63 Ola and the Sea Wolf (5 page)

He knew exactly where he could tether his horse and, having done so, he walked surely and without hesitating along the twisting path that skirted the rhododendrons and ended at the edge of the rose garden in the centre of which was a sundial.

It was then that he was aware that the lights were on, not only in Sarah’s bedroom but also in the drawing room.

The Marquis stood still.

It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps Sarah was entertaining, which would explain why she had asked him to come tomorrow instead of tonight.

Then he told himself that she would never have expected anyway that he would have received her letter so early and have left London immediately.

She knew how meticulously he always planned his various engagements and it was, in fact, unprecedented for him, as he had done this morning, to send messages to no fewer than four people regretting that he could not keep the appointments he had made with them.

‘When I tell her, she will appreciate how much I love her,’ the Marquis told himself.

Now, looking across the darkness of the garden towards the light, he suddenly felt uncertain.

The last thing he should do was to walk in unexpectedly if Sarah was entertaining their neighbours.

Then it struck him that despite the fact that there were lights in the drawing room everything seemed very quiet.

Although he was listening intently, he could hear no chatter of voices or laughter as might have been expected.

‘Perhaps she has simply not yet gone to bed,’ he told himself. “She may be sitting reading or sewing in the drawing room and, if I knock on the window, she will open it.”

He took a step forward from the shelter of the rhododendrons and, as he did so, he saw the long French window open and someone standing against the light.

‘She is waiting for me,’ he thought joyously.

They were so attuned to each other, he told himself, that she had known perceptively, almost clairvoyantly, that he was coming and had opened the window to welcome him in.

There was a rapturous smile on the Marquis’s lips as he took another step forward.

Then suddenly he saw that Sarah was not alone.

A man had appeared beside her and hastily the Marquis retreated into the shadows.

Now he saw Sarah turn her face up towards the man beside her and the next moment she was in his arms and he was kissing her!

At first the Marquis could hardly believe that what he was seeing was not a figment of his imagination or part of some terrible nightmare.

Then the moon came out from behind the clouds and he could see more clearly than he had done before.

Sarah was wearing her blue negligee.

He knew it well and, when he had last seen it, she had been letting him out of the window as she was doing now with the man she was kissing.

What was more, the Marquis recognised who he was.

He was the handsome younger son of a Peer whom the Marquis had found, since he had inherited Elvin, to be a considerable nuisance.

Because the boundaries of their two estates marched together, Lord Harrop was always sending complaints of one sort or another to the Marquis.

He knew that the reason for most of them was that Lord Harrop was far from wealthy and was determined to extort from his rich neighbour every concession and help for his own estate that was possible.

The Marquis was well aware that Lord Harrop’s sons – and there were four of them – were jealous of the horses he was able to ride hunting, at the local point-to-points and at the steeplechases, which he invariably won.

It was not his fault, but it flashed through his mind now that Anthony had exacted his revenge by taking from him the only woman he had ever wished to marry.

Then, as he watched Anthony kiss Sarah before he stepped out through the window and onto the terrace outside, the Marquis felt the blood rush to his head.

He wanted to fight Anthony, knock him down and even kill him.

Then not only years of self-control kept him from moving but a pride which told him he had been made a fool of not only by Sarah but by a man younger than himself whom he had always thought too insignificant even to consider as a rival.

As the Marquis battled with himself, he realised that Anthony was walking towards him and in the space of a few seconds they would meet face to face.

He clenched his fists together.

Then, as he was not quite certain what he would do, he heard Sarah’s voice, soft and sweet as it had so often been to him, call out,

“Anthony, darling, I have something more to say to you.”

His rival turned back and it was then the Marquis knew that he must escape.

He retreated, moving swiftly back the way he had come and found his horse.

It was only as he mounted that he saw Anthony’s horse about fifty yards further along the side of the shrubbery.

In the darkness before the moon came out he had not noticed it, but now he could see it quite clearly.

The Marquis wasted no time and he just rode away, hoping that Anthony would not see him go.

It was only when he reached home and walked upstairs to his own room that he felt numb with shock, and there was, at the same time, a growing anger deep within him that seemed to increase as every minute passed.

He allowed his valet to help him undress without speaking and, only when he was alone, did the Marquis ask himself what he should do.

He knew that he could not stay in England to face Sarah, the explanations that would have to be made and the scene that would follow.

He knew, too, because he was deeply humiliated by what he had seen, that it would take him some time to control himself to the point where he could appear indifferent.

At the moment he was angry and hurt, wounded and jealous, murderous and yet at the same time weak with a kind of misery that he knew would increase because he had lost something that he thought was more valuable that anything he had ever possessed before.

He asked himself a thousand times how he could have been so foolish as to be deceived like any greenhorn by what he knew now was a scheming woman.

He had no doubt that Sarah had intended to marry him from the first moment they had met. He could see all too clearly that by playing ‘hard to get’ she had excited and enticed him into offering her exactly what she had wanted, which was marriage.

The Marquis admitted frankly that usually his love affairs did not last very long.

Once a woman had surrendered herself, he had found the repetition of their lovemaking soon became tedious and he began to wonder what it would be like to pursue another beauty and whether she would be more original, more captivating than the one he was with now.

Sarah had been too clever to allow him to feel like that and had driven him crazy by bestowing her favours after a long wooing and then withholding them again.

The Marquis gritted his teeth when he thought of how he had fallen into the trap that women have set for men ever since the days of Adam and Eve.

Each move had been traditional, almost like a game of chess, but he had not had the intelligence to see it until now.

Then he told himself in the darkness of the night that he could not face Sarah, because all he could really accuse her of was being more astute than he was.

‘I have to get away,’ he thought and remembered his yacht that was waiting ready for him at Dover.

It was three months since he had used it and then only for a short journey across the Channel with a friend who wished to fight a duel without anyone in England being aware of it.

He knew that, on his orders, the yacht was always ready to put to sea at a moment’s notice.

He had risen before dawn and left Elvin when the stars were still shining in the sky.

The Marquis could hear the slap of the sea against the bow of the yacht as they were under way and, as the timbers creaked and there was the rasp in the rigging, he felt the sails fill and knew there was a strong wind blowing.

‘At least there will be nothing to hold us up,’ he told himself.

He had given his Captain instructions the night before and it should take them less than five hours to reach Calais where he would deposit his passenger. After that, he would be free to sail anywhere in the world that took his fancy.

He wondered now how Ola would manage on the way to Paris, but then he told himself it was none of his business.

It must have been the brandy last night that had made him feel he ought to help her out of what must have been for her a frightening situation – that is if he was to believe what she had told him.

There was no doubt that the man who had been involved in the accident through driving his horses in a pea-soup fog was elderly and the girl with her flaming red hair was very young.

But perhaps she was deceitful and a liar, the Marquis thought scornfully, as all women were – damn them!

“When I return to England there will be no more Sarahs in my life,” he said aloud, “and no more games of pretence. No woman will ever have the opportunity to do this to me again.”

He could almost hear himself saying his loving words to Sarah, which now made him blush with embarrassment.

Although he had thought she genuinely meant the sentimental promises that all lovers make to each other, she had been laughing at him.

Doubtless, too, she held him up to ridicule with the man she really loved, penniless Anthony, who had been her lover those nights when alone at Elvin, he had felt frustrated and solitary because Sarah was worrying about her ‘reputation’.

“Her
reputation
!”

The Marquis laughed bitterly.

These were the words he had repeated when he drove his superb horses from Elvin to where the road joined the main highway to Dover.

At the first coaching inn he changed his horses for those that were kept for him month after month, just in case he should need them.

There was another change later on and these horses should have brought him easily to Dover before dusk.

But then they had run into the fog and it was only by superb driving and because the Marquis knew the way so well that he had managed to board his yacht and inform the Captain that he wished to put to sea immediately.

“I regret, my Lord, that’s completely impossible!” the Captain had replied gravely.

“You mean because of the fog?”

“No ship could move in this weather, my Lord. There’s not enough wind to fill a pocket handkerchief!”

“Then we will leave as soon as it is possible.”

“Where to, my Lord?”

This was something the Marquis had not considered and he replied after a moment,

“I will tell you later.”

“Very good, my Lord. I hope we have everything your Lordship’ll need aboard. We took on fresh water supplies yesterday.”

The Marquis nodded, but he was not interested in the details of his yacht’s equipment. It was just a vehicle – almost a Magic Carpet – to carry him away, not only from England but from Sarah.

When he dined, he could not bear to be alone with his thoughts and he walked through the fog to where he saw the lights of
The Three Bells
.

Now he wished he had made use of the fog to escape from yet another woman.

He had the uncomfortable feeling that he had made a fundamental mistake in agreeing to carry that redhead – what was her name? – Ola, to France.

If her stepmother caught up with them and learned that the Marquis of Elvington had assisted her, all sorts of misconstructions might be put on what had been a simple act of charity.

‘I have been a fool once again!’ the Marquis told himself. ‘What the hell is the matter with me? Of course I should have left her at the inn.’

Instead of being, as she had said, a ‘Good Samaritan’, he could easily find himself accused of being interested in the girl personally and, if her Guardian was anything like as ambitious as Sarah, he might be expected to make reparation by offering her marriage.

“I am damned if I will do that!” the Marquis exploded angrily.

Then he told himself he was being needlessly apprehensive.

He would do what the girl asked, drop her at Calais and then forget about her.

By the time she had got herself into trouble he could easily be on the other side of the world, but where he intended to go he had not yet decided.

‘I suppose the Mediterranean would be best – at any rate as a start,’ he thought.

He remembered Smollet had eulogised over Nice and knew that the climate would be spring-like at the moment and there would be sunshine and a blue sea.

‘It might as well be Nice as anywhere else,’ he told himself.

The sea would be blue, which immediately made him think of Sarah’s eyes.

“She is haunting me, that is what she’s doing!” he exclaimed.

Then he thought of how she had put her arms around Anthony’s neck and lifted her face in a way that was very familiar and which he had confidently believed was the way she only greeted him.

Had she not said again and again that she loved him as she had never loved anybody else?

There was a red blaze of anger before his eyes and once again he found himself clenching his fists.

“Damn her! Damn her! Damn her to hell and back!” he said aloud and the sound of his ravaged voice mingled with the whistle of the wind and the sudden slap of the sails as the ship listed to starboard.

‘We are in for a rough passage after the fog,’ the Marquis told himself.

Ola was so tired that unlike the Marquis she did not hear the anchor being raised or realise that the ship was pitching and tossing as soon as they were out of the harbour.

Instead she slept deeply and dreamlessly until a knock on the cabin door awakened her.

After answering, a Steward appeared, moving unsteadily across the cabin to put a closed cup, such as she had heard was used at sea in rough weather, down beside her bed.

“We’re in for a bad passage, miss,” he said. “I’ve brought you some coffee and if you’d like something more substantial the chef’ll do his best, but it’s a bit difficult to work in the galley at the moment.”