168. Love Holds The Cards - The Eternal Collection

Barbara Cartland

Description

Accustomed to spending fortunes on fast women and high living, Lord Wynchingham is horrified to lose one hundred thousand pounds in a card game and then finds that he is almost bankrupt. So when Tina Croome, his beautiful orphaned Ward, throws herself on his mercy he says that there is nothing he can do. Unless, she suggests, he uses the last of his credit to launch her into London Society and quickly attract a rich husband, using her large dowry to save her unfortunate Guardian from disgrace and the debtors’ prison. Eager suitors flock to the lovely young debutante, Tina, like bees to a honeypot, including Lord Wynchingham’s craven dissolute cousin Claude and the unpleasant but very wealthy Lord Welton, who Tina takes an instant dislike to. With great reluctance, she agrees to marry him, but only to save Lord Wynchingham from a dreadful fate. The more she comes to despise her fiancé, the deeper she falls in love with Lord Wychingham. But it is too late to prevent her imminent Wedding to Lord Welton and surely her love is doomed – until the crazed cousin Claude’s wicked and murderous kidnap plot intervenes to change her life, and love, for ever.KeywordsThe Prince of Wales, Newmarket, Piccadilly, Berkeley Square, Fleet Prison, the duns, the Beau Monde "Barbara Cartland was the world’s most prolific novelist who wrote an amazing 723 books in her lifetime, of which no less than 644 were romantic novels with worldwide sales of over 1 billion copies and her books were translated into 36 different languages.As well as romantic novels, she wrote historical biographies, 6 autobiographies, theatrical plays and books of advice on life, love, vitamins and cookery.She wrote her first book at the age of 21 and it was called Jigsaw. It became an immediate bestseller and sold 100,000 copies in hardback in England and all over Europe in translation.Between the ages of 77 and 97 she increased her output and wrote an incredible 400 romances as the demand for her romances was so strong all over the world.She wrote her last book at the age of 97 and it was entitled perhaps prophetically The Way to Heaven. Her books have always been immensely popular in the United States where in 1976 her current books were at numbers 1 & 2 in the B. Dalton bestsellers list, a feat never achieved before or since by any author.Barbara Cartland became a legend in her own lifetime and will be best remembered for her wonderful romantic novels so loved by her millions of readers throughout the world, who have always collected her books to read again and again, especially when they feel miserable or depressed.Her books will always be treasured for their moral message, her pure and innocent heroines, her handsome and dashing heroes, her blissful happy endings and above all for her belief that the power of love is more important than anything else in everyone’s life."

Sujets

• Sultan
• Bazaar
• Harem

Informations

• Publié par: M-Y Books
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782139478
• Langue: English

Extrait

Chapter one ~ 1784
“Then what shall I do?”
The question was plaintive, the voice shrill with anger.
The Earl of Wynchingham turned on his heel.
“You can go to the devil,” he said in a voice that seemed to cut through the air like a whip and on
the way you can find some other cork-brained idiot to pay your bills.”
He walked from the room with dignity, crossed the hall, waited for the footman to open the door
and stepped across the pavement into his coach that was waiting outside.
He flung himself back against the cushioned seat.
“Where to, my Lord?”
For a moment it seemed as though he had not heard the footman’s question. There was a deep
frown between his eyes and his mouth was set in a hard line.
“Where to, my Lord?” the footman repeated the question a trifle nervously.
“Home.”
The word came out like a pistol shot.
The footman sprang up onto the box.
“’Ome,” he whispered to the coachman, “and ’is Nibs be in a rare tantrum.”
The coach had already begun to move and the driver turned his head to wink at the footman.
“I bet you she wouldn’t last long,” he said. “Not but what she’s cost ’im a pretty penny.”
“’E can afford it,” the footman countered laconically.
Inside the coach Lord Wynchingham put his hand up to his forehead and then covered his eyes
as though they hurt. In fact he felt exceedingly ill.
The brandy he had drunk last night in large quantities, the rich food he had consumed and
above all the tension of the evening had all combined, when he did get to bed, to make sleep
impossible and as soon as it had been decently possible he had risen and called for his coach so that he
could visit his mistress.
He had no idea why he turned to her in his trouble, except that there seemed no one else and
perhaps at the very back of his mind, behind the cynical facade that was so characteristic of him, was
some youthful fantasy that believed that her continually voiced expressions of love had some basis in
reality.
He was to be speedily disillusioned. He had no sooner begun an explanation of his gaming losses
the night before than Cleo de Castile, who incidentally had been christened ‘Maisie Smith’, produced a
sheaf of bills, which she declared were his responsibility.
He would not have minded so much had he not been convinced in his own mind that he had
paid those self-same bills only a fortnight earlier or at least he had given Cleo the money to do so.
What had started as a half-expressed appeal on his part for a little sympathy and understanding
had ended in a furious quarrel with Cleo de Castile making threatening demands and Lord
Wynchingham’s final decision to be rid of her once and for all.
Now, sitting back in the coach with his eyes closed, he wondered how he could ever have been
so besotted as to have wasted so much of his money on such a particularly common and unpleasant
strumpet.
But Cleo was the fashion and the fact that he had beaten two of his greatest friends in a race for
her affection and carried her off from under the very nose of one of the richest and most powerful
men at Court had added both flavour and piquancy to the affair.
Now he saw her for what she was, a loud-mouthed, hard-headed creature whose only interest in
any man was what she could get out of him. He counted up how much he had spent on her during
these past six months and clenched his teeth in a sudden fury.
‘God! What I could not do with that money now!’
Through the fumes that still seemed to be in possession of his head and the throbbing of his
temples the scene last night came back to him in all its vividness.He had not been too foxed to know what he was doing. He realised that his luck was out, but like
every gambler since the beginning of creation he had believed that his luck would turn and the next
card would be in his favour – the next or the next –
But Lampton had gone on winning and winning and, because they were old enemies across the
green baize tables, he had not hesitated to taunt Lord Wynchingham, needling him into making more
and more extravagant bids until, finally, one hundred thousand pounds had waited on the turn of a
card.
Lord Wynchingham could see his own six of diamonds staring up at him and he thought now
that he had known, even before Lampton’s long thin fingers very slowly turned his own card over,
what it would be in the split second before he actually saw what the card was, he had known that he
was beaten.
And, drunk though he was, he knew exactly what it meant.
It was almost as though he saw a procession of his possessions passing away from him into
Lampton’s keeping. His house, his estate, the pictures his father had set so much store by, his horses
and last of all, because she was the least important, Cleo de Castile.
The card was there blinking up at him from the green baize, the ten of spades, black as his luck,
dark as the sudden despondency that gripped his heart until he felt himself almost squeezed of breath.
Yet he managed with a superb effort to give a little laugh.
“My pockets are now definitely to let, Lampton,” he had said lightly and as though it was not of
the least consequence. “I must drink to your good fortune as it is too late for any further play.”
He had known by the expression of the faces of those who had been standing round the table that
his sportsmanship appealed to them. He gulped down the brandy that the waiter had brought him and
then turned towards the door.
He was surprised to find Lampton at his side. For a moment he had thought the older man was
going to taunt him, but Lampton had said in a quiet, almost commiserating tone,
“I know that this is going to knock you a trifle, Wynchingham. Shall we say payment in a
month?”
Just for a moment rage had surged up in Lord Wynchingham. He had longed to be able to retort
that the money should be in Lampton’s hands first thing the following morning and yet, even as he
moved his lips, he knew that it was impossible. But because he was embarrassed, furious, hating both
himself and his opponent, he merely muttered ungraciously,
“I shall not default, you may be sure of that.”
He had walked from the Club without looking back. His coach was waiting outside, the horses
and the coachman half-asleep.
A drunken fop was protesting to the nightwatchman that he had been robbed by footpads.
“It’s a dish-grace!” he slobbered, “ – that’s what it is – a stinking dishgrace that a gentleman
cannot move about the streets without being ash-aulted! What I asks ish – ish this 1784 or ish it not?”
Unsteadily he brushed against Lord Wynchingham who swore at him.
Lord Wynchingham flung himself into his coach and slammed the door without waiting for his
footman to do it for him.
It was only a short distance to Berkeley Square, but it seemed to him that he had time to review
the whole of his life as the carriage carried him home.
God! What a fool he had been! He cursed himself as he climbed out and glanced for a moment at
the fine exterior of the house and at the massive silver door handle and knocker that shone in the
light from the linkman’s lantern.
He cursed himself as he moved across the marble hall with its ghost-like busts of his ancestors
and he cursed again as he went up the softly carpeted stairs where the pictures of previous Earls stared
back at him with what seemed to be accusing eyes.
He had never before appreciated the elegance of his bedchamber, his valet waiting up to undress
him, the fire burning brightly in the hearth and the heavy silken curtains blotting out the dawn
which was just beginning to creep over the rooftops.
He waited until his valet had left and then he strode up and down his room remembering, too
late, an interview only three days ago with his Solicitor.“You are spending too much, my Lord,” he had been told then.
“Gracious!” he exclaimed. “What is money for but to be spent and why this sudden parsimony?
There has always been plenty in the past and to spare.”
“Not to spare, my Lord,” the Solicitor corrected. “We’ve managed, with I think commendable
administration, to keep what one might call a steady balance. In fact, to put it clearly, the rents from
your Lordship’s estate have been able to offset the majority of your expenditure, but now things are
different.”
“How different?”
He had known the answer even before his Solicitor had enumerated his increased expenditures,
his racing stables at Newmarket, the improvements he had made to his house in the country before
the Prince of Wales’s visit six months earlier, but these were almost paltry beside the sums of money
that he had been expending in London on the entertainment of his friends and to satisfy the
extravagance of his mistress.
Cleo de Castile had not been the only one. Before her he had been the protector of a more
flamboyant and even more expensive ‘lady’, who was not only French by name but French by birth.
She had succeeded an opera dancer and further into the past were innumerable little ‘bits of muslin’
whom he had allowed to fleece him, only