Название: Enchanted
Автор: Barbara Cartland
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
Серия: The Eternal Collection
isbn: 9781788674041
isbn:
“How? How?” Caroline asked. “I know Papa will not – listen to me and Edward has – no money at the – moment. He told me when I saw him – yesterday that he had to borrow from the Bank to buy those last mares.”
“If Edward borrowed a million pounds,” Elfa remarked, “it would still not save you from being a Duchess.”
“I know – I know, but I don’t – want to be a Duchess! I just want to marry Edward and live in that – dear little house – alone with him.”
Caroline’s voice was almost incoherent and now the tears were running down her cheeks and spilling onto the front of her gown.
“Listen,” Elfa urged. “Listen to me, Caroline.”
She went down on her knees in front of her sister and took her hands in hers.
“I have thought of how I can save you,” she said, “but you have to do, dearest, exactly what I tell you – you promise?”
“I will promise – anything if it means I can marry Edward.”
“Very well,” Elfa nodded. “Now listen to me – ”
*
The Duke of Lynchester watched the Duke of Northallerton’s carriage drive away from his front door. Then he walked across the hall and into the study where he habitually sat.
It was a comfortable well-designed room and, although there were a few books the walls were covered with a magnificent collection of pictures of horses, which he had transferred from various other rooms in the house.
The artists were mainly Stubbs, Sartorius and Herring and had been collected by one of his ancestors. By re-hanging them together the Duke knew he had improved one room in the house out of all recognition and he was determined gradually to bring the others to the same state of perfection.
He was, although he did not admit it to himself, a perfectionist and he liked everything around him to please both his eye and his mind.
It had always annoyed him that Chester House had been left in what he thought was a ‘state of disarrangement’ by his father and doubtless his grandfather before him.
It was an exceedingly impressive building, having been completed in about 1750 and at the time was a model both of Georgian architecture and of Georgian taste, which had been acclaimed by everybody.
The second Duke had been concerned only with women and horses and the third had an obsession for gambling, which had cost the estate a great deal of money and the sad loss of a number of fine pictures.
The gaps caused by their sale had been filled in haphazardly with any picture of about the same size that could be transferred from a less used part of the house. The result was, the present Duke decided, neither artistic nor pleasing.
However, he was now getting things as he wanted and, although the house had certainly acquired a new grace and artistry, he knew when he thought about it that what it lacked was a woman’s touch.
This unfortunately could be achieved only when he had a wife to share the great building with him.
For years he had been determined not to marry, knowing it would interfere with the very amusing life he lived in London and the pleasure he derived from not just one woman but a number.
Now, however, without the prompting of his relatives, he was well aware that it was time he thought for producing children and especially an heir to carry on the succession.
“If you wait much longer, you will be too old to teach your son how to become a game-shot and how to ride,” his grandmother said tartly when last he saw her.
He had not replied and she added,
“It distresses me to think of the Lynchester diamonds shut away in a safe and the pearls doubtless losing their lustre and growing green as they are not worn against a warm skin.”
The Duke had laughed, but he was aware that his grandmother was talking sense.
But when later he thought about it, he had wondered how one set about getting married, when in the Social world in which he reigned as a King in his own right, he seldom, if ever, encountered a young girl.
There were, of course, numbers of debutantes there for the asking, standing beside their chaperones and looking, he thought, dull, gauche and quite beneath his condescension.
At the house parties he gave himself and those he attended, the guests were chosen with particular care and on one primary consideration that they should be entertaining. This, as far as he was concerned, implied two other qualities, they must be alluring and bewitching!
That was certainly what he had found in the sophisticated beauties who looked at him knowingly from under their long eyelashes, pouted their red lips provocatively and made it very clear that they were as willing as he was for a fiery affaire de coeur.
These, the Duke knew, had all the thrill of a sound day’s hunting, a run for his money and the joy of the chase and satisfaction of the kill. It was all most enjoyable and in theory no one was hurt.
This in fact was an assumption that did not always prove true.
The women with whom the Duke engaged himself had a way when he made love to them of not only losing their heads but also their hearts.
He often wondered when he was feeling introspective, why it was when women came to love him so passionately, possessively and demandingly, that invariably after far too short a time he himself became bored and restless.
He wondered why he suddenly ceased to desire them and began to look for a new face and a new interest.
He came to the conclusion that it was because, when he was not making love to them, he began to anticipate exactly what they would say and do, the allurements they would use and the enticements that he had so often met before.
Then all he wanted was to close the door on what had been a short fiery encounter and forget about it.
But in practice it was not as easy as that and women who were in love with him clung, complained and reproached him.
That was what he found boring in the extreme and he sometimes asked himself if it was really worthwhile.
He liked women, he thought, as much as he liked horses and he could not imagine life without either of them.
But he would like also to have children.
Just recently he had been thinking that he would like to teach his son, when he had one, to appreciate the improvements that he had made to Chester Hall.
He would show him how to hunt with the pack of foxhounds of which he was Master and he would certainly start him shooting at an early age so that he would become as outstanding a game-shot as he was himself.
He would also teach him to fish. First the trout in the lake and then he would take him to Scotland where as a boy he would never forget the supreme excitement of catching his first salmon when he had been twelve years of СКАЧАТЬ