Love and The Marquis. Barbara Cartland

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СКАЧАТЬ marrying anybody at the moment.”

      “Every woman should marry,” the Earl said sharply, “especially someone as beautiful as you. You need a man to look after you and protect you, but the sort of gentleman I want as a son-in-law is not to be found at parties I give. If he is, he will not treat you with respect.”

      “Why not?” Imeldra asked.

      “Because, my darling one, you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled by it and a man of aristocratic birth, especially an Englishman, wants his wife to be pure and untouched and certainly not to have had a ‘Cosmopolitan education’.”

      Imeldra laughed because the way her father spoke sounded so funny. At the same time she knew that in a way he was speaking the truth.

      When she had last been with him, she had become aware for the first time that, although she was dressed as a young girl and her hair was loose over her shoulders, the expression in men’s eyes was different from what it had been before and they no longer treated her as a child.

      Aloud she asserted,

      “I cannot lose you, Papa! You know you are the only person I belong to.”

      “That is not true,” the Earl answered. “You have a great number of relations and I have already been in communication with them. I have in fact arranged that your Aunt Lucy will present you at Court.”

      Imeldra looked at him wide-eyed.

      “The Duchess?” she exclaimed. “But I thought she never spoke to you.”

      “She loved your mother and I have promised her that I will not interfere or even see you as long as you are under her chaperonage.”

      “Papa! How could you promise anything so – horrible – and so cruel to me?”

      “And to me,” the Earl added quietly. “But, my dearest, it is best for you.”

      Imeldra rose to stand at the window and looked with unseeing eyes out into the garden.

      The daffodils were coming into bloom and the first buds were appearing on the trees, but she was thinking that she had only seen her aunt, the Duchess, once at her mother’s funeral.

      She had seemed an austere woman, cold and controlled, who looked at everybody else as if they were beneath her condescension.

      Equally Imeldra was intelligent enough to know that under the Duchess’s patronage she would be accepted everywhere in the Social world that her father thought so necessary for her.

      She knew too that the Duchess was a Lady-of-the-Bedchamber to Queen Adelaide.

      She was also aware that, while her father’s raffish reputation as a roué had been easily acceptable during the reign of George IV. King William and his prim little German wife had changed the whole attitude of Society towards morality.

      This meant that the Earl, whose amorous indiscretions had been admired and envied by the Georgian bucks and beaux, now evoked upraised hands and gasps of horror from those who wished to ingratiate themselves at Court.

      Because the Earl was so handsome and because, as Imeldra knew, women gravitated to him like rats to the Pied Piper, he was always engaged in one love affair after another.

      It was what prevented him from mourning the one woman in his life he had really loved, her mother.

      He was also a keen sportsman and his racehorses romped home regularly to take the most treasured prizes of the Turf.

      He had when young been an acknowledged pugilist and a champion swordsman.

      Men admired, envied and fêted him, but those of them who prized their wives kept them away from a man who was too fascinating to be anything but a danger.

      After her mother’s death, when she had gone everywhere with him, Imeldra had noticed the gleam that came into many women’s eyes the moment they saw him.

      She knew that long before he was aware of them they were yearning after him in a way that she found sometimes amusing and sometimes irritating.

      “I want to see Papa,” she had said once to one of her Governesses, who had kept her in the schoolroom when she had wished to go downstairs.

      “Then you will just have to wait for your turn,” the Governess had answered somewhat brusquely.

      The only consolation was that her father grew bored very quickly in every love affair and his invariable habit when this happened was to move somewhere else.

      Imeldra could remember when they had packed up and left a Palace that he had rented in Rome at only twenty-four hours’ notice as the dark-eyed and passionate beauty who had been constantly with them had suddenly become no longer welcome.

      Her father in leaving so precipitately avoided the floods of tears and recriminations that inevitably followed one of his swift changes of mood.

      He and Imeldra had journeyed often to Greece, but while the Acropolis and Delphi had entranced Imeldra, her father’s dalliance with a Maid of Athens did not last much longer than Lord Byron’s and they had both moved on.

      Egypt had been such a wonderful place for Imeldra because her father found no modern Cleopatra there and the women depicted on the Temple walls were very much more attractive than those who lived and breathed.

      The Earl was a very well-educated man and Imeldra had often thought recently that she had learnt so much more from him than from her teachers and books at school.

      Yet because it pleased him she had worked at her lessons until, as she had said, she was top in everything and there was really nothing more that they could teach her.

      She had been so sure that she would be with her father at least for a little time that she could hardly believe now that she was to be separated from him and the mere idea of it made her want to cry.

      The Earl disliked tears, having endured too many of them from the women he had loved and left.

      So Imeldra bit her lips to stop herself from sobbing and said in a voice that only trembled a little,

      “Can I not – stay with you for – just a little time – Papa? I have dreamt of you and – longed to be with – you and to talk to you.”

      “That was what I too have wanted,” the Earl answered, “but because I have been a fool, Imeldra, it is now impossible.”

      “Must you – really run away with – this lady?”

      “It is something I have to do,” he replied, “and you must expect me, as your father, to do the honourable thing.”

      “Not if you don’t love her.”

      “Love? What is love?”

      Then, as he saw the expression on his daughter’s face, he said in a very different voice,

      “You know as well as I do that I have only loved once in my life and that sort of love never comes again.”

      “Is that true of СКАЧАТЬ