The Goddess and the Gaiety Girl by Barbara Cartland

Author:Barbara Cartland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782130635
Publisher: Barbara Cartland EBooks ltd

Chapter Five

Larentia was sitting in the sunshine on a grass incline that led up to the keep.

Because the sun was so hot, she had taken off her bonnet and the shawl that she had put over her shoulders, and Tennyson’s poem of the Holy Grail was on her lap.

She was reading the words carefully, feeling that somehow they held a message for her, but she was not certain exactly what she would find.

She only knew that the words created pictures in her mind somehow linked with the beauty of the Castle and the atmosphere of mysticism, which was inescapable wherever she went or looked.

For the moment she had forgotten her own troubles and difficulties and was swept away into an ancient land of the past where Arthur’s Knights rode out to save and rescue the women who were menaced by evil in any form, whether that of a dragon or a sorcerer.

‘That is what I need to save me,’ Larentia thought and saw the Duke walking towards her over the green grass. She had known when she appealed to him in the morning room that although it was against his common sense he wanted to help her.

For a moment she thought he was going to reply that he would give her the money she had asked for and let her return to London.

Then he had said,

“May I think about what you have asked me, and let you know later in the day? I do appreciate your sense of urgency and the reason for it, but I also have to do what is right and fair towards my family.”

“Yes, of course you must.”

She knew what he was saying was wise and, in fact, just, but rather irrationally she was disappointed.

She realised when she ate her luncheon alone in the room where she had breakfasted that the Marchioness was refusing to associate with her.

She told herself it was what she should have expected, instead of believing, as she had, that perhaps an older woman would be sympathetic because Katie King was young and ignorant.

Thinking back into the past Larentia was aware how bitterly her mother’s relatives had disapproved of her marrying her father because he was poor and had nothing to recommend him except his academic distinction, which, in their eyes, did not count for much.

Her mother’s family lived in the North of England and could trace their ancestry back for hundreds of years. Although they were certainly not the social equals of the Garons, they were gentlefolk and had their roots in an estate that had been theirs for many centuries.

Larentia could remember her grandfather, a very autocratic old gentleman, who barked out orders to his children and to his servants in the same way that he had ordered about the Regiment he commanded.

Her mother’s two brothers were at the moment in India, serving their country as their father had done before them but Larentia had not seen either of them for over seven years.

When her grandfather had died most of the estate had been sold and the money went to his sons.

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