Man of Destiny Read online

  His fingers were very hot, almost as if he had a temperature, and they clung to her as she sat beside the bed. It was true that he was only a very little boy for his age, and he looked very wan and helpless as he lay there.

  “If they take you away I shall run after you,” he vowed. “I don’t like that tall man who came and took us off the ship this morning!”

  “I’m sure Senhor de Capuchos isn’t really as unkind as he seems,” Caroline tried to soothe him. “I don’t suppose he has any little boys of his own, so he doesn’t know how to handle them.”

  And that set her wondering whether Vasco de Capuchos had any little boys of his own—which seemed extremely unlikely!—and whether, indeed, he was married. She felt a shiver of sympathy for his wife if in some misguided moment some woman had linked her life with his.

  But Richard was not interested in reasoning or explanations just then. He had one fixed obsession, which was preventing him feeling very much better than he had done before he was violently and physically sick.

  “If he sends you away I won’t let you go away without me! I really will run after you, and you’ll have to take me with you!” he reiterated, as if he was making a solemn vow.

  But Caroline tried to soothe him.

  “I’ll stay with you for a few days. I’m sure he’ll let me stay with you for a few days...”

  But Richard turned his face to the wall. Young though he was he knew that a few days would pass, and where would he be then? Alone and at the mercy of the dark man who was already a sort of ogre.

  To do him justice, Caroline thought there was a certain concern in de Capuchos’ voice and expression when, later that afternoon, he arrived at their suite and asked after the Marques’s nephew.

  “He’s sleeping,” Caroline said. “It must have been some sort of stomach upset.”

  He looked at her oddly and nodded his head.

  “He is better now?”

  “I think he will be better when he wakes up.”

  De Capuchos looked at her even more oddly, and strolled across to the window that overlooked a corner of the hotel garden. Beneath the hot blue sky it was an oasis of coolness and shade.

  “I always think,” he remarked musingly, “that if you have a bad tooth the sooner you have it extracted the better. Then the pain is over, and there is no more trouble. Ricardo is not suffering from toothache, but he does appear to have formed an attachment for you which is not in his own best interests ... And in his best interests the sooner you leave him the better!”

  “You mean—?” She felt something like a rush of horror, for unless she read him incorrectly the intention he had formed was ruthless. “Not—not almost immediately...?”

  “Si, senhorita.” He nodded almost approvingly. “I see you understand me, and no doubt follow my reasoning. It will be like depriving a baby of a kitten for a few days, and then all will be over and forgotten. I shall take Ricardo out of Lisbon tomorrow, and hand him over to the care of the housekeeper at the Quinta de Fonteira, which is a small country home of the Marques within easy reach of the sea. It will be good for Ricardo there, and the housekeeper is an excellent woman who will find someone to take entire charge of him until the time arrives when he can be despatched to school. And that should not be such a great while ahead.”

  “And his uncle—the Marques? Will he not want to see him before he is disposed of out of hand like that?” Caroline, who was shaking with resentment and indignation, enquired with all the coolness she could muster.

  De Capuchos shrugged.

  “The Marques’s health has not been good lately, and we do not trouble him with small matters. Only essential matters.”

  “And the well-being of a child who has only recently lost his father, and has no idea when he will see his mother again, is not, in your opinion, an essential matter?”

  “Well—” with another shrug, and a cool look of amusement dawning suddenly in the dark, disdainful eyes—“you must admit that a child is but a child— a small person. When he is older the Marques, I have no doubt, will take an excessive amount of interest in him.”

  “But the Marques,” she pointed out, “is an old man. He might not live long enough to take an interest in him.”

  “In that case Ricardo himself will become the Marques. But,” with faint surprise, “why do you assume that my employer is old? He is, as a matter of fact, in his early fifties ... A well-preserved man who might marry again one of these days. He has intimated as much to me.”

  “Then he has already been married once?”

  “Yes, but there were no heirs.” Caroline turned away. Somehow this new picture she was able to form of the Marques de Fonteira as a man still of an age to marry again—thereby providing Richard with a woman in his life who might perhaps take a genuine interest in him, and mother him—made the knowledge that she had got to leave him almost at once seem less painful. She bit her lip hard as she stood staring at the handsome, painted wall of the private sala, and then with an air of casualness asked how soon he wished her to leave.

  “Tomorrow morning, if you will have your cases ready for collection, senhorita.”

  She wheeled round and looked at him with clear eyes.

  “It is possible I may not get a flight back to London at such short notice.”

  “Then we will accommodate you in another hotel, where you will be as comfortable as you are here,” he returned without hesitation, and with the utmost amiability. “The important thing about getting you out of this hotel is that Richard will not see you again before you leave,” he explained. “Or after you have said goodnight to him tonight, that is!”

  “And I am not to tell him that I am going?”

  “Please, no!”

  “I think,” she told him, before she could stop herself, “that you are an extraordinarily ruthless person, senhor ... And cruel!” she added.

  His dark, handsome face was a smiling mask of mockery as he bowed to her.

  “And you, senhorita, are excessively sentimental ... And not good for small boys, I feel sure!”

  After which he left her alone in the room, and she stood biting her lower lip so hard that it bled. She dabbed at it, when she tasted the salt taste on her tongue, with a wisp of cambric handkerchief, and then tiptoed to Richard’s room and peeped in at him.

  He was sleeping peacefully ... Or he appeared to be sleeping peacefully. She sighed and wondered how skilful she would have to be to say goodnight to him without arousing his suspicions.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN the morning she was ready and waiting when the porter came to her room to collect her luggage.

  There was not a great deal of it for she had travelled light when making her first trip to Africa, and she had not collected a lot of new clothes or souvenirs in the ensuing weeks. Now that she was going home to England, and it meant looking for a new job, her cases looked somehow pathetic standing in the middle of the floor covered by its sumptuous carpet.

  She cast a glance round at the elaborately furnished private sala, and the thought crossed her mind that she had had little opportunity to enjoy it. And it was highly unlikely that her next job would provide her with such a luxurious background. Yet the thought uppermost in her mind was not that she was saying goodbye to luxury, but that last night she had deliberately deceived Richard ... And she might never see him again!

  In fact, it was extremely likely that she would never, never see him again!

  She followed the porter from the room, and Senhor de Capuchos was waiting outside in the corridor, looking alert and ready to face the day in one of his fine silk suits.

  Caroline herself was wearing a suit of light blue shantung, and her fair hair was caught back from her face by a blue Alice band. In her handbag Senhor de Capuchos’ cheque, for a month’s salary in lieu of a proper amount of notice, was busily burning a hole, and even as she said goodbye to him she wondered whether she ought to take it out and tear it into shreds and scatter them over the carpet before his
eyes.

  He was so arrogant that he thought a cheque for a month’s salary, to be cashed at a bank in London, was sufficient compensation for breaking faith with a small boy who had trusted her, and leaving him to the mercy of his own dark, unfeeling kind. Although, in absolute fairness, his mother was a golden blonde, and she had had very little more consideration for the son who was her only child ... so far!

  “Goodbye, senhorita.” Senhor de Capuchos extended his hand. “You understand that your passage to London—your air ticket, that is—is paid for, and all you have to do is to call at the airline offices some time during the day and pick up your ticket. You are booked for a flight that leaves tomorrow. In the meantime I hope you will enjoy! Lisbon,” with a queer little impersonal smile curving his lips.

  “Thank you, senhor.”

  His smile expanded, grew almost urbane, and drily humorous.

  “Please forget what I said to you about wearing a uniform yesterday, Senhorita Worth. Your clothes,” as his eyes roved over her trim little suit, “are charming, and I had no right to offer any comment about them, in any case.”

  “You certainly hadn’t, senhor.” Her blue, English eyes flashed at him coldly. “We are both, apparently, on the pay-roll of the Marques de Fonteira—or we were until I was removed from it yesterday—and if any stipulations about clothes had to be made, then it was the Marques who had the right to make them, not you.”

  He bowed his sleek head.

  “I stand reproved.”

  “I hope, in your capacity as spokesman for the Marques, and carrier-out of his wishes, you will see to it that little Richard—” she paused for a moment to steady that treacherous lower lip of hers, which she had no desire at all should betray her to this man—“little Richard will be allowed some fun in his life, as well as discipline. He has had very little fun so far, and I did try to make up to him for—a lot of things!”

  She fumbled with the clasp of her handbag, hastily stooped and picked up a small shagreen beauty-box that had been given to her by a former appreciative employer, and then started to walk hastily away along the corridor. Although he made no move to follow after her she knew that Senhor Vasco Duarte de Capuchos stood watching her every movement until the lift received her, and the soft closing of its gates disturbed the early morning hush of the corridor.

  The journey to the hotel where she was to spend one night was only very short, and the taxi decanted her almost before she had had time to feel her anger cooling, and the beauty and brilliance of a Lisbon morning at the height of the summer season had started to exercise its spell.

  She went up in another lift to a pleasant suite comprising a large, airy bedroom and bathroom that had been reserved for her, and after a second breakfast of coffee and rolls—the first she had barely tasted—she went out on to the balcony to ponder the problem of how to pass the day.

  Lisbon, she had been given to understand, had a lot to offer apart from a wonderful shopping area where the prices were high and the streets were steep, but she was in no mood to look at museums or examine architecture, however interesting and unusual it might prove to be. And the famous jacaranda trees along the river were not in bloom at this season, so the mist of blue beneath which the fishergirls walked with their creels of fish on their heads was one sight she would have to miss. But she could take a taxi out to the suburbs, which were quite unlike the suburbs of most up-to-date capital cities—according to Ilse de Fonteira, who was quite enthusiastic about Portugal as a country in which to live—and gain a swift impression of the countryside. It would be something to take back to England, something to think about in later days, when she was also thinking about Richard, and wondering how he was getting on.

  Of course, Ilse de Fonteira had promised to keep in touch with her ... to write to her occasionally. She had been grateful for the way in which the girl had fitted into her household, and for the way in which she had handled Richard. Unlike Senhor de Capuchos she had wanted someone to take over Richard who was young enough to keep him entertained, and responsible enough to have his welfare at heart. And Caroline, daughter of a clergyman who had died and left her without the means to support even a small furnished flat over her head, but with many happy memories of an extraordinarily well-balanced childhood, had seemed the ideal person to fulfil the dual task satisfactorily.

  But not in the opinion of Senhor de Capuchos, who had not hesitated to send her packing with the very minimum amount of delay!

  As she made her way down to the ground floor of the hotel she wondered whether Ilse would write to her at the address she had given her. But it was so unlikely that she thought it was most probable she would never again hear any news of Richard.

  They were two ships that had passed in the night ... A small boy who would one day have a title, and own a lot of land and houses, and possess a big bank balance, and a girl who was not so very many years older than he was, although she could have been his mother. And at the thought of being a mother to a small boy like Richard she suddenly felt a little deprived, and by no means certain about the future, or anything connected with it. At the moment it stretched ahead of her like a long, empty road ... And she didn’t even know in which direction the road would proceed.

  She was in no mood for a taxi ride when she got out into the street, so she boarded one of the overcrowded tramcars, and ended up in the main shopping thoroughfare, where she spent the morning window-gazing.

  She bought herself a silk head-square and a bottle of inexpensive perfume. It was the bottle that attracted her and, again, it would be something to remind her of Lisbon. And then she had lunch in a small restaurant where the food was good, but didn’t particularly tempt her because she had little or no appetite, and it was so hot that long, cool drinks were all she really needed. Afterwards she wandered along beside the Tagus and vaguely admired the Italianate church of S. Vicente that stands on a wide terrace and overlooks the river, and two other churches nearby with terraces and splendid views. And then she wandered in some public gardens and found herself under the shadow of the Castle of St. George, with golden-white battlements and perhaps the best view of all over the city, right out to the bar of the Tagus and the pinnacled Cintra hills, like the backcloth of a fairy tale. And as the heat of the afternoon reached its peak she sat outside an open-air cafe and drank a glass of Coca-cola in preference to wine or coffee, and finally made her way back to the hotel as the sun was slanting in a westerly direction across the vivid arc of sky, and Lisbon shop and office workers were pouring out into the streets after the enforced confinement of the day, and the tramcars were so crowded that it was almost unbelievable, and the noise of them made her feel a little deaf.

  Inside the hotel vestibule she found Senhor de Capuchos pacing up and down and waiting for her in a kind of contained fury. Hardly had she entered the vestibule than he pounced on her, gripping her bare, smooth arm and vaguely recognising that she was wearing a striped sun-suit instead of the tailored shantung in which she had departed from the Aviz that morning, and carried an enormous shady hat in her hand and a pair of dark glasses—like any ordinary tourist with nothing at all on her mind, and no guilty secret to conceal.

  “Where is he?” he demanded, his voice like the drip of ice, although his dark eyes were actually flaming with fury, and she felt as if they seared her as they bored into hers. “Where is Ricardo, and why is he not with you? What have you done with him? Where is he?”

  Caroline stood absolutely still while his hard, strong fingers carelessly bruised her arm, and a group of people near the reception desk turned and stared at them. Another group of people entering the hotel also stared.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Caroline’s voice was also clear and cold, although inside her a wave of uneasiness was spreading like an agitated torrent. “I haven’t seen Richard since last night. When I left this morning I imagined he was still in bed in his room.”

  “He was. But he wasn’t in his room at ten o’clock, and since then no one ha
s seen him. It’s no use you saying you know nothing about it, because you must have planned this. You took him sightseeing with you, yes?”

  The ‘yes?’ was like a pistol shot.

  “Don’t be absurd, senhor.” Although she was badly startled her tone was quite unruffled. “As if I would arrange to take Richard sightseeing when it was by your wish that I said goodbye to him last night! If he’s missing I know nothing about it...” And then a rush of concern invaded her voice. “But if he is missing where is he? We must find him at once! Oh, senhor, we must find him!”

  Suddenly realising he was still grasping her arm, he released it. He stood back and looked at her without any apology in his expression, however.

  “Don’t worry, senhorita, we will find him. As you say, we must!” His tone was grim.

  Caroline felt suddenly appalled. She faced him stiffly.

  “If he has run away it’s your fault,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NO sooner had she uttered the words than she felt faintly dismayed.

  “I’m sorry, senhor,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He half turned away from her. “What does matter is that we should cease accusing one another and start looking for the boy. I was so certain he was with you that I didn’t inform the police, but I will rectify that omission now. You will go to your room and wait until you hear from me.”

  “But can’t I help you look for him?” It was bad enough to know that Richard was missing, but to be expected to sit still and do nothing while others searched for him was too much to expect of her ... more than she was prepared to agree to. “He can’t have got very far—he’s so small...”

  “He has been missing since ten o’clock this morning, remember?” His tone was very grim. “In that time he could have travelled quite a distance, even on his small feet. Unless you can supply some reason for him running away there is nothing else you could do that would be really useful ... That is why I request that you stay here.”