A Serpent of Satan E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 237

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Earl of Rochester is as notorious as his 17th Century namesake, enjoying the pleasures of London society and the trappings of his riches. When visiting the fascinating, but married, Circe Langstone he accidentally meets her stepdaughter, Ophelia. Clearly frightened in her surroundings he begins to wonder what could have upset her so, until a chance encounter a few days later, reveals all. What she tells him starts a train of events that nearly kills her and leads the Earl to hide her away on his country estate. Furious at losing her stepdaughter, Circe, whom the Earl has nicknamed 'The Serpent of Satan' calls on the forces of black magic to get her back. How the Earl thwarts the evil stepmother, how he saves Ophelia from a fate worse than death and how he finds true happiness are all told in this thrilling tale by Barbara Cartland.

Leseprobe

Author’s Note

The second Earl of Rochester (1647 – 1680) was the most notorious of the Restoration Rakes. He was also an outstandingly lyrical and satirical poet.

His life of lechery, wild pranks, dialogues, and practical jokes brought him the punishment of being exiled from Court, but King Charles remained his friend and even joined in some of his erotic escapades.

His friend Etherege depicted him in the stage character “Dorimant” – “I know he is a Devil, but he has something of the Angel yet undefac’d in him.”

Chapter One ~ 1802

The Earl of Rochester drew his four horses to a standstill with an expertise that brought a look of admiration to his groom’s face.

“Walk them, Jason!” he ordered as he stepped down from his phaeton.

His man had already rung the bell that hung outside the heavy porticoed doors of Lord Langstone’s house in Park Lane. The door was opened immediately by a footman wearing a blue livery trimmed with yellow, which were the Langstone colours. The Earl knew the colours well, for Lord Langstone often competed with him on the racecourse, where the Earl was invariably the winner, as he was in every other sport he undertook.

If his groom looked at him with admiration, so did the other footmen who stood in the marble hall of the Langstone mansion.

There is nothing the English admire more than a sportsman, and to the racing public the Earl was predominately the ‘King of Sport’, while in other activities he excelled in a different manner, which was usually spoken of in whispers. As the butler came hurrying towards him, the Earl asked in his habitual drawl,

“Is Her Ladyship in?”

“Yes, My Lord. I’ll inform Her Ladyship of your arrival.”

The butler went ahead up the curved staircase, which had been climbed by many distinguished people, and led the Earl into the long drawing room, which stretched the whole length of the house. It was a room that seemed to have been made for entertaining. The crystal chandeliers caught the sunshine coming through the windows, while the hothouse flowers, doubtless from Lord Langstone’s estate in the country, filled the air with fragrance.

The Earl walked languidly across the carpet, and only as the butler closed the door behind him did, he realise that he was not alone. In a far corner of the room, intent on arranging some flowers in a vase, was a young woman, and it was only when he reached the centre of the room that she became aware of his presence. She turned to look at him with an expression in her eyes, that to his surprise, was one of fear.

The Earl was used to receiving every sort of glance from women of every age, but fear was not included – in fact the most common was one of adoration. Yet he realised now that the girl – for she was little more – was extremely disturbed by his presence. Hastily she picked up the flowers that she had not yet placed in the vase and started to move away from the side-table in an obvious effort to reach the door. To do so, however, she had to pass the Earl, and as she came near to him, he saw that she had an unusual loveliness which he could not remember ever seeing before.

She was also very young, seventeen or eighteen, his experienced eye estimated, and she was dressed in a simple gown that was slightly out of fashion. Her small waist was encircled with a blue sash.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself,” he said as she came to a standstill a few feet from him.

“I know who you are, My Lord,” she murmured uncomfortably. “And I-I should not be here, I am afraid I m-misjudged the time.”

“I think in actual fact I am early,” the Earl said, which he knew was the truth.

He had driven his horses at such a speed round the park that he had arrived at his destination at least twenty minutes ahead of the time at which he had told Lady Langstone to expect him.

“I-I must go.”

The words were hardly above a whisper, but he heard them, and he deliberately moved two steps so that he stood directly in the route which the girl wished to take.

“Before you leave,” he said, “as you are obviously aware of my identity, it is only fair that I should know yours.”

She looked up at him and the fear was back in her eyes.

As if she felt compelled to reply, she said,

“I am Ophelia Langstone ... My Lord.”

“Are you telling me that you are Lord Langstone’s daughter?” the Earl enquired.

“Yes, My Lord.”

“By his first marriage, of course?”

“Yes, My Lord.”

“Then I suppose your stepmother will be presenting you this Season? Or are you still at school?”

There was an obvious pause. Then with a little tremor in her voice Ophelia replied,

“I-I shall not be presented, My Lord.”

The Earl raised his eyebrows. At the same time, knowing Lady Langstone, he thought it very unlikely that she would wish to chaperone a stepdaughter, and certainly not one who was so lovely.

Ophelia glanced towards the door, then at the Earl. He waited, thinking that her beauty seemed to belong not to the present but to the past. She had nothing in common with the fashionable, full-blown Junoesque type of beauty set by Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire, twenty years ago, or the mature attractions of Mrs. Fitzherbert. There was something classical in the little oval face with its straight nose and perfectly curved lips, and there was also, he thought, a spiritual look, which he had not expected to see in such a young girl.

The Earl was a connoisseur of women, and an epicure when it came to food and wine. He found himself wondering now where he had last seen such a face or a grace such as hers, which had attracted his attention from the moment she began to cross the room.

He realised that she had something to say to him, and now once again, glancing at the door as if she was afraid of who might open it, she said in a voice that was hardly above a whisper,

“May I ask Your Lordship something?”

“Of course,” the Earl replied, wondering what she was about to say to him.

“Do you remember Jem Bullet?”

The Earl knitted his brows together.

The name seemed familiar, but he could not place it.

“Jem Bullet,” he repeated.

“He was a jockey in your employ some years ago.”

“Of course!” he exclaimed. “Jem Bullet! A good rider. He won several races for me.”

“Then could you not do s-something for him now?”

The Earl frowned.

“Do something for him?” he repeated. “I recall that he left my employment.”

“He had an accident.”

“Yes, of course!” the Earl said. “I remember now. He had an accident. I retired him.”

“Without a pension!”

“That is not true!” The Earl’s voice was sharp. “I have never in my life, Miss Langstone, and this is the truth, retired a man or a woman who has served me well, without ensuring their future.”

“But not,” Ophelia replied, “Jem Bullet.”

Now there was a note in her voice that told the Earl she was criticising him.

He opened his lips to expostulate, but as he did so there was a sound outside the door, and the girl standing in front of him started. In a voice he could hardly hear, she said,

“Please, please do not tell Stepmama that I have spoken to you.”

There was a cry of sheer, undiluted fear. Then, with the swiftness of a fawn, before the door could open, she had reached it, as if she was on the point of leaving the room. But it was not the person she feared who stood there. It was only the butler.

Ophelia passed him without a word and vanished down the passage.

“Her Ladyship asks, My Lord,” the butler said to the Earl, “if you would be gracious enough to join her in her boudoir.”

It was what the Earl had expected, and he merely walked back across the room, and the butler went ahead of him down the passage. The Earl found himself looking to see if there was any further sign of Ophelia, but there was only the quietness of the large house and the heavy footsteps of the butler ahead of him.

“Jem Bullet!”

The Earl said the name beneath his breath, remembering now the small, wizened little man, whose way with horses had invariably taken them first past the winning post. He recalled the accident. He had been disappointed to learn that it was unlikely Jem Bullet would be able to ride again. But of course he had provided for him, as he always did for those who had served him well.

He wondered how Ophelia Langstone could have received such inaccurate information, and why in any case she should concern herself with other people’s staff. Thinking of her, he realised that he knew very little about the Langstones except that Lady Langstone had been pursuing him for some time. It was nothing new for the Earl to be pursued by the type of woman she undoubtedly was, but it was a relief to know that the mothers of eligible daughters felt that he was to be avoided at all costs.

He had had quoted at him so often the words that had described the man he emulated,

“A Devil with something of the Angel yet undefac’d in him.”

He would therefore have been somewhat disconcerted had he been accepted in what he thought of to himself as ‘Polite Society’. Only his very closest friends, and they were few, knew what a complex character the Earl actually was. It was typical that he should have taken upon himself not only the name of the man who had been known as one of the greatest rakes in history, but that he had also deliberately emulated his character and his talents.

The Earl of Rochester had been born a Wilmot, and although he was no relation, Wilmot had also been the family name of the man who had made himself a by-word for license and rakishness in the Court of Charles II. It was therefore not entirely surprising that when he was offered an Earldom by King George III, he had asked if he could revive the title of Rochester.

The third Earl of Rochester had died at age eleven. After that the Earldom had become extinct, although the second Earl had never been forgotten. It had amused the present owner of the title when he was at Eton to read the Restoration Rake’s bawdier poems and to find a similarity between their two lives.

John Wilmot had had a puritan wife who blew like a tempest through the lives of her husband, her son, and her son’s wife, always disapproving, always railing. His father had been a “thorough good fellow”.

Gerald Wilmot could say the same, and it was perhaps a psychological urge to defy his mother and to give her an excuse for her railing. which made him continue his research into the life of the man with whom he identified himself.

The Earl of Rochester, in the reign of Charles II, had been a man who, in the words of his biographer, was a “witty, brave, human, light-hearted debauch”. Perhaps his admirer over a century later would not have been so eager to step into his shoes if his mother had not continually berated him for his boyish excesses and for every prank that could fairly have been attributed to high spirits. She drove him, the Earl was to think later, into deeper excesses than he had originally contemplated.

Like the Restoration Rochester, he took his seat in the House of Lords at the age of twenty-one, when his father, Lord Wilmot, died. And there was another parallel in his interest in the navy.

He had passionately denounced the policy by which the navy was allowed to run down, with the seamen dismissed and put on half-pay, immediately following the signing of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802. But before this, the Earl had distinguished himself both by his bravery and by his imagination. He had brought to safety a great number of the emigrés who were trying to escape from France at the time of the Revolution to save their heads from the guillotine.

As a reward, George III had offered him an Earldom and asked what title he would take. Without hesitation, and with just a faint smile because he knew it would infuriate his mother, Gerald Wilmot had replied,

“The Earl of Rochester – if it pleases Your Majesty!”

He had already earned his nickname.

In his last year at Eton his contemporaries had called him “Rake Wilmot”, and the nickname had followed him to Oxford, where it was doubtful if anyone there knew he had any other name. “Rake Rochester” was exceedingly appropriate and pleased him because once again the comparison was there, bridging the years that lay between the Restoration Rake and the Georgian one that he considered himself to be.

It had been inevitable that he should be a leading light in a boisterous, raffish circle round the Prince of Wales, and the Queen actually blamed him to some extent for the Prince’s licentious behaviour where women were concerned. If the original Rochester had been a devil with women, then Rake Rochester II was one too. It was not difficult, because he was not only extremely handsome, tall and athletic, but he had a rake’s look, which combined cynicism with audacity, and a mocking smile with a sadistic tongue. And of course, as the Restoration Rake wrote satires, the present Earl must do the same, but in prose rather than verse, in speeches rather than in rhyme.

There was only one way in which they differed. John Rochester had fallen deeply in love and his poems and letters to Elizabeth Barry were as beautiful and as soulful as his other poems were often crude and obscene.

There was no-one in his life now, nor had there ever been, to whom Rake Rochester II could write, “I do you justice in loving you, so as no woman has ever been loved before.”

Sometimes when he found a woman particularly attractive, the Earl would read the love poems that his predecessor had written to Elizabeth Barry.

“When with a lover’s resistless art, And her eyes, she did enslave me.”

He told himself he had never felt like that – he had never been enslaved by a woman and he had no wish to be. Women were there for amusement, for laughter, and for desire, but nothing else.

He had seen only too clearly the hell his mother had made his father’s life and he had no intention of suffering in the same way. He passed from love affair to love affair, with a swiftness and at times a ruthlessness, that was naturally a subject of comment by the whole of Society.

“Let me make it quite clear,” mothers would say protectively to their daughters, “if by some misfortune you are at the same party as Rake Rochester, you will avoid him, and if you disobey me, you will be sent to the country the very next day.”

But the sophisticated women with complaisant husbands, looked at him with a speculative yearning in their eyes. The Earl was well aware that he could pick and choose where he pleased, and because it was all too easy, he grew particular and more fastidious than he had been in his riotous youth.

Then, after the constrictions and eternal naggings of his boyhood, he had run riot, finding women delectable and making certain of only one thing – that they did not bore him. That was still an all-important criterion, and he had resisted the blandishments of Lady Langstone for some time. He was in fact amused and even slightly infatuated with Lady Harriet Sherwood, who had a wild streak in her, which made her unpredictable and at times even surprising.

But Lady Langstone, ‘Circe’, as she called herself – was very persistent.

She had chosen her name deliberately, forgetting the banal ‘Adelaide Charlotte’, the names of her christening, and paraded her power over men, which was quite considerable. She was in some ways the female counterpart of the Earl, for she took lover after lover, discarding them as soon as they were besotted by her, and looked around for another man to conquer.

She was, the Earl acknowledged, one of the most evilly attractive women he had ever known. It was not only her haunting, sphinx-like eyes, her dark red hair and her lips, which could twist enticingly with a promise of unmentionable attractions, but she had a sensuous, feline appearance that made every man who beheld her think of a snake.

“She is the original serpent in the Garden of Eden,” a woman had once declared furiously. “It was not a ‘he’ but a ‘she’ – and the serpent’s name was Circe!”

There were dozens of women who thought the same thing when their husbands had been enticed away from them, when their sons had had their hearts broken and their lives ruined, and when, triumphant, and untouched by the havoc she caused, Circe appeared always to be the victor.

There were so many stories about her that the Earl sometimes thought she really was his equal in the Jousts of Love and if he was not careful, he could lose the contest. Not that he intended to compete with any woman, or any man for that matter. The days when he had been young enough to glory in his reputation, to defy his critics by being wider and even more disreputable than they said he was, were over.

He was still a rake, but one who could no longer be driven either by his own desires or by other people’s. If he wanted a woman, he took her – otherwise he had no intention of showing off to make a Roman Holiday.

Last night, when Circe Langstone had invited him, in just too casual a manner for it to be natural, to visit her this afternoon, he had known exactly what she meant.

“I am entertaining some friends,” she had said. “It would be delightful to see you, if you have nothing better to do.”

It had been too casual and too artificial for the Earl not to read between the lines and be aware that at the last moment the friends would be ‘unavoidably detained’, and he would find himself alone with his hostess.

As he looked down at her, with the emeralds round her neck glinting almost as evilly as the green of her eyes, he suddenly felt that after all it might be amusing to find out exactly what she was like, and if she was in fact as bad as she was reputed to be. A woman’s reputation, the Earl well knew, could be built up on a very fragile foundation. A breath of scandal could be magnified and enlarged upon, until a small deviation from the conventional became something that appeared to be more depraved than the depths of hell.

But Circe certainly looked evil, and the Earl knew that the sidelong glances under her darkened eyelashes and the twist of her lips were as artificial as the enigmatic things she said. Yet there was no doubt she gave an excellent performance, and he felt that perhaps it would be a mistake not to experience the whole repertoire.

“I am trying out some new horses,” he had answered, “and if they please me, as I expect them to do, and I find myself in Park Lane, I might do myself the honour of accepting your invitation.”

He spoke with his habitual cynicism, and the look in his eyes told the woman listening that not only would he be quite likely to change his mind at the last moment, but that he was also exceedingly sceptical of being interested if he did call. Now he was here, and the Earl thought that so far everything was exactly as he had expected – with the exception of Ophelia.

The wait in the formal drawing room for the invitation, after he had cooled his heels, to Her Ladyship’s boudoir, was all part of the game, which was being played according to a plan. But Ophelia was certainly a diversion, and even as the door of the boudoir opened, he found himself puzzling as to what had happened to Jem Bullet and why the girl should have said he was not receiving a pension.

*

Upstairs, in her small back bedroom, Ophelia asked herself how she could have been so insanely stupid as to have been caught in the drawing room by the Earl of Rochester. She was aware how angry her stepmother would be if she heard of it, and she could only pray that Bateson the butler would be tactful enough not to say that the Earl had found her there still doing the flowers.

There had in fact been more to arrange than usual, which was another reason why she was aware of how important the Earl’s visit was. Ophelia could almost gauge the significance of the men her stepmother entertained, by the amount of flowers that were purchased to augment those that came up every week from the country. Today, quite an unusually large number of flowers had been delivered, and after Ophelia had finished in her stepmother’s boudoir there had been no time to complete those in the drawing room. At the same time, she should have watched the clock, knowing that she should have made herself scarce long before the Earl arrived and was brought upstairs.

‘How could I have been so foolish?’ she asked herself.

She looked apprehensively in the mirror, seeing not her own reflection but her stepmother’s face, contorted as it was so often with an almost terrifying anger. Every nerve in Ophelia’s body shrank with terror when the woman, who had taken her mother’s place, looked like that. But she was intelligent enough to be aware that it was not just for the misdeed of the moment that she must suffer, but because she looked like her dead mother and was herself far too attractive for a stepdaughter.

Before she had left school, she had had some idea of what her life would be like. But her anticipations were not half as unpleasant as the reality. Now, after three months of living with a woman who hated the sight of her, Ophelia wondered frantically how long it could continue.

Nothing she did was right, and she knew that her stepmother had only to look at her for her eyes to darken and her lips to set in a hard line. It was no use appealing to her father, because whatever she said, her stepmother would contradict it, and he would believe his wife. After two years of marriage he was still infatuated, still completely under the thumb of the woman who had ensnared him almost before his first wife was in her grave.

Ophelia did not know it, but quite a number of people realised that George Langstone had become a widower at exactly the right moment for Circe Drayton. Her husband, a drunken waster, had at last conveniently got himself killed in a duel, but her lover of the moment had immediately disappeared because he had no wish to marry her. The men who had been quite content to flatter her, to visit her when her husband was not at home, and even to contribute towards her gowns and jewellery, had no intention of putting what she most desired, which was a second gold band, on her wedding ring finger.

Without money, with no women-friends, and with a very precarious position in Society, Circe had looked round desperately for someone who would save her, and she had found George Langstone. He had been easy prey, charming, good-natured, a sportsman, and wealthy – a man who always thought the best both of men and of women.

Circe had turned all her wiles on him and even, some people averred, used Black Magic to get him into her clutches. Whoever had started the rumour that Circe had invoked the help of Satan may have been activated by spite, but the story had spread like wildfire.

“My dear, she is a witch!” one woman said to another. “And how could Henry, and you know how simple he is, stand up against witchcraft?”

If it was not Henry, it was Leopold or Alexander, Miles, or Lionel. It certainly seemed as if men were like rabbits mesmerised by a snake, and once they looked into Circe’s eyes they were enslaved until she no longer wanted them. It was in fact Harriet Sherwood, more than anyone else, who had made the Earl interested in Lady Langstone when he had no intention of following the lead of the herd.

“She is a wicked woman!” Lady Harriet had said violently. “John is in her clutches and I swear it is all due to Black Magic!”

“Can you really believe such nonsense?” the Earl asked.

“But you know John!” Lady Harriet protested. “He is the kindest brother any woman ever had. He is quiet and sensible and has never before cared for anyone but his wife and family.”

“Then perhaps it is time he sowed a few wild oats!” the Earl remarked cynically.

“Wild oats? At thirty-four?” Lady Harriet retorted. “He should have been past all that nonsense a long time ago! But it is not his fault. I do not blame him – it is that woman, that wicked, evil witch! He did not have a chance of escaping her.”

She had been so upset about her brother and so violent in her denunciation of Circe Langstone and her Black Magic, that the Earl had found himself mildly curious. He was well aware of the invitation in Lady Langstone’s eyes when she looked at him. He also knew, from the way she sometimes pointedly ignored him, that it was a challenge which most men found irresistible. But he merely watched her with half-closed eyes and a mocking smile, which told her that, if nothing else, her performance did not deceive him.

Now, finally, he was succumbing. But not too far, he told himself. Only a little reconnoitring to see if she was as false as he suspected her to be and if her vaunted powers of seduction had merely been magnified by those who hated her.

To Ophelia he was just another in the long train of her stepmother’s lovers, which made her feel sick and disgusted because she saw how blatantly her stepmother was deceiving her father. It offended everything she believed in as sacred to think that this woman should have taken her mother’s place, this woman who was now sleeping in her mother’s bed and wearing her mother’s jewels.

If Circe hated her stepdaughter, Ophelia despised anyone who had sunk so low and who could be so deceitful. But she was also physically afraid, and that was something she had never been before. She wondered now, with apprehension that was almost a pain, if, despite what she had said, the Earl would tell her stepmother that she had spoken to him of Jem Bullet?

She wondered how she had been brave enough, and yet she felt despairingly that she must help the poor man, who was living on the verge of starvation. It was his daughter who, when she was maiding Ophelia, had told her of the penury to which he had been reduced.

“You’d think a gentleman like the Earl of Rochester, Miss,” Emily had said, “would’ve more consideration than to let me poor father die o’ starvation, after all the years he’d served him.”

“Surely the Earl gave him a pension when he had to leave his service?”

“Not a penny, Miss,” Emily said, shaking her head.

“Why did your father not get in touch with the Earl?”

“He couldn’t walk at first after the accident, Miss,” Emily replied, “and when he could move about with a stick, he goes down to Rochester Castle and sees His Lordship’s agent.”

“What did he say?” Ophelia asked.

“He told him he’d do what he could, but his Master were close-fisted to those as were no longer any use t’ him.”

“It is disgraceful!” Ophelia exclaimed. “I cannot imagine Papa behaving like that towards anyone who had worked for us.”

Even as she spoke, she knew that if her father would not do so her stepmother would, and she supposed that Society people were not like her mother, for they could never see anyone suffering without trying to help them. Because Emily had made her feel so sorry for Jem Bullet, she had insisted on going to see him.