Deirdre, Comtesse de Montcon, never slept in the Chateau during the holiday season. She would never have slept there at any other time if she could have helped but during the summer she had her anonymity to think about, and besides, by staying the night in Boosat, she was sure of getting the best vegetables in the market and the finest cuts of meat at the butcher. Nobody at the Chateau Carmagnac could complain that the cuisine wasn't excellent or the service poor. Nor would they know that the expert cook was a countess. More importantly, no one would suspect that the woman who drove up in the Renault van each morning and spent the day scurrying about the kitchen and shouting orders to the other servants was English or that her greatest ambition was to retire to an even greater anonymity in her bungalow in Bognor Regis. Above all, they must not know that she had a past.
Born Constance Sugg, of 421 Selsdon Avenue, Croydon, she had risen by a series of changed identities and useful adulteries to her present title. In fact it could be truthfully said that she had a great many pasts. She had been Miss Croydon at seventeen, a starlet in Hollywood at nineteen, a masseuse in an extremely dubious parlour in San Francisco at the age of twenty-two, a hostess at a dude-ranch three years later and for ten years the wife of Siskin J. Wanderby. By then Wanderby, a man who believed in putting his money where his mouth was, had made and lost several fortunes and Constance, now Anita Blanche and mother of Anthony B. Wanderby, had divorced him on the grounds that never knowing from one week to another whether she was the wife of a millionaire or something destined for Skid Row constituted a particularly sadistic form of mental cruelty. At the time, Wanderby had been on the point of making a fortune out of capped oil wells in Texas and had looked good for a gigantic alimony. Instead, the oil glut had put paid to her hopes and she had been forced to provide for her own future. Since she was in Las Vegas she had changed her name to Betty Bonford and had stayed on as sucker-bait at Caesar's Palace. It was there she met her future husband, Alphonse Giraud Barbier, Comte de Montcon.
At fifty, the count had already gained a considerable reputation as a playboy, a gambler and a piss-artist, a consequence of his having followed his widowed mother's advice to the letter. 'Don't marry for money, Alphonse,' she had told him, 'go where money is.' And Alphonse had. By the time he landed in Las Vegas he had been to almost every expensive hotel, ski-resort, exclusive club and casino in Europe and was down to his last million francs and the Chateau Carmagnac. He was also under orders to marry the first rich woman who would have what was left of him. Again the Count had done what he was told and had proposed to Deirdre Gosforth (she had changed her name once more for this eventuality) in the mistaken belief that a woman who could win a hundred thousand dollars three nights running in crap games had to be loaded. The fact that it was the dice that were, and that she handed back her winnings to the management, never occurred to him, even when she had steered him in an alcoholic haze through a marriage ceremony and onto a jet to Paris taking with her, for once, all her winnings.
It was only when they reached the Chateau that the Count realized his mistake and the new Countess knew that in hooking her last sucker she had been hooked herself. Worse still, there was no way she was going back to the States with a hundred grand of the Syndicate's money. She had reconciled herself with the knowledge that any man who breakfasted on black coffee laced with Armagnac was heading for the hereafter at a rate of knots and as his widow she'd be able to flog the Chateau. The illusion hadn't persisted. The Count's constitution proved stronger than his intellect and while the Chateau might be in his possession it couldn't be in his will. Without an heir it would revert to the family and the Count's two sisters had no intention of losing it to a Yankee gold-digger. In fact they had done their damnedest to get the marriage annulled. Deirdre had fought back by keeping the Count's alcohol level too high for him to remember where he'd been married, or to care.
In the ensuing vendetta neither side could be said to have won. Deirdre's premature announcement that she was pregnant had driven the two sisters to consult the family lawyers while her efforts to achieve the only partially desired result had killed the Count. Since the
