Katerina's Secret

  About the Book

  Handsome war hero Edward Somers is recuperating in the South of France when he stumbles upon a lonely villa inhabited by the bewitching and beautiful, but ailing, Countess Katerina.

  At first Edward is delighted to have such a charming and lovely companion, but as a sinister chain of events begin to unfold it becomes apparent that he and Katerina are in very grave danger. Is it really Katerina’s ill health that has forced her into such an isolated position? Will she always be on the run? And will her remote and perilous life deny her the love that she craves and needs so dearly?

  An enthralling wartime adventure by the ever-popular author of the Adams family sagas.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Jane Staples

  Copyright

  Katerina’s Secret

  Mary Jane Staples

  Chapter One

  The isle of Formentera, veined by dry gullies and patterned by Mediterranean shrubs, lay like an uncut stone of brown and green in a setting of oceanic blue. Although it was close to Ibiza and not far from the Spanish mainland, it had escaped the rampaging development that had smothered so much of the Balearic islands. It had even escaped an airport. Its principal town, San Francisco, was tiny, its scattered hamlets were few, and its people, for the most part, were still compulsive tillers of its baked soil. Formenterans looked after their own business and each other. Holidaymakers were a race apart, a species of sunseekers accepted and politely indulged.

  On slopes and lowlands the almond trees were dusty, the olive trees laden, the fall of the fruit still some way off. The isle was as quiet as a slumbering monastery, except for the Playa d’es Pujols in the north and the Playa de Mitjorn in the south. There the eccentric holidaymakers disported in skimpily-clad fashion, swamping their bodies in oil.

  East of Es Calo, the sun-splashed cliffs showed their brown, barren face to the shimmering sea. The single-storeyed villa, lapped by almond trees and overlooking the cliffs, was enclosed by a bougainvillea hedge, the shrubs explosive with bursting colour. The large garden was an enchantment, its beauty the consequence of being lovingly tended from the time, fifty years ago, when it had first been won from the intemperate ground.

  There were no holidaymakers in this area save for the family which had just arrived at the only other villa, two hundred yards from the first and a short walk from the village. Kate Matthews, slipping off her jeans and T-shirt, put on a yellow dress, combed her hair and hurried downstairs.

  ‘A dress?’ said her mother.

  ‘Oh, well, you know,’ said Kate, with a fifteen-year-old’s natural ambiguity.

  ‘Where are you going so soon?’

  ‘I thought – well, to see the Señora,’ said Kate, raven-haired, blue-eyed and pretty. Romantically disposed, she could wander dreamy-eyed while others rushed into life’s pursuits.

  ‘You spent most of your time last year with her.’

  ‘Strange girl,’ smiled her father.

  ‘And the year before,’ said her mother. They came to the villa for a month each year, renting it from mid-July to mid-August. There was no beach. There was only sun, peace and a restful inclination to do nothing.

  Kate smiled a little shyly and sidled out. It was hot. The light breeze fanned her face with heat. But, young and alive, she ran on quick feet down the path and over a hard little track that wound through scrub. Reaching the white-walled villa, festooned with hibiscus, she found the Señora sitting at a table on the tiled patio that overlooked the garden. A blue umbrella shaded her aged body from the fierce sun.

  ‘Señora?’ said Kate. That was what she always called her dear and treasured friend, even if she wasn’t Spanish.

  The lady looked up. She was very old, white of hair and slender of figure. But her eyes were still quite magnificent, a clear, unveined grey, and no deep lines furrowed her face. The fragility of age was apparent, but not its wrinkles or its bent back. Her eyes regarded Kate out of a mind full of dreams.

  ‘They’ve all gone, all my loved ones,’ she said in English.

  ‘Señora?’ said Kate, puzzled. The Señora had a son and daughter, and grandchildren, and although one family lived in England and the other in America, they would all come to visit her before the end of August and stay for some weeks as they always did.

  The lady came to her feet. She rose slowly but with grace, as if she had been born in the Court of St James or another. Her white dress was a lightness around her slender, fragile body, and she was upright, not stooping, and to Kate quite beautiful. Kate had spent tranquil hours with her since the age of eleven. They had an affinity, these two, the very old and the very young.

  The dreams slipped, the lady’s eyes opened and she smiled in pleasure and affection.

  ‘Why, it’s Kate. You’ve come again. Has another year gone? Another one? Yes, but how good to see you, sweet child. Your letters are precious, but not more than you are.’ She kissed the girl on the cheek, and Kate hugged her.

  ‘Señora, oh, I came as soon as we arrived, to see how you were.’

  ‘Well, I’m old, Kate, that is all.’ The lady’s smile was warm. Kate in her bright yellow dress was a reminder of her own sweet youth of long ago. ‘How pretty you’re getting. How very pretty.’

  ‘You look super,’ said Kate. She had put a dress on because she knew the Señora did not consider girls in jeans to be at all acceptable.

  ‘I am super?’ The lady smiled. ‘But I’m so old, Kate. I will tell you. I’m almost a hundred.’

  Kate, staggered, gasped, ‘You’re not, you can’t be.’

  The lady laughed softly.

  ‘Well, I’m eighty-three. That’s near to a hundred, isn’t it?’

  ‘Eighty-three?’ Kate calculated. ‘Señora, you were actually born when Queen Victoria was still alive?’

  ‘Yes, when Queen Victoria was still in command of almost every royal family in Europe, and I, old as I am, was only a contemporary of her great-granddaughters. You’ll stay a little while, my sweet?’

  ‘Oh, I should like to.’

  ‘Then let us have lemonade.’ The lady picked up a little silver bell from the table and rang it. ‘Maria? Maria?’

  Maria, her servant, appeared. She was a middle-aged Formenteran.

  ‘Señora?’

  ‘Lemonade, please. You see, Maria? Kate is here again.’

  ‘I see, I see,’ said Maria, and smiled at Kate. She brought the lemonade in a jug covered with a white napkin. Ice tinkled as she filled two glasses, and the lemon slices spilled and splashed. It was always the same, always made from fresh lemons, always cool and delicious, with a little bite to it. The lady served no other drink to young people.

  She sat and talked with Kate. Kate was quick and energetic in her speech, the lady mellowly articulate, and each was receptive to the other. The bees buzzed on gossamer wings, the sun cast heated light, and the colours of the garden danced before the eye. Kate was fascinated by the graceful woman she had met five years ago, on her family’s first visit to the adjoining villa. The Señora often told stories of her youth, of her years as a girl, and Kate
sometimes wondered what stories there were concerning all the other years.

  The lady became quiet. It was age, of course, which often transported her from the present to the past. Her eyes were full of dreams, her face serene. There was always serenity about her, as if the magic of life was a beatitude. This year, thought Kate, the serenity was more finely drawn.

  The Señora broke her temporary silence to ask Kate about her schooling. Kate told her of the struggles and problems she had with subjects like science and mathematics.

  ‘Science, child? Mathematics?’ The lady sighed. ‘What is the world doing to girls these days? Has it forgotten that girls grow into women, and that women relate to compassion and caring, not to infernal things? Science and mathematics are the essence of the infernal. Everything one reads or listens to these days tells one so.’

  Quite earnestly, Kate said, ‘Then I shall do my best, Señora, to give them up.’

  The lady smiled and shook her head.

  ‘No, no, Kate. I shouldn’t say such things. It’s your world you have to live in, not mine, and if your world is in desperate need of women scientists and women mathematicians, then you must continue to struggle with the subjects.’

  ‘Do you think so, Señora?’ said Kate, who would have been quite happy to have had nothing to do with them at all.

  Again the lady smiled, and again the grey eyes dreamed.

  ‘Such a world, such an unhappy world,’ she murmured. ‘I know Edward would have said it was no better than a factory, into which every woman, as well as every man, was being pushed.’

  ‘Who was Edward?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Edward?’ said the lady, as if it had been Kate who had plucked the name out of the day. She looked at the girl, at her dark hair, her blue eyes and her vivid youth, and because Kate was so remindful of another the dreams returned to possess her. ‘They are all gone, my loved ones, all gone, Celeste.’

  Kate’s susceptible heart missed a beat.

  ‘Señora, I’m Kate. Who is Celeste?’

  The lady came to.

  ‘She’s gone, my sweet, but you are so like her.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ve a story to tell,’ said Kate.

  ‘Stories are like life, Kate, always to do with the past.’ The lady put a hand under Kate’s chin and lifted her face. The fine grey eyes searched the unclouded blue. ‘Life is always a memory of moments just gone and years long past. Cling to each moment, if you can, for each is so precious, yet so fleeting. Only love defies time. Time robs us of all else, of all whom we cherish, but it can’t rob us of love. God gives it, and it is His greatest gift to people. But so many people, so many, never understand it. Be sweet, my child, as Celeste was, and then you’ll come to know that love means giving, not receiving.’

  ‘Tell me about her, Señora.’

  ‘About Celeste? But then there was also Edward, you see. I could only tell you part of the story. The rest only they could tell. And they are gone, Kate, all of them, all whom I loved so much.’

  ‘Oh, tell me, Señora, tell me your part.’

  Fragile old age took on the serenity of treasured dreams.

  Chapter Two

  The small hotel, painted white, gleamed in the warm October sunshine. Half a mile from the little village of La Roche, it fronted the winding coastal road and its sign said it was the Hôtel de Corniche. It could not, of course, be compared with the grand establishments of Nice and Cannes, but set in an environment of peace and tranquillity, with a breathtaking view of the blue sea, it had its own appeal.

  Unlike other small hotels, it remained open all the year round, which said much for its desirability. Madame Heloise Michel, the owner, valued the patronage of guests who provided her with an income during the out-of-season months and enabled her to keep a few of her staff at work. Times were hard in 1928. One heard that exiled Grand Dukes in Nice had to sell their valuables to pay their hotel bills, or did not pay them at all, creating embarrassment for managements instinctively disinclined to throw the exalted into the street.

  A pre-war Bentley, approaching the Hôtel de Corniche from the west, rounded one of the thousands of bends at a moment when some idiot leapt into the road from the right-hand verge. It was an idiot of the male gender, a man clad in a blue flannel shirt and blue serge trousers. The driver, handling the car carefully, was able to stop in good time. The man flashed a startled glance, showing a ruddy face and a dark, untidy moustache. He did not, however, apologize for his suicidal stupidity, but ran across the road and disappeared into the shrubs and trees of the ascending terrain. The sound of a rifle shot followed him. It was, to the driver of the car, unmistakably a rifle shot. He had experienced a surfeit of rifle fire during the war. He stood up in the car and looked around. He saw no one. He heard no one. Silence prevailed. The sky was clear, the afternoon warm and bright. The South of France lay in quietness under its October sun.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Edward Jonathan Somers. He got out and peered at the trees and shrubs crowding the gentle ascent. He detected neither movement nor sound. He turned and inspected the downward slope on the other side of the road. Scented pine trees covered the ground. He advanced. One did not shrug off a running man and a rifle shot. Somewhere, fairly close, was the person who had fired the shot. Because he was curious and intrigued, he began a slow and cautious ingress into the profusion of pines. Caution was commonsensical, slowness a necessity.

  The descent was not steep, but even so he could not go too far because the return would be a climb, which would mean an uphill effort for him in more ways than one. Reaching a break in the trees, he saw the high stone wall that bounded the Villa d’Azur. The villa itself, nestling amid palms at a distance of some seventy yards, showed only its pink roof tiles. He noticed the jagged array of broken glass cemented into the top of the wall. Villa owners were not usually inclined to seal themselves off as uncompromisingly as that. Intruders intent on burglary or pillage were rare in the quieter areas of the Riviera, although confidence men and gigolos operated with smooth efficiency in Nice and Cannes.

  Edward turned at the lightest of sounds and saw, not a rifleman, but a slender and quite lovely woman, a brimmed white hat in her hand. Her silk dress was also white, and with it she wore black silk stockings and white shoes. She came to his eyes as a vision unexpected and enchanting. Her hair was a mass of dark, rich auburn; long lashes framed eyes of deep, clear grey, eyes that were startled as she beheld him. He thought her about thirty, but there was something of the magic of never-forgotten youth in those eyes of striking clarity. They held him mesmerized. He was as silent as she was. It was a moment when his tongue lay still, a discovery more fascinating than anything which might have been said. But he spoke when the silence began to bring a slight flush to her oval face,

  ‘I heard someone fire a rifle,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘M’sieur,’ she said, ‘you are regarding me with so much earnestness that I fear you think I am the guilty one.’ Her voice was warm and mellow, with an undercurrent of amusement, her responsive English so fluent that she might have been a compatriot. But he had a certainty she was not English.

  ‘Have I been staring?’

  ‘Indeed, m’sieur, and earnestly.’

  ‘I do apologize—’ Edward broke off as a man appeared.

  Tall and strong-looking with an iron-grey beard and an impassive countenance, he was dressed in a white shirt, grey tie and black trousers. Without either jacket or hat, he looked as if he might have been interrupted while relaxing in the sunshine. He turned dark eyes on the slender woman. She, taller than average, lifted her chin and Edward thought he glimpsed a flicker of imperious defiance. The bearded man said nothing. He merely shook his head in reproach. She turned without a word and walked away, elegant and graceful, to become a flutter of white amid the pines.

  The bearded man regarded Edward sombrely.

  ‘This is private property, m’sieur,’ he said in French.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Edward in the s
ame language. ‘It isn’t fenced.’

  ‘It is private property, m’sieur. Please go.’

  ‘My only reason for being here is that I heard a rifle shot,’ said Edward.

  ‘A rifle shot?’ The bearded man was unresponsive.

  ‘I think it was fired over the head of a running man.’

  ‘I’m not that man, m’sieur. Nor, as you see, do I have a rifle.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Edward, ‘I’m sure one was fired, and that isn’t something which happens every day.’

  ‘I think, m’sieur, you will find rifles being fired every day in many parts of the world. Please have the goodness to go on your way.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Edward, and left, making a slow climb back to the road. He was breathing a little heavily by the time he reached his car, but he was thinking more about the striking vision of elegance than his chest.

  The doors of the Corniche swung open for him a few minutes later as he pulled up outside the hotel. Jacques, the porter and handyman, came down the wide steps to take care of his luggage.

  ‘Welcome, mon Capitaine. You are well?’ That was how Jacques, an old soldier, always greeted him.

  ‘I’m in excellent health, Jacques.’ That was how Edward always responded, although it was never precisely true. He was no longer in the British Army, and nor was he resplendent with health. He had been gassed in Flanders in 1917. Any exercise in advance of a slow walk put a strain on his poisoned lungs. He had not been as badly gassed as some, but he had breathed in enough of the deadly stuff to reduce him from a vigorous man to a disabled one. His doctor assured him he was not in danger of dying unless he indulged in activities fatally foolish, like mountain-climbing or hundred-yard sprints. All in all, anything of a robust nature was out. Providing he walked where others ran, providing he paced himself, he could live his allotted span – and providing he escaped the hazards of severe and foggy winters. So he spent his winters at the Corniche, where there was neither fog nor snow to endure.

  At thirty-five, he considered he had already enjoyed eleven years that might have been denied to him. To live at the Corniche during its out-of-season periods was an added enjoyment. Its comfort, peace and quiet made him feel he could not count himself an entirely unfortunate man. He always stayed until April, returning then to England and an appreciation of its burgeoning spring, and the endearing vagaries of its summer, in his little cottage near Guildford.