Читать книгу The Hidden Evil - Barbara Cartland - Страница 3

The Duc de Salvoire climbed the twisting stairs that led from one part of The Palace to another. The candles had burned low in their sconces and, where one had flickered out, he banged his knee against a protruding pillar in the darkness and swore beneath his breath.

‘I am getting far too old at twenty-six for creeping along passages in the middle of the night,’ he told himself wryly with a twist of his lips that his enemies would have recognised as being an expression of his most caustic mood.

As he reached the wing that led on to the Queen’s apartments and those of her suite, he hesitated and for a moment considered returning the way he had come. And then with a shrug of his shoulders he realised that René would be waiting for him. It would be churlish and discourteous to cancel his appointment when he had not seen her alone for nearly three weeks and had been away at Anet for part of the time.

There were only two more passages, mercifully empty at this hour of the night, although he could hear the footsteps of a sentry in the distance. And then he was knocking on her door, two long knocks and a short staccato one, before it was opened swiftly by a maidservant who kept her head down and did not raise her eyes from his feet when she dropped him a curtsey.

The Duc walked past her without a word and then was in the small fragrantly scented boudoir which stood adjacent to a larger and more impressive bedchamber.

The Comtesse René de Pouguet was waiting for him. As he entered the room and closed the door behind him, she rose from her chaise-longue and came towards him eagerly.

She was most attractive with raven hair and slanting green eyes that gave her a seductive mysterious expression which, however, was belied by her lips and about them there was no mystery, only the hunger and yearning of a passionate woman.

“Jarnac!” she then exclaimed. “I have been waiting so long. I thought that perhaps you had forgotten me.”

“How could I do that?” the Duc enquired, bending his head to kiss the long white fingers of her left hand on which glittered an enormous emerald ring.

As she moved with a serpentine grace, her robe of satin trimmed with ribbons and lace revealed that underneath it she wore very little and there were tantalising glimpses of softly rounded breasts and beautifully shaped legs.

She used a heady and very exotic perfume, which seemed to permeate the whole room and mingle with the fragrance of lilies and tuberoses. There was also the hint of some other scent, something Oriental, which made the Duc feel as if his senses were swimming a little.

Only a few tapers were lit and so most of the light came from the half-open door of the bedchamber.

“You have missed me?”

It was a conventional question and now, with her lips parted, she looked up at him, her dark eyes glinting behind the incredibly long black lashes.

“I was about to ask you that same question.”

“Why did you spend so long with the Duchesse de Valentinois this evening?”

The Duc straightened and there was a sudden guarded expression on his face.

“Ma foi, René!” he exclaimed. “Is anything hidden from you? Have you an ear at every keyhole in The Palace?”

The Comtesse threw back her head and laughed.

“But, of course, mon brave!” Do you not know it is why I am so completely useful and indispensable? If I was not, do you know what my Fate would be? To be sitting with my husband in the country looking at the crops and my only outing a drive to Church on Sunday with my children grouped around me. It is a pretty picture, but not one to my liking.”

The Duc knew that it was the truth. The Comte de Pouguet had retired from the Court a year ago, ostensibly to see to his estates in the Chambord district, but in reality as he could no longer afford his wife’s extravagances or continually to turn a blind eye to her excesses.

The Comtesse had enjoyed countless protectors after his departure, but none had been so important, so wealthy or indeed so charming as the Duc de Salvoire.

Unfortunately, however, for René’s peace of mind she had fallen in love. For the first time in her whole life her heart took precedence over her head. She loved the strange cynical young man who she now suspected had taken her as his mistress merely because several of his friends had been competing for the honour and it had amused him to win far too easily what they coveted.

René might be shallow, but she was certainly not stupid. She was a Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen and had contrived to make herself so useful that, if Catherine did know about her indiscretions, she turned a blind eye to them.

René’s love for the Duc made her not so subtle in dealing with him as she would have been if her emotions had not been involved.

“You have not answered my question,” she insisted. “Why were you so long with the ‘divine Diane’? Is it perhaps that you too find her divine?”

“We seem to have had this very same argument before,” the Duc said, surprisingly good-humouredly. “I admire Madame La Duchesse enormously, as you well know, but I do not yet contemplate suicide by rivalling His Majesty for her attention.”

René laughed again.

“I am being stupid, I know that, but I am jealous – jealous of all the time you spend away from me. I cannot think why you cannot take me to your estates in the country. Who would know if we went there by different roads? Oh, Jarnac, let’s be alone for a little while.”

She pressed herself close against him and laid her head on his shoulder. He put his arms around her but almost perfunctorily as if his mind was elsewhere.

“You have been with the Duchesse at Anet all the week,” she pouted, “and yet when you come back to Paris you spend the evening with her while I wait alone and think that you will never come to me. Are you surprised that I feel hurt and a little resentful?”

“There is no need for either,” the Duc replied. “The Duchesse had asked me to be present when she received Mistress Sheena McCraggan, the Scots girl who has arrived to take the place of Madame de Paroy, to whom Mary Stuart had taken a violent dislike.”

The Comtesse drew herself out of his arms.

“So the new Gouvernante has arrived!” she exclaimed. “I thought she was not due until tomorrow. What is she like? Is she pretty?”

“Small, attractive – yes, I think you would say distinctly pretty,” the Duc answered.

“The Queen will be pleased,” the Comtesse murmured.

“The Queen! Why should she be interested?”

The question was sharp.

“Have you forgotten Lady Fleming?” the Comtesse enquired with a little sidelong glance of her eyes.

The Duc looked puzzled for a moment.

“Lady Fleming!” he repeated. “Oh, you mean the previous Governess who attracted the King for those few months when the Duchesse was ill and away from the Court.”

“So you do remember,” René smiled.

“A nasty scandal and one that should never have happened to anyone connected with Mary Stuart,” the Duc said almost harshly. Then added slowly, “Do you mean that the Queen was pleased about that?”

René shrugged her almost naked shoulders.

“Pourquoi pas? The King’s attention was then diverted from the hated Diane. Even her witchcraft did not work when she was indisposed.”

“By all that is Holy!” the Duc exclaimed. “I have never heard such a monstrous idea, that the Queen should be pleased at her husband’s indiscretion with some strange woman simply because it made him unfaithful to the woman he has adored since he was a young boy.”

“And who is eighteen years older than he is!” the Comtesse said sharply. “If that is not witchcraft I should like to know what is.”

“I will not discuss it,” the Duc retorted angrily. “It is the Duchesse de Valentinois who has taught the King how to rule. Without her France would be in a sorry state today.

If he loves her to the exclusion of all else it is not surprising. But, if the Queen or anyone else imagines that his devotion is likely to be forgotten or diverted by any little foreigner who comes tripping into The Palace on one pretext or another, they are very much mistaken.”

“How fortunate the Duchesse is to have such a champion,” René said softly with a little edge on her voice which told all too clearly that she was piqued and annoyed by the turn the conversation had taken.

“What you have just suggested is disgusting and indecent,” the Duc asserted.

He walked across the room away from the Comtesse and then turned to look back at her. Her robe had slipped from one white shoulder and a long slim thigh was revealed by the swift movement of her body.

She was enticing and seductive and they both knew it. And yet it seemed to him that for a moment the vision of another small face with angry flashing blue eyes and a trembling mouth came between him and the woman seated at the end of the chaise-longue.

It was a face haloed by unruly golden curls a face with skin so white and so unblemished that it seemed almost transparent.

He had not noticed until now, he thought suddenly, that René’s skin was indeed not her strongest point. It was rather pock-marked and, although she was just twenty-four, there were already small lines at the corners of her eyes, which were the toll of late nights and too much of the heady wine in golden goblets at the banquets given nightly at The Palace.

For a moment he felt almost repulsed by the thought of his lips on her red expectant mouth. Then somehow the heat and the perfume of the room made him feel that any effort to escape from the inevitable was hardly worthwhile.

And so he stood looking at her as she rose very slowly to her feet and she swept back the rustling robe from her shimmering body and moved swiftly towards him.

He felt her arms going around his neck and drawing his head down to hers, felt her lips searching for his and heard her whisper,

“Why are we talking? It is such a waste of time. Oh, Jarnac! Jarnac! I have missed you so much – ”

*

In another part of The Palace, Sheena, too tired to sleep, tossed from side to side on the most comfortable bed she had ever known. There was so much to think about and so much for her to consider.

And yet she was conscious that her overriding emotion was one of fear.

She had expected to feel small, insignificant and apprehensive in any Royal Palace. She had even expected that she would feel afraid in the presence of the King and the Queen. But what she had not anticipated was this feeling of being an utter failure, of having to return to those who had sent her and tell them that there was nothing she could do, nothing she could say as everything was completely and absolutely different from what they had imagined.

She had thought to find Mary Stuart a child. But she found her a woman and, what was more, a very educated young woman.

“It is really time that I should finish with lessons,” Mary Stuart had said. “I am proficient now in Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian. When I insisted that Madame de Paroy should be dismissed, I had not thought that they would send me anyone from Scotland.”

“I do not think that your Statesmen meant to impose another Teacher upon you,” Sheena commented humbly. They sent me more as a – a companion.”

“I have many of those,” Mary Stuart replied a little wearily and then with that engaging easy Stuart charm she added,

“But it is nice to have you here. A new face is always a divertissement. Come, you must meet the others.”

“No, no,” Sheena protested hastily. “Not at this moment, please, ma’am. Let’s be alone together for a little while. There is so much I want to talk to you about and so much I have to tell you.”

“About Scotland?” Mary Stuart queried and it seemed to Sheena that there was a note of boredom in her voice. “The others said you would come full of long speeches and addresses. The letters of the Elders are enough, I assure you. Sometimes they take nearly an hour to read and they write all the time about things that I know nothing of, the Reformers, the dissension amongst the Clans, their solemn conclaves and dreary discussions. Oh, it is so boring. Let’s forget about it. There are lots of interesting things to do. Can you play Pall Mall? It is a game we all enjoy.”

Sheena felt her heart sink. What could she tell her father, waiting anxiously for her report on the attitude of Mary Stuart towards the dissentious Scotland? How could she ever explain to this laughing, happy girl the horror and the privation her subjects were suffering not only from the persecution of the English but also from the poverty which stalked the land, taking more toll of helpless children and weakened women than were ever killed in battle?

“I expect you can ride,” Mary Stuart was chattering on. “We must persuade the King to lend you one of his horses. The stables at the Château des Tournes are filled with the most magnificent horseflesh you have ever seen.”

Sheena murmured something.

“His Majesty says that I can ride as well as I dance,” the young Queen boasted. “I saw the Queen flush with anger when he said it. She is so jealous that she cannot bear him to pay anyone a compliment.”

“Perhaps Her Majesty has reason for her jealousy,” Sheena suggested quietly.

“Oh, nobody bothers about her, Mary Stuart exclaimed. “She is très ennuyeuse and when she sends for me I always try to make an excuse not to visit her. It is not always easy because Madame La Duchesse insists that I behave with the utmost courtesy to Her Majesty.”

“The Duchesse de Valentinois is right – ” Sheena began and then realised that she was siding with the woman whom she thought of as a natural enemy.

This moment of bewilderment was repeated again and again before she had left Mary Stuart to find her bedchamber and Maggie unpacking for her.

“Have you seen Her wee Majesty?” Maggie enquired eagerly as she entered the room.

Sheena nodded.

“I have, indeed,” she answered. “She is very lovely, Maggie, but she is no longer a child. We are not needed here.”

“Ah, now, Mistress Sheena, dinna you go makin’ up your mind aboot somethin’ like that within the first moment of your crossin’ the threshold. “’Tis not likely that our Queen, after bein’ in exile all these years, will not have learned to hide her true feelings and so not to go about wearin’ her heart upon her sleeve. How is she to know at the first sight of you whether you be friend or foe? And the Lord knows there’s enough of both in Scotland!”

“At least she knows I have come as a friend,” Sheena pointed out.

“There’s friends and friends,” Maggie muttered darkly. “Dinna forget there are those in Scotland who have fought against her mother, poor blessed lady. Do you no suppose that she is aware that they will be ready to fight against her again when the time comes?”

“Yes, you are right!” Sheena exclaimed in tones of relief. “Perhaps it will seem simpler and plainer tomorrow. Now I am in such a daze that I don’t know what I do think.”

“Of course you dinna,” Maggie answered stoutly.

It was then that without any warning Sheena found the tears running down her cheeks. It had been a long voyage, it had been unnerving to arrive at Brest to find that there was no one there to meet her. Her encounter with the Duc, the elegance of her escort and the knowledge of her own insignificance and badly dressed appearance had all culminated in the shock of finding the little Queen she had come to instruct was not a helpless homesick child.

She had thought to find Her Majesty lost and bewildered in the corrupt Court – instead she had discovered a poised and elegant young woman seemingly far older than herself, well educated, exquisitely mannered and already more au fait with the world and its affairs than Sheena could ever hope to be.

This was all too much to be borne and, hiding her face on Maggie’s broad shoulder, she sobbed,

“Let’s go home. We are not wanted here, Maggie. Let’s go home.”

“Now dinna fuss yoursel,” Maggie said soothingly.

She held Sheena close and then, when the tempest of her tears abated a little, fetched her a drink of water and with it a draught of what Maggie called her ‘soothing medicine’.

She had no sooner drunk it than she started to feel unconscionably sleepy.

She tried to protest but Maggie took her clothes from her and helped her into bed.

“I must dress and go down to dinner,” she murmured. “They will be expecting me.”

“There’s plenty of time for that on the morrow,” Maggie said quietly.

The sheets smelt of lavender and were warm from the warming pan. Her tired body sank low in the goose feather mattress.

“I will get up in five minutes,” she tried to say to Maggie, but before the words were past her lips she was asleep.

Maggie found a chambermaid and told her to carry a message to the young Queen that Sheena was indisposed after the long journey and would not be able to come down to dinner that night.

The chambermaid then promised to deliver it to a footman and Maggie, having seen that Sheena was asleep, drew the curtains quietly and went to her own room.

*

Sheena woke with a start feeling that something was wrong.

The room was in darkness, the fire had burned low and she guessed that it must be in the early hours of the morning. She felt conscience-stricken that she should have failed in her new position so soon and so quickly after her arrival. but it was too late now to do anything about it and she knew that the wisest thing she could do would be to go back to sleep.

But this was the one thing that seemed impossible. Instead she began to toss and turn. Scraps of conversation came back to her, the expression on Mary Stuart’s face when she had spoken of Scotland and the tone of contempt that it seemed to her had been in the Duc’s voice as he told the Duchesse de Valentinois to provide her with some clothes.

“I should never have come,” she said forlornly to the darkness and felt her heart ache because of the blindness of those scores of devoted men in Scotland, plotting and planning and worrying over their young Queen, quite unaware that she was a very different being from the baby they had seen carried aboard the ship that had taken her to the safety of France.

‘How can I ever tell them? How can I make them understand?’ Sheena asked herself.

She must have dozed a little.

When she opened her eyes again, the light was coming in through the curtains. It was the pale, faint, golden light of dawn and, because she felt stifled by the comfort of her feather bed and over-soft pillows, she rose and crossed the room to throw wide the long windows, which reached to the floor.

She found herself looking out over the courtyard beyond which were the gardens of The Palace. There was the sound of horses’ hoofs below and Sheena craned her head forward.

A magnificent white stallion was being led into the courtyard. The embroidered reins and velvet-covered saddle made her guess that it belonged to someone of importance.

Did the King rise at such an early hour? she wondered and guessed by the light on the horizon that it was not yet six o’clock.

Then down the steps below her she saw a figure that she recognised.

It was the Duchesse de Valentinois. She heard her voice, low, musical and wishing the grooms good morning and saying a word of greeting to the horse itself. Then she sprang into the saddle with the elasticity and grace of a young girl, her foot barely resting in the cupped hand of the page who knelt to assist her.

With only a groom in attendance the Duchesse cantered away over the cobblestones, her lovely face raised towards the sun as if she would drink in the beauty and freshness of it.

Sheena stared after her in astonishment. How could the Duchesse be up so early when she was so old and when she must have been late last night at dinner with the King? It was yet another of the puzzling things which she was finding in this strange Palace in this strange land.

Somehow she had had in her mind a picture of how wicked people behaved, drinking, making love and gambling all night and staying in bed half the day because they were too tired to rise as ordinary people had to do.

This was certainly not true of the Duchesse de Valentinois.

Sheena felt that she could not sleep again and so she dressed herself, knowing that it was far too early to leave her room. She settled herself at the small escritoire in the corner and tried to begin a letter to her father.

“I will write to you the moment I arrive,” she had promised him.

Yet what was there to say except to tell him how bad the voyage had been, how Maggie had succumbed to the waves and how there had been no one there to meet her when she had arrived at the quayside?

She put all this down on paper and then stopped. How could she go on? Was she to tell him about the Duc and how she disliked him? Was she to recount her first impressions of Madame de Valentinois? Could she possibly describe in words the look on the King’s face when the Duchesse had come into the room and it seemed as if he was suddenly lit by a light from within to become, before her very eyes, a different man altogether?

And Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland. What could she write of her?

There was the sound of more horses’ hoofs outside and Sheena, glad of the excuse, rose and went to the window. She looked down into the courtyard expecting to see the Duchesse returning, but now she saw that it was the King who was mounting a splendid black horse and there were four of his gentlemen to squire him.

“Which way did Madame La Duchesse go?” she heard him ask one of the grooms.

The man pointed out the direction and the King rode off eagerly. Another person rising early and contradicting her reasonable assumptions as to what was likely to happen in this great luxurious Palace.

Sheena went back to her desk, but she had not been there long before there was a discreet knock at the door. She opened it, wondering if it was Maggie who had come to her but found instead a page with a note on a silver salver.

She opened it and looking quickly at the signature saw that it read, Gustave de Cloude, and remembered that he was one of the young men who had escorted her from Brest to Paris.

“I have seen you at your window,” he wrote, “so I know you are awake. Will you not meet me in the garden? There are many things I should like to speak to you about while the rest of The Palace is still asleep.”

Sheena hesitated. She felt it would be indiscreet and perhaps something which would be frowned on, that she should walk in the gardens with a man she knew so slightly.

And yet at the same time she was very curious. She longed to ask questions of someone, anyone, who could answer what she wanted to know.

The small page stood there solemnly looking at her.

“Are you waiting for an answer?” she asked him.

“I am waiting here, ma’mselle, to escort you to the garden,” he replied with a little bow, which made her smile because it was such a perfect imitation of his Master’s.

She suddenly felt young and gay and the troubles and anxieties of the night seemed to fall away from her.

“I will come for a few minutes,” she said, more to herself than to him and, picking up her shawl, she slipped it over her shoulders. “Show me where the Comte is waiting.”

“I will take you to him immediately, mam’selle,” the page promised.

They went down a twisting maze of corridors and staircases, which made Sheena think that she would never find her way to the ground floor, when suddenly they emerged not into the courtyard but into the garden itself by a side entrance that led directly onto the terrace and formal lawns where a fountain was playing.

There was no sign of anyone until the page led her down a twisting lavender-hedged path and through two cypress trees standing sentinel over a Herb Garden that was hidden from the windows of The Palace

It was then that she saw the Comte sitting on a marble seat by a small goldfish pool, the early sun shining on his polished dark head.

He sprang up eagerly at her approach and came towards her and then, taking her hand in his, he raised it to his lips.

“I hardly dared to hope that you would come,” he began in a low voice.

Sheena smiled at him.

“It was kind of you to ask me,” she said. “I was feeling lost and I think a little homesick. I wanted so much to talk to someone.”

“And I so wanted to talk to you,” he replied. “It was impossible while I was your escort with three of my friends listening to everything that we might say. But now it is different. You are so lovely. I have been able to think of nothing else since I first met you.”

The tone in his voice made Sheena feel embarrassed. She dropped her eyes, conscious that he was still holding her hand.

“Enchanting and an enchantress,” he smiled. “Come and sit and let me look at you.”

“Please, you must not pay me such compliments,” Sheena asked him.

“Why not?” he asked in genuine astonishment.

“I am not used to them,” she answered. “In Scotland no gentleman would think of saying such things on so short an acquaintance. And, besides, I have come into the garden because I want to talk to you on serious matters.”

The Comte laughed.

“How can we be serious?” he asked her. “And indeed why should we be? We are young and alone and I am very much in love.”

“Please – please – ” Sheena murmured, feeling with something like panic that she should not have left her room.

She made a movement, but now the Comte had both her hands in his and was covering them with kisses.

“You are adorable,” he said softly. “How can I talk to you when all I want to do is to tell you that you have set me on fire? I can think only of your hands, your eyes and your lips.”

He bent towards her as he spoke and now, really frightened she realised how stupid she had been to accept his invitation,

Sheena exerted all her strength and managed to free her hands from his. Then, lifting her skirts, she ran hastily back the way she had come, leaving him calling after her, her woollen shawl lying at his feet.

She ran helter-skelter down the garden between the cypress trees and across the terrace towards the door into The Palace which the page had led her through. She found it and pulled it open only to be confronted by a choice of several passages.

Wildly, half-afraid that the Comte would follow her, she turned left, only to realise after she had been running for a few seconds that she had chosen wrongly.

The passage broadened out into a wide hall. She then saw an open doorway, which she realised led into the courtyard and knew that she must retrace her steps.

She halted, but it was too late. Someone coming into the hall from the other direction saw her and crossed the polished floor to her side.

She tried to turn back. but he put a hand on her arm and prevented her.

“Mistress McCraggan! What are you doing here?” he asked.

She looked up at the Duc de Salvoire and saw his face, dark and unsmiling and with a stab of horror realised how she must look to him with her hair dishevelled, her cheeks flushed from running and her hands trembling.

“It is – it is a m-mistake,” she stammered. “Please let me go. I-I didn’t mean to come this way.”

“Let me show you the right staircase,” he suggested quietly.

She was too frightened to argue with him and too lost to protest her independence.

With her breath coming unevenly in gasps she was forced to move beside him down the passage, one hand creeping up to try to subdue the curls over her forehead.

“What has frightened you?” he asked gently.

“N-nothing, Your Grace. It was – just that I-I lost my way.”

She felt her cheeks burn furiously at the lie and yet, she asked herself, what else could she say? If only he would not find out how stupid she had been.

“It is very easy to do that in this Palace,” he said in his quiet bored voice. “And that is why it is wisest, until you become more accustomed to the many entrances and exits, to take your maid with you or to go with a Lady-in-Waiting of Mary Stuart. You will meet them this morning. So I hope you will find some congenial friends amongst them.”

“I think that is unlikely,” Sheena said, surprised into speaking the truth.

Her voice was low and miserable and the moment she had said the words she regretted them.

The Duc stopped walking and looked down at her.

“I always thought that the Scots were fighters,” he said. “I thought they had, if nothing else, more courage than anyone else.”

Sheena felt herself quiver at his words. They flicked her on the raw. At the same time, in all honesty, she had to admit that they were justified. Because she had no one else to ask she had to ask of him the question that had been torturing her all night.

“You do not think,” she said in a voice little above a whisper, “that it would be best if I returned home now and at once?”

Because she hated him and she knew of his supreme indifference to herself, she felt his answer would be honest, perhaps more honest than anyone else’s would have been.

“No!” he replied unexpectedly abruptly. “Put your chin up and face it. Do what you have come to do.”

Instinctively they had stopped walking and now their eyes met. For a moment she gazed at him, knowing that he had said what she ought to hear and yet somehow dismayed because he had said it.

And then, even as he had commanded her, her chin went up.

“Thank you,” she said, almost beneath her breath. “You have answered my question for me. I will try not to be afraid.”

“There is nothing to be afraid of really,” he said. “You will find that most of our fears are inside ourselves and not outside.”

Sheena glanced at him quickly and then, almost as if he was sorry that he had said so much, he pointed ahead to where there was a staircase just a little to the right of the door from which he had entered the garden.

“That is the way you should have taken,” he said abruptly and uncompromisingly.

She opened her lips to thank him and then as she did so, through the open door that led to the garden, she saw coming across the terrace straight towards them the Comte de Cloude.

He was looking annoyed and he was carrying in his hand a woollen shawl that seemed to Sheena to shriek in every homemade stitch of it that it came from Scotland.

She saw the Duc glance towards the Comte, she saw his lips tighten and knew that he understood what had happened. She thought she saw an expression of contempt in his eyes. And then, because the situation was beyond her, because she felt that anything she did or said would make matters worse and without another word she ran forward and up the stairs that the Duc had indicated to her.

She ran so quickly that by the time she reached the top her heart was pounding and it was hard to breathe. In fact she might have had two devils instead of one at her heels!