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  The Demon Lover

  Виктория Холт

  When Kate Collison, to help her ailing father, completes his portrait of the powerful Baron de Centeville, her only thought is to be a dutiful daughter. But when the Baron presents her to Parisian society as the painter, Kate finds herself basking in the recognition . . . until she discovers that the Baron has plans for her -- shocking plans that will change her life unless she can fight the Baron with his own weapons...

  Victoria Holt

  The Demon Lover

  Summons to the Chateau

  It was a hot June day when I discovered my father’s secret which was to change the whole course of my life, as well as his. I shall never forget the horror that gripped me. The sun was brilliant, merciless, it seemed. It had been the hottest June for years. I sat there watching him. He seemed to have grown ten years older in the space of a few minutes, and as he turned his eyes to me I saw the despair in them, the sudden releasing of pretence. He knew that he could no longer hide this tragedy from me.

  It was inevitable that I should be the one to discover it. I had always been closer to him than anyone else even my mother when she had been alive. I understood him in all his moods. I knew the exultation of the creative artist, the striving, the frustrations. The man I knew in this studio was different from the gentle, rather uncomplicated human being he became outside it. Of course it was the studio which claimed the greater part of him. It was his life. He had been brought up to it. From the age of five, in this very house -which had been the home of the Collisons for a hundred years he had come to the studio to watch his own father work. There was a story in the family that when he was four years old they had thought he was lost and his nurse had found him here painting on a piece of vellum with one of his father’s finest sable brushes.

  Collison was a name in the art world. It was always associated with the painting of miniatures, and there could not be a collection of any note in Europe which did not contain at least one Collison.

  The painting of miniatures was a tradition in our family. My father had said that it was a talent which was passed down through the generations and to become a great painter one must begin in one’s cradle. So it had been with the Collisons. They had been painting miniatures since the seventeenth century. Our ancestor had been a pupil of Isaac Oliver, who in his turn had been a pupil of none other than the famous Elizabethan miniaturist Nicolas Hilliard.

  Until this generation there had always been a son to follow his father and carry on not only the tradition but the name. My father had failed in this; and all he had been able to produce was a daughter-myself.

  It must have been a great disappointment to him, although he never mentioned it. He was a very gentle man outside the studio, as I have said, and was always conscious of other people’s feelings; he was rather slow of speech because he weighed his words before uttering them and considered the effect they would have on others. It was different when he worked. Then he was completely possessed; he forgot meal times, appointments, commitments of any sort. Sometimes I thought he worked feverishly because he believed he was going to be the last of the Collisons. Now he was beginning to realize that this might not be so, for I too had discovered the fascination of the brush, the vellum and the ivory. I was teaching myself to carry on the family tradition. I was going to show my father that a daughter was not to be despised and could do as well as any son. That was one of the reasons why I gave myself up to the joy of painting. The other far more important was because, irrespective of my sex, I had inherited the desire to produce that intricate limning. I had the urge and I ventured to think the talent to compete with any of my ancestors.

  My father, at this time, was in his late forties. He looked younger because of his very clear blue eyes and untidy hair. He was tall I had heard him called lanky and very thin, which made him seem a trifle ungainly. It surprised people, I think, that from this rather clumsy man could come those delicate miniatures.

  His name was Kendal. There had been Kendals in the family for generations. Years ago a girl from the Lake District had married into the family and the name came from her birthplace. It was a tradition that all the men should have names beginning with K and the letters KC. etched in a corner so small that they were barely perceptible were the hallmark of those famous miniatures. It had caused a certain amount of confusion as to which Collison had executed the painting, and it had often been necessary to work out the date from the period and the subject.

  My father had remained unmarried until he was thirty. He was the sort of man who was inclined to thrust aside anything that might distract him from his work. Thus, with marriage, too, although he was well aware of his duty rather like that of a monarch to produce the heir to carry on the family tradition.

  It was only when he went to the seat of the Earl of Langston in Gloucestershire that the desire to marry became something other than a duty to the family. He had been engaged by the Earl to paint miniatures of the Countess and her two daughters, Lady Jane and Lady Katherine known as Lady Kitty. He always said that the miniature of Lady Kitty was the best work he had ever done.

  “There was love in it,” he commented. He was very sentimental.

  Well, the outcome was romantic but of course the Earl had other ideas for his daughter. He had no appreciation of art; he merely wanted a Collison miniature because he had heard that “This Collison is a good man’.

  “A Philistine,” my father had called him. He thought artists were servants to be patronized by men of wealth. Moreover, he had hopes of a duke for his daughter.

  But it turned out that Lady Kitty was a girl who liked to have her own way and she had fallen as deeply in love with the artist as he had with her. So they eloped and Lady Kitty was informed by her irate father that the gates of Langston Castle were closed to her forever more. Since she had had the folly to become Kitty Collison, she would have no further connection with The family of Langston.

  Lady Kitty thereupon snapped her fingers and prepared for what, to her, must have been the humble life at Collison House.

  A year after the marriage I made my dramatic entrance into the world, causing a great deal of trouble and costing Lady Kitty her never very robust health. When she became a semi-invalid and unable to bear more children, the disastrous truth had to be faced: the only one was a girl and it seemed as though that was the end of the Collison line.

  Not that I was ever allowed to feel that I was a disappointment. I discovered it for myself when I learned of the family traditions and became familiar with the big studio and its enormous windows placed so as to catch the strong and searching north light.

  I learned a great deal from servants’ gossip, for I was an avid listener and I quickly realized that I could learn more of what I wanted to know through them than I ever could by asking my parents.

  “The Langstons always had a job getting sons. My niece is up there in service with some cousins of theirs. She says it’s a grand place.

  Fifty servants . no less . and that just for the country. Her ladyship wasn’t meant for this sort of life. “

  “Do you think she has regrets?”

  “Oh, I reckon. Must do. All them balls and titles and things … Why, she could have married a duke.”

  “Yet, he’s a true gentleman … I will say that for him.”

  “Oh yes, I’ll grant you that. But he’s just a sort of tradesman … selling things. Oh, I know they’re pictures and that’s somehow supposed to be different… but they’re still things … and he’s selling them. It never works … stepping outside. Class and all that. And there’s no son, is there? All they’ve got is that Miss Kate.”

  “She’s got her wits about her, no mistake. A bit of a madam, that one.”

&
nbsp; “Don’t really take after either of them.”

  “Do you know what I reckon? He ought to have married a strong young woman … his own class … A lady, of course … squire’s daughter or something … He went too high, he did. Then she could have had a baby every year till she got this son what could learn all about painting. That’s how it ought to have been. It’s what you get for marrying out of your class.”

  “Do you think he minds.” “Course he minds. He wanted a son. And between you and me her ladyship don’t think all that much of this painting. Well, if it hadn’t been for the painting he’d never have met her, would he? And who’s to say that mightn’t have been for the bes;.?”

  So I learned.

  At the time I discovered the secret a year had passed since my mother had died. That was a great blow to our household. She had been very beautiful and both my father and I had been content to sit and look at her. She had worn blues which matched her eyes and her tea gowns were draperies most becomingly trimmed with lace and ribbons. Because she had been a semi-invalid since my birth, I felt a certain responsibility for that; but I consoled myself that she enjoyed lying on her sofa and receiving people, like a queen at her coucher. She had what she called her ‘good days’; then she would play the piano or arrange flowers and sometimes entertain people from the neighbourhood mostly.

  There were the Farringdons who lived in the Manor and owned most of the land round about, the vicar and the doctor with their families. Everyone was honoured by an invitation from Lady Kitty, even Lady Farringdors, for social status was a great concern others and although the Farringdons were rich, Sir Frederick was only a second-generation baronet and Lady Farringdon was somewhat impressed by the daughter of an Earl.

  My mother made no attempt to manage the household. That was all achieved by Evie, without whom our lives would have been a great deal less comfortable. Evie had been only seventeen when she came to us.

  That was at the time when I was about a year old and my mother had by that time slipped gracefully into invalidism. Evie was a distant cousin of my mother’s one of that army of poor relations which so often exists on the fringe of wealthy families. Some distant female member of that family had married beneath her, which meant against the family’s wishes, and so took a leap into obscurity. Evie was a bud from one of those branches, but she had for some reason kept in touch and, during family emergencies, had been called upon for help.

  She and my mother had been fond of each other and when the beautiful Lady Kitty found that she would spend a certain time of her life reclining on sofas it occurred to her that Evie was just the person needed to come and take charge.

  So Evie came and never regretted it. Nor did we. We depended on Evie.

  She managed the household and the servants, was a companion and lady’s maid to my mother, an efficient housekeeper, a mother to me and all this while she made sure that my father was able to work without distraction.

  So we had Evie. She arranged little parties for my mother and made sure that everything went smoothly when visitors called at the house about commissions for my father’s work. When he had to go away which he did fairly frequently he could go, knowing that we were well looked after.

  My mother loved to hear of my father’s adventures when he returned home. She liked to think of him as a famous painter in great demand, although she was not really interested in what he was doing. I had seen her eyes glaze over when he was talking enthusiastically but knew what he was talking about, for I had the Collison blood in my veins and I was never happier than when I had a fine sable brush in my hands and was making those faint sure strokes on a piece of ivory or vellum.

  I was Katherine too, but called Kate to distinguish me from Kitty. I did not look in the least like my mother or father. I was considerably darker than either of them.

  “A throw-back to the sixteenth century,” said my father, who was naturally an authority on faces.

  “Some long-ago Collison must have looked exactly like you, Kate. Those high cheekbones and that touch of red in your hair. Your eyes are tawny too. That colour would be very difficult to capture. You’d have to mix paints very carefully to get it. I never like that for delicate work … The result can be messy.”

  I often laughed at the way his work always seemed to creep into his conversation.

  I must have been about six years old when I made a vow. It was after I had heard the servants talking about my being a girl and a disappointment to my father.

  I went into the studio and standing in the glare of the light which came through the high window, I said: “I am going to be a great painter. My miniatures are going to be the best that have ever been known.”

  And being a very serious child and having a passionate devotion to my father as well as an inborn knowledge that this was what I had been born for, I set about carrying out my intention. At first my father had been amused, but he had shown me how to stretch vellum over a stiff white card and press it between sheets of paper, leaving it under a weight to be pressed.

  “The skin is greasy,” he told me, ‘so we have to do a little pouncing.

  Do you know what pouncing is? “

  I soon did, and learned how to rub the surface with a mixture of French chalk and powdered pumice.

  Then he taught me how to use oil, tempera and gouache. | “But water-colours are the most satisfactory for the smallest work,” he said.

  When I had my first brush I was delighted; and I was filled with joy when I saw my father’s face after I had painted my first miniature.

  He had put his arms round me and held me close to him so that I should not see the tears in his eyes. My father was a very emotional man.

  He cried: “You’ve got it, Kate. You’re one of us.”

  My mother was shown my first effort.

  “It’s very good,” she said.

  “Oh, Kate, are you going to be a genius too? And here am I… so surely not one!”

  “You don’t have to be,” I told her.

  “You just have to be beautiful.”

  It was a happy home. My father and I grew closer through our work, and I spent hours in the studio. I had a governess until I was seventeen.

  My father did not want me to go away to school because that would interrupt the time I spent in the studio.

  “To be a great painter, you work every day,” he said.

  “You do not wait until you feel in the mood. You do not wait until you feel ready to entertain inspiration. You are there waiting when she deigns to call.”

  I understood completely. How could I have borne to be away from the studio? My resolve to be as great-no greater-than any of my ancestors had stayed with me. I knew that I was good.

  My father often went abroad and would sometimes be away for a month or two at a time. He had even visited several of the European courts and painted miniatures for royalty.

  “I should like to take you with me, Kate,” he often said.

  “You’re as capable as I am. But I don’t know what they would think of a woman.

  They wouldn’t believe the work was good . it it had been done by a member of the female sex. “

  “But surely they could see for themselves.”

  “People don’t always see what their eyes tell them is there. They see what they have made up their minds to see, and I’m afraid they might make up their minds that something done by a woman could not possibly be as good as that done by a man.”

  “That’s nonsense and it makes me angry,” I cried.

  “They must be fools.”

  “Many people are,” sighed my father.

  We painted miniatures for jewellers to sell all over the country. I had done many of those. They were signed with the initials KC.

  Everyone said, “That’s a Collison.” They didn’t know, of course, that it was the work of Kate not Kendal Collison.

  When I was a child it had sometimes seemed that my mother and father inhabited different worlds. There was my father, the
absentminded artist whose work was his life, and my mother the beautiful and interestingly delicate hostess, who liked to have people around her.

  One of her greatest pleasures was holding court while admirers revolved about her, so delighted to be entertained by the daughter of an Earl even though she was merely the wife of an artist.

  When tea was dispensed I would often be there to help her entertain her guests. In the evenings she sometimes gave small dinner-parties and played whist afterwards, or there was music. She herself played the piano exquisitely for her guests.

  Sometimes she would be talkative and tell me about her early life in Langston Castle. Did she mind leaving it for what must be a very small house compared with the castle? I asked her once.

  “No, Kate,” she answered.

  “Here I am the Queen. There I was just one of the princesses-of no real importance. I was just there to make the right marriage … which would be one my family wanted and which I most likely did not.”

  “You must be very happy,” I said, ‘for you have the best husband anyone could have. “

  She looked at me quizzically and said: “You are very fond of your father, aren’t you?”

  “I love you both,” I told her truthfully.

  I went to kiss her and she said: “Don’t ruffle my hair, darling.” Then she took my hand and pressed it.

  “I’m glad you love him so much. He is more deserving than I am.”

  She puzzled me. But she was always kind and tender and really pleased that I spent so much time with my father. Oh yes, it had been an extremely happy home until that day when Evie, taking my mother’s morning chocolate to her bedroom, found her dead.

  She had had a cold which had developed into something worse. All my life I had heard that we had to take care of my mother’s health. She had rarely gone out and when she did it would be in the carriage only as far as Farringdon Hall. Then she would be helped out of the carriage and almost carried in by the Farringdon footman.