Hide and Seek for Love by Barbara Cartland Page A

Russians.”
    David’s eyes lit up.
    â€œAre you talking of The Great Game , my Lord?”
    â€œYou have heard of it?” Lord Clare exclaimed.
    â€œMy father told me about it,” David replied, “and if there is one thing I wish to do more than anything else, it is to take part in what seems to me the most exciting and original ‘game’ that has ever been invented!”
    â€œYou are quite right about that, but I am sure your father told you of its dangers, its difficulties and the fact that you take your life in your own hands every day.”
    â€œIt is exactly what I want to do, my Lord.”
    His enthusiasm pleased Lord Clare, who had indeed been extremely fond of Lord Richard.
    David sailed out to India with a letter to the Colonel of his Regiment and also a private one to the Viceroy.
    David had been deeply shocked at losing both his father and his mother, but the prospects ahead of him took his mind off himself.
    Occasionally, he thought it was really rather sad to have no relatives and no family and to be, to all intents and purposes, entirely on his own.
    When he thought of his grandfather and the way he had behaved, he wanted to forget that he was an Ingle, just as his father had done, and make a life for himself.
    *
    Yet now at the age of ninety-two, his grandfather was dead and, although it seemed incredible, so were both his sons from his first marriage.
    As David ruminated on the irony of what had happened, he knew that his father would have laughed.
    After everything his father had done to break all ties with his paternal family, his son was now the ninth Marquis of Inglestone.
    If this had happened to his father, he could have looked forward to a long life as the Head of the family and as the owner of Ingle Hall and two thousand acres of good Kentish land.
    As the ship drew nearer to English shores, he was hoping that the rest of the family, if any existed, would not resent him or feel that he was usurping their inheritance.
    At the same time he could not believe anyone had much love for his grandfather, maybe a number of them hated him as much as he did.
    Even now he could again feel his fury as he had assisted his mother from the study and had carried her with Newman’s help into the post chaise.
    He wondered if the Vicar was still at the Vicarage – he had meant to write to him from India, but had been too preoccupied to write to anyone.
    He could not help recognising that, coming back to England after so long, he had in fact no friends there at all.
    His father had always been meeting his Eton or Oxford friends in strange and unexpected places.
    â€œFancy meeting you here!” they would say to him almost before Lord Richard could greet them.
    â€˜My friends,’ David mused, ‘are scattered all over the world in strange places.  I have to think of England as a foreign country I have not explored before.’
    Equally as he drove from London to Ingle Hall, he felt apprehensive.
    Maybe there were many family members there who would resent his taking over his grandfather’s place – they would remember all too clearly how his father had run off and married someone they had not approved of.
    It was five o’clock in the afternoon when the post chaise turned in at the gates and he well remembered being impressed by them when he had first come to Ingle Hall with his dear mother.
    Now, when he regarded the lodges, they looked, he thought, as if no one was living in them.
    The post chaise ambled on and, once again the beauty of the Elizabethan house entranced him.
    Only as they drove into the courtyard was he aware that the house looked very different from five years ago.
    The mullion windows needed cleaning and the flowerbeds along the front of the house were filled with weeds.
    There was certainly no red carpet being run down the steps before the front door.
    David had deliberately not telegraphed through the time or day of his arrival, as