Barbara Cartland - Helga in Hiding

Milly gave a gasp and looked around wildly, as if for a moment she could not believe what the dressing room looked like.

Then aloud she called out,

“Wait one minute, Joe, until I am decent.”

As she spoke, she rose to her feet and beckoned Helga towards where across a corner of the dressing room was hung a long curtain behind which she changed when there were people in the other part of the room.

Now, as she pulled the curtain aside and pushed Helga behind it, she whispered,

“Don’t make a sound.”

As Helga disappeared behind the curtain, she pulled it back and put a hard chair in front of it.

Then she sat down in the chair she had just vacated and, taking her glass from behind the photograph, she finished off what remained in it before she shouted through the door,

“Ask His Grace to come in, Joe.”

A few seconds later the door opened and the Duke of Rocklington came into the dressing room, seeming to fill it with his presence.

He was a tall broad-shouldered man and exceedingly good-looking.

There was no one in London who did not know the Duke and most certainly no one in the theatre world.

It was no secret that he had invested a large amount of money in George Edwardes’s productions and a word from His Grace could either make or break an aspiring young actress or actor.

Milly had, of course, known the Duke for years and had often attended the supper parties he gave at Romano’s after a show and occasionally in his own house.

But he had never been in her dressing room, except when there was a party in progress, and now she wondered frantically whether he was perhaps the conveyor of bad news that her services were no longer required.

She was well aware that, although she had tried not to let her personal feelings intrude, the performances she had given since Christofer had died were inferior to those she had given before.

She felt as if she carried a heavy stone in her chest and had been numbed by a shock that seemed to have paralysed not only her body but also her brain.

She had struggled on, but she knew only too well that the Duke expected perfection and he would undoubtedly be the first to realise that she was not up to her usual form.

She was, however, actress enough to smile at him beguilingly.

It was just the same smile that had sold thousands of postcards of her in every stationer’s shop all over London and that had ensured that there was still a large contingent of autograph hunters to besiege her every time she went in or out of the stage door.

“This is a great surprise, Your Grace,” she said, holding out her hand with a gesture that was almost Royal.

“Good evening, Milly.”

The Duke kissed her hand, foreign fashion, with his lips not actually touching her skin.

Then he pulled up a chair from the other side of the room and, sitting down beside her, began,

“I want your help.”

“ My help?” Milly exclaimed, thinking that this was the second time her help had been asked for that evening and both times it had been exceedingly surprising.

“So how could I possibly help Your Grace?” she asked before the Duke could speak. “I should have thought that the boot was very much on the other foot and it is something I might well be asking you.”

“The help I require is something that I think it is possible only for you to give me,” the Duke said, “and that is why I have come to the theatre early when I knew that you would be alone to ask for your assistance.”

“You are certainly making me very curious!” Milly said lightly.

To her surprise the Duke looked very serious and, putting his tall hat and cane down on the dressing table, he seemed for just a moment to have difficulty in finding words to express himself with.

A dozen ideas meanwhile flashed through Milly’s mind as to what he could possibly want of her, none of which had any likelihood of being the truth and she could only wait, thinking that, when one strange and unexpected thing happened, there was usually another to follow it.

But never in her wildest dreams had she expected the Duke of Rocklington to approach her in such a way.

She knew a great deal about him. He was enormously rich and was the most sought-after bachelor in the whole of the Social world.

He had made it very clear that he had no intention of marrying and so preferred when he was not in attendance upon the Prince of Wales to be in the company of the latest and most beautiful actress that the theatre world could provide.

At least a half dozen Gaiety Girls had passed through his hands in the last two years and, although they extolled all his attractions even after being discarded and were apparently still enamoured of him when he had no further use for them.

He was certainly a phenomenon in that way and, looking at his broad forehead, his dark flashing eyes and the squareness of his chin, Milly could understand any young woman being bowled over by his good looks without counting the importance of his being a Duke and the fact that he was extremely generous.

But she knew as well that he was a force to be reckoned with.

There were endless stories of how he and George Edwardes had fallen out on numerous occasions.

The Duke had always won and it was said that George Edwardes had always conceded that in this, if in nothing else, the Duke was the ‘Guv’nor’ and not himself.

There was a curve on his lips that Milly knew could be extremely sarcastic and at times cynical and she was aware that he was capable of making a woman very unhappy if she really loved him in the same way that she had loved Christofer.

There were, of course, many stories of ladies with broken hearts, who lived not among the brilliant lights of the theatre but in the Duke’s Social world.

It was very easy to understand that, if a woman aspired to marry him but found that it was something he had no intention of offering her, she could in consequence find it agonising to lose him.

This all flashed through Milly’s mind until the Duke had settled himself back in his chair and said,

“Now, Milly, listen to my problem and please find me a solution to it.”

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