreciating each other's good qualities." He smiled a little wryly. "Possibly you do not think I have many good qualities, but I have discovered what a capable young woman you are, what an earnest and reliable young woman — so different to my first conception of you! And even that was affected by the extreme femininity of your appearance!"

She said nothing, but her heart was pounding, and he stepped back and lighted himself a cigarette, frowning over the operation as if he, too, were quite unlike himself, tonight, and he had a problem he wished to get to the bottom of.

"Miss O'Farrel—Kathleen!" He said her name again, quite clearly and distinctly. "Is it because I interfered

on that night when you met young Queiroz in the corridor that you have learned to dislike me afresh?" She gasped.

"But I don't dislike you!" Unwarily she rushed on. "I don't dislike you in the very least . . . And you can't really believe that I met Senhor Queiroz in the corridor that night by appointment! It was just an accident . . ."

He was staring hard at her.

"I had already gathered that," he admitted.

"And although you saw him kissing my hand that was merely a cover-up for a—for a—"

"An even more compromising situation?" She thought his sensitive nostrils were dilating a little. "That much, also, I had already gathered!"

"Then . . ." She stared at him helplessly. "Surely you recognised that the sort of kiss Senhor Queiroz —snatched! — was the sort of kiss he would have bestowed upon one of your maids, in similar circumstances, if she had attracted him enough!"

"I think not!" The Conde's mouth was grim and displeased. "Even Fernando — young though he is — would not confuse you for an instant with one of the maids! And if he waylaid you it was because you attracted him enough to make the risk of being interrupted while he was proving the attraction was quite
worthwhile
. Inez, for instance, might have come along that corridor instead of myself!"

Kathleen turned away her face, not willing to involve his sister.

"So you do
realise
the form of attraction it was," she said rather bitterly.

The Conde once more walked to the open french window, and as he looked along one of the pale paths which led deep into the garden, and his cigarette smouldered unheeded between his fingers, he asked as if the words offended his lips: