Love in High Places Page 2

  To Valentine, with the stars pressing close to the window, and the frosty brilliance of the snow outside, the thought of having such an experience once in this warm, flower-scented atmosphere was an oddly pulse-quickening one just then.

  Perhaps because she was not likely to have it with the Baron von Felden, and even if the attractive Englishman asked her to dance ... he was looking her way again, with increasing interest... she couldn’t possibly agree, being what she was. Cinderella dressed up in borrowed plumes (or rather, cast-off ones!) and granted an evening off. For to-morrow she would be so much at the beck and call of her employer that it might be an offence if she stopped to talk with one of the guests.

  Although on the other hand, if she happened to be in a good mood, Lou might hand her a whole day’s holiday quite graciously!

  Without waiting for the sweet, or the coffee, Lou lighted a cigarette and ordered her to talk to her.

  “Talk about anything,” she insisted. “Yourself, or ... anything! But preferably yourself! There must be a lot I don’t know yet about you.”

  This was so true that Valentine gazed at her thoughtfully. Several months before, in America, she and Lou had run across one another in a New York beauty parlour, and but for Lou’s intervention Valentine would have lost a much-needed job on the spot. She had most unfortunately used the wrong rinse on Lou’s hair—even more unfortunate than it sounded, for the manageress was merely giving her a trial, and Lou was a special customer—and while the result was not quite disastrous, it would have been inflamed anyone less unpredictable than Lou. She had actually laughed, and pleaded for Valentine to be given another chance, and because the manageress could not afford to offend the only daughter of an Oil King, Valentine was given another chance, and she and Lou became in short space of time quite firm friends.

  It was really an extraordinary relationship that grew up between them, for Lou confided in the English girl to such an extent that Valentine frequently felt embarrassed, and invited her to lunch at the Morgan’s palatial New York home. Then she invited her for the week-end, found out all about her—or as much as Valentine cared that anyone should find out about her—and offered her a job. First as companion-secretary, and then as companion-personal maid.

  Valentine often wished she had more talent for typing letters and receiving dictation than she had for adjusting hemlines and invisibly mending lace underwear, for until Lou discovered how invaluable she was in the latter capacity she had had more status. Her father, if he had been still alive, would have felt less horrified to know that his daughter was earning her own living in a very down-to-earth manner if she could have been categorised the equivalent of a black-coated worker, and not transformed into someone whose task it was to turn the bathroom taps, and keep them running at just the right temperature, and brush a golden cloud of hair night and morning (and wash and set it at least three times every week!).

  Not that Valentine herself minded, for it was dull typing letters, and she took a kind of pride in performing a miraculously neat darn. And in America it didn’t seem greatly to matter what she did, so long as she was left in obscurity. But when they went off to Europe, taking in London on the way, she began to feel differently about the freakishness of Fate.

  In London she and her father had once lived very happily together. There was a certain tall town house which she did not dare go near in case it should bring back all too vividly days that were dead and done with. And in the pleasant countryside, quite close to London there was another house beside the river...

  She had prayed that Lou would not want to see too much of England, or linger too long, and fortunately the American girl had had other plans, and they had gone on to Paris, where there was less likelihood of someone who had once known Valentine well bumping into her accidentally and demanding to know where she had been hiding herself. And after Paris there was Monte Carlo and Nice, then Florence and Rome, where they passed the strangest Christmas Valentine had ever known, and Lou became involved with an Italian prince who was so plainly after her money that even she recognised she had had a lucky escape when another heiress caught his roving Italian eye.

  And now they were high up in the mountains of Austria, so far from the weathered thatch of an Oxfordshire village beside the Thames, and the hum of Piccadilly, that Valentine felt she could safely draw breath again, and take a certain amount of pleasure in her new and altered life.

  For one discovery she had made was that there are moments of happiness in every way of life, even moments of satisfaction and exaltation. One did not need to be rich and secure to enjoy a sunset, and the beauties of the world are free for everyone to gaze at. She could go out in the early morning with nothing at all in her pocket, but the feel of the sun and the wind on her face could make her suddenly quite content.

  There were also moments when she was not content—when she knew there were a great many things that she secretly craved—but these were controllable moments. The one thing she found it extraordinarily difficult to do was talk about herself, and Lou’s curiosity about her was aroused at regular intervals. She tapped impatiently with her scarlet-tipped fingers on the fid of her delicate toy of a platinum and diamond-encrusted cigarette-case while she waited for some diversion for her thoughts, and Valentine was saved by the tall Englishman somewhat diffidently approaching their table.

  He accorded them each a diffident little bow, and then addressed himself to Lou.

  “I was wondering whether you would be so very kind as to have coffee and a liqueur with me ... both of you, of course!” he added hastily. “In one of the lounges, or the ballroom if you would prefer it.”

  Lou regarded him without very much interest or appreciation.

  “That’s sweet of you, Mr. Haversham,” she murmured languidly. Then she introduced Valentine. “This is Miss Brown. Val, Mr. Giles Haversham, writer of thrilling detective stories.”

  “I love detective stories,” Valentine told him, as she gazed at him shyly.

  He had very white teeth, and eyes that were reassuringly grey and kind. Why was it, she wondered, that grey eyes were nearly always kind ... unless they were a certain steely type of grey. Compared with lustrous dark ones, that had the power to confound you, the fact that you could trust them came right out at you.

  She did not know that inwardly he smiled as he thought that, if she had been born plain “Miss Brown,” then his powers of detection were decidedly at fault.

  Lou rose and smiled at them both dismissingly.

  “I don’t think I feel like staying down here any longer,” she said. “You two can go off and dance if you like, and I’ll go straight up to my room. After all, you’re both English, so you’ll probably have a lot to talk about while you dance!”

  Valentine looked at her uncertainly, but Lou touched her cheek in a condescending manner.

  “Go off and enjoy yourself, my child. I’ll put myself to bed!”

  Giles Haversham stood politely staring after her as she whirled away from them in a cloud of green-flecked draperies and French perfume, and then he said a little bewilderedly to Valentine.

  “Do you normally put her to bed?”

  Valentine laughed.

  “I’m her personal maid, so of course I do.”

  “You don’t look like a personal maid to me,” he remarked, as he regarded her gravely; “but, then, I didn’t think many people had them nowadays, so I wouldn’t honestly know how much a rapidly disappearing species looks when it actually exists.” He placed a hand lightly under her elbow and guided her towards the ballroom. “Apparently it’s quite permissible for red hair and golden eyes to enter into the picture!”

  She glanced up at him with a smile in her eyes.

  “Auburn hair, Mr. Haversham, if you please! It was red in my schooldays, but those happened a long time ago.”

  “Or it seems a long time ago, is that it?” he asked gently, as he placed her in a chair that was companionably arranged alongside another, with a table between them,
on the fringe of the dance floor. He ordered coffee, and although he couldn’t tempt her with a liqueur—“Not even something colourful and innocuous, like crème de merit he?”—he toasted their better acquaintance in brandy that looked rather lonely at the bottom of a huge glass, and continued to regard her with thoughtful interest. “I take it your ‘employer’—is that the correct term?—has other uses for you, apart from those involved with assisting her to retire, since you appear to be on fairly good terms with one another? Very friendly terms!”

  She nodded.

  “Miss Morgan is an American, and the Americans are not sticklers for formality. Also I believe she quite likes me.”

  “I haven’t a doubt of it,” he assured her, “since she asks you to dine with her.” He offered her his cigarette case and lighted one for her. “Miss Morgan is the daughter of Martin C. Morgan, the oil man, isn’t she? An almost painfully wealthy man, and I’ve no doubt the suitors are thick as flies wherever she goes.”

  “The would-be suitors,” Valentine corrected. “Lou is no fool, and she keeps most of them at a distance.”

  “But she’s a highly glamorous young woman, and that can’t be too easy. It is part of your job to fend some of them off? Take the overflow and relieve the tension?” She smiled

  “Lou was bored to-night, and she asked me to have dinner with her. I don’t often do so.”

  “I’m very glad you did to-night,” he told her, with strange earnestness. “I’ve glimpsed you several times in the few days I’ve been here, but you always seem to be terribly preoccupied and have no time at all for light dalliance. Don’t you believe in it? ... Light dalliance, I mean!”

  Her expression grew serious.

  “I’ve a job to do, Mr. Haversham. I’m not here to waste my employer’s time.”

  “But you must have some time of your own, and tonight you’ve have been encouraged to dance.” He stood up, his grey eyes warming her with the eagerness of their invitation. “Shall we? I’m not very good at cha-cha-ing, and that sort of thing, but I’ll have great respect for your toes.”

  Actually, he was quite a good dancer, and if the modern rhythms defeated him a little he was quite masterly in the old-fashioned waltz. Valentine, drifting dreamily in his arms, remembered how little she expected to be sampling this excellent floor to-night, wondering whether she dare ask him if they could attempt the Viennese method of whirling round the room—especially when the orchestra struck up the inevitable “Blue Danube”—but decided against it when she caught sight of Lou on the edge of the floor.

  Lou had evidently decided against going to bed, and was sipping a drink in company with one of her numberless admirers in the hotel. Rather an elderly man, with patches of white hair at his temples and a generally distinguished appearance, who was often to be seen talking with the Baron von Felden, he was plainly endeavouring to convince Lou that the Baron’s absence was not a complete disaster. And although she still looked bored, she was obviously thawing a little under the influence of so much flattery, and was not prepared to find the Baron standing suddenly at her elbow, looking down sardonically at his fellow-countryman with the monocle.

  The latter uttered an expression of pretended disgust, and flourished the monocle. Lou turned wonderfully, gloriously pink—like the dawn on a high peak—and her blue eyes blazed with delight. She actually sprang to her feet.

  “Alex!” she cried, and anyone who had any doubts at all of the fatal attraction the handsome Austrian—an acquaintance of such a short time!—had for her must have had those doubts resolved instantaneously.

  For the time being, at any rate, he was her sun, moon and stars, and lesser men simply hadn’t a chance. Not a hope of persuading that particular heiress to endow them with all her worldly goods!

  “But you didn’t even warn me you might get back tonight,” she approached him, as she clung with both hands to the sleeve of his coat. “Alex, that was too bad!”

  “Nevertheless, I’m here.” he returned, and to make up for a certain soberness of tone he lifted one of her hands off his sleeve and kissed it. “Here, and completely at your service, Liebling,” he told her, smiling at her a little crookedly. His dark eyes were less brilliant than usual, and there was something jaded about his whole expression. “Don’t run away, Willi,” he requested the older man. “I feel like a celebration with champagne.”

  “Why?” Lou asked quickly. “Were things better than you expected to find them at your schloss?”

  “No worse,” he answered, and signalled the waiter. Willi—otherwise Count Wilhelm von Hochenberg—looked suddenly acutely depressed.

  “Nothing that is really bad ever gets better ... without a considerable effort,” he observed. “Or a smile from Providence,” he added, looking thoughtfully at Lou.

  And it was at that moment that Valentine, catching sight of her employer, made up her mind that she ought to retire. Her new acquaintance protested, advancing arguments that the night was young and Miss Morgan couldn’t reasonably object to her enjoying herself—especially as she didn’t apparently do so very often. But Valentine insisted, and they went back to their table and collected her handbag, and on their way to the lift they had to pass by the table where Lou was queening it with her two distinguished men friends, and a waiter was uncorking a bottle of champagne. Valentine would have avoided the ordeal if she could, but Lou caught sight of her, and in her bubblingly happy mood couldn’t refrain from demanding that the two should come over and join them.

  “This is Val, who looks after my clothes and things,” she said gaily to von Felden. “You wouldn’t think it tonight, because she’s wearing one of my cast-offs, and although she looks a poppet she’s much more at home running my bath. Sit down, sweetie,” she said to her employee, “and share in this toast the Baron’s determined to drink. I don’t know what it’s all about, but any occasion’s an occasion for champagne!”

  Giles Haversham said stiffly:

  “I was just escorting Miss Brown to the lift. I think she’s rather tired, and would prefer to go to bed...”

  “Nonsense!” Lou cried, in her elevated, insensitive mood. “What has Val done to make her so tired? I should be tired because I’ve been out all day in the fresh air, risking my neck on perilous slopes, and Val doesn’t even ski.”

  “Then that is something we can put right,” Alex von Felden said quietly behind Valentine’s back, and he put a glass of champagne almost ceremoniously into her hand. “Why is it that you do not join in the general rough-and-tumble like everyone else, Fraulein?” he inquired, his dark eyes subjecting her to a long and somehow uncomfortable scrutiny. At least, she found it uncomfortable, for it was oddly searching, somehow, and yet at the same time it was overpoweringly courteous, and on top of Lou’s introduction it made her feel as if her wits were deserting her.

  “I—I do ski,” she answered, and looked across at Lou. “But I’m not employed to amuse myself in Miss Morgan’s time.”

  “Oh, come now, Val!” Lou exclaimed, feeling momentarily ashamed of herself. “I’m not such a taskmaster, am I? And there’s always the instructor who would take you under his wing if you wanted him to do so. He’s terribly good-looking and most of the girls here seem to love falling about all over the place while he’s looking on.”

  “There’s no need for Miss Brown to fall about all over the place,” the Baron said incisively. He had a slight attractive accent which might have appealed to Valentine if she hadn’t been feeling so uncomfortable just then. “And there is no need to relegate her to a ski-instructor.”

  “You’re not suggesting that you give her lessons, are you?” Lou demanded, with rather an unpleasant laugh.

  The Baron bowed formally in front of Valentine.

  “Why not?” he asked. “Why not, Miss Brown? It is such a very—unusual name,” he added softly.

  Valentine put down her glass of champagne untasted as she felt Lou’s cooling glance upon her.

  “I think if you’re tired you’d better
go to bed, Val,” she said.

  The elderly Count von Hochenberg smiled at her rather charmingly, the Baron stood stiffly, as if at attention, and Giles Haversham moved in a relieved fashion to continue his escort to the lift. But the Baron moved forward quickly.

  “I will see Miss Brown to the lift,” he said. “I wish to ask her about such an unusual name!”

  Valentine felt him moving at her side, a dark, graceful, elegant shape, and she knew that his dark eyes were brooding on her thoughtfully as they made their way down the length of the ballroom and crossed the vestibule. Behind them they left a wide-eyed, incensed Lou, an amused Count, and a distinctly annoyed detective-story writer.

  “Tell me, Miss Brown,” Alex von Felden said softly in her ear, “are you easily upset? You must not be, you know! Lou does not realise that she can be crude at times, and the English Miss Browns are a little more sensitively constructed.” He took her hand before he parted from her at the lift gates. “You really must join us sometimes when we are out on the snow,” he said. “It can be fun, and Lou does not need a constant attendant. I had no idea that she kept someone like you imprisoned here.”

  “But I’m not imprisoned...” Valentine protested.

  He smiled down at her, and never in her life had a man smiled at her in quite that way before. Never in her life had she even dreamed that a man’s eyes, and the shapely curves of his mouth, could take on such a look while he was lightly clasping one of her small, pale hands as if it were a piece of porcelain.