63 Ola and the Sea Wolf by Barbara Cartland Page B

to sit up in bed.
    “ Three days !” he repeated, as if he was speaking to himself, “and you think that is possible on one bottle of claret?”
    “Your Lordship had nothing else,” Gibson replied defensively, “the Steward said that the brandy went untouched.”
    “I slept for three days on one bottle of claret?”
    “There must have been two,” Gibson conceded, “what your Lordship drank at dinner and then a full decanter placed on the table after dinner.”
    It seemed, because he was sitting up, that the Marquis felt his head was swimming dizzily and he lay back again.
    “There is something wrong here, Gibson,” he said. “Very wrong! I intend when I am better to get to the bottom of it.”
    “Yes, my Lord, of course, my Lord,” Gibson agreed, “but Your Lordship should rest until you feels yourself again.”
    The Marquis was silent for a moment.
    Then, as his valet was moving away from the bed, he asked,
    “The young lady – what is her name?”
    “Miss Milford, my Lord.”
    “She is still aboard?”
    “Yes, my Lord. Enjoyin’ every moment of the voyage. Up on deck from first thing in the mornin’ to last thing at night. We’ve all been sayin’ we’ve never seen a young lady so happy.”
    The Marquis lay still.
    Now he was remembering what had happened.
    He had been firm in his decision to put Ola ashore at Plymouth and send her back to her stepmother so that he would no longer have any responsibility for her.
    He remembered, too, how at first she had raged at him and accused him of treachery. Then she had been surprisingly pleasant, especially at dinner.
    Slowly, because it was an effort, he tried to recall everything that was said, everything that happened.
    Now he remembered the toast she had asked him to drink and how, after he had poured a little claret into her glass and filled his own, she had dropped her diamond brooch under the table.
    He had retrieved it and she had thanked him and then she had lifted her glass saying,
    “No heeltaps!”
    He gave a little exclamation.
    It was after he had drunk his glass of claret and thought it had a strange taste that darkness had covered him and he remembered no more.
    The Marquis was extremely intelligent and, although it seemed incredible that this sort of thing, like something out of a Walter Scott novel, could happen in real life, he felt sure that, when he was picking up her brooch, Ola by some means had drugged his wine!
    ‘But was she likely to carry a drug around with her?’ he asked himself.
    Then, knowing how he felt when he first awoke, the heaviness of his head and the difficulty he had thinking, it struck him that he had felt like this once before.
    It was after he had broken his collarbone out hunting and the doctor had been called to attend to him at Elvin. He had hurt him excruciatingly putting the bone back into place.
    He had cursed and the doctor had opened his leather bag and produced a small bottle and from it he had poured some dark liquid into a teaspoon.
    “Drink this, my Lord.”
    “What is it?” the Marquis enquired.
    “Only laudanum, but it will take the edge off the pain.”
    “Women’s remedy!” the Marquis had said scornfully.
    “Women are not expected to be courageous about pain like a man,” the doctor replied. “But I have always believed that there is no point in suffering unnecessarily.”
    “No, you are right,” the Marquis agreed.
    He had taken the laudanum and found it helped him considerably, although the next morning, he awoke with a heavy head and a dry mouth such as he had now.
    Of course that was what Ola had given him – laudanum – and he told himself he had been a fool not to be suspicious of what she was up to when she had made herself so pleasant and talked so agreeably to him.
    He had known that she was determined not to return to her stepmother, just as he was determined that she should.
    ‘Damn that woman – she has won!’ the Marquis thought irritably.
    He slept intermittently for