admiration in the Queen Dowager’s eyes was, however, quickly replaced by one of anxiety.
“I sent for you, Viktor,” she began in her quiet voice, “to inform you that something very serious has happened and I wished you to learn of it from me rather than from anybody else.”
“What can have occurred?” the Count enquired.
He wondered as he spoke if the Queen Dowager had learnt of a rather regrettable party he had given two nights ago.
He thought while it was taking place that his guests’ behaviour would undoubtedly cause a scandal if anybody talked the next day.
But people, even the Dutch themselves, accepted some looseness of behaviour in those who belonged to the theatrical world, especially when they were French.
He thought it most unlikely that the Queen Dowager should have been told of certain regrettable incidents, although one could never be sure who would whisper spitefully in her ear and what tales she would find it expedient to remember.
“What has upset you?” he enquired. “If it concerns me, I can only express my deepest regrets. ma’am, that you should have been troubled.”
He always addressed the Queen Dowager formally and he knew that she liked the way he did not presume on their relationship.
“I am indeed upset,” she replied, “and I am afraid, Viktor, you are involved.”
The Count raised his eyebrows and waited.
He was not really apprehensive as to what might be disclosed. He knew only too well how any titbit of gossip could be mouthed over and exaggerated in Court circles and it was inevitable that he would always be suspected of the worst.
The Queen Dowager drew in a deep breath as if to sustain herself and then she started,
“Luise van Heydberg killed herself last night!”
She spoke without any emotion and yet it seemed as if the monotonous tone of her voice echoed and re-echoed around the room.
The Count stared at her incredulously.
“I ‒ don’t believe ‒ it!” he managed to stammer at last.
“It is true. She took enough laudanum to kill two strong men and, when her maid found her this morning, she must have been dead for eight or ten hours.”
“Good God!”
The Count expostulated the words. Then, forgetting all ceremony, he walked across the room to stand at the window gazing out onto the barren garden under a bleak November sky.
“I will do everything in my power to keep your name out of this,” the Queen Dowager added after a moment, “and to prevent there being a huge scandal.”
“Why should I get involved?” the Count asked her truculently.
“Because Luise had quarrelled with Willem over you.”
“Over me?”
“She had written a letter to you, an extremely indiscreet epistle, I understand, which any husband would resent.”
“How did Willem come to see it?”
“Luise was writing it in her private sitting room. He entered unexpectedly and, because she looked so guilty and tried to cover up the letter, he took it from her by force,”
“It is the kind of thing Willem would do!” the Count commented harshly.
The Queen Dowager sighed.
“You know just as well as I do how insanely jealous he is and, of course, where you are concerned he has had every justification.”
“It was all over two months – no, nearly three months ago.”
“Perhaps it was from your point of view,” the Queen Dowager said, “but Luise was still in love with you and behaved, I must admit, in an exceedingly hysterical manner.”
The Queen Dowager paused for a moment and then she added,
“So she died.”
The Count stared blindly out at the formal gardens. He was wishing, as he had wished so many times before, that he had never become involved with the Baroness van Heydberg, who had been the only attractive woman in attendance upon the Queen Dowager.
The other Ladies-in-Waiting were fat, middle-aged and dumpy and even to look at them made the Count think of suet puddings and dumplings that he had always disliked as a child.
In contrast Luise van Heydberg had been like a breath of spring on a winter’s day.
She had been beautiful, slim and very young for the post she occupied by right because her husband was of such high standing at Court.
The Baron’s second wife, Luise, was young enough to be his daughter and, as the Count quickly discovered, was not in the least in love with the man she had married.
Since she came from a family of no social importance, it had been for her a brilliant marriage accepted ecstatically by her parents who could hardly believe their good fortune.
It had not mattered to them that the Baron was now over fifty years of age or that his obsession for Luise from the moment he had seen her was likely at first to frighten and then revolt a very young girl.
All that mattered was that, as Baroness van Heydberg, she would become a hereditary Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen Dowager and have a position at Court which they had never imagined possible.
To the Count it had been just another of his light and amusing flirtations, which made the path of duty easier than it might have been otherwise.
He had no intention of embarking on anything serious with the wife of another man, nor did he intend, if he could help it, to add to the gossip writers’ store of incidents, which they repeated and re-repeated always to his disadvantage.
He had found Luise’s instantaneous response to his very first overtures intriguing and definitely flattering.
She had made it very clear that he embodied everything that she had dreamt about in her adolescent dreams and was the hero to whom she had been romantically inclined since she was a child.
“I worship you,” she had said to him once. “You are like Apollo. You bring a light to the darkness of my life.”
Satiated as he was with beautiful women and with affaires de coeur, which had occupied a great deal of his time since he was adolescent, the Count had been touched and at times moved by Luise’s passion for him.
Then about three months ago he had realised that it was getting out of hand.
She found it impossible, loving him as she did, to disguise her feelings even when they were surrounded by the stern disapproving eyes of those to whom protocol was a religion.
She began to plead with him to see her more than it was possible for him to do.
She
