Ratcliffe jammed his monocle in his eye, and stared at her. She was looking radiantly young in her beautiful tea gown which was cut with the utmost simplicity. Her hair was dressed simply, too, and he felt a dreadful spasm of desire—for Grant’s wife, of all people!
Well, he had taken Susanna Winthrop away from the Yankee brute, and now the sight of Dinah’s youthful beauty had him wishing that he had been the one to initiate her, to enjoy her, to teach her to please him…
Cobie, visited by the intuition which had plagued him—and blessed him—all his life, read the man before him. Something in his stance, the set of his mouth, in the answer he made to Dinah, innocent in itself, ‘You hardly look old enough to have left dolls behind, Lady Dinah, so not surprising, hey?’ told him that he had been right to believe that the murdering swine was lusting after his innocent young wife.
He knew, which few did, that Sir Ratcliffe’s taste for young girls had led him into perversion and murder, and he also knew that for some reason the authorities were protecting him, which was why he had made it his business to try to trap him and see that he was punished for what he had done.
He controlled himself with difficulty, and took Dinah’s arm gently, saying, ‘We must move on, my dear,’ and led her away. He could hardly keep his hands off the man who had raped and killed poor Lizzie Steele and who was now laughing and talking with Susanna. He must try to warn her against him again, although he didn’t think that the man was fool enough to treat her as he had treated his child-victims.
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ asked Dinah, smiling and bowing at those whom she knew as they moved through the press of people.
‘Who?’ he asked, although he knew whom she meant, and was surprised by her acute understanding. He thought that, like himself, she probably possessed the uncomfortable gift of reading people accurately.
‘Sir Ratcliffe. I don’t like him. I didn’t like the way he looked at me.’
‘I didn’t like the way he looked at you, either,’ he told her frankly. ‘A man to avoid, my dear.’
Dinah was equally frank. ‘He gives me goose-pimples. Oh, hello, Violet. How odd and time-wasting that we have to go through all this polite palaver with people with whom we have already spent the day, just as though we were meeting them for the first time after years apart.’
Violet said briskly and nastily, ‘Don’t waste your clever remarks on me, Dinah. Save them for others. Not the Prince, he doesn’t like clever women.’
‘Fortunately I like clever women,’ Cobie murmured in Dinah’s ear, in case she was overset, which she wasn’t. He was bowing to Violet now, and saying all the right things. Reluctantly, Violet approved of him. He seemed to have an instinct which allowed him to be as exactly proper as the occasion demanded.
Kenilworth had once said that Grant was almost too good to be true. No one, and particularly no American, ought to be so civilised, so well seen, so athletic, so exactly everything a man ought to be. It was perhaps as well, Violet thought, that he couldn’t know what a tiger Cobie Grant was in bed—and now Dinah was getting the benefit of that. But she didn’t look particularly mauled, so perhaps she wasn’t.
Then, as they moved away from her, to do their duty to the other guests, before sitting down before one of the tea trolleys, Violet saw Cobie bend his head to say something to his wife. She saw Dinah turn to look up at him and give him such a smile that sexual jealousy had Violet in its thrall. Oh, yes, Dinah was getting the benefit, all right—and the parlour maid’s language which Violet used to herself was symbolic of the shock she was feeling.
Cobie had earlier told Dinah that she would have few rivals among the women present. She had teased him gently, saying that he thought so because she was his wife, and must therefore automatically be a nonpareil—as he was. Had she known of both Susanna’s and Violet’s reaction to her appearance and her manner, she would have known that he was speaking the truth.
They had barely sat down before the Prince and his wife arrived, and they all jumped to their feet to acknowledge the Royal presence.
Dinah was to discover that this strange mixture of Royal protocol and informality was typical of their Sandringham visit.
Later, after they had spent a leisurely hour over tea, she and Cobie retired to their rooms.
‘Now what do we do?’ she asked him comically, once they were alone together.
‘Well,’ he told her gravely, ‘I understand that if you are to be absolutely comme il faut in the drawing room by half past eight, you must immediately send for Hortense and Pearson and set them to dressing you. Whilst Giles and I must attend to the business of making me look suitable to honour the Prince’s dinner table.’
Dinah stared at him in disbelief. ‘Who told you that? It can’t possibly take us the next two hours—that must be nonsense.’
‘Violet did me the honour of putting me in the know, as she called it. She and Kenilworth come to Sandringham at least twice each autumn and winter for the shooting. We are a little early for that, so we must find other means of entertainment. The Prince, as you know, occasionally takes his with Violet. At the court of eighteenth-century France she would probably have been known as “la maitresse en titre”.’
Dinah smiled. ‘I suppose that translates as the King’s Prime Mistress, rather along the lines of a female Prime Minister. Do you really wish to live this idle life, Cobie?’
Her question was a serious one this time, and he answered her equally seriously. ‘Not really as a permanent thing, but, for the moment, it is a new experience. I have other major interests, and in time you will share them with me. But, for the moment, we are engaged in experiencing high society and Royal favour. Oh, and by the by, I ought to warn you that the Prince’s dinner-party usually consists of twelve courses, so don’t eat too much of the earlier ones.’
‘Violet being your informant again, I suppose. I must say, she does have her uses.’
‘True, and the dining table is arranged strictly according to precedence so I am hoping that you and I don’t end up having to eat our meal in the kitchen, seeing that we are an American peasant and his wife.’
He said this gravely, but, as usual, she took his comic meaning.
Later he came into her room where Hortense and Pearson had just finished dressing her. He was already immaculately turned out—a tribute to Giles’s art. He had difficulty in not laughing out aloud when he saw her evening gown. It was a dream of a thing in white, cut with artful simplicity to improve her figure and decorated only—in a saucy reference to her nickname as The English Snowdrop—with tiny silk flowers. The largest bunch of them was on the green sash which circled her narrow waist.
She had ordered it in secret and Cobie had not seen it until he had walked in a few minutes ago. Her reward was to be favoured with one of his wicked grins, rarely offered to anyone.
‘If you are trying to make Violet jealous, you could hardly have done better,’ was his comment. This, plus a careful kiss on the cheek, designed not to disturb her fashionable splendour, was sufficient reward for her. After that, once she had entered the drawing room, the admiration on the faces of the men, and the annoyance on the women’s, were merely icing on her cake. To have pleased and surprised her unflappable husband was, she considered, an achievement in itself!
They sat apart at dinner,
