Rose in the Bud (14 page)

CHAPTER VIII

Despite t
he fact that she felt strongly that she would be far wiser to return to her own country without delay, and follow up clues concerning Arlette’s disappearance from there, Cathleen agreed to accompany Bianca and her brother to Edouard’s
palazzo
for lunch the following day, and although she despised herself for her weakness she also found it quite impossible to forget the feel of Edouard’s hands when they alighted on her shoulders, and the look of extraordinary tenderness in his eyes just before Nicola Brent had burst in upon them at the Palazzo di Rini.

Nicola, wearing skin-tight pants in a brilliant orange colour, and a low-cut emerald top, was already there when they arrived, and not merely was she there but she was curled up like a kitten on the model’s couch and smoking a cigarette in a foot-long holder, and declaring that she was exhausted after having posed for Edouard since sun-up.

“As a matter of fact, we decided it would be a pity to waste valuable time returning me to my hotel,” sh
e
explained with a kind of relish to Bianca, “and Edouard brought me here for breakfast, and he sent Giovanni to fetch some of my things.” She stretched herself seductively, and the skin-tight slacks looked as if they were threatening to burst at the seams. “Don’t you think we were wise to take advantage of the light?” indicating an easel on which the rough beginnings of a portrait was displayed for all to see.

“That depends on whether or not Edouard is going to make a good job of you this time,” Bianca replied
in an arctic voice, crossing the room to examine the portrait. “The last time I was not very much impressed by your insistence on posing as Salome.”

“Minus the seventh veil.” Nicola, who was really quite extraordinarily lovely in the broad light of day, giggled. “Only Edouard refused to permit me to discard it. I didn’t know, until we got as far as that, that he was so old-fashioned,” and she regarded him with amusement.

Edouard, who was plainly disinclined to discuss his attempted portrait of Nicola, put a glass containing one of his own specially blended cocktails into Cathleen’s hand. She had seated herself demurely—and somewhat distantly—in a chair near the window, and her eyes were resting broodingly on the canal as he crossed over to her.

“When are you going home?” he asked curtly.

She looked up at him with a slightly disdainful expression.

“I haven’t any plans for going home yet,” she replied.

His face hardened—or so she thought.

“Don’t tell me you seriously imagine Paul is interested in you
?
” There was an unexpectedly cruel edge to the inquiry that brought the colour flooding into her face.

“What—do you mean?” she demanded.

“I think you know very well what I mean.” He was bending over her, in order that their voices should not need to be raised and carry across the room to the others. “Those rubies last night, the fact that Bianca is encouraging you to wear her clothes, and plans to take you on an expensive shopping spree. She is labouring under the delusion that you have a very great deal of money, and because Paul has virtually none she will marry him to you if she can. But first you will have to provide proof that the money is in the bank.”

The hot colour in her cheeks was literally scorching them.

“I
... How dare you
?
” she exclaimed. “And the amount of money I have in the bank is nothing whatever to do with you!”

“True,” he agreed, unsmiling and hard-eyed. “But unless you wish for unpleasant repercussions you will disabuse Bianca of the notion that you are a rich young woman as soon as possible, hand back the rubies and go home. Otherwise you might well find yourself the centre of an humiliating situation.”

She bit her lip. She felt as if she had been exposed as a kind of adventuress, and in the midst of her distress she wondered how he had managed to arrive so close to the truth
... that is, she wondered how he knew—which she was certain he did—that far from being a wealthy young women she had considerably less than five hundred pounds in the bank.

Her wide, startled eyes met his, that struck her as dark, deep and remote as the stars.

“You—know how much money I have?” she enquired in a choked whisper.

He nodded.

“I know.”

Bianca, graceful in striped silk, came across the room to them and wagged a finger at them coyly.

“Now then, you two! I must warn you that Paul will not be at all happy if he sees you putting your heads together like that
!”

“Paul?” Edouard regarded her with interest.

“Yes.” Smilingly Bianca went round behind Cathleen and touched her cheek. “We are keeping it secret for the moment, but I am very much hoping that —before long—we shall have an announcement to make, and then you will all be invited to the Palazzo di Rini to celebrate.”

“Indeed?” Edouard murmured, in a colder tone. Bianca flashed a smile at him that had in it a certain provocative, skilfully disguised hostile quality.

“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?” she declared in that smooth, soft voice of hers, and once again her finger touched Cathleen’s cheek. She stroked it caressingly. “Poor Paul has been unhappy for a long time now, and it often seemed to me that I would look in vain for a sister-in-law after my own heart. But Cathleen—so very like Arlette, of whom we were all quite fond—is not merely acceptable to my heart, but I’m sure she is acceptable to Paul’s. You may have noticed how much more contented he appears lately.”

T
hey glanced across the room at Paul, who was flirting outrageously with Nicola. Edouard smiled in a queer, sardonic
mann
er, Bianca looked vexed, and Cathleen exclaimed indignantly:

“But I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Bianca!”

Bianca bent over her wa
rn
ingly.

“Not so loud!” she cautioned, speaking close to her ear with a mixture of playfulness and anxiety. “You know we have agreed to keep matters secret a little longer, and Paul will be upset if we do not observe this arrangement. It will be his pleasure to make the announcement when the time is ripe
!”

Leaving Cathleen staring upwards into Bianca’s face as if she was fairly certain she had not heard aright, Edouard walked away with deliberate steps and joined his other two guests. His attitude was unexplainable, but there was a certain amount of distaste in the way he refrained from glancing back over his shoulder at the Count’s sister and their visitor, and when later a movement was made to go into the well-equipped dining-room for lunch he concentrated all his attention on Nicola, and it was she who sat close to him in the dining-room, and who plainly found it easy to hold his interest.

Bianca, unaccustomed to being ignored, and resenting it openly—her pine dark eyes developed indignant sparks as the meal progressed, and her thin but beautifully cut lips grew even thinner before the coffee arrived—lapsed into a silence that was intended to make clear her displeasure, and as Cathleen was also more or less ignored—except by Paul, who divided his attentions almost equally between the English girl and the bright-eyed American Nicola—she was glad when the meal ended, and they went out on to a deep balcony that overlooked the canal to recline in long adjustable chairs.

Bianca talked about calling on some friends who had rented a villa on one of the neighbouring islands, but Paul was so plainly attracted by Nicola that he was loath to leave. It must have seemed somewhat peculiar to Edouard—if he hadn’t been very familiar with Paul’s lit
tl
e ways—if he was contemplating marriage with Cathleen, while the provocative looks and smiles of another girl who was in actual fact far more beautiful than Cathleen could ever hope to be, although in some eyes she might have more charm, obviously had the same effect on him as a magnet.

He was trying to be polite and charming to Cathleen, but it was Nicola with whom he exchanged badinage and whose conversation plainly inspired him—perhaps because she spoke an effortless form of Italian that made it unnecessary for him to have constant recourse to English. And when at last Bianca managed to insist on leaving he was equally insistent that Miss Brent should dine with them that night, if she wouldn’t stay with them.

In the meanwhile, Cathleen wandered off and attempted to explore the
palazzo.
Actually she was looking for the picture of Arlette that she had first come upon in the studio, but when she searched for it amongst the canvases piled against the wall she found that it had gone. Edouard, whom she had believed too occupied with Nicola—when she left the others he had been paying her almost as much attention as Paul—to notice her withdrawal from the balcony, came up behind her as she searched, and startled her with a few clipped words.

“You won’t find it there
!”

She rounded on him, and then felt annoyed with herself because she coloured guiltily.

“How do you know I wasn’t simply admiring your work
?
”

He shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether you admire it or not, but it was fairly obvious to me that the reason you came back here was because you wished to find your sister’s portrait.”

“Well?” she demanded, with an aggressiveness she was far from feeling.

He shrugged again.

“You won’t find it there because Arlette herself has it. I sent it to her before I left for Paris.”

“Then you must have Arlette’s address...” She felt a kind of anguish because he could bother to send Arlette her portrait, but for herself he had nothing but contemptuous looks, and his tone was uncompromising when he addressed her again.

“I want to know what you think you’re doing keeping up this farce of being a guest of the di Rinis—an important guest, with hopes of becoming something more later on!—and what arrangements you have made for cutting short your visit? I warned you
last night that you must not stay on at their
palazzo
.
”

She bit her lip.

“Last night your warning didn’t impress me very much... in fact, nothing very much about you impresses me,” she lied.

He appeared unaffected by her criticism. If anything, his hard dark eyes looked harder and colder, but he did not comment on her observation.

“Let me put things more clearly to you,” he said. “The di Rinis are out to contract rich marriages. It doesn’t matter very much to either of them whether it is Bianca who contracts the marriage or Paul, so long as they both benefit as a result of it. They are devoted to one another, although you may not believe it, and their way of life will not change when they finally settle down. For some reason they have decided that you will do very nicely for Paul—possibly because Arlette often talked of an aunt who planned to leave her considerable fortune to either her or her sister, and quite obviously you were the one finally selected—but only I know that the fortune left to you by your aunt was not really a fortune at all. It was a matter of a thousand pounds in English money. Correct me if I am wrong.”'

She fairly gaped at him.

“But how can you possibly know that?”

Once again he shrugged.

“My dear girl, I’m not going to let you into that secret at this juncture, but I am going to insist that you pack up your things and leave the di Rini
palazzo
for good and all.” He slipped a hand inside his pocket and produced an envelope. “Inside this is an air ticket to London, and I suggest that you make use of it without delay. It is, as a matter of fact, for a flight leaving at noon to-morrow. You will touch down in Paris, but that is the only halt you will have, and once back on your home ground you will have no difficulty in making your way to your mother’s flat. If she wants news of Arlette tell her that information concerning her will soon be on its way
... but I don’t think she will ask you for news of Arlette!”

Cathleen was bereft of words. She could only gaze at him speechlessly.

He held out the envelope to her.

“Make your excuses to Bianca,” he suggested. “Just a simple excuse. Tell her you want to go home!”

Cathleen bit her lip again, and this time it was quivering. She felt as if tears of actual mortification were rising behind her eyes.

“I think you’re ... horrible!” she told him.

“Why?” he enquired, almost mildly.

She fought to keep the tears from doing anything apart from hurting her eyes.

Because you’ve obviously been making inquiries about me and—and my money, and because you’re so blatantly trying to protect your friends.” She swallowed, and her voice quavered. “I should have understood quite clearly when I first met you that you’re hard ... Paul is weak, but you’re hard. You’re also a snob. It isn’t only my lack of money—if I had money you would still think I wasn’t good enough to become a di Rini. Not that I ever had any intention of becoming one!”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he commented, in the same mild tone of interest. “You would make a very pretty little Contessa, but somehow I do not think you would be happy as an Italian one ... and Paul, most certainly, would not be happy with you. Therefore I am protecting both your interests by asking you to fly away to-morrow.”

She took the envelope out of his hand, and under his eyes tore it acr
o
ss and across. With flaming cheeks she tossed the pieces at him.