Rose in the Bud (6 page)

“You will look delightful in that,
signorina.
With your skin, and your eyes, it could hardly be better.” But Cathleen was in no mood for dressing herself up once she got upstairs to her room. She felt like a child that had been denied
a treat ... a
promised treat. And she simply could not understand why Edouard Moroc, who had the air of being very much master of his own fate, and was even slightly disdainful and arrogant at times, as if he was accustomed to ordering his life without interference, should have so meekly submitted to being roped in to a dinner-party that he didn’t appear to wish very much to attend,
and which meant submitting Cathleen to the slight embarrassment of being set aside as if she was, after all, a thing of very small account in his public world, even if in his private world he enjoyed her company.

But did he really enjoy her company? As she lifted the black lace—really rather exquisite black lace that had cost her quite a lot of money—out of her wardrobe and examined it dispassionately, she wondered.

She was reasonably certain that the Count was making himself very pleasant to her—quite noticeably pleasant—because he was the victim of a misunderstanding, and as a result of that misunderstanding he believed she was the one thing she was not
... a young woman of means. His attitude towards her when she first arrived at the
palazzo
had been carelessly charming, but he had been prepared to let her go without expressing the smallest wish to see her again—in fact, at one stage she felt he would be thankful to see the last of her!—right up until the moment when she mentioned having inherited a sum of money.

From that moment his attitude had changed entirely, and it was not perhaps surprising since, according to Edouard, he and his sister, although living in their crumbling
palazzo
still full of family treasures, were very badly off.

Cathleen could see the hand of Bianca in this desire to get better acquainted with herself.

And looking back on Edouard’s attitude she was not impressed by what she could recall. Edouard had seemed particularly disdainful, and his
disdain
had not melted until he returned to the salon with the coffee tray and overheard Cathleen in the midst of her admission about inheriting money.

A nasty pang smote her. She couldn’t really believe it, having spent practically the whole of a day with Edouard, and read certain unmistakable things into his expression at times, that he, too, was only interested in her because someone had left her money.

She remembered that he had particularly asked her not to let him know the extent of her means. He had said it was nothing to do with him.

And, of course, it wasn’t
!

There was a knock at the door, and a corsage of gardenias was handed in. They were the faint pink of the inside of a shell, or a pearl, and with them there was a card on which the name Paul was scrawled, while the edges of the card were heavily embossed.

This time she was left in no doubt as to who had sent her the flowers she was to wear for the evening, and although the beauty of them delighted her she would far rather she had not received them than that Paul di Rini had footed the bill for them.

Had he formed the habit of sending Arlette flowers, and had he decided she reminded him of a gardenia
?

In Italy time, she was to discover, meant nothing, and it was late when she was finally collected and escorted to Francini’s. After spending more
than
an hour waiting in one of the public rooms of the hotel she felt a little out of humour at the commencement of the evening, and her good humour was not restored quickly when she realised that Edouard had not yet put in an appearance.

But the Count’s guests were already numerous, and they were in high good humour. The restaurant was brilliantly lighted, with almost as many waiters as there were guests threading their way amongst the tables, and what instantly riveted Cathleen’s eye was the enormous horseshoe table at one end that was groaning under an assortment of chickens, lobsters, cold salmon, grapes, peaches, pineapples and other exotic fruits.

Champagne corks were popping like machine-gun fire all around them, and as she was placed in a chair between Paul and a florid dowager—who looked as if sooner or later she would wish to lea
rn
all about her—she found herself mentally trying to calculate how much such an evening as
this
was likely to cost the Count, and if he was really as financially insecure as Edouard had intimated she couldn’t help wondering where the money came from. The money that would pay for it all.

Did families like the di Rinis live on credit
?
Was it always assumed that they would many well, and if they did not were their assets enough to justify the confidence of their bank manager in them
?
All those pictures on the walls at the
palazzo
,
the jewels in the bank vaults, the fading heirlooms?

Although there was a charming young woman in white on the other side of Paul he devoted
himsel
f almost exclusively to the guest on his right hand. He pressed her to discover an appetite, to look as if she was really enjoying this, her first trip to Venice.

“Forget Arlette,” he whispered in her ear, while Bianca, in shimmering cloth of gold, on the far side of the table, managed to pay attention to her own near neighbour and at the same time keep her inscrutable eyes fixed on her brother and the girl he had singled out for so much attention. “You are so much more charming than Arlette could ever hope to be, and already I feel that I have known you for years.” He was gazing into her eyes, forcing her to meet the ardent look that embarrassed her acutely, had he but known it; and every time he lowered his voice and spoke confidentially she was aware of other eyes watching them apart from Bianca’s ... shrewd, speculative eyes that increased her embarrassment tenfold.

They were so
so
i
gnee
and patrician, these Italian women of good family. They had slender necks and sloping shoulders, like the shoulders of women in Old Masters, and their eyes were brilliant and fantastically long-lashed. She didn’t for one moment make the mistake of attributing these lashes to false ones, for the men were distinguished in the same way. But the women had the advantage every time in their couturier-designed dresses, and their brilliant jewels. They chattered like birds in a cage, and their exquisitely dressed heads were either black as ebony or excitingly Titian.

She knew now why Titian had painted his women with that hair that resembled damped-down fires. Against creamy skins it was enchanting.

But still Edouard failed to put in an appearance, and even Bianca began to lose interest in Cathleen and watch the door. She looked as if something had gone wrong with her evening, and Cathleen decided it was the continued absence of the Frenchman.

When twelve o’clock struck he had still not arrived, and by that time most of the party were dancing.

They danced
modern
dances, but the orchestra was a muted affair, soft and sensuous. Cathleen, with the Count’s arms round her, wished he would not hold her so tightly that she found it difficult to breathe. She was crushed up against the front of his jacket, and his one idea seemed to be to dance cheek to cheek. All the time he whispered to her of the perfection of her dress, her hair, her eyes
... and she was heartily thankful when a floor show took place, and for a brief period at least she was permitted to sit quietly and watch.

The room was growing very hot, exotic perfumes floating in the atmosphere and heavily overcharging it. Even for the floor show the chattering guests refused to be silent, and Cathleen’s head began to whirl a little, while she actually felt that if this went on much longer she might faint.

The lights went down for a Harlequin dance, and it was then that she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked round and up and into Edouard’s eyes.

“Time to go home,” he barely breathed in her ear, and as the Count was temporarily preoccupied in another
corner
she managed to dip silently and swiftly away. Edouard ordered a waiter to fetch her wrap for her, and outside in the silken coolness of the night she was able to draw breath.

Not only that, for the first time that evening she was content. As she looked up at Edouard his eyes were laughing at her, and he drew her unresisting towards one of the pontoons.

“My gondola is waiting,” he said. “It is a bad thing to waste a night like this! I thought we would explore Venice by night. Is that as you would wish
?
”

Cathleen answered breathlessly, “It is as I would wish!”

Cathleen had no idea what the time was when she stumbled into bed at last. It seemed to her quite unimportant in any case, and as her head was full of magic and her eyes were bedazzled by a thousand lights in inky dark water the tiny face of her travelling-clock would have blurred if she had attempted to study it.

She had seen the lights go out in the
palazzos
and their ghostly shapes bathed in the silver of a late-rising moon. In the daytime they were a harsh red, or merely a faded pink, but by night they came into their own, especially around the hour of dawn when the canals were still and silent, and their spires soared into the starry sky as if reaching for contact with the stars.

Edouard’s boatman had brought a guitar with him, and he had strummed and sung softly for nearly two hours. Cathleen had marvelled at his capacity for dissociating himself from the couple in his boat, the extent of his repertoire, and his tirelessness. Edouard explained that he was paid by the hour, and this piece of intelligence could have ruined the magic, but after being rescued from Francini’s, and having Edouard beside her, nothing, it seemed, could dim the contentment she felt.

They explored all sorts of little side canals, sat quietly watching the flares on the Rialto bridge, crept past landing-stages where couples lingered in the throes of saying goodnight—or rather, good morning. When the moon rose the silver sands of the Lido looked like a strip of silver ribbon; the island of San Giorgio appeared to be actually floating on the water.

Edouard explained casually that he had been prevented from attending Paul’s party by some pressing business, but he did not explain why he had not pressed his prior claim to have dinner alone with Cathleen. Apparently this late-night excursion was intended to make up for any disappointment she might have felt, and although Cathleen would have preferred an explanation—if an apology was too much to hope for—under the influence of the night and the unreal beauty she very quickly ceased to remember that she had even the smallest cause for grievance.

It was enough for her that Edouard had rescued her from the di Rinis, and that the curious anxiety she had felt about him during the whole of the evening was now abated. Edouard was on the seat beside her, and whenever she turned to look at him he appeared to be regarding her thoughtfully, and with something that the night only partly permitted her to see in his eyes.

It could have been simply admiration
... for a pretty girl in a black dress that emphasised the purity of her skin and the beauty of her hair. It could have been partly unexplainable, since there was at moments a certain detachment in his manner, as if a portion of his mind was occupied elsewhere, or there was some matter that preoccupied him to such an extent that he couldn’t entirely forget it.

But having rescued her he was determined to provide her with a few imperishable memories to take back to England. The singing gondolier was hardly his idea of entertainment, but he could tell that Cathleen was bemused by the warm tenor voice and the soft twanging on the guitar. The melodies were mostly old Italian folk songs, although from time to time one of the latest pop releases sounded a trifle odd rendered in liquid Italian. The boat made absolutely no sound as it slid through the dark waters of the canals, and as traffic on the canals had practically ceased there was little or no competition to detract from the tirelessness of the gondolier’s singing.

Since Cathleen hadn’t a coat Edouard had wrapped a light fur rug over her knees, and when he thought she shivered slightly he took his own coat off and slipped it about her shoulders.

“We can’t have you catching cold,” he said, as he had said once before.

To Cathleen it was all completely unreal. Edouard’s hand under the rug felt for, and encompassed, hers, and she made no attempt to remove it, although he was still holding it half an hour later. Their desultory talk died, finally, into silence, and they sat beneath a dreaming palace with the sunrise not so very far off and for a time there was absolute silence between them.

He had asked her whether she had enjoyed the Count’s party, and seemed faintly amused when she said hurriedly that she had hated it.

“There was no one I knew, and it was all so strange...” She sounded a little pathetic, as if she had needed support.

“Would you have enjoyed it better if I had been there
?
”

“I
... Yes.” After a moment of hesitation she answered emphatically. “I would. I would probably have enjoyed it very much.”

He turned and
smiled
at her. It was a faintly caressing smile, but there was also something withdrawn about it
... reserved.

“You are transparent, little one. But you must not confuse glamour with the essential things of life. All this—” he waved a hand to indicate the
sl
eeping canal —“all this is enough to turn any young woman’s head, particularly when she has been brought up in England where the climate is not very dependable, and the male element is essentially practical. Here in Italy the sun shines for most of the time, and the nights are such as this. But deep down the basic things are not so very different from the basic things in England, or France for that matter. Men and women meet and fall in love, or are attracted...” She felt a slight squeeze on her fingers. “They want to see more of one another. They want to go on seeing one another...”