Black Panther (eBook)

Barbara Cartland (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
351 Seiten
Barbara Cartland eBooks Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78867-846-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Lady Gwendolyn Sherbrooke always felt she didn't belong, until a chance encounter with the brilliant Sir Philip Chadleigh changes everything. From the moment they meet she is strangely drawn to him, and him to her. Yet Sir Philip is a man tormented by the ghost of a lost love, one that binds him deep into a despair that he cannot escape. Or can he?

Drawn into a world of haunting memories and forbidden passion, Gwendolyn discovers a chilling truth: the woman he lost died the very night she was born.  Is the supposed connection they have together a coincidence or just her imagination?  Is she simply a new love caught in the shadow of the past, or could she be something more? Could love, long lost, truly return?

The answer is found in this spellbinding tale of reincarnation, mystery and romance that shows that some destinies can't be denied, and some love never dies.

Textauszug

2

My whole life changed on that May morning when mother called “Gwendolyn!” as I was doing the flowers in the housekeeper’s room. Mother is the only person who calls me by the name I received at my baptism – it was her mother’s name and she has, naturally, an affection for it. Everyone else has always said how awful it sounds, and so since a baby I was called “Lyn”. Mother, however, is never swayed by other people’s opinions.

“Gwendolyn,” she called, “come here.”

I put down the flowers with a sigh. It is impossible to get a job done at home before one is called to do something else. There is so much to do in the morning – the dogs to be brushed and combed, the flowers to be rearranged, the china dusted in the drawing room, innumerable messages to be carried backwards and forwards between the kitchen and the morning room, as well as the food to be ordered from the village. There was only me to do it all, for Mother had suffered from arthritis all the winter and had been told to keep her leg up as much as possible. Once she got down to the sofa in the morning room she seldom moved from it, except for meals, until it was time to go to bed.

“Coming!” I shouted and I ran across the hall and up the short flight of steps that led to the morning room.

Mother was in her usual place in the big bow window. The sun was shining on her hair, which even now retains much of its lustre, she looked at me with such a radiant smile that I said to myself, ‘How pretty she is!’

“I have got news for you, Gwendolyn,” she said.

“News for me?” I questioned.

She held up a letter and I saw it was in Angela’s writing.

“Angela wants you to stay with her in London,” she said. “Would you like to go?”

I felt my heart leap with excitement.

“When?” I asked.

“As soon as we can spare you,” Mother replied. “She says that she had meant to ask you last year, only, of course, Uncle Granville’s death made it impossible. But she feels now that we are out of mourning that you must have some kind of coming out. She has written and asked if she might present you and has received her command for the third Court.”

“Oh Mother!” I said.

Mother put on her spectacles. She always has to wear them to read.

“She adds that you needn’t worry about clothes. ‘Henry has been very nice about it,’ she writes, ‘and when I explained that things were a little difficult for you now, he said he would stand Lyn a trousseau, so that’s that!’”

“When can I go, when?” I asked.

Mother took of her spectacles again and looked at me.

“I shall miss you,” she said gently.

“But, Mother, I must go, I must.”

“Of course, my dear,” she answered. “I want you to go and I want you to have a good time. I often feel very guilty that we didn’t send you to school. Angela enjoyed her year at Mademoiselle Jacques’, but you do understand, that income tax is so much worse now than it was then. We can’t afford to do anything nowadays.” She gave a sigh.

“I’m not complaining, Mother, but I would like to go to London.”

She looked at me with a smile.

“I hope you won’t be disappointed,” she said. “I remember hating my first season.”

“But you had a wild success,” I said.

“Afterwards, not the year I came out. But then, girls are so different now. I was shy, desperately shy and I knew so few people.”

“Well, I shan’t know anybody,” I said, “except Angela and, of course, Henry, but in a way that makes it all the more interesting. It will be like going off on a voyage of exploration. Can’t you see me, Mother, a traveller in a strange land?”

“Oh Gwendolyn, your imagination!” Mother laughed. “I am afraid that one day it will get you into trouble.”

“My imagination?” I questioned. “You make it sound like a deformity.”

Mother looked up at me with a quizzical expression in her eyes.

“Ever since you were tiny,” she confessed, “I have wondered how much you have realised of what is going on around you and how much you have lived in a world of your own.”

I laughed, almost in a shamefaced way. It is always disconcerting to find that other people have noticed things about one, when one has hardly been aware of them oneself.

“I will keep my imagination severely in check,” I promised. “How long will Angela keep me?”

“She doesn’t say,” mother replied. “But I suppose that the Third Court is hardly likely to be held before the middle of July.”

“Over two months!” I cried. “Oh, how exciting! Can I go at once – tomorrow?”

“There’s the Sale of Work on Saturday,” Mother said. “You must be here for that, you promised the Vicar.”

“Sunday, then?” I asked.

“Angela is certain to go away for the weekend. You had better go on Monday and arrive about teatime.”

“I can catch the 2.45,” I said, remembering the many times I had driven our guests down to catch the London train and watched it steam out of the station, waving them goodbye as they journeyed away into the unknown world outside.

“What shall I wear to go to London? What can I wear?”

“What have you got?” Mother asked.

I knew that she could not remember – Mother never was interested in clothes, either for herself or for us. I can hear Nanny now in my childhood saying, “But, My Lady, the child hasn’t got a rag to her back and her shoes are right through at the toes.”

Mother would stand and listen, a vague look of anxiety on her face.

“How distressing, Nanny,” she would answer. “Well, I am afraid you will have to write to London for some patterns.”

When the patterns came, Nanny would take them triumphantly in to Mother, only to be met with surprise.

“Clothes! Surely Gwendolyn doesn’t need anything more? I thought it was only a month or so ago that she had something new.”

“It will have to be the blue serge,” I said. “It is frightfully shabby, but I am thinner, aren’t I, Mother? And it might be possible to get into something of Angela’s until we have time to shop.”

I walked across the room and looked at myself in the long Queen Anne mirror, dark with age, that hung between the two big bookcases. I was a little thinner, but my figure seemed to me voluptuous. Looking at it I thought of Nanny saying, “She is beautifully covered, My Lady, and firm as anything – it is muscle, not fat!”

I was still beautifully covered, there was no getting away from it. There was no pretence of my having the slender hipless and chest less outline that was fashionable and which Angela had managed to attain and keep ever since she was seventeen.

I was so big – my feet were well shaped, but I took sixes. My neck was white and firm but almost, well Junoesque…

I hated myself and I turned away from the glass.

“I hope Henry is prepared to spend a good deal of money on me,” I said sharply. “He will need to if I am to be anything like fashionable enough for a London Season.”

‘Supposing I’m a failure?’ I thought. ‘Supposing I disgrace them?’ I felt almost terror at the idea. Supposing after a few weeks they suggested that I should come home, that I needn’t wait for the Third Court? Wouldn’t it be better not to go, not to risk humiliation?

I tried to shake myself free of my fears, but I knew they would pursue and terrify me, circling around me like ghouls and giving me no peace, I should lie sleeplessly tossing hour after hour at night, or wake before day to find the question still irritating, still unanswered.

“You are quite certain that Angela wants me?” I asked Mother desperately.

She looked startled at the tone of my voice.

“But of course she does,” she said, “why, she says in her letter” – she picked up her glasses again and turned over the pages – “yes, here it is,

‘You know how much I would like to have Lyn, Mother dear, and how carefully I would look after her. I promise you that she shall have a lovely time, so don’t have a moment’s anxiety about how she will be getting on.’”

“She really is an angel, isn’t she?” I cried in a tone of relief.

“I will write and accept,” Mother said. “The 2.45 on Monday! You are sure it is running?”

“Quite certain,” I answered, “but I shall call in at the station this afternoon to make sure.”

I went towards the door. When my hand was on its handle, Mother said,

“I will lend you my small row of pearls, Gwendolyn, while you are away, but you will be careful of them, won’t you dear?”

“Oh Mother, how sweet of you!”

Her small row of pearls that she wore more often than the heavy family jewels, was a particular treasure. I knew that it had been given to her by her father when she came of age. The pearls were well matched, slightly pink with diamond clasp. Angela had borrowed them for her coming out dance – now I was to be allowed to wear them.

I love jewels, I always have. When I was a small child I used to creep into Mother’s room when she had gone to do dinner and look into the jewel box that was left out her dressing table. I would try on the heavy diamond rings and clasp her bracelets round my wrists. Once I was caught, for Father came back to the room for something that Mother had forgotten. I was too terrified to move and only stood staring at him with frightened eyes, the diamonds glittering on my arms and round my neck. But he laughed, said I was a little peacock, and picking me up in his arms, carried me downstairs to show me to...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.6.2025
• Reihe/Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: aristocrat romance • edwardian romance • victorian second chance romance
• ISBN-10: 1-78867-846-X / 178867846X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78867-846-9 / 9781788678469