An Innocent in Paris

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWO“So this is where you have moved to,” Bertram Cunningham commented as he entered the large sunny room in the British Embassy where, at the far end, Lord Hartcourt was seated at a desk writing.

“I forgot to tell you I have been promoted,” Lord Hartcourt answered.

The Honourable Bertram Cunningham seated himself on the edge of the desk and tapped his shiny black riding boots with the tip of the leather switch he held in his gloved hands.

“You will have to be careful, my boy,” he said in a jovial tone. You were always a bit of a swot at Eton. If you don’t look out they will be making you an Ambassador or something.”

“There is no fear of that,” Lord Hartcourt replied, “Charles Lavington went off ill and decided to chuck in his hand so I have taken his place.”

“If you want my opinion,” Bertram Cunningham said, “his illness was entirely due to too much Maxim’s and the expenses of that little ladybird he was always taking to Cartier the morning after.”

“I should not be surprised,” Lord Hartcourt replied to him in a somewhat bored tone.

He disliked conversation that verged on gossip and it had never interested him.

“Incidentally,” Bertram Cunningham chatted on, while we are talking of ladybirds, what is this story André de Grenelle has been telling me? I met him riding in the Bois de Boulogne. He was full of a sensational denouement at Lily de Mabillon’s last night.”

“Never, never listen to anything the Comte has to say,” Lord Hartcourt said coldly. “It is inevitably inaccurate if not entirely invented.”

“Oh, don’t be stuffy, Vane,” Bertram Cunningham said. “There must be something in the story. Why, de Grenelle told me that the Duchesse had imported a new turn from the Moulin Rouge, who looked like a nun or even a schoolgirl. But before she could appear upstairs she collapsed into your arms and you carried her away into another room and locked the door!”

Lord Hartcourt laughed briefly, but the sound had no humour in it.

“Well, is it true?” Bertram Cunningham persisted. “I just cannot credit de Grenelle with having made all that up.”

“It has a slight element of truth somewhere, lavishly ornamented with the Comte’s very vivid imagination,” Lord Hartcourt said drily. “Mind you, I do like de Grenelle up to a certain point. He is amusing when a trifle foxed. But the morning after he is a dead bore. Personally I avoid him and I advise you to do the same.”

“Now stop evading the question,” Bertram said, slapping his whip down on the polished desk. “I want to know what happened and by Jove, Vane, you are going to tell me!”

And if I don’t?” Lord Hartcourt enquired.

“Then I shall go straight round and demand to see Her Grace and find out what really went on.”

Lord Hartcourt laughed again.

“You will get very short shrift at this hour of the morning. Besides I can imagine nothing more depressing than to see the debris after one of the more spirited parties chez Mabillon!”

“Then who was the charmer? André was extremely flowery in his description of her. Fair hair, grey eyes and heart-shaped face combined with an air of real or assumed innocence. It sounds most intriguing to me.”

“De Grenelle was drunk!” Lord Hartcourt pointed out.

“I should not imagine any of you were very sober,” Bertram Cunningham chaffed, “but it is just my luck to have to escort the Ambassadress to a party when all those excitements were going on. Very dull it was too. Would you believe it, we sat on gilt chairs for over two hours listening to some long-haired Pole playing the piano and afterwards we danced. There was not a woman in the room under fifty!”

This time Lord Hartcourt laughed without reservation.

Then he rose from the desk and put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder.

“Poor Bertie. You really do earn your salary at times like that.”

“I don’t mind telling you now,” Bertram said hotly, “if there are many more of them I am going to send in my resignation. I am becoming fed up with the whole thing. If it was not for you being here and one or two other chaps, I would then go straight back to London. After all it will be Royal Ascot in a few weeks.”

Lord Hartcourt sauntered over to the window and looked out over the Embassy garden. The lilacs and magnolias were in full bloom and tulips made a glorious patch of red beneath a tree of golden laburnum.

“England is always beautiful at this time of the year,” he said quietly. “Perhaps we are fools to waste our time and our money in any foreign country, even Paris.”

“Henriette being difficult?” Bertram asked with a sudden sympathy in his voice.

“Oh no!” he replied. “She is as entrancing as ever. It is just occasionally, Bertie, I find the whole thing so damned artificial. Too many parties, too much drink, too many people like the Comte making a drama about nothing.”

“You still have not told me what ‘nothing’ was,” Bertram Cunningham said pointedly.

Lord Hartcourt turned from the window to walk back to his desk.

“It is of little significance. As the Comte and I were leaving, we found a girl sitting in the hall. She was English, shabby, travel-stained and obviously very out of her element and when De Grenelle tried to kiss her she protested. And I obviously had to go to her rescue. Then she fainted from lack of food, not from fear of the Comte’s Latin attentions.”

“So he was telling the truth,” Bertram Cunningham exclaimed. “Was she outstandingly pretty? André has gone into eulogies over her.”

“I really did not notice,” Lord Hartcourt relied in a bored voice. “I told the servants to bring some food, gave her my advice, which she had no intention of taking, and came away.”

“You left her after all that excitement?” Bertram Cunningham asked.

“It really was not very exciting,” Lord Hartcourt said with a twist of his lips. “The girl was exhausted. She had been travelling since early morning and, I fancy, the wooden coaches of a French train are none too comfortable.”

“But who is she? Did you find out?” Bertram Cunningham enquired.

“She said she was the Duchesse’s niece.”

“Her niece!” Bertram exclaimed. “In that case André is most likely right. She is a chip off the old block! You undoubtedly spoiled her grand entrance. According to André she was going to get into her trunk in her dress and get out with little on save a few spangles!”

“De Grenelle talks the most utter nonsense,” Lord Hartcourt said. “I don’t think for one moment that she was anything but a genuine traveller. As for being a niece of the Duchesse, who knows?”

He shrugged his shoulders and started to tidy the papers on his desk.

“What are you doing, Bertie?” he asked. “Let’s go and have lunch at the Traveller’s Club. They have hired a new chef who can produce the best roast beef I have tasted outside Piccadilly.”

“All right,” Bertram agreed. “And I tell you what, Vane, we will drop in on the way and see what this new protégée of Lily’s is like. She is worth a look over. It will be amusing to get in before André and the other boys. He is swearing that nothing will keep him away from Lily’s tonight, but his Mama is holding a Reception which all the Diplomatic Corps are going to, so I don’t know how he is going to get out of it.”

“I never have been able to face the Duchesse or her like in the daytime,” Lord Hartcourt confessed stiffly.

“Oh, Vane, really! The old girl’s not quite as bad as all that. My father says that thirty-five years ago she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And I can assure you that my Papa was an experienced judge in his day!”

“Really?” Lord Hartcourt observed and it seemed just for a moment as if he was slightly interested. Who is she by the way? I always thought that her title was entirely bogus.”

“Oh no. You are wrong there,” Bertram Cunningham replied. “The Duc actually existed. I saw him myself many years ago when I was only a boy. I remember it well. I came over to Paris in the holidays. My father was First Secretary then and he took me to lunch at the Ritz.”

“You had better see the elite of the Capital now, my boy,” he told me. “It will stand you in good stead when you are in the Foreign Office yourself.”

Bertram was silent as if his memory had gone back to the first sight of what was always to be to him an enchanted City.

“Well, go on,” Lord Hartcourt said. “You were telling me about the Duc de Mabillon.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Bertram said. “He was sitting by a table near the door and looked exactly like a tortoise, his neck choked by his collar, his face deeply lined and he had hardly any hair on his head. My father pointed him out to me. ‘That’s the Duc de Mabillon,’ he said and as I stared a woman came into the restaurant and all heads turned round to look at her. It must have been Lily, of course, but I was looking at the Duc and thinking that he was not in the least my idea of what a French Duc ought to look like.”

“So he really existed,” Lord Hartcourt murmured in quiet surprise.

“Oh, very much so,” Bertram answered. “Years later when I came back to Paris I heard the whole story from my father. It appears that Lily was married to another Frenchman, a rather unsavoury chap, a hanger-on of the Nobility, who had just enough decent blood in him to be accepted on the outer fringe of their stuffy and stuck-up Society. Anyway, he married Lily in England, brought her over to live here and somehow or other they met the Duc. The old man, twice widowed, had one look at Madame Reinbard and took them both under his wing, so to speak.”

“A dirty old man in fact!” Lord Hartcourt exclaimed.

“But, as my father used to say, a magnificent connoisseur where beautiful things were concerned and Lily was undoubtedly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The three of them became inseparable. Of course the Duc paid Reinbard’s debts, set him up in a better apartment than he could afford and made life very easy for him and, naturally, particularly easy where his wife was concerned.”

“You tell the story well, Bertie,” Lord Hartcourt smiled. “If you are not careful, you will find yourself writing a novel about the redoubtable Lily.”

Bertram laughed.

“I had it all from my father and, I assure you, if anyone ever knew the truth about Lily de Mabillon, it was he. Apparently he was rather besotted himself by her at one time.”

“So I understand that it could be said of half the men in Paris,” Lord Hartcourt remarked drily. “The nineties must have been very gay indeed.”

“By Jove they were,” Bertram agreed, “and apparently Lily had rather a soft spot for my old boy. Anyway she used to tell him all about herself, that she came from a decent English family and that she would never have married Reinbard if she had not been so terribly poor. And, of course, the idea of living in Paris had seemed so attractive.”

“It certainly paid a dividend where she was concerned,” Lord Hartcourt said cynically.

“It did when Reinbard died. He was drinking far too much and got pneumonia one cold winter. Lily’s enemies, of course, always say that she was too busy entertaining the Duc to send for the doctor. Whatever the reason he died and the bets were a hundred to one against the Duc ever marrying her.”

“But he did,” Lord Hartcourt said, sitting back in his writing chair, a twinkle in his eyes as he listened to his friend’s story.

There was, however, a cynical twist to his mouth, as if he was not prepared to believe the whole story, even while he was ready to give it his attention.

“Oh, Lily saw to it that he married her all right,” Bertram observed. “One of the Russian Grand Dukes came along at that time, I have forgotten which one it was, but, just like Boris and that other chap who are here now, he was splashing his money about, snaffling all the best women and giving parties and presents that no ordinary fellow could compete with. My father always said that Lily gave the Duc exactly twenty-four hours to make up his mind.”