Lee Wilkinson - The Venetian's Proposal

In heavily accented English, he said, ‘Good evening, Dominic. It is nice to see you again. Mrs Whitney, welcome to Schloss Lienz. If you will follow me, you have a table on the terrace, as requested.’

‘Thank you, Franz.’

Their host led the way to the end of a large flagged hall and through a carpeted, chandelier-hung dining-room, where a quartet of musicians played Mozart and most of the well-dressed clientele seemed to be in decorous groups.

As they followed him Nicola noticed that several of the women with middle-aged escorts gave Dominic a second surreptitious glance, and her an envious one. As they reached a long, curving flight of stone stairs, Franz said, ‘Please be careful. The steps are old and worn in places.’

The stairway led up to a flagged open-air terrace, which held only a handful of widely spaced tables, four of which were already occupied.

‘Out here it’s somewhat less stuffy,’ Dominic remarked sotto voce.

His sidelong smile convinced her he wasn’t referring to the temperature.

When they were seated at a table set with gleaming crystal and a centrepiece of fresh flowers, the Baron said, ‘I hope you will enjoy your meal,’ clicked his heels, and departed.

Intrigued by the glowing charcoal braziers standing at intervals along the waist-high outer wall, Nicola remarked, ‘They look so wonderfully appropriate.’

‘As soon as the sun goes down they’re necessary to keep the air comfortably warm,’ Dominic explained. ‘Though before they were installed, a couple of years ago, the hardy diner would risk pneumonia for the sake of the view.’

Gazing at the wonderful panorama of Innsbruck spread below them in the wide, flat valley of the Inn, she said, ‘If you want my opinion, it was well worth the risk.’

‘When all the city lights start to come on, you’ll find it’s even better.’

As they ordered and ate a superb dinner she found he was right. In the blue velvet dusk the glittering lights turned the twenty-first century into a fairy tale. While at the castle itself the lanterns on the terrace and the flaring torches in the courtyard below gave the scene a medieval feel.

Though he drank little himself, Dominic kept Nicola’s glass topped up with an excellent Riesling that was light and subtle and easy to keep sipping.

Caught up in the magic of the moment, a magic that had a lot to do with the schloss but even more to do with her companion, she failed to notice just how much she was drinking.

During the meal he had steered clear of anything remotely personal, so it came as a complete surprise when, reaching across the table, he lifted her bare left hand and remarked, ‘You’ve taken off your ring.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I—I’m not sure,’ she stammered, shaken both by his touch and his question. ‘The time just seemed to be right.’

Something in his look made her go on to explain, ‘I suddenly realised I’d been a widow for longer than I’d been a wife.’

Releasing her hand, he queried, ‘How long were you married?’

‘Not quite a year…’

Perhaps it was too much wine that loosened her tongue, or maybe, at long last, the time had come when she felt it a relief to be able to talk about the past.

Whichever, she found herself opening up to a perfect stranger in a way she hadn’t been able to open up to anyone, except John.

‘Jeff and I had a traditional white wedding on my twenty-first birthday.’

‘But you’d lived together before that?’

‘Virtually all our lives… Oh, I see what you mean. No, we hadn’t lived together in that sense.’

Seeing his slight frown, she explained, ‘Jeff’s parents were my parents too. My foster parents. They had been my grandmother’s friends for a number of years, and they took care of me while she was in hospital and after she died.’

‘How old were you then?’

‘Just turned five.’

‘And your husband?’

‘He was a few months older, and their only child.’

‘They never tried to officially adopt you?’

‘I think they would have liked to. They had hoped for more children, but they were well past middle-age when Jeff was born, so they would have been considered too old.’

‘You had no grandfather?’

‘He’d died the previous year.’

‘What about your natural parents?’

‘I’d never known them, and one day, having realised that most of my peers had a mummy and daddy, I asked my grandmother why I didn’t. She sat me on her knee and gave me a cuddle while she explained that mine had gone away. Because of something one of my little friends had said, I translated “gone away” as “gone to heaven”, and over the years my foster parents, no doubt thinking it was for the best, allowed me to go on believing they were dead.

‘Then when I reached sixteen, perhaps as an awful warning, they decided I was old enough to know the truth. My natural mother, whose name was Helen, was my grandmother’s only child. From the age of thirteen she’d been a bit wild, and she was barely sixteen when she discovered she was pregnant.

‘It seems she wanted to have an abortion, but my grandmother was horrified and insisted on her going through with the pregnancy.

‘She hated the whole idea of motherhood, and even before I was born blamed me for spoiling her life. When I was only a few weeks old she disappeared, leaving my grandmother to take care of me.’

‘Your grandmother must have been quite young when she died?’

‘She was in her middle fifties. She had some kind of minor operation that went tragically wrong.’

Running lean fingers over his smooth chin, Dominic remarked thoughtfully, ‘So, with having the same parents, you and your husband must have been brought up like sister and brother?’

Made a little uncomfortable by the bluntness of the question, she answered, ‘We were always very close. Though we spent most of our time together—we even went to the same school—we never argued or fell out… I can’t ever remember not loving Jeff, and it was the same for him.’ Smiling fondly, she added, ‘He once told me he’d loved me since I was a scrawny five-year-old with big solemn eyes and a pigtail.’

‘Didn’t close friends think it strange that you never quarrelled like other siblings?’

She answered truthfully, ‘I don’t recall having a really close friend, apart from Jeff, until I got to college. As children, our parents didn’t encourage us to mix much, and really we never seemed to need anyone else.’

‘What about when you grew into adults?’

‘You mean did we stay friends?’

‘I mean when did you become lovers?’

‘Jeff wanted us to sleep together as soon as I’d turned eighteen.’

‘But you didn’t?’

She shook her head. ‘No… Though after he’d died I almost wished we had. It seemed such a waste of three years… But although our parents were kind, they were quite strict and God-fearing, and they seriously disapproved of anyone having sex outside marriage.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Jeff suggested we should get married, but we were due to start college and neither of us had any money. Eventually he decided to approach our parents and tell them we loved each other and wanted to be together.

‘When he did, they said if we waited until we’d finished college—to be sure we weren’t making a mistake—they would give us their blessing and pay for a white wedding and all the trimmings. That way they could be proud of us.’

Seeing Dominic’s expression, she admitted, ‘It must seem terribly old-fashioned, but we’d been brought up to respect their wishes, and living under their roof meant accepting their standards. Apart from anything else they’d been very good to me, and I didn’t want to let them down, so finally we promised to wait.’