Look with Love E-Book

Barbara Cartland

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

Seitenzahl: 219

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

After losing her mother to a fever, then her beloved father the Earl of Darrington – and now her Godmother too, eighteen-year-old Ilita is bereft, stricken by poverty as well as grief. For a fleeting moment, she's saved when her aunt takes her in. But the Countess is, to Ilita's horror, bitter, jealous of her beauty and ashamed to be associated with her. Sent away to work for a recently blinded Marchioness under a false name and ordered never to reveal her true identity, she meets her employer's son, the Marquis of Lyss. He's surly and sarcastic, suspecting she's a gold-digger. If only she could explain who she really is! Little by little, though, Ilita's perceptive spirit, kindness and beauty begin to melt his cold, hard heart. Is it possible that their mutual mistrust is turning to love?

Leseprobe

Author’s note

In this busy mechanical age, we often forget that the faith of indigenous people have, since the beginning of time, set an example for mankind.

Anyone who has lived amongst the natives in Africa, India, or in other isolated parts of the world, has realised that they can affect what seem to us miracles, by thought and by faith in themselves and their gods.

Even a witch doctor cannot prevent an African from dying, if he has made up his mind to do so, and the Voodoo of South America has many strange things it could teach those who despise it, if they would trouble to listen.

Soldiers who served in India during the days of the Raj can tell tales of Indians who knew when one of their close relatives died three hundred miles away, long before it was possible for them to receive any physical communication of the death.

What these people use is their instinct, or what the Egyptians called their ‘Third Eye’, which we today have discarded for written references, certificates and documents of every sort.

So much of what is called ‘clairvoyance’ is merely the person in question using the instinct that was given to all of us and which can be, if we use it properly, both a protection and an inspiration.

Chapter One ~ 1886

As the train steamed into Victoria Station Ilita had a sudden impulse to cling to Sister Angelica.

Even as she thought of it, she knew she was being ridiculous. At the convent she had never liked Sister Angelica, who had been in charge of the laundry and taught the girls the more boring types of sewing, which included darning and mending.

But now her lined face and bespectacled eyes seemed all that was familiar, while ahead there was only apprehension and the emptiness of the unknown.

‘If only Papa was here, it would be wonderful to be back in England,’ Ilita told herself and felt the pain that, even after a year and a half, invariably accompanied thoughts of her father.

Then her travelling companion, daughter of the Italian Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, was standing up at the window crying,

“I can see Mama! She is standing on the platform. Oh, Sister Angelica, please let down the window!”

“All in good time, my child,” Sister Angelica replied. “If your mother has come to meet you, then you can be quite certain she will find you.”

The Italian girl did not listen, and Ilita wondered if there would be anyone to meet her except perhaps a senior servant.

It seemed impossible that on her return home to England the only relative she was certain of seeing was an aunt whom she had only met once before in her life and who she had thought then did not like either her or her father.

‘Perhaps she will be pleased to see me now,’ she told herself and tried to find it a consoling thought, though her instinct was certain it was very unlikely.

All the time the train had been carrying her from Florence to England, Ilita, looking back on all that had happened, had tried to imagine how things might have worked out very differently.

She might now, if Fate had not struck in a devastatingly cruel manner, have been going to Darrington Park to be with her father.

Instead of which her father was dead and so, although it seemed incredible, was his younger brother, who had succeeded him as the sixth Earl.

Now there was only a young boy still at school to carry on the family tradition.

Ilita knew it had never crossed her father’s mind that he might inherit the huge house in Buckinghamshire and the Earldom of which the family had always been extremely proud.

As a second son, and with a father who was still relatively young and a brother two years older than himself, Marcus Darrington-Coombe had decided that with the small income his father allowed him, he would explore the world.

He had married a girl who was as adventurous as he was, and together they climbed mountains, visited unmapped parts of Asia, sailed up crocodile-infested rivers, and crossed uncharted deserts with the optimism of amateur explorers who found nothing impossible.

When Ilita was born, she did not inhibit their journeys – she merely went with them.

She was rocked asleep in a basket on the back of a camel, carried up mountainsides in a pannier attached to a yak, and learnt to exist on strange foods that might have killed other children.

They had little money, but everything was fun and Ilita could remember her childhood seemed always to be radiant with laughter and love.

Then three years ago, when she was fifteen years old, disaster struck.

Coming back by sea from a journey in Africa, they had landed in Naples and both her father and mother were stricken down with a strange fever, which the doctors did not recognise and had no idea how to cure.

When her mother died quickly, almost before they realised how ill she was, her husband and her daughter found it impossible to believe that life could go on without her.

It was actually Ilita who had the stronger will of the two. She forced her father to eat and gradually made him interested in things that were going on around them – excavations in Pompeii, the discovery of a Roman villa on Capri – and when at last he made an effort for her sake he gradually became a little more normal.

For some months he was weak from the fever that had killed his wife and it was then that unexpectedly Ilita’s Godmother, Mrs. Van Holden, had appeared.

She had been a close friend of her mother’s and, hearing they were in Naples, had come from Rome where she was then staying to tell them how desperately sorry she was at their bereavement.

“I loved Elizabeth,” she said with tears in her eyes, “and although we saw very little of each other after I married an American, I cannot bear to think that she is no longer in the world that she made beautiful because she lived in it.”

As she sat with Ilita and her father in the untidy garden of the cheap hotel in which they had installed themselves, she talked of the days when she and Elizabeth, who had been the same age, had made their curtsies at Buckingham Palace and thought they would conquer the world because they were so young and happy.

“And you know what happened?” Mrs. Holden asked Ilita with a smile. “Your grandmother was quite certain that your mother would make a brilliant marriage because she was so beautiful. I used to laugh and say she had every Prince, Duke and Marquis in the English aristocracy lined up for her!”

Knowing the answer, Ilita asked,

“What happened, Godmama?”

“She saw your father at a ball,” Mrs. Van Holden replied, “and fell in love! After that, if every King, even the Shah of Persia himself, had fallen on their knees in front of her, she would not even have known they were there!”

“And I fell no less in love with her! She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life,” Ilita’s father said, and she could hear the pain in his voice.

“And I, too, fell in love,” Mrs. Van Holden said, as if she did not wish to linger on thoughts that would make them unhappy. “But my family were horrified because he was an American! He was an Attaché at the American Embassy in London, and after we married, we went back to America together. I can honestly say I have been a very lucky and happy woman.”

There was a little pause before she added,

“Unfortunately, I was not blessed as your mother was by having any children.”

“I am sorry about that,” Ilita’s father said.

“So am I,” Mrs. Van Holden answered, “and that is why I am going to talk to you very seriously, Marcus, about my Goddaughter.”

Ilita looked wide-eyed at Mrs. Van Holden as she went on.

“I suppose you realise she is going to be as beautiful as her mother! So, it is very important that before she makes her debut in England, she should go to a finishing school.”

“I do not know what you are saying!” Ilita’s father exclaimed in a bewildered tone. “I have never visualised Ilita as a conventional debutante.”

“Then it is very selfish of you not to!” Mrs. Van Holden said. “Of course, Ilita must have her chance as Elizabeth and I had ours.”

She sighed before she continued,

“Although she may turn her back on the balls, the receptions and the glamour of London Society, which is grander than anywhere else in the world, she must at least have the choice of knowing what sort of life she would prefer in the future.”

“I want to be with Papa!” Ilita said quickly.

“And I want my daughter with me,” her father added, putting his arm around her shoulders.

“You have had her for nearly sixteen years,” Mrs. Van Holden said, “and now, my dear man, you have to think of her not as a child but as a young woman who one day will be a wife and mother.”

Ilita felt her father’s arm tighten protectively around her shoulders and she knew from the expression in his eyes that the ideas that Mrs. Van Holden had proposed had never occurred to him before.

They talked and argued about Ilita’s future all that afternoon and the discussion continued when they dined with Mrs. Van Holden at the largest and most expensive hotel in Naples, where she was staying.

Although she had travelled so much with her father, Ilita had seldom seen the inside of the luxury hotels, which they could not afford, and was actually far more at home in a tent hurriedly erected in an oasis or a dak bungalow in some obscure Indian village.

She was acutely aware that compared with Mrs. Van Holden and the other diners in the restaurant, she was extremely badly dressed, and even her father, handsome though he was, seemed somehow ill at ease in his evening clothes compared to the other gentlemen around him.

“I have been thinking things over, Marcus,” Mrs. Van Holden said as dinner finished, “and what I have decided is that my present to my Goddaughter, which is somewhat overdue as I had no idea where in the world you might be on her last two birthdays or even at Christmas, will be fifteen months’ education in the most renowned and important Convent School in Florence.”

Ilita gave an almost audible gasp as her Godmother went on,

“I have made enquiries from the American Ambassador and one or two distinguished Italians, and they all tell me that the Convent of St. Sophia, which is both a school as well as an enclosed order, is the smartest and the most important in the whole of Europe.”

“Oh, please,” Ilita cried, “I do not want to go to school!”

“A sentiment that makes me quite sure it is something you should do,” Mrs. Van Holden replied.

Her voice sounded a little harsh, but she smiled as she said,

“I know being with your beloved mother who was very intelligent and very well read, was an education in itself and of course it would be impossible travelling, as you have with your father, not to learn languages.”

She paused.

“But there are other things a young lady of fashion should know, and that is exactly why the young girls of the aristocracy, whether they are Italian, French or English, have usually a year at finishing school before they emerge like butterflies on an astonished world.”

Ilita had laughed, thinking this way of putting things was funny, but her Godmother went on,

“I promise you, dearest child, you will be a very beautiful, much acclaimed butterfly when you do appear. And since your dear mother will not be able to present you at Buckingham Palace, I will come over from America to do so and will arrange that you are sponsored, if not by one of your relations, by one of mine, and I will give the finest and most exciting ball for you that London has ever seen!”

Feeling somewhat frightened by what she was hearing, Ilita slipped her hand in her fathers under the table, silently begging him not to agree.

But she had known before he spoke that, because he loved her, he recognised that Mrs. Van Holden was speaking sense and that it was, if she thought about it, what her mother would have wanted for her.

After that, Ilita thought, everything happened so quickly she did not have time to think.

Before she realised it, she found herself in the Convent in Florence, possessing a whole outfit of new clothes her Godmother had bought for her, and although she tried to cling to him, her father disappeared.

“Where are you going, Papa?” she had asked.

“I have an invitation to investigate some new excavations in Turkey.”

“Oh, Papa, let me come with you,” Ilita begged.

“We will go away later when you are free to do so,” he promised.

“But you will not go without saying goodbye to me?”

“No, of course not,” he replied. “It is going to take me a month or more to get everything ready and I will come to Florence before I leave. Of course, I will tell you exactly where I am going so that you can get in touch should anything happen.”

Ilita wanted to say that nothing was going to happen to her, but it would be agony to know that he was going to be so far away from her.

She was well aware that when he was on an exploring trip it was often almost impossible for him to communicate with the outside world.

But when he had come to see her just before leaving for Turkey he had very different news for her from what she expected.

She had known the moment she saw him that something was wrong from the expression on his face and because she knew his every mood and every vibration that came from him. Before he even spoke, she said, as she put her arms around him,

“What is the matter, Papa? What is wrong?”

“Who said anything was wrong?” her father enquired.

“I know it is. I can feel it.”

“There is nothing exactly wrong,” her father said, sitting down on the hard, uncomfortable sofa in Mother Superior’s sitting room.

“Then why are you worried?”

Her father smiled at her and it illuminated his face, making him look even more handsome than he did already.

“You always know what I am feeling, just as your mother did,” he said. “Yes, I am worried because something very unexpected has happened and I have to make up my mind today whether I go on this trip that I have planned or go back to England.”

“To England, Papa?”

Her father nodded.

“I learnt this morning from a messenger, who had been especially sent from England to find me, that your grandfather died a week ago.”

Ilita listened wide-eyed.

Although she could barely remember her grandfather, whom she had not seen for some years, her father had often talked about him, and she knew he had ardently disapproved of what he thought was his son’s wasteful, unproductive way of living.

“Are you very upset that your father is dead, Papa?” she asked.

“I never thought of his dying,” her father replied. “After all, he was little over sixty and always seemed so strong – and I suppose indestructible is the word I should use.”

“And you think you ought to go back for the funeral?”

“The funeral is over,” her father answered. “They could not find me in time to tell me about it. But I am now the Earl of Darrington.”

Ilita stared at him in amazement before she said,

“But . . . your brother Uncle Lionel?”

“He was killed in the Sudan nine months ago. It must have happened when we were beyond the reach, as we so often were, of the newspapers, and until this morning I had no idea that he was not alive and with his Regiment.”

Realising that her father was upset, Ilita laid her hand on his.

“I am sorry, Papa.”

“So am I, desperately sorry, because he would have made an excellent head of the family and a far better peer than I am ever likely to be.”

Ilita had laughed.

“That is untrue, Papa. I remember Mama saying the only thing she ever regretted was that she would not see you wearing a coronet and that you would be far better looking than anyone else in the House of Lords. Her father had laughed at that and had said,

“The truth is, Ilita, I am not cut out for the pomp and ceremony of being an English aristocrat. I should feel constricted even in the huge rooms of Darrington, while the broad acres surrounding it would make me long for distant horizons and the snowy peaks of unconquered mountains.”

Before Ilita could answer he went on,

“I know exactly what everyone will say. That it is my duty, my responsibility, and the type of life to which God has been pleased to call me. All right! All right! I accept all that!”

His voice had sharpened as he went on,

“But I am damned if I will give up what will be my last and perhaps my most exciting journey before I become a pillar of respectability and undoubtedly a pompous bore!”

Ilita’s laughter had rung out and despite himself, the irritation vanished from her father’s eyes and he laughed too.

“You are quite right, my darling. You are thinking that I am being over-dramatic, which is exactly what I am!”

He got up from the sofa to walk about the austere room, its only decoration being a crucifix over the desk where the Mother Superior wrote.

For a moment he did not speak and Ilita said pleadingly,

“Please, Papa, take me with you. I know you intend to go on your expedition to Turkey as planned, wouldn’t it be so wonderful if we could be together!”

Her father looked at her and she knew he was tempted.

“It is what I would enjoy more than anything in the world,” he said, “but, my precious, I know your Godmother was right when she insisted that I sent you here. Just as I shall have to do my duty in the future, you must do yours.”

“I will try, Papa, I promise,” Ilita said. “Only if you can play truant, so can I.”

“Not so easily,” her father replied, “and you know that giving up six months more of your education would be a mistake”.

“What I will promise,” he said, “is that when you finish here at the Convent, before you become the society butterfly that your Godmother is planning, you and I will go off somewhere alone where no one will find us and we will discover something so exciting, so different that the whole world will acclaim us!”

“I only want to be with you, Papa.”

“That is what I want too,” her father said. “We will start on our exploration the very moment they give you all the prizes and send you away from here as the brightest and most intelligent pupil they have ever had.”

Ilita laughed, but at the same time she knew with a sinking of her heart that her father would be going to Turkey without her.

That night when he had left, as she was to do for a dozen nights after, she cried herself to sleep.

It was no consolation to learn that now she was Lady Ilita Darrington-Coombe and of far more consequence in the eyes of her schoolmates than she had been previously.

Afterwards, when three months later the dreadful news came that her father had been killed in a volcanic eruption on one of the mountains he was exploring, she thought she must have had a presentiment that he would never return from that particular expedition.

When he said goodbye to her, she had clung to him frantically, feeling in some strange way that he was slipping away from her, not only physically, but as if there was never any future for them together.

“Do not forget your promise that we will go exploring the moment I finish here!” she had said, over and over again.

Yet even as she said it, something deep within her heart told her that whatever her father’s reply, it was something that would never happen.

It was impossible to think of him as dead because he had always been so vital and magnetic in a way that was difficult to explain to other people who had no magnetism and who, to Ilita, often seemed little more than morons with whom it was impossible to communicate.

Then as her first misery lightened a little and she forced herself to concentrate on her work, she knew that, just as she had known after her mother’s death, her father was still near her, and that still, in some strange way she could not describe in words, she could communicate with him.

At night she would lie thinking of him until she could see his face etched in the darkness in front of her, and he would be smiling at her in his irresistible way, which always seemed part of the sunshine as he said,

“Look forward – not back!”

‘That is what I have to do,’ Ilita told herself, but what she had to look for or what she had expected to find, was a question to which there was no answer.

She received a letter from her father’s younger brother who had now succeeded and was the Sixth Earl of Darrington.

It was a somewhat cold letter telling her that he deeply regretted his brother’s death, but he was glad to think she was well looked after in such an exceptional school, and if there was anything she wanted she could get in touch with him.

There was no mention, Ilita noticed, of his being anxious to see her, and she wondered whether he intended, when her schooldays were finished, that she should live with him and her Aunt Sybil.

It was something, she was sure, they would dislike and so would she, but she cheered herself up with the thought that her Godmother had promised to look after her in London as soon as she was of age to be a debutante, and as Mrs. Van Holden had no children, she would perhaps, when she returned to America, take her with her.

‘That would be rather exciting,’ Ilita thought, and she sat down and wrote to Mrs. Van Holden telling her what had happened.

It took a long time for her letter to cross the Atlantic and for her to receive a reply, but the letter she eventually received from her Godmother said everything she had hoped.

Mrs. Van Holden was naturally horrified at the news of her father’s death and, although she did not say so in her letter, Ilita had the idea she was actually delighted that now she had the title and was of course socially now far more important than she had been before, as merely the daughter of a younger son of a peer.

She had, since she arrived at the Convent, written to her Godmother every month to tell her how she was getting on and the work she was doing.

She felt it was something she must do since her Godmother was paying for her education, and the least she would expect was a regular report on her progress.

Mrs. Van Holden had answered every letter Ilita had written to her until six months ago. Then there had been a long silence and she had written anxiously asking if she had received her letters, or perhaps she had been travelling and they had not been redirected.

She finally had a letter from a secretary who told her that her Godmother had been recently widowed and was deeply distressed at losing her husband and was not in good health herself.

She, however, sent her love and begged Ilita to write again as soon as possible.

Ilita did so, increasing her letters to one a week but finding it hard to think of interesting things to tell someone on the other side of the world.

Over the following two or three months she had received two short letters written by Mrs. Van Holden in a very shaky hand.

“I am getting better, dear child,” she had said, “and of course, I am hurrying to be well enough to come to England to meet you in London when you leave the convent. I have already told them to find me a large house that I can rent for the Season where I can give the ball I promised for you. I have also written to your uncle’s wife, the new Countess, to ask if she intends to present you at Buckingham Palace.”

It all sounded very exciting, but then a month ago Ilita had received a letter from her aunt.

It had obviously been dictated to a secretary and was brisk, cold and business-like. It informed Ilita that she had just learnt that her Godmother, Mrs. Van Holden, had just died in Virginia and was therefore not coming to London as had been planned.

“It had been arranged,” the letter went on, “that you should stay in London with Mrs. Van Holden. However, I have also had a communication from the Mother Superior at your school in which she informs me that you are now too old to remain there as a pupil and they will therefore be sending you back to England at the end of the term. You will come here to me at Darrington House, and I will then inform you of what has been decided about your future. I do not wish you, until I have seen you, to communicate with any other members of the family. When I know what time the train on which you will be travelling reaches Victoria, I will send a carriage to meet you. Kindly follow the instructions in this letter.

Yours sincerely,

Sybil Darrington.”

Ilita read the letter over and over again, thinking it extraordinary, that her aunt should write to her so formally. She remembered that when she heard of the death of her uncle two months earlier and had written a conventional letter of condolence, she had had no reply.

This did not particularly surprise her because she had not had any communication from her father’s family, except the one formal letter after his death.