Pure and Untouched

Chapter 1 1889-2

“I have no wish to do anything so – unkind,” Cleodel said gently, “but I must have gowns in which to look – beautiful for you.” “Are you really buying them for me?” the Duke asked.

“But of course!” she replied. “Everybody has told me how fastidious you are, so I am very – afraid of – failing you.”

“You are perfect just as you are,” the Duke said, “and all I want is for us to be married so that I can take you away alone and tell you how lovely you are.”

“That will be very – exciting.”

“I will make you excited,” the Duke said, “and it will be the most thrilling thing I have ever done in my life!”

He spoke with a sincerity in his voice that surprised himself.

Then he put his arms around Cleodel and kissed her very gently, for he was aware that if he was in the least passionate or demanding she would be frightened.

On one occasion she had held him at arm’s length saying,

“Please – please – ”

“I do not mean to frighten you, my darling,” the Duke said quickly.

“It is not that I am really – frightened,” Cleodel said, “but as I have never been – kissed before, I feel – almost as if you are making me your captive and I am no longer myself.”

“It is I who am the captive,” the Duke said. “Forgive me, my sweet, and I will not be rough with you again.”

He kissed her hands, turning them over to kiss their soft pink palms and thought as he did so that no woman could be more attractive and at the same time more difficult to capture.

The women who had loved him in the past found his behaviour not only incomprehensible but infuriating. “Raven is the most fascinating devil who ever stalked London,” one of them said, “but in the guise of a Saint I find him depressing.”

“I agree with you,” another of the Duke’s loves added, “but make no mistake, that chit straight out of the schoolroom will have lost him before Christmas.”

“I am willing to wager that it will not last even as long as that,” was the spiteful reply.

Strangely enough the only person who did not admire Cleodel was Harry, but he was far too tactful to say anything to the Duke or to his other friends, who he was certain would repeat any criticism he made about the future Duchess.

But to himself he thought there was something about her that was not entirely natural.

He could not put his finger on it, but it was as if she was with her innocent little ways really too good to be true.

The Duke, however, was carried away on the wings of bliss, counting the hours until he could see his future bride again like any boy with his first love.

Because Ravenstock House in Park Lane was so much larger than the house the Earl owned in Green Street, it was decided that the Reception should be held in the former and the Duke with his usual passion for perfection was organising every detail.

The guests were to be received in the ball room which opened out into the garden.

The presents were to be displayed in the picture gallery and the Duke planned that the whole house should be decorated with flowers brought from his country estate at Ravenstock Hall and arranged by his own gardeners.

It would be impossible to accommodate all his estate workers, tenants and farmers in London and he therefore gave orders that only the heads of each department should sit in the gallery of St George’s.

In the country a huge marquee was to be erected on the lawn where all the others would start their celebrations late in the afternoon.

This meant that if the Duke and his wife travelled after the Reception from Park Lane straight to Ravenstock Hall by his private train they would arrive in time to receive their congratulations and good wishes.

He would make a short speech thanking them, after which there would be an enormous display of fireworks.

The bride and bridegroom would have to spend the first night of their honeymoon at Ravenstock Hall, but to the Duke it was somehow very fitting that he should take his bride home on their wedding-night to the house of his ancestors.

It had never troubled him before that he had no heir to succeed him, but now he told himself nothing could be better or more perfect than that his son should be born to two people who loved each other as he loved Cleodel and she him.

“Tell me you love me,” he had said to her insistently the previous evening as they sat in the garden of Devonshire House where they were attending a ball.

“I have given you my heart,” Cleodel replied.

“It is something which I shall treasure for ever!”

He had even contemplated writing a poem to her perfections, which he intended to send round to Sedgewick House with a large bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley.

He thought that particular flower best typified her with its delicacy and the fragrance and there was something very young about it, because it never became full-blown like a rose. He was just finishing his letter when Mr Matthews appeared again.

“What is it now, Matthews?” the Duke asked.

“I am sorry to disturb Your Grace again,” Mr. Matthews replied, “but the Dowager Countess of Glastonbury has arrived and I know you will wish to see Her Ladyship.”

The Duke rose from his desk immediately.

“Of course! But I had no idea my grandmother was coming to London.”

Leaving the letter unfinished he walked from the library to the drawing room where his maternal grandmother was waiting to see him.

Now in her eighties, the Dowager Countess still held herself as straight as a ramrod and it was impossible not to realise that she had been a great beauty in her youth.

Her hair was dead white, her face was lined, but her features were classical and had remained unchanged.

When the Duke appeared, she held out her hands with a little cry of delight.

“Grandmama!” the Duke exclaimed. “I had no idea that you were well enough to come to London. Why did you not let me know?”

“I did not make up my mind until the last moment,” the Dowager Countess replied. “But when I had an invitation from the Queen to stay at Windsor for the races at Ascot I could not resist accepting it.”

The Duke having kissed her cheek sat down beside her holding one of her hands in his.

He looked at her with laughter in his eyes. Then he said,

“That is a very lame excuse, Grandmama! I have a feeling that the real reason why you have come to London is to look at my future wife.”

The Dowager chuckled.

“I confess that is the truth! I could not believe that any young girl would catch ‘Casanova’ after he had resisted every bait and hook cast over him for so many years!”

“I was a very willing catch.”

“That is what is impossible to believe!” the Dowager Countess flashed.

The Duke laughed.

“Let me say, Grandmama, how delighted I am that you are here and of course you are staying with me.”

“Of course!” she replied, “I do not know of anybody else with such an attentive staff or another house that is as comfortable as this.”

“I am flattered indeed.”

The Dowager Countess looked at him with her eyes that were still shrewd, despite her age.

“Is it true that you have definitely lost your heart?” she asked him.

The Duke smiled.

“Wait until you see Cleodel, then you will understand.”

“I doubt it,” the Dowager Countess said, “and I think, like all the other women you have loved, I am going to miss the buccaneer who was invincible and the pirate who invariably captured the prize!”

The Duke’s laughter rang out.

“Grandmama, you are priceless! Nobody else ever talks to me as you do and in such amusing language. But this pirate has struck his flag and now I am going to settle down to domesticity.”

“Fiddlesticks!” the Dowager Countess declared. “And you will certainly have to find something to take the place of the women in your life.”

“That will be Cleodel,” the Duke said. The Dowager Countess did not reply because at that moment servants came in carrying the tea.

By the time they had set the table with silver and produced every form of delicacy to eat, the Duke was talking not of himself, but of the presents they had received and the places they were to visit on their honeymoon.

His grandmother listened attentively and she thought, as Harry had done, that it seemed incredible after all the glamorous, brilliant, spectacular women who had attracted him that the Duke should have succumbed to the fascination of a young girl, who, however lovely, had nothing much to offer him except youth.

If he had been much older, the Dowager Countess thought to herself, she would have been able to say ‘there is no fool like an old fool’, but the Duke was still young, except perhaps by comparison with the girl he was to marry.

Then she told herself that all that mattered was that he was happy.

She had always loved ‘Raven’, as he had been called since he was a very small boy, more than her other grandchildren.

It was his naughtiness which had started almost from the time he was in the cradle that had amused her and, having been brought up herself in the Regency period, she found the prim solemnity of the Victorians extremely boring.

She had always thought that the Duke would have felt far more at home with George IV and, when she heard him criticised, she excused him for bringing amusement and a sense of adventure to an age that was not only prudish but hypocritical in its outlook.

One of her other grandchildren had told the Dowager Countess that he was shocked at his cousin’s way of life and his innumerable love affairs, but the Dowager had merely looked him up and down and answered contemptuously,

“The trouble with you is that you are jealous! If you had the looks or the guts to behave like Raven, you would do so! As it is, you can only grind your teeth and wish you were in his shoes.”

Because the Duke had so much to say to his grandmother, he did not leave her until she retired to her own room and, because they had been talking until the last moment, he had to dress in a hurry.

He was dining at Marlborough House and it was only as he was going downstairs resplendent in evening clothes and wearing his decorations that he remembered he had not finished his letter to Cleodel.

It had been left in the library with his bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley which he had intended to send with it.

Quickly he hurried to his desk, added to the letter a last expression of his love and put it in an envelope.

Then, as he picked up the bouquet, which he intended to tell his coachman to leave for Cleodel after taking him to Marlborough House, a thought came to him.

It brought a smile to his lips and he wondered why he had not thought of it before.

*

Carrying the lilies-of-the-valley, the Duke stepped into his carriage and, as he turned towards Marlborough House, he was thinking of Cleodel and how he had been unable to see her all day.

Yesterday they had met for a brief drive in the Park, then again at a ball, but on neither of these occasions had he been able to kiss her.

He found himself yearning for her with an intensity that actually surprised him.

He had kissed so many women and had always felt that one kiss was very much like another, but with Cleodel it was different.

He thought perhaps it was because, as she was so young and so innocent, she never completely surrendered herself to him.

Because she was unawakened and perhaps a little fearful there was always a barrier between them.

It was a barrier that he had every intention of removing as soon as they were married and again he thought how thrilling it would be to awaken her to womanhood.

‘I want her! God knows I want her!’ he told himself and he was still thinking of her as the carriage drew up at Marlborough House.