Royal Purple Read online

  She selected a brooch encrusted with rubies and diamonds, in the shape of a garland of flowers, and announced that that would have to be the item to be sacrificed. It was quite small by comparison with most of the other pieces, and the stones were not as good as they might have been. One or two of them, in fact, actually contained flaws; but she was prepared to part with it because it had very little sentimental value, and the sum it would fetch would not help materially in the restoration of the ruling family to Seronia.

  It would, however, settle all the tradesmen’s bills, and leave something over for current expenses and Lucy’s wages. Lucy wanted to protest that, if there was only the question of her wages, there was no need at all to sell the brooch, but having made up her mind to separate herself from one, at least, of her treasures, the Countess was impatient for her to be off and execute the sale.

  “Go and put on your outdoor things and tell Augustine to put back the lunch for half an hour or so, in case you’re not back in time. You’d better take a taxi...” She fumbled beneath her pillows, and brought to light a small embroidered purse. From it she extracted a one-pound note. “Take this, and in the name of heaven be careful and do not lose the brooch, and do not allow anyone to accost you or address you in any way until you have arrived at the jeweller’s. You had better let Augustine get a taxi for you.”

  “But I don’t need a taxi,” Lucy said quickly. “I can walk.” And then she remembered that she had not the least idea how to dispose of a brooch, and that the Countess had not even mentioned the name of a jeweller. “And you haven’t said where I’m to take it.”

  “True.” The old lady waved impatient fingers. “Give me a pen and paper and I’ll write the name down for you. There is a man in St. James’s...”

  “Or how much I’m to accept.”

  “Tell him you want two thousand pounds—not a penny less! Believe me, he won’t jib. And ask him to give it to you in cash.”

  “Oh, but I couldn’t possibly ... I could never walk about London with all that money on me!”

  “You won’t have to. One of the assistants can find you a taxi, and you’ll come straight home.” Lucy felt somewhat appalled. She was longing to get out in the fresh air and the sunshine, but the very idea of being responsible for the safety of such a valuable item of jewellery provided her with a sensation next door to sheer alarm. And the idea of returning with two thousand pounds in her bag ... a very shabby bag, the clasp of which was none too secure, so she’d better keep it tightly clutched up under her arm.

  The Countess gave her an affectionate little push, and then called her back.

  “If you can get him to make it guineas—two thousand guineas, which might be worth trying for— I’ll buy you a complete new outfit when you return. Coat, suit, dresses, underwear ... everything!”

  Augustine could not refrain from having something in the nature of an argument with the taxi-driver once the taxi had arrived at the door. He was a good- natured man, with a rugged but kindly face, and he told her not to be such a ‘bad-tempered old so-and-so’ before he and Lucy drove off.

  Lucy was wearing a tweed suit that had seen much wear, but which nevertheless suited her because it had a light greenish fleck which made her eyes look light greenish also. Her hair, spun-gold and unfashionably long, swayed like a gold cloud on her shoulders.

  “Where to, miss?” the driver asked, sliding back the glass window which separated them once they were well away from the kerb.

  Lucy told him.

  “It’s a jeweller’s,” she added.

  He laughed.

  “I’ll say it is. The sort of place where you ask for a nice diamond tiara, or something inexpensive like that. Going to treat yourself to a set of emeralds, miss? Something not too ostentatious!” He laughed still more throatily, for he had seen the darns in the elbow of the tweed suit, and the milkman had told him something about Augustine the other day. A regular old termagant she was, and the old lady she looked after hadn’t a penny to bless herself with!

  Lucy let down the window of the taxi, and she felt as if her heart expanded as she inhaled the excitingly cool air. It was the sort of morning she loved in London, with sunshine falling across the pavements and fleecy clouds chasing one another across the blue sky overhead. There were lilacs bursting into leaf behind iron railings, and short sweet grass showing in the squares. Milkmen were still doing their rounds, and milk-bottles tops gleamed in the sunshine as they sat on newly whitened steps and waited for a housewife to whip them indoors, and cats, aware of a sudden rise in the temperature, sprawled in the middle of window-boxes that would bear stunted examples of spring flowers as a result.

  A lot of the houses the taxi flashed past were receiving coats of new paint, and some of the doors were a bright and cheerful yellow. Others were a sort of turquoise blue, and startling vermilion. Lucy decided that if ever she had a London house of her own—which was extremely unlikely—she would have an ivory white door, because they looked so nice with shining brass letter-boxes, bell-pushes, and so on.

  There were one or two cafes opening up in the quieter streets, and they looked quite Continental with their striped awnings, little tables placed outside on the pavement instead of inside, and gaily painted chairs. She wondered whether the patrons minded when a chill breeze swept along the streets and cooled their soup, or an odour of exhaust fumes from a passing car added flavour to their coffee.

  But they did that sort of thing in Paris. So why not London?

  They were turning into Piccadilly, and she glanced eagerly at the Burlington Arcade as they swept past.

  Then St. James’s Street, and at the bottom of it St. James’s Palace, a beautiful cool grey in the morning light. There were sentries standing outside it, and one or two obvious tourists with cameras. Lucy tapped on the glass of the window, and ordered the driver to stop.

  “Set me down here,” she requested. “I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  The taxi-man shrugged.

  “Just as you please, but we’re not there yet.” Lucy smiled at him and proffered the Countess’s pound note. While she waited for her change she clutched her handbag tightly under one arm, and between admiring the petal-soft beauty of her skin and thinking what a funny little thing she looked in that old-fashioned suit and low-heeled shoes—his daughter wore stiletto heels that made holes in the floor covering all over the house, to his great annoyance—he found himself charging more than he ought to have done. Lucy realised that he had pocketed two shillings of the Countess’s money, but decided to say nothing about it since she supposed he expected a tip.

  As he watched her walk away, with a friendly but cool nod of her head, he called after her:

  “I wouldn’t go above pearls if I was you, miss! Pearls is cheap nowadays ... Ha, ha!”

  And he let in his clutch and swung his taxi round and was way like a streak of light to collect a new fare.

  Lucy found the shop door held wide open for her. A beautiful-looking young man in a dark suit and striped silk tie asked her, with a slight bend of his head, what he could do for her.

  Lucy, who had received her coaching from the Countess, asked to see the head of the establishment, and produced the brooch from her bag. After that there was no end to the bowing and scraping, and she was ushered into a kind of inner sanctum where the business of providing the brooch with a new owner was entered into.

  Before the door of the sanctum closed behind her Lucy noticed a rather austere-looking man who was not very old examining a tray of tie-pins at one of the counters. He too wore a beautifully cut suit, and his tie was much more restrained than that of the jeweller’s assistant. He carried a pair of soft suede gloves in one hand, and his hat in the other. His face was dark and interesting, and there were a few threads of grey in the blackness of his hair at the temples.

  Lucy found the man who was holding the door open for her looking at her rather oddly, and she stumbled forward with a sudden rush of colour into the room. But before she d
id so the man at the counter looked up at her, and their eyes met.

  In the middle of a thick carpet, surrounded by glass cabinets displaying costly treasures, and with an urbane gentleman rising from behind a polished walnut desk, Lucy paused to reflect how vastly dissimilar eyes, and their expressions, were.

  The man who was choosing a tie-pin had eyes of an extraordinary, almost opaque darkness. Yet at the same time there were lights in them, like the lights in cairngorm. And his eyelashes were almost feminine.

  CHAPTER III

  THE next ten minutes or so were afterwards a mere period of confusion in Lucy’s mind.

  She knew that she was provided with a chair, and the gentleman who had risen from behind the walnut desk had a most ingratiating smile, and was very polite to her. She was quite certain that he eyed her a little curiously at first, and was afraid the worn condition of her suit was largely responsible. But when she mentioned the Countess von Ardrath, and produced the brooch, it apparently didn’t matter whether the condition of her suit was worn or not. The urbane gentleman began to beam, and from beaming he arrived at being positively effusive.

  The brooch was scrutinised through a specially constructed magnifying glass, and a lot of excited comment passed between the elderly jeweller and his assistant. Lucy caught expressions of admiration like ‘superb’ and ‘extraordinary depth of colour’, and gathered that it was not every day in the week that a brooch of that quality came into their eager hands, and began to feel more confidence in the Countess’s prediction that they would not jib at a couple of thousand pounds in exchange for it.

  As a matter of fact, the question of price arose so simply and naturally that she had merely to shake her head at their first figure. One thousand seven hundred and fifty guineas...

  “Not enough,” she said.

  The two men exchanged glances, and they each smiled a little.

  “Two thousand.”

  “Guineas?” Lucy probed, anxious to have the position clarified.

  The elderly jeweller assured her that he meant guineas. Lucy felt the blood rush up into her face, and her eyes glowed. She felt every pulse in her body quicken with excitement, and for a moment she could hardly believe that the transaction had been so simple. One moment she had been quaking at the roots of her being, afraid that they would find some flaw in the Countess’s cherished possession, or that the old-fashioned setting of the stones would lower its value, and the next both the butcher and the milkman who had been worrying the life out of Augustine for their money were as good as paid, and they would be able to bury the remains of the tin of black treacle in the garden. The dogs could be provided with an outsize marrow-bone to sharpen their teeth on, and if they had grown tired of gravy-beef they might have a slice of rump steak cut up between them. Garnished with a few mushrooms if they fancied them!

  She felt so light-headed with relief that she could have giggled at the thought, and the one thing her mind didn’t dwell on was the Countess’s promise that if she got two thousand guineas for the brooch she would receive an entire new outfit of clothes. In addition—presumably—to her arrears of salary!

  What was an outfit of clothes compared to the sheer joy of knowing that, for the next few weeks, at least, there would be no more heavy suet puddings for lunch, and Augustine would have no excuse for looking dour every time she entered the kitchen?

  “In cash?” she got out eagerly, in a slightly husky voice.

  The two men exchanged glances again, and apparently this was not entirely usual. But it so happened that a customer had just paid cash for a particularly costly trifle that would no doubt adorn a lady’s neck that night, and they had the cash in the safe. If the young lady didn’t mind waiting a short while while they made certain that this was the case...

  The young lady didn’t mind waiting at all, and rid their minds of any doubts with one of her breathlessly attractive smiles. Then she wandered round the room and examined the contents of the glass cases on the walls, and the elderly jeweller came up behind her and half-jokingly suggested that he might interest her in taking a closer look. Lucy answered quite seriously that it would benefit no one if she took a closer look, and then exclaimed impulsively at the beauty of a sapphire necklace—not dull and clouded, like so many of the pieces in the Countess’s jewelbox, but alive with every gradation of blueness, and sparkling as if every separate stone was an unsullied blue star.

  The jeweller lifted it off its bed of velvet and clasped it about Lucy’s neck. Afterwards she wondered whether he had some idea that she was a slightly eccentric heiress, going about in her threadbare clothes, but when he turned her gently towards a mirror and she got the full impact of herself with the sapphires hugging the slender column of her throat she could only gasp. By some extraordinary trick of the light—or as the result of some strange metamorphosis—her eyes were as blue as the sapphires, and they blazed with the same excited blue fire. Her mouth with its soft pink curves—generous curves, for it was not really a small mouth—was parted in amazement, and her teeth gleamed like flawless pearls between her lips.

  “You should always wear sapphires,” the jeweller said softly in her ear. “They do something for you ... and pearls,” he added, “will do the same!”

  The door behind them opened, and a slightly impatient voice spoke apologetically.

  “Forgive me for intruding, but I haven’t a great deal of time...”

  “Of course, of course,” the jeweller said swiftly, transferring the full blast of his urbanity from Lucy to the newcomer, so that it washed over him like a wave. “I’ll be with you in a moment ... you shall have all my attention!” Then he rescued the sapphires from Lucy’s neck and returned them to their case, and the man, who by this time had probably made his purchase of a tie-pin, stared hard at Lucy. He stared so hard, in fact, that Lucy was suddenly acutely embarrassed, and under the concentrated regard of his extraordinary dark eyes she felt like a swimmer who had been striking out strongly and then suddenly realised that there was nothing but fathoms and fathoms of water beneath her, and she wasn’t such a good swimmer after all. In fact, she could no longer swim a stroke.

  She managed to say something to the jeweller, to thank him for allowing her to try on the necklace, and then, grappling with the most amazing confusion she had ever experienced in her life, she turned to the young man who had two thousand guineas in crisp banknotes waiting to be stowed away by her in a compartment of her commodious handbag, and thanked him jerkily for simplifying the stowing-away process.

  He tested the clasp of her bag to make certain it wasn’t faulty, and the elderly jeweller suggested calling a taxi for her.

  “Oh, no,” Lucy said quickly. “I’ll walk.”

  “But with all that money ...?”

  “I’ll pick up a taxi if I want one,” she said breathlessly, and they bowed her out of the shop, the young assistant going ahead to open the door, the elderly man bowing from the waist until she was off the threshold.

  And the man who had interrupted stood watching the procedure, and another customer—rather a rough-looking individual, wearing a loud suit, and with a flower in his buttonhole, who said he wanted to buy a present for a lady—watched also.

  Outside the shop Lucy felt as if she was walking on air. For the first time in her life she had a large sum of money not merely in her possession, but in her handbag, and for the first time in her life a man had looked at her in such a way that she wondered whether she would ever completely forget him.

  She couldn’t say that he had looked at her in admiration; she couldn’t even say that he had looked at her with a tremendous amount of interest. He had just looked at her, and her bones had seemed to dissolve, as if they weren’t really bones at all, and she had experienced a deep and most curious breathlessness and unsteadiness, so that her hand shook when she crammed the banknotes into her bag; and when she walked out of the shop she had known that he was following every one of her movements, and it was like having eyes in the back of he
r head.

  She walked on without realising where she was going, or why she was walking, and the only thing she had the sense to do was to clutch her handbag up against her breast, so that no one could possibly snatch it from her.

  Who is he? Who is he? she asked herself. And why did he look at me like that?

  A taxi crawled past her, and she thought vaguely that she ought to hail it. She was looking round just as vaguely for another that might be following it when someone seized her arm and walked her down a side street.

  “Keep going,” said a voice very close to her ear—a harsh, grating voice. A most unpleasant smell of garlic and inferior tobacco filled her nostrils, and she was about to protest when the voice warned her icily: “Try making a scene, sister, and it’ll be the worse for you! One scream out of you and this little chap”—she felt something digging into her ribs—“will see to it that it’s your last. So be sensible and just keep on walking along naturally. This is a quiet street, but a cab’ll be along any minute, and we’ll take it.”

  But what he actually took was a sudden plunge into the gutter, and Lucy stood watching while a pair of slim but astonishingly powerful hands plucked him out of it again, stood him up against the wall, and then sent him sprawling back into the gutter again with a badly bruised jaw and a dazed look in his eyes. The man who had been filling Lucy’s thoughts to such an extent that she had allowed a situation to develop which might not have ended so satisfactorily ordered him to remove himself with all speed, and he crept way without uttering a sound. After which Lucy found her arm taken firmly for the second time in a matter of minutes, and she was marched peremptorily back to the main thoroughfare, a cruising taxi was halted and she was deposited inside it—and the dark-eyed man got in beside her.