Barbara Cartland: The Hidden Evil

“It is – it is a m-mistake,” she stammered. “Please let me go. I-I didn’t mean to come this way.”

“Let me show you the right staircase,” he suggested quietly.

She was too frightened to argue with him and too lost to protest her independence.

With her breath coming unevenly in gasps she was forced to move beside him down the passage, one hand creeping up to try to subdue the curls over her forehead.

“What has frightened you?” he asked gently.

“N-nothing, Your Grace. It was – just that I-I lost my way.”

She felt her cheeks burn furiously at the lie and yet, she asked herself, what else could she say? If only he would not find out how stupid she had been.

“It is very easy to do that in this Palace,” he said in his quiet bored voice. “And that is why it is wisest, until you become more accustomed to the many entrances and exits, to take your maid with you or to go with a Lady-in-Waiting of Mary Stuart. You will meet them this morning. So I hope you will find some congenial friends amongst them.”

“I think that is unlikely,” Sheena said, surprised into speaking the truth.

Her voice was low and miserable and the moment she had said the words she regretted them.

The Duc stopped walking and looked down at her.

“I always thought that the Scots were fighters,” he said. “I thought they had, if nothing else, more courage than anyone else.”

Sheena felt herself quiver at his words. They flicked her on the raw. At the same time, in all honesty, she had to admit that they were justified. Because she had no one else to ask she had to ask of him the question that had been torturing her all night.

“You do not think,” she said in a voice little above a whisper, “that it would be best if I returned home now and at once?”

Because she hated him and she knew of his supreme indifference to herself, she felt his answer would be honest, perhaps more honest than anyone else’s would have been.

“No!” he replied unexpectedly abruptly. “Put your chin up and face it. Do what you have come to do.”

Instinctively they had stopped walking and now their eyes met. For a moment she gazed at him, knowing that he had said what she ought to hear and yet somehow dismayed because he had said it.

And then, even as he had commanded her, her chin went up.

“Thank you,” she said, almost beneath her breath. “You have answered my question for me. I will try not to be afraid.”

“There is nothing to be afraid of really,” he said. “You will find that most of our fears are inside ourselves and not outside.”

Sheena glanced at him quickly and then, almost as if he was sorry that he had said so much, he pointed ahead to where there was a staircase just a little to the right of the door from which he had entered the garden.

“That is the way you should have taken,” he said abruptly and uncompromisingly.

She opened her lips to thank him and then as she did so, through the open door that led to the garden, she saw coming across the terrace straight towards them the Comte de Cloude.

He was looking annoyed and he was carrying in his hand a woollen shawl that seemed to Sheena to shriek in every homemade stitch of it that it came from Scotland.

She saw the Duc glance towards the Comte, she saw his lips tighten and knew that he understood what had happened. She thought she saw an expression of contempt in his eyes. And then, because the situation was beyond her, because she felt that anything she did or said would make matters worse and without another word she ran forward and up the stairs that the Duc had indicated to her.

She ran so quickly that by the time she reached the top her heart was pounding and it was hard to breathe. In fact she might have had two devils instead of one at her heels!

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