Barbara Cartland - Love Me Forever

“I don’t know,” the Duke said grimly.

Amé’s fingers, small and fluttering, came to rest against his palm.

“It must be my fault,” she said miserably. “You should have refused to take me with you. You should have put me out on the road once you had discovered me beneath the rugs.”

“Would you have gone?” the Duke asked.

She heard the sudden lightness in his tone. She looked up amazed to see that his eyes were shining. He looked down then at her astonished face and he laughed, the gayest laugh she had heard for some time.

“We are in the middle of a great adventure,” he said, “the sort of adventure that I thought had gone out of fashion when I was a boy. Yes, this is an adventure, Amé, and damn it all , I am going to enjoy myself.”

The Château was impressive, surrounded on three sides by thick dark woods. Its turrets and towers seemed to have an almost unreal air as they glittered silver in the sunshine and were reflected on the smooth surface of a large artificial lake.

They crossed the lake over a series of bridges cunningly designed to give an illusion of fragility. But there was no illusion about the guard who stood at the entrance to the Château or about their muskets and pistols.

The Duke’s eyes noted everything and then calmly and in an unhurried voice he said to Amé,

“Be careful to be as unobtrusive as possible here. Keep behind me while we are received, say as little as possible and make no movement unless I personally command you to do so.”

He glanced down at her as he finished speaking.

“Are you frightened?” he asked.

He liked the way she raised her head and the sudden flash of pride in her eyes as she replied,

“Not while I am with you, Your Grace.”

There was no time to say more. The guard on the stone steps leading up to the front door of the Château came to attention, the door of the coach was opened and the Duke stepped out.

He glanced neither to right nor to left but walked slowly and with a tremendous dignity up the steps and in through the open doors of the Château.

A Major Domo at the head of a long line of footmen wearing a red, white and blue livery bowed and led the way down a long corridor decorated with valuable pieces of furniture and hung with a fine collection of oil paintings.

The Major Domo crossed the hall and flung open two large mahogany doors on the further side of it.

“His Grace, the Duke of Melyncourt,” he announced.

The Duke had an impression of a large salon bathed in bright sunshine. There was the sparkle of crystal chandeliers, the glisten of many gilt mirrors, the luxuriance of brocade and velvet and, by an open window, a small group of people.

For a moment it seemed that they were all strangers and then one man detached himself from the others and came towards him, a tall ponderous figure, exquisitely dressed and bejewelled, his heavy florid face alight with a smile in which there was both amusement and a hint of malice.

“My dear Melyncourt, this is indeed a pleasure.”

“Chartres!” the Duke expostulated.

“So you remember me?”

“But, of course. It is five years since we met, but I am not likely to forget the dinner you gave for me and my friends in Paris.”

“My dear fellow, it was nothing. But it is delightful to see you again. I heard you were on the road and could not allow you to pass my home without according me the pleasure of entertaining you.”

“Your invitation was at least dramatic,” the Duke said sardonically.

As he spoke, he was watching the Duc de Chartres closely and his brain was trying to penetrate the veneer of overacted friendliness and to find the truth.

“Now, you must meet my friends,” the Duc said effusively, taking him by the arm. “We are just a small party for it is really too hot for lavish entertainment but I promise you one thing, you will not be bored.”

He presented with elaborate ceremony two gallants and three attractive young ladies to the Duke. There was a flutter of fans and eyelashes, a rustle of silks and satins and a polite exchange of courtesies, then glasses of wine were carried in on big silver trays.

All the time the Duke was thinking.

It was true that he remembered Philippe, Duc de Chartres, heir to the Duc d’Orleans, despite the fact that he had only met him twice before in his life.

The Duc de Chartres was not someone one forgot easily. Even five years ago he had been dangerous and after the last meeting, in which he had more or less forced his hospitality upon a party of English sportsmen, the Duke had deliberately avoided him and refused all further invitations.

He had also taken care not to meet the Duc when he visited London the previous year. That the Prince of Wales had honoured the Frenchman with his friendship had not altered in the slightest the opinion which the Duke had formed of him.

The Duc de Chartres had Royal blood in his veins and sprang from a branch of the Royal house as old as that to which Louis XVI belonged. Wealthy, powerful and ambitious, he did not hesitate to oppose the King’s will in the Parliament of Paris and it was natural, therefore, that he should become the leader of the malcontents who were against the Throne.

But, by nature a rake, a spendthrift, a gambler and a dandy, the Duc de Chartres would never have attained or wished for the power he now held had not the whole bitterness and hatred of his shallow nature been directed against one person, the Queen.

She was his declared enemy and, although all others who disliked the Government of France, who were against the Royal line of Bourbons or who wished to overthrow the present regime came under his protection, the Duc’s own battle was with Marie Antoinette and there alone was all his venom centred.

The Queen had mortified his incredible vanity when she had prevented the bestowal on him of the office of Lord High Admiral of France. Almost from that moment the Palais Royal had become a revolutionary centre to which the Duc de Chartres welcomed all discontented elements.

There met Liberals, Constitutionalists, Voltarians, Innovators and Free Masons, besides those who were heavily in debt, disgruntled aristocrats, unemployed lawyers, demagogues and out-of-work journalists. As yet they had no war cry, but it lay unspoken in the hearts of those who entered the Palais Royal . Against the King and, above all, against the Queen.”

The Duke, on his last visit to Paris, had not been concerned with the Duc de Chartres’s activities, but he had disliked him on sight. There was something pretentious and unpleasant about him and though he had, there was no doubt about it, a popularity with the people, he was in himself shifty and very untrustworthy, a man whose friendship was, to say the least of it, undesirable.

Yet the Duc de Chartres had greeted him now, the Duke noted, with a gushing effusion that pretended, at least to those who knew no better, that their acquaintanceship in the past had been close and intimate.

Sipping his wine, the Duke was all the time conscious of Amé standing a little behind him, discreetly self-effacing and yet to the Duke at any rate difficult to ignore.

The Duc de Chartres had not, however, given her more than a passing glance and his friends had not even deigned to notice the presence of a page.

They were all laughing and talking. The ladies, in their full-skirted gowns and glittering with jewels, were as colourful and fragrant as the flowers that filled this room, as they had filled the corridor and the hall. There was no pause in the conversation.

The Duke set down his glass on the side table with an air of decision.

“This has been most enjoyable,” he said. “But you must forgive me if I take my leave. I have arranged to be in Paris before evening.”