Master of Hearts (3 page)

"Thank-you, senhor, I understand perfectly!" But as she wrenched free her hands and walked past him the colour in her face was burning so painfully that her cheeks felt actually as if they were on fire.

He bowed his head.

"I am concerned that you have had to waste so much of your time It is a pity because my nephews are beyond the discipline of any ordinary young woman, as I now realise."

"What nonsense!" she exclaimed, turning on him. Her blue eyes blazed her contempt at him. "They are perfectly normal children who must feel half smothered by the atmosphere in this house! Children require to run free, and above all to be understood. Particularly when they've just lost a parent! And I've no doubt your Portuguese nursemaid is as little capable of understanding how they feel, uprooted as they have been, as you yourself apparently are!"

She bit her lip until the blood spurted, and she felt herself trembling with the indignation that had taken

possession of her. The Conde's eyes grew colder and infinitely more remote, but the iciness of his displeasure had little effect on her.

"My recommendation to you is that you send them to school.. . Anywhere out of this house! And if they've got any relatives in America why not send them back there, if their mother can't bestir herself and look after them herself? In England a young widow would feel grateful for the compensation of two little sons."

Then horror rushed over her as she realised what she had said, and Jerry rushed after her and caught her by the arm.

"Was it you who were going to look after us? Was it really you? Oh, but Uncle Miguel mustn't let you go!" His bottom lip started to tremble, and he looked appealingly at his uncle. "You won't let her go, will you?"

"Silence!" his uncle thundered, and any ordinary boy would have been petrified by the cold ferocity of that order.

But Jerry merely rubbed his eyes and explained: "We didn't know it was her!"

"You didn't know it was me," Kathleen said gently, ruffling his hair. "Something ought to be done about your grammar, but I'm afraid there isn't time now."

"You don't mean you really are going?" Joe asked, sidling up and capturing her other arm. He, too, looked perturbed. "It would be fun if you could make Uncle Miguel let you stay! I didn't mean to kick you when you were under the table just now, but I'd have kicked harder if it had been Rosa. She's fat and dull, and I don't like her!"

"It isn't fair to kick people just because you don't like them," Kathleen murmured to him, and then once more freed herself from clinging hands and moved purposefully towards the door.

She knew that two pairs of greenish-hazel eyes followed her regretfully, but in the Conde de Chaves eyes there was no relenting as he stepped forward to hold open the door for her. Unfailingly polite, he bowed his sleek dark head once more as he said:

"It was good of you to come, senhorita." But she was certain he merely despised her for her stupidity in imagining for one single instant that she was good enough to take entire charge of the nephews of a Portuguese nobleman. Rosa might be fat and dull, but at least she was Portuguese, and she would never have had the effrontery to criticise his sister, and certainly not himself! The additionally bleak look in his eyes was undoubtedly there because she had been so unwise as to let her tongue run away with her. "I understand you are returning to England," staring at her neatly-shod feet, as if they pleased him more than anything else about her. "I wish you a good journey," with the utmost formality.

"Thank-you, senhor. It is almost certain to be a perfectly smooth journey," she returned, with an arctic quality about her clear English voice that was certainly a match for his own.

And then she turned to say goodbye to the boys, and a wave of concern for them rushed over her. They looked so small and unwanted standing there in the doorway to the magnificent library, and once she had left them alone with their uncle there would be no one to put in a good word for them.

"Please, senhor," she begged suddenly, her voice all soft, womanly pleading, one slim, tanned hand with lightly polished nails actually extended a little towards him, "you won't be too harsh on them, will you? For tearing up your letter, I mean, and — and being a bit of a nuisance! After all, they are young!"

His thick eyelashes lifted, and for an instant she thought she saw a look of surprise in the eyes themselves. And then they actually glimmered with something . . . Surely it couldn't be a flickering of humour? It might have been her imagination, but his handsome mouth appeared to twitch slightly at one corner before he straightened his well-held shoulders, and said softly:

"I will bear it in mind that you have put in an appeal for them, senhorita! And I will not actually flay them alive!"

Then he was conducting her across the hall, with its baroque staircase and shining marbles, and although he didn't appear to watch her as she ran down the steps and joined her brother in his antiquated car she had the feeling that he did. Possibly from one of the side windows, for it was a manservant who closed the door.

"Well?" Shane asked, smiling at her as he let in his clutch. "How did it go? When do you start?"

"I don't," Kathleen answered ruefully. "I was a dismal failure. It's England, Home and Beauty for me!"

On the verandah of their little white-walled villa, as they sipped their coffee after lunch — the sort of lunch, Kathleen thought regretfully, she wouldn't be enjoying much longer, with fresh fruits and exciting dishes that were always extremely appetizing — Peggy shook her head in a sort of dull amazement, and declared that she simply didn't understand.

"I'd have said you were the perfect answer to the Conde's problem," she mused. "And, dash it all," she added, with a touch of indignation, "I think he might have taken you on after I bothered to telephone!"

"And I delayed my departure to England!" Kathleen reminded her. "You realise, now, that I shan't catch that plane from Lisbon!"

Peggy looked rather pleased than otherwise.

"As to that, I didn't want you to go, and now I think you ought to stay another week. Do try and persuade her, Shane," she added, turning to her husband.

Shane lay back in his chair and looked at his sister rather quizzically.

"It's up to Kathie herself," he murmured. "She may have an ardent admirer awaiting her return in London!"

"If she has, I'm the King of China's daughter!" Peggy exclaimed scoffingly, and then looked at Kathleen reproachfully. "Why do you never do things like other young women of your age?" she demanded. "At twenty-two, and with your looks, you ought to be beset by admirers! But I suppose it's the old story, and you're waiting for some unlikely Mr. Right to come along and sweep

you off your feet? Don't you know that in this day and age, with bags of competition and an acute shortage of males who're even willing to think about matrimony, that's simply asking for a lifetime of spinsterhood!"

Kathleen coloured delicately, as she always did when her sister-in-law got on to this
favourite
subject of hers, but she managed to infuse humour into her voice as she replied:

"Perhaps I'll enjoy being a spinster all my days. Perhaps I'm even looking forward to it!"

"Rubbish!" Peggy declared. "No woman wants to be a spinster if she can avoid it."

"Then perhaps I really am waiting for Mr. Right to come along. And if I'm as delectable as you're always trying to make me out to be he won't hesitate to grab hold of me when he does appear!"

Peggy looked at her thoughtfully.

"You're delectable all right. You're quite lovely. You and Shane have glorious colouring." She looked at her husband appreciatively, and then back again at her sister-in-law. "And in your case, Kathie, you have the air of a Dresden Shepherdess. Sometimes you don't even look quite real. Perhaps that's one reason why our hearty English males have refrained from stampeding you. You're a thought too fragile for the hard-working man who needs someone to fend for him on occasion."

"It's a deceptive fragility, as you should know by this time," Kathleen said, smiling. "I'm tough enough underneath."

"Plainly the Conde thought you were a little too tough," Peggy remarked regretfully. "It's a pity he found you under the table with his nephews. You probably struck him as a kind of Paddy-the-next-best-thing, and he couldn't see you disciplining those precious twins. However, I'm sure he's wrong."

"So am I," Kathleen agreed, seriously. "I thought they were precocious but lovable."

"They sound quite abominable," Peggy said, laughing. "I'm not at all sure I'd want the charge of them myself."

"I'm very certain I'll never have the charge of them," Kathleen, with the wry note in her voice that had been there when she admitted her failure to her brother, observed with a peculiarly keen regret stirring in her. "The Conde was quite firm."

"A pity," Peggy remarked again. She looked more closely at her sister-in-law. "What did you think of his looks?"

"I was more struck by his arrogance," Kathleen answered, not altogether truthfully. "I thought he was detestable."

"Yet all the unmarried women in the district are dying to marry him, and their mamas lay traps for him. In Lisbon, I believe, it's the same. He's a very much sought-after bachelor, and it isn't only because of his wealth and rank. He's reputed to have a certain charm."

"I can't believe it," Kathleen said, and she said it so firmly that Peggy decided to drop the subject. But she didn't drop her insistence that Kathleen should stay for another week, and in the end, because Shane, too, urged that there was no real reason why she should rush back to England, and so far as he was concerned it would be delightful if she made up her mind to remain with them forever — or, at any rate, until she contracted that marriage Peggy was always hoping for — Kathleen agreed to stay on. Shane brought out a bottle of champagne and they toasted one another on top of their coffee, which was a little odd but very pleasant in the cool shade of the verandah.

And Kathleen had a curious sensation as if she had received a reprieve because she was staying, and the blue sky and the bluer sea and all the rest of the magnificent display of colour would be hers for another seven days. But she repeated to herself when she went to bed that night, and looked out at the stars, and thought of two lonely small boys in the Quinta Cereus — which, as she knew, meant Queen of the Night, or Nightblowing Cereus, a huge water-lily like blossom of waxen beauty — that the Conde de Chaves was probably the most unpleasant man she had ever met in her life.

Unpleasant, and brutal. For there had been something quite ruthless about the way he had despatched her about her business, and ignored the appeals of his nephews.

IT was surprising how quickly that extra week passed. Kathleen took advantage of every moment of it, and the weather remained perfect. She bathed and sun-bathed, careful not to offend the local inhabitants by wearing her sun-suits on the beach, but doing so in a corner of the O'Farrel varandah.

Portuguese women, she had discovered, were at all times extremely correct. She doubted whether they ever laid aside their formality while there was any danger of a public eye being focused on them. Such things as slacks were never worn by even the youngest amongst them, and black was a popular colour for both day and evening wear.

Peggy and Shane had surrounded themselves with a small coterie of friends, and they had already introduced Kathleen to most of the members of this limited circle. There was no one particularly smart; no one to provide her with a single heart-throb; and certainly no one moved in the exclusive set that was favoured by the inclusion of the Conde de Chaves. No one who appeared to have even a nodding acquaintance with him—apart, that is, from Peggy, who had once been graciously given a lift by him in his car when she was returning from the weekly market with her usual crowded basket of shopping.

"I shall never quite forget the occasion," she said, chuckling over the recollection as she and Kathleen sat enjoying a cup of coffee beneath a sun-umbrella in busy Amara one morning when the latter's week was drawing to a close. "He was driving a long glistening black car that was the most
magnificent
car I've ever been permitted to sit in, and he himself was faultlessly turned out. I was wearing my usual well-worn slacks, and a cotton blouse, and I even had my head tied up with a bandanna. But as he slowed the car it was quite obvious he didn't mistake me for a peasant, and he even looked

at me as if he had a feeling he ought to know me . socially, I mean! I was immensely flattered!"

"Why?" Kathleen asked, rather crisply, and Peggy looked at her with a smile in her eyes.

"Because he's so staggeringly good-looking, for one thing—and because he is the Conde! We all know about him, we all look upon him like the locals as a kind of Lord of the Manor, and that sort of thing, and we're all secretly impressed by the tales of his wealth. And to me that morning he was charming, just as he's charming to all his numberless tenants when he comes here in the autumn for the wine-harvest."

"Don't tell me he joins in the festivities? I can't imagine him unbending sufficiently for that!"

"He doesn't forget his dignity, but he does join in. He's immensely popular with the poorer people, and is a first-class landlord. There are no neglected houses on his estates, and he's reputed to be very generous."