Nurse for the Doctor Page 4

  Josie assured him that is was perfectly all right, and then aperitifs were brought to them in the wide verandah that overlooked the sea. Josie asked for an iced grapefruit juice, and she carefully refrained from appearing to expect to take any part in the conversation that followed, although Michael would have drawn her in more than once. He was looking deceptively fit after his few days in San Fernando, and his spirits were unmistakably high, which pleased his mother so much that she herself was in the highest spirits. She constantly addressed the marquis as “My dear Marquis”, and made anxious inquiries after his sister, and was plainly reassured on being informed that Maria Cortes was looking forward to their arrival at the villa, which was several miles along the coast. She would have liked to have accepted the invitation for lunch today, but had a friend of her own whom she had had to entertain.

  Josie had the strong feeling that Mrs. Duveen hoped quite ardently that the friend being entertained was not masculine.

  “I have been telling Nurse Winter that your sister is an extremely successful writer,” Mrs. Duveen said, when they went in at last to lunch. Their table was in a window, decorated with some wonderful wine-colored carnations that gave off a gloriously spicy smell, and the cream of the waiting staff seemed to have been deputed to attend to their wants.

  Josie wondered whether it was because of the marquis, who was no doubt very well known, since it was a little in excess of the attention they normally received at their table.

  She thought that he looked a little amused at the description of his sister as an extremely successful writer.

  “Maria has been amusing herself by attempting to break into literature ever since she left school,” he said. “But I would hardly call her success so far extreme. However, it does keep her entertained, and since my mother’s death she has been a little inclined to mope. She has just returned from a visit to the United States where she became engaged to be married.”

  “Engaged to be married!” Mrs. Duveen sounded absolutely shocked.

  The marquis smiled.

  “But it came to nothing—or, perhaps I should say, it terminated in nothing! But Maria is a little like that. Her short married life was not particularly happy, and nowadays she seems to be experimenting a little. Perhaps one day she will find someone who will ensure for her a more permanent kind of happiness than my late lamented brother-in-law was able to ensure for her.”

  His eyes were on Josie as he spoke, dwelling upon her as if, in spite of her silence, she interested him, and in any case he found her a pleasing study. It was the first time Josie had been given any indication that Maria Cortes was a widow, and she looked surprised as she glanced up.

  Carlos Alonso Christoval, twenty-first Marquis de Palheiro, misunderstood the look of surprise, and smiled a little more inexplicably as he explained: “In Spain, Nurse Winter, marriages are so often arranged by parties with whom the success or failure of the marriage does not really rest, and perhaps that is one reason why they do not always work out. My sister’s experience was not one of the more fortunate ones, but mercifully she did not have to put up with it for very long. My brother-in-law ended his life in a motor car rally.”

  “I—I see,” Josie said, but she wondered why he had attempted to make clear the situation to her, of all people. And she also thought it a little strange that he should give such public emphasis to the fact that his sister’s marriage had not been a success.

  Mrs. Duveen broke into the conversation.

  “Oh, but Maria is so beautiful—so much like her mother, who was at the same finishing school as I was in Paris,” as if that made the beauty understandable. “I have always felt for her—for Maria, I mean—as if she was my own daughter, and it is unthinkable that she should not meet and marry a really attractive man before long. But this time she will have to be a little careful. I have been thinking of her so often lately, and I feel that she must be very careful.”

  She sounded as if it was of the utmost importance to her that Maria should be careful, and the marquis looked at her a little quizzically as he answered, in a very quiet voice and his effortless English: “One should expend a great deal of care on anything that is likely to affect one’s whole future life very closely.”

  A great deal of care, Josie thought, almost visualizing the words as she studied him discreetly between her lowered eyelashes while she sipped her coffee. He looked like a man who would never allow himself to be stampeded into anything, and that meant that his Latin temperament was not perhaps as Latin as it might have been. In fact, it was more like the cautious temperament of one of her own countrymen.

  They had their coffee served to them on the terrace at the rear of the hotel which overlooked the gardens, but although he had obviously enjoyed the lunch, and the society of the guest, Michael seemed noticeably to flag a little as he lay in his comfortable chair. Josie felt that quick twinge of anxiety on his behalf which she always experienced when she looked at him and observed the slight fading of his color, and the way in which his blue eyes sought to remain alert and interested although he was obviously keeping exhaustion at bay with difficulty. In spite of the presence of the other two she said quickly: “I think it is time that you should rest now, Doctor. You mustn’t attempt to overdo things.”

  “Quite right,” the marquis agreed, crushing the end of his cigarette in an ash tray at his elbow. He looked across the table at his hostess. “My thanks for an excellent lunch, senora, and we will await with impatience your arrival tomorrow.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t mean to break up the party!” Josie exclaimed, looking guilty as Mrs. Duveen looked slightly vexed, but Michael covered her hand with his own in a fashion he had never done before in public and patted it.

  “Of course you didn’t!” he exclaimed, with a lazy look of amusement in the blue eyes that gave away so much. “You only wanted to banish me.” And then he gave her hand a squeeze and released it, looking up at the marquis. “But she’s an excellent nurse, Carlos, and you mustn’t be misled by the youthful appearance. It’s the iron hand in the velvet glove, I assure you.”

  “I am quite sure that Miss Winter is an excellent nurse,” the Spaniard returned, and once again his eyes dwelt thoughtfully on Josie. She was also certain he had not neglected to observe the way in which Michael had squeezed her fingers. “Perhaps if you would care to walk with me to my car, senorita, you might give me a few hints as to the manner in which we must receive our invalid. Little things we must do to ensure his comfort.”

  It was not so much a request, as a naturally autocratic command, and although Mrs. Duveen elevated her eyebrows a trifle, and even Michael looked surprised, Josie was faced with no other alternative but to accompany the marquis. He bowed over Mrs. Duveen’s hand with all the courtly grace in the world, smiled at the doctor and patted him encouragingly on the shoulder, and then walked down the steps with the English girl who looked very slight and fair beside his elegant darkness.

  “I did not of course really wish to consult you about our method of receiving our guest,” he said as they crossed the forecourt. “All arrangements so far as that is concerned are complete. But I did wish to ask you about his progress. He looks fitter than I imagined, but has quite a long way to go yet.”

  “Yes,” Josie agreed, as they stood in the white-hot sunshine beside his glittering car, and the uniformed chauffeur held open the rear door. “He is improving every day, but he has, as you say, a long way to go.”

  “It was, I believe, a nasty accident he survived?”

  “A very nasty accident.”

  His slim fingers extracted a cigarette from his case, and he lighted it thoughtfully.

  “Sometimes it is a disadvantage for a man of his type to possess an over-devoted mother.” He looked at her, his black eyes soft, yet probing. “You know what I mean when I say ‘over-devoted’? It is no disparagement to Mrs. Duveen.”

  “I—well, I——” Josie sounded uncertain, while the light breeze stirred her curls, and he did not rem
ove his eyes from her face. “No, I can’t say I do,” she concluded, with more firmness.

  The cigarette was alight, and he put it between his shapely lips. An aroma of expensive tobacco surrounded them like incense.

  “In that case it is a little awkward for me to explain. But mothers sometimes have ideas—especially about only sons. And my sister’s future is entirely her own affair, do you understand at least that much? She has suffered in the past ... In future I wish her to make her own decisions, without interference from anyone, even members of her own family circle.”

  “I see,” Josie said, as she had said once before, when he had tried to make something clear to her. But she didn’t really see at all—until all at once light broke over her. And then she decided that his perception was uncanny, unless it was something more than perception that he was working on. And he certainly had a forthright method of dealing with problems as they arose.

  “But do you see?” His eyes were a little impatient. “Perhaps I have made a mistake, but it struck me that you and your patient—that you and he...”

  “Yes?”

  He frowned, and then turned away.

  “I am being unpardonably inquisitive. Please forgive me,” he said, and bowed to her formally. As his car rolled away out of the forecourt Josie had a strange recollection. She remembered Michael for some reason holding her hand very familiarly at the coffee table, patting it as if he liked the feel of it—smiling at her with warmth and humor and a touch of—intimacy? But there had never been anything intimate in their relationship!

  And Michael had never held her hand quite like that before, while other people could see what he was doing. Why had he done it today? And what had the marquis deduced from it?

  After dinner that night Michael suggested a stroll in the gardens. Mrs. Duveen had retired to her room with one of the blinding headaches that afflicted her occasionally, and she had not even been capable of facing up to dinner. Josie had done all that she could for her, and seen that a tempting tray was sent to her room, and then she and Michael had shared their table in the dining room while the third chair remained empty.

  It might have been Josie’s imagination—or the lingering hypnotic influence of the Marquis de Palheiro—but it did seem to her that the doctor was definitely less inhibited when his mother was not there to observe his every reaction. And tonight he was obviously feeling much more like himself than he had felt for weeks. He had rested well in the afternoon, bathed, shaved, and put on a superbly fitting dinner jacket which lent him the Englishman’s air of being effortlessly distinguished, and there was high good humor in his eyes.

  “I’m feeling fine,” he said. “Another few weeks and I’ll be back to normal, and you won’t see me leaning on a stick again for the rest of my life.” He consulted the wine list. “I’m not going to order champagne, because one can do that anywhere, and here in Spain there are so many wonderful wines that we mustn’t neglect to sample them.”

  The wine he ordered was sparkling, and the color of peach brandy, and a half-glass of it told Josie that it was fairly heady. Afterwards, on the terrace, they sipped liqueurs with their coffee, while an orchestra in the great restaurant behind them dispensed the zestful Spanish rhythms that set most people’s feet moving restlessly. Josie felt as if hers were affected by a kind of itch to be out in the middle of the glistening ballroom where late holidaymakers were gliding back and forth in an atmosphere heavy with flower scents, and the wine-sweet tang of the sea that wafted in through the open windows.

  Josie’s eyes were fascinated by the great stars that hung in the heavens above them, and a young moon was climbing above a thicket of umbrella pines that grew in a corner of the grounds. It looked like a thin sliver of silver caught up in the black branches, and the sky behind it was deep and dark like indigo. She couldn’t see the sea, but she could hear it slapping murmurously on the white beach just a little below them; there was something seductive and enticing about the way it crooned away tirelessly.

  “I can’t ask you to dance,” Michael Duveen said, “but we can have a little stroll before turning in, if you’d like that. Would you like it, Josie?” He smiled at her. “And may I say that you look quite devastating in that dress? Why is it that a uniform smothers a young woman’s personality?”

  “Does it?” But Josie had always been of the opinion that the Chessington House uniform was very attractive; and her dress was a simple, rather floating green chiffon—one of only two evening dresses she possessed—and would not have stood comparison with any of the other, far lovelier and more expensive dresses worn by visitors in the hotel that night. Or so she thought, remembering precisely what she had paid for it. “Perhaps I haven’t got a great deal of personality to smother,” she dimpled at him.

  “On the contrary, you’re a bit of a dark horse,” he told her, limping with her to the head of the terrace steps. As they descended them she felt sure that eyes watched them, and that limp which in some way merely added to his distinction, and the wing of gold in his hair above his right eyebrow as the colored lights shone down upon them. His hand was inside her arm, and he was leaning on her very lightly. “When I first saw you I thought you were terribly demure and meek—that under no circumstances would you say boo to a goose. But now I’m not so sure.”

  He led her away from the main paths where couples perambulated—and other couples took advantage of discreet alcoves and well-arranged garden seats to enjoy the magic of the evening—and they penetrated a grove of ilex trees. It was like entering a cool, dark tunnel, with the moonlight faintly filtering through and creating a checkerboard at their feet. It was also extraordinary to Josie that she should be here at this hour, in a land that was still completely strange to her, with a man who refused to let go her arm, although he was capable by this time of walking quite comfortably with the aid of his stick.

  “What did you do to the marquis this morning?” he mused, smiling down at her in the dim light. “Why was it that he so particularly wished to be alone with you for a few minutes before he left?”

  Josie pretended to look surprised.

  “You heard what he said. He wished to make certain there was nothing lacking for your reception tomorrow.”

  “And if that isn’t the height, and breadth, and depth of Spanish hospitality I don’t know what is!” Duveen returned a little mockingly. “No, Josie, you can’t expect me to believe that. There was something else, wasn’t there?”

  She hesitated.

  “You know Dona Cortes?”

  “Dona Maria de Silva y Cortes,” he corrected her. “That is her full name. I met her once about ten years ago. She was then eighteen. She will now be twenty-eight.”

  “Did you—like her?” she asked.

  “I could have liked her, no doubt, if I’d got to know her a little better. I had no opportunity to get to know her better. Why?”

  “Your mother says she is very beautiful.”

  “She was beautiful at that time, in a rather flawless, camellia-like way. She was also a bit of a blue-stocking.

  “And that put you off?”

  “Look here,” he said, looking down at her and frowning, “don’t tell me the marquis discussed his sister with you?”

  “Of course not,” Josie answered, so relieved that it hadn’t even occurred to him before that the marquis would do anything of the kind that she uttered the lie quite unblushingly. And then she rushed on: “I noticed that he has only one arm. That is rather a grim disablement. How did it happen?”

  “I think he was thrown from a horse—he used to play a lot of polo at one time, and in addition he broke in horses himself. He was always the intrepid type, the fearless, ardent sportsman who liked to live life dangerously, and was bored without excitement. He was always throwing in his lot with some expedition or other in some far corner of the globe, and often he financed the whole thing, because, of course, with him money has never been any object whatsoever. He still has the money, but nowadays life must seem a l
ittle circumscribed to him, to say the least.”

  “Terribly circumscribed,” Josie agreed, a note of purely womanly sympathy throbbing in her voice, because the marquis had struck her as unusually self-contained, and that surely meant that at some period of his life—probably soon after his accident—he had had to come to grips with himself, and recognize that in future there would be many limitations. His character had been strong enough to accept the thought of those limitations without any attempt at rebellion, hence the look of discipline in his face, the quiet strength of his mouth, and the gravity of his eyes.

  She felt a surge of admiration for him rise up in her. “However, it could be a great deal more circumscribed if he wasn’t so well endowed with this world’s goods,” Michael remarked. “And he doesn’t have to earn his own living, which is fortunate.”

  “Nevertheless, a one-armed man is very badly handicapped.”

  “So the sight of that, empty sleeve of his aroused all your feminine pity, did it?” He was smiling down at her in the gloom, and although she wasn’t looking upwards she could feel him bending his head towards her a little, as if he was attempting to look into her face. “Little Florence Nightingale with the truly tender heart! I believe most women find him irresistibly attractive, even though he does possess only one arm. How does h affect you?”

  “Affect me?” She gazed up at him in faint surprise, and then appeared to consider. “Well, of course, he is attractive—and unusual! I’ve never seen anyone quite like him before, but then I’ve never met a real live marquis before. And I’m quite sure he doesn’t require anyone’s sympathy.” She was so sure of this that she was even a little surprised by her own certainty; and, puzzling over the reason for this, and recalling the marquis’s dark uninformative face, and the cool note of authority in his voice, she was able to forget for a few moments the disturbing nearness of her present companion, and that warm grip of his upon her arm. Then, as a result of not concentrating on where she was placing her feet in that tunnel-like path she stumbled suddenly, one of her high heels catching in a corner of loosened paving, and but for Michael’s close grip she would have fallen flat on her face.