Barbara Cartland - Love has his way

“I am hoping so, at the same time I should like to be prepared,” the Marquis answered.

Mr. Barnham knew that this meant that he must send far more food than the Marquis had suggested and he hurried away to the chef with a long list of requirements.

The Marquis, however, was pleasantly surprised as he walked into Nicole’s house and found it far more attractive than its outside appearance suggested.

Chelsea, where the houses were cheap, was patronised by a number of bucks when they took a lady under their protection as it had been since the time of King Charles II.

The houses varied considerably and the one the Marquis had in mind in which to install Nicole de Prêt was large and luxurious and, as he had taken the trouble to ascertain, boasted an excellent kitchen.

This was much smaller, but tastefully furnished and the Marquis was not surprised when Nicole de Prêt said,

“I theenk, my Lord, we should dine upstairs in my sitting room. Eet ees far cosier than the dining room.”

“That would be delightful,” the Marquis agreed.

The evening was already moving so inevitably according to plan that he might have been watching a play that he had seen dozens of times before.

She went on ahead of him up the narrow but well-carpeted staircase and he admired the lines of her figure and the graceful way that she moved.

‘She is perfection!’ he told himself.

He thought with satisfaction that he was going to enjoy his evening and doubtless a great many subsequent evenings like it.

The sitting room, which had two windows, was well furnished in surprisingly good taste.

There was none of the garishness of brightly coloured satin cushions or vulgar souvenirs of the theatre that cluttered most chorus girls’ apartments.

Instead it might have been a room owned by a Lady of Quality and the Marquis decided once again that Nicole was better bred than the other girls who she danced with.

There was a table set in front of one of the windows and on it were four candles, which a maid in a frilly apron and a lace-trimmed cap came in to light.

“You sent much food weeth ze wine, my Lord,” Nicole said, “which I do theenk is an insult.”

“I do not |wish you to take it as one,” the Marquis replied. “I merely wished to save you trouble and expense.”

“I ’ave incorporated some of my extra special dishes with yours,” she replied, “and when supper is over, you can tell me which you prefer.”

She gave him one of her alluring little glances as she added,

“I shall be veree disappointed if I am ze loser.”

“That is something you could never be, not where I am concerned.”

She crossed the room to where a bottle of the Marquis’s champagne was already open and set in an ice cooler.

She poured out two glasses and brought one over to him to where he stood in front of the mantlepiece watching her and appraising every moment.

Then he took the glass from her and raised it.

“Shall I drink to your beautiful eyes,” he asked, “or to our future happiness together?”

“You are very certain that we shall be together.”

“That is, of course, all your deceesion, my Lord.”

He knew really that there was no question that she would not accept him as any woman in the theatrical world would be only too eager to do.

He had the reputation of being exceedingly generous as he could well afford to be.

The only difficulty, as Nicole had been told already, was that his interest in any woman, whatever her status in life, never lasted very long.

“We might as well face it,” he had heard a woman he had dallied with for a short while say to another, ‘he is here today and gone tomorrow so make the most of it while you have the chance’.”

The Marquis had been amused.

He had known that this was undoubtedly the truth. It was the pursuit of the woman that he enjoyed and the hope that, as she was new, she would be perhaps a little different from the many women he had known previously.

Yet it was too much to hope for any great originality and, as one cynic in White’s Club had said,

“All cats are the same in the dark!”

Equally the Marquis liked women simply because they were a relaxation from his other activities.

He was a sportsman who was acclaimed on every Racecourse, at every mill and was the acknowledged champion swordsman of England.

The Prince of Wales asked his advice when he bought horses and the pugilists he had backed had been so successful that he found it hard with his latest protégé to find him a fight.

Besides all his sporting interests, the Marquis was continually in demand in the House of Lords.

He was an excellent speaker and, when he could be persuaded to take up a cause, he then championed it in a manner which made him a favourite with the Prime Minister and hated by the Opposition.

The rest of his time was occupied with his estates and large staff.

Sarne Hall, his fine mansion in Kent, was not only one of the largest and most admired houses in the country but the parties when he entertained there were so interesting and at the same time so exclusive that it was said that even the Prince of Wales would beg him for an invitation.

The Marquis owned other properties, all of which had something interesting and unusual about them, but he then expected his houses to excel as he expected all his possessions to be perfection down to the very last detail.

“The trouble with you, Sarne,” someone had said to him only last week, “is that you are too good to be true and the only thing that is lacking as you run over us with your chariot wheels is that you have no wife to cut you down to size!”

“Do you really think a wife would do that?” the Marquis asked with a twist of his lips.

“Women have a manner of making a man ‘toe the line’ in one way or another,” his friend answered.

“Then I shall be the exception,” the Marquis said. “I assure you I shall choose my wife as carefully as I choose my horses.”

“Knowing your damned luck,” his friend said, “she will doubtless be such a high-stepper that she will win the Gold Cup at Ascot and trot home with the Derby Stakes!”

The Marquis had laughed.

“You are setting me such a very high standard that I shall be wise and remain as I am a perennial bachelor.”

“You will certainly want a son to inherit so much wealth.”

“There is plenty of time for that,” the Marquis replied confidently.

He was, as a matter of fact, avoiding marriage because he had seen that, as far as many of his friends were concerned, it was a most unenviable state.

He had been very fortunate in that he had inherited the title before he was twenty, which meant that he had no father to pressure him into an arranged marriage such as was usually accepted as inevitable by the young men of his own age with whom he had been at Oxford University.

“Why the devil did I ever get so tied up with that virago who just makes my life a hell on earth?” one of his closest friends had asked him two years after they had left Oxford.

“You were too young to know your own mind,” the Marquis said.

“ My mind?” his friend almost shouted, “my father’s mind! If you only heard the way he went on at me.”

He mimicked his father’s voice as he said,

“‘She will suit you admirably, my boy, comes from a very good stock and has a dowry of eighty thousand pounds, which is just what we want at this moment and there will be much more when her father dies’.”

“You should have looked at her rather than what she had in the bank,” the Marquis said unsympathetically.

“She seemed all right,” his friend went on. “It was only when the knot was tied and there was no escape that I realised what had happened to me.”