Rose in the Bud Read online

  His lips felt cool and gloating, somehow... and yet at the back of his lustrous eyes there was a tiny little glow like a flame.

  His sister came out on to the steps to welcome them, and seeing her for the first time Cathleen understood what Arlette had meant when she wrote that Bianca was ‘quite superb.’

  She had an unmistakably disdainful air, and her attitude towards Cathleen was not particularly friendly, but she strove to behave like a welcoming hostess, and the condescension that was betrayed by her manner was partially mitigated by the unusual beauty and mellow cadences of her voice. She spoke English faultlessly—as, for that matter, did her brother—and as it was quite plain that Cathleen was very English she made no attempt to interlard her English with flowing Italian, as well as a few French phrases, as she did with Edouard Moroc.

  She had a figure that must have delighted her dressmaker, and the clinging loveliness of the heavy oyster satin dinner-dress she wore was richly ornamented with gold embroidery, and the pearls at her ears and throat could not have looked more real. She was very like her brother, but her hair was flaming red rather than burnished, and her complexion made Cathleen think of warm white velvet and Devonshire cream. Her eyes were sparklingly beautiful, very large, very well set, but without the emotional fires that dwelt in Paul’s. If fires lay at the back of them they were very well damped down.

  “Ah, Edouard!” she exclaimed, as he bent over her hand. She pouted very noticeably as his dark eyes appeared to quiz her a little. “You should have warned me that we could expect you this afternoon and I would have cancelled my appointment with the hairdresser! It is more than a week since you remembered our existence!”

  “A thousand pardons,” he replied, in a very soft tone, “if I have appeared to neglect you, Bianca, but I have been unusually busy. You must come to my studio and see some of my work.”

  “I will,” she replied, but she snatched away the hand which he seemed to wish to retain, and turned to one of the other guests who had joined them on the steps.

  “This is Miss Brown,” she said, introducing her. “She is the sister of the other Miss Brown who was companion for some time to my late aunt.”

  Cathleen found that she was received with a certain amount of curiosity by the other guests. Most of them—and there were about a dozen altogether, mostly young people with the same, dark, flashing good looks of the di Rinis, and perhaps a couple of more mature Venetians—regarded her speculatively, or so it seemed to her, and behind their smiles there was a measure of amusement, and something else that she didn’t quite understand.

  The apartments which the Count and his sister occupied in the palazzo—and Cathleen discovered later that a large number of rooms were completely unoccupied, as well as unfurnished—were very gay to-night, and the quantity of flowers emphasised the fact that this was the warm, sunny land of Italy. The Count’s studio was only visited after dinner by those who wished to see evidence of the hours he devoted to filling canvases which were quite unlikely to attract recognition later, and aperitifs were served in a splendid and rather over-ornate room, which was as full of collector’s pieces as a museum.

  Cathleen wondered whether the Tintorettos and Titians on the walls were genuine, and decided that if they were the di Rinis could still muster a small fortune between them if the need arose and their home had to be sold up, and the silver-gilt furniture in the dining-room was so reminiscent of a stage-set that she was inclined to doubt its authenticity. All the same, it was the first time in her life she had sat between a young woman dripping with diamonds and a young man with emerald studs in his shirt at a table so loaded with silver and glowing Venetian glass that, even if every single piece was not an heirloom, the effect achieved was sufficient to make one think of the Borgias and their standard of entertaining, particularly when one glanced at the handsome brother and sister presiding one at each end of the table.

  After dinner coffee and liqueurs were served in the salon, and Bianca reclined on a satin-covered couch while a white-coated servant did the honours with the coffee-cups. Cathleen refused a liqueur, and after the champagne that had been pressed on her at dinner she thought it wise to do so. She was not accustomed to champagne, and it had seemed to her only common sense to say ‘No’ every time attempts were made to refill her glass.

  Paul, who had often looked along the length of the table at her and smiled and waved his hand, attached himself very purposefully to her after dinner. Edouard had been placed at Bianca’s right hand in the dining room, and after dinner she seemed disinclined to relinquish her right to keep him close to her side if she wished.

  Like a spoiled, pampered, luxurious cream-coloured cat with flaming hair she lay on the exquisite eighteenth-century couch, and Edouard sat on the foot of it and told her entertaining stories and smiled at her with his inscrutable dark eyes. By contrast with the other men present he was aloof, controlled, and an enigma; but not, apparently, to Bianca, whose wide eyes gazed into his so frequently that a looker-on could have received the impression that, without displaying anything in the nature of personal interest, she yet had a message to convey to him, and one that she was determined should not escape him or be capable of misinterpretation before they parted that evening.

  As for Moroc himself, it would have been impossible to have gathered much from his expression, or even his attentiveness. But it was obvious he realised what was expected him, and the hostess kept him chained to her side without, apparently, the smallest difficulty.

  Paul, once dinner was over, attached himself to Cathleen as if he, too, had a purpose. But it had no connection with her journey to Italy. Try as she would she could extract nothing from him that threw any light on her sister’s disappearance, and apparently Bianca was unwilling to enter into any revealing discussion on the subject of Arlette.

  When Cathleen asked Paul whether Signorina di Rini had been able to provide any clue to Arlette’s extraordinary disappearance he merely shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, smiling regretfully.

  “I am sorry, signorina, but Bianca is as ignorant of Arlette’s whereabouts as I am.” He spoke soothingly. “Believe me, we would help you if we could, but there is nothing, I’m afraid, that we can tell you. After all,” trying to ensure her reasonableness, “your sister did not have to tell us where she was going.”

  Cathleen bit her lip.

  “You have no knowledge even whether she left Italy?”

  “None.”

  Bianca looked across the room at her brother and Cathleen thought that her eyes were hard as glass. She appeared to shake her head a little, and then rose and came sinuously across the room towards them.

  “Miss Brown,” she said, when she reached the settee on which they were seated, “you are so like your sister that it gives me quite a shock every time I look at you.” She sank gracefully on to a footstool and wrapped her arms about her knees. “How long do you propose to stay in Venice?”

  Cathleen looked vague.

  “I haven’t, really, any idea.”

  Bianca drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, and then waved away the smoke that had settled between her and the English girl.

  “It must be a little lonely staying in an hotel,” she observed. “Especially if you are travelling alone.”

  “I am.”

  Brother and sister exchanged glances, and then Bianca smiled with extraordinary sweetness and leaned impulsively forward.

  “Then why not come and stay here with us?” she suggested, causing Cathleen to feel uncertain whether she was actually hearing aright. “There is so much room in the palazzo that it is quite ridiculous you should be forced to endure an hotel, especially when there is already a link between us in the shape of your sister. If my aunt were alive she would absolutely insist that you came here.”

  Cathleen found herself stammering:

  “It’s very kind of you, signorina, but I’m perfectly comfortable in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t be more comfortable.” She thought
with a touch of cynicism that if Bianca di Rini could see the flat in the Cromwell Road, London, that she and her mother shared, and which they both disliked thoroughly after the country home they had once had when her father was rector of a Worcestershire parish, she would not be surprised that the modern Venetian hotel, run on lines of oiled efficiency, and with every luxury thrown in—if one was willing to pay!—struck her, Cathleen, as superbly comfortable.

  Bianca looked unconvinced, and she also looked as if she was willing to try persuasion.

  “Ah, but for one so young it is not an ideal thing to have to suffer the amenities of an hotel,” she protested. “And if you have no knowledge of the language—”

  “I speak a little Italian,” Cathleen said quickly.

  “Ah!” An impatient hand crashed out the cigarette in an ash-tray. “But you do not speak it fluently, and therefore you are, in a sense, vulnerable. And there is so much that Paul and I could show you if you came here. A tourist’s knowledge of Venice is always limited. We could introduce you to all the worthwhile sights, enable you to see Venice from the inside, as it were. And if you are not in any hurry to return home to England then you could stay here as long as you wish—”

  Edouard Moroc rose and came across the room to them. He spoke crisply, apologising for interrupting the conversation.

  “But I am very much afraid I have to leave,” he said, “and if Miss Brown is going to give me the pleasure of returning her to her hotel—”

  Bianca waved a still more impatient hand at him. “Edouard,” she declared, “I refuse to let you go. I have much to talk to you about, and Paul can see Miss Brown back to her hotel. In fact, he has every intention of doing so, haven’t you, Paul?” looking up at him.

  “Every intention,” he replied smoothly. He put his hand beneath Cathleen’s elbow and helped her to her feet. “Come, Miss Brown, you will not deny me the pleasure of seeing you home? And Edouard and my sister have a personal problem to discuss. Shall we go?”

  Cathleen looked for a moment almost appealingly at Edouard—it had never occurred to her that she would have to return to her hotel in the charge of anyone but him—but following a brief period in which she was sure he hesitated he made a slight, expressive movement with his hands, and resigned her to her fate.

  She felt the hot colour rush up into her face as if she had been rejected in favour of someone far more glamorous, and then turned away.

  “Very well,” she said, stiffly, to the Count. “If you will be so kind.”

  CHAPTER III

  In the morning she awakened to find the sun streaming into her hotel bedroom. After a somewhat restless night—and this was unusual for her, since she usually fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow— she gave herself up to the pleasure of simply lying and studying her luxurious bedroom.

  It was bright and airy and modern, and yet there was a certain something that could have been Italian splendour overlaying, or underlying, the simplicity. The drapes were supremely elegant, and so was the bed coverlet and the white telephone beside the bed. Her own private bathroom had every modern fitment, and the thing she liked best of all was the amount of sparkling mirror. From every angle she could view herself, and in the capacious wardrobe space her well-chosen but not particularly extensive outfit of entirely new clothes was in no danger of being crowded or crushed.

  And that went for the amount of drawer-space in which her gloves and her sheer stockings and all her other smaller items were deposited.

  As she lay in bed, and the cloudless blue sky of Venice filled the entire window space, the already strong sunshine bathed the furniture and sparkled in the mirrors, she knew that she had but to reach out her hand and lift the telephone in order to order breakfast to be brought to her—the breakfast of coffee and rolls and delicious preserves that she had been looking forward to ever since she left England—she could hardly believe that she was where she was, and that enough money to account for all her expenses was locked away in the manager’s safe.

  She could stay for a week, a fortnight, or a month, if necessary, and her unexpected nest-egg would not be too badly depleted. She recalled that on her first visit to the Palazzo di Rini the day before, almost immediately after her arrival in Venice, and while she was still not very clear about what she was going to say to the di Rinas, she had somewhat impulsively disclosed that she had been the recipient of a recent legacy. Thinking back, she had an idea she had said something about having a “lot of money left to her’ ... Well, to people like the di Rinis a thousand pounds would almost certainly not represent a ‘lot’ of money, but to her it was a fortune. As an assistant in a small London book-shop, in receipt of a modest weekly wage—two-thirds of which she handed over to her mother for housekeeping—she could hardly believe her luck when a little-known aunt died and left her, in addition to the thousand pounds, a few items of old-fashioned jewellery and the charge of a couple of love-birds in a cage. The love-birds were a source of pleasure in themselves—although her mother, a vague but once very beautiful woman who spent her days reading books which she borrowed from the library and doing extremely fine needlework, had objected, at first strongly, to the idea of looking after them while her daughter was away. And as for the items of jewellery, one or two of them were quite pretty, and Cathleen had included them in her luggage when she left London Airport.

  Her mother, who had always adored Arlette, had raised no objections to the trip to Venice ... indeed, she had encouraged the idea. Cathleen had split the thousand pounds down the middle and given her mother five hundred pounds, and with the remainder Mrs. Brown considered she had every right to do as she pleased. But the disappearance of Arlette, who was four years older than Cathleen, was a cause of great anxiety. If no news could be gleaned of her as a result of the trip to Venice it was not yet quite clear what could be done to trace her, but something both relatives were agreed would have to be done, despite the fact that Arlette, an independent type, had always discouraged too much interest in her affairs.

  Looking back on her first day, as she lay in bed, Cathleen had to decide that the results were so far negative. She had seen the two people who should have had some knowledge of Arlette’s whereabouts, but both of them pleaded complete ignorance. Indeed, it was quite obvious they disliked being questioned about the missing English girl, and although Arlette—or Bridget, as Cathleen and her mother always called her in the family circle—had written glowingly of all three members of the di Rini family while she was employed by the Contessa as a companion, and had practically insisted that she was about to be married, Paul di Rini quite as much as his sister seemed to dislike discussing her, and from that quarter it was fairly obvious to Cathleen she would receive little help in tracing her sister.

  She was puzzled as to the reason why Bianca had so persuasively invited her to stay with them, but since she had no intention of becoming a guest at the palazzo she did not even dwell on the invitation as she reviewed the events of the day before. The one person she had met for the first time the day before she found it difficult to forget—at any rate, once she was awake —was Edouard Moroc, and as he was quite unlike any man she had ever met before in the whole of her life, and almost any young woman on meeting him would be inclined to register some positive reaction about him, this was perhaps not so surprising.

  After breakfast, and while she was still completing her toilet for the morning, the roses were brought to the door. She had never seen roses like them ... deep red, heavily scented roses, lying in a large florist’s box, but without any card to indicate who was the donor. At first she thought there must be a mistake, but the chambermaid, who had intercepted a page in the corridor and relieved him of the box, was quite definite that there was no mistake. Despite the absence of a card the label on the outside of the box was quite clearly Miss Cathleen Brown.

  Miss Cathleen Brown ... not Signorina Brown.

  Cathleen counted the roses and discovered there were two dozen. Two dozen red roses from som
eone who preferred to remain anonymous was an unbelievable thing to happen to her on her second day in Venice. She put them in water with the help of the chambermaid, who produced an extra vase for the purpose, and by that time the scent of the roses was filling the room.

  The chambermaid chattered volubly in Italian, and from her arch look Cathleen gathered that she was quite certain she had an admirer. Cathleen, who was equally certain that she had no such thing, would have corrected this false impression if she had had enough Italian to make the effort worth while, but not having enough Italian she merely looked slightly embarrassed and kept shaking her head in bewilderment.

  She decided to spend the morning behaving as if she was an ordinary tourist, and St. Mark’s Square was the first place where she lingered. She had had her first glimpse of it the day before, and had determined to sit at one of the pavement tables outside one of the intriguing-looking cafes at the very first opportunity, and drink a cup of coffee or a cool drink while the pigeons crowded about her feet. The pigeons were always being fed by tourists and they were both plump and bold. St. Mark’s Cathedral, with its fantastic Byzantine front, cast a great shadow across the square —which, in point of fact, is not a square at all, but a vast irregular space in which visitors spend whole hours at a time, either parading up and down and exclaiming at the architecture, or sitting at one of the little tables—and it was like a solid bulwark rising against the vivid blue of the sky. Cathleen, who was not accustomed to the intense heat at such an early hour of the day, was glad to put on sun-glasses while she sipped her drink and watched the crowds on the other side of the square, but that did not prevent her being recognised by a man who very quickly took his place on the opposite side of her table, after bowing as he stood above her and politely enquiring whether she had any objection.