Duarte's Child

They had first met at Bliss’s apartment. He’d had his girlfriend with him, a wealthy and possessive divorcée who did not trust other women within an inch of Toby’s blond good looks and easy boyish charm. But Toby had never flirted with Emily when she went down to his studio for sittings. His lady friend had soon tired of superintending Emily’s visits like a suspicious chaperone.

With Toby living so close to the Quinta de Monteiro, Emily had felt it was only polite to invite him to dine with her and Duarte one evening. So she had told her first lie to Duarte and had pretended that she had just got talking to the young Englishman in the village. Prevented from revealing her friendship with Bliss, how could she possibly have told the truth? And, since she’d wanted the portrait to be a big surprise, she had had to keep her visits to Toby’s studio a secret.

After a meal during which her husband and Toby seemed to radically disagree on virtually every subject under the sun, Duarte had drawled, ‘Try to bury him in a larger gathering of guests if you invite him again. He’s as argumentative as a rebellious teenager and, if he’s such a wonderful artist, why did he drop out of his art college in England?’

Duarte had been extremely unimpressed by Toby. Emily, by then in the early stages of pregnancy and suffering from horrible morning sickness and a distinct feeling of abandonment because Duarte had not made love to her in weeks, had felt defiant. Whatever else, Toby might be, he was, in Emily’s humble opinion, an incredibly talented painter. As far as she was concerned, any artist who could make her look almost beautiful was gifted beyond belief. She’d looked forward to the prospect of Duarte being forced to eat his own words.

Nobody had been more astonished than Emily that fatal night when Toby suddenly broke into an impassioned speech on the terrace beyond the salon. Telling her that he loved her, that Duarte did not deserve her, that if she ran away with him, he would cherish her forever and never neglect her as Duarte did. Since Emily had seen no warning signs of Toby falling in love with her, she’d been transfixed by shock. The most enormous self-pity had engulfed her when she appreciated that, for the very first time ever, someone was telling her that they loved her. Duarte, she’d thought in an agony of regret that evening, would never ever look at her that way or speak to her as though she was some unutterably precious being whom he could not live without.

‘Meu Deus…’ Duarte breathed without the smallest warning from behind Emily.

Dredged at dismaying speed from her miserable recollections of the past, Emily turned scarlet because even thinking about Toby made Emily feel ultra-guilty. She spun round to find Duarte, sleek and sophisticated in a superb dark business suit, engaged in studying her floral arrangement with raised dark brows.

‘Was the vase knocked over?’ Duarte enquired.

Emily paled and surveyed the results of her creative efforts with tragic eyes and a sense of injustice. Bad had gone to worse. Several stems had broken beneath her too-rough handling and the blooms now hung forlorn.

‘No, the vase didn’t fall,’ Emily admitted in a small, wooden voice devoid of any human emotion. ‘I was trying to arrange the flowers.’

Beside her, she heard Duarte draw in an audible breath. ‘I was looking at it from the wrong angle. It’s one of those trendy displays…right?’

‘Oh, shut up!’ Emily launched at him, shocking him as much as she shocked herself with that outburst that rejected his face-saving excuse. She dashed a defensive hand across eyes that were now filled with stinging tears. ‘It looks blasted awful and you know it does! I’m no good with flowers—’

‘Why should you be?’

‘Because other women are and I’m no good at anything!’ Emily lamented bitterly and went racing for the stairs before she broke down altogether. On the first wide landing, she glanced back over her shoulder. Towards the back of the hall, Duarte’s uniformed chauffeur, who was holding a pile of fancy-looking gift boxes, stood like a graven image. Duarte was just staring up at her with stunned dark eyes that seemed to suggest that not only was she lousy in the feminine creativity stakes but also decidedly unhinged.

Emily fled on up the stairs like a lemming gathering speed to jump off a cliff. Why not? A night of horrible humiliation stretched before her. Playing hostess with Bliss smirking on the sidelines at her awkwardness. The even more horrendous challenge of choosing what to wear. The crazy but superstitious conviction that having her predecessor’s portraits banished had been the kind of move calculated to bring serious bad luck.

Therefore, it was decidedly disorientating for Emily to race for the sanctuary of her bedroom and find the bed stripped, the wardrobe doors hanging open on empty spaces and two maids engaged on a thorough clean-up. Slowly she backed away again, only to find something or someone very solid blocking her retreat. She whirled round, trembling, shaken, bewildered by what she had just seen.