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Perhaps if he was honest he was a little bemused by what was happening to him. Bemused, but still instinctively and automatically convinced that his love was the love of his lifetime, a love that would last a lifetime.
Convincing Beth, though, he suspected, was not going to be easy. She was suspicious of him, and perhaps rightly so, and he could see, oh, so clearly, how much her outward antagonism towards him, her animosity, masked an inner fragility and fear. Somehow he would find a way to show her that she had no need of those protective barriers against him. Somehow he would find a way...
* * *
After Alex had gone—une
xpectedly without asking her to pay him for the day—Beth went upstairs to her room, intending to spend the rest of the evening there. But once she had bathed and eaten she suddenly got an unexpected surge of energy. From her bedroom window she had an excellent view of the river. The sky had cleared and was now washed with a tempting evening palette of colours; soft blue, pale yellow and a heavenly indescribable silvery pink.
Down below her in the square she could see people strolling around, or sitting at the pavement cafés.
She was, she reminded herself, here to enjoy herself, and to explore Prague and its historical beauty, as well as on a buying trip.
Before she could change her mind she dressed in comfortably casual chinos and a soft shirt and, picking up her jacket and bag, made her way down to the hotel foyer.
Her guidebook had an excellent street map; she could hardly get lost. Wenceslas Square was her ultimate destination. It featured largely in all the articles she had read about the city and, to judge from the photographs, with good reason.
As she walked in the Square’s direction her attention was distracted by the plethora of shops selling crystal and china. At each one she stopped to examine the contents of their windows. All of the goods displayed were breathtakingly good value, but, to her disappointment, none of them had on show the same quality of glass she had seen in the hotel gift shop. She was just re-examining the display in one window when a young man approached her.
Only eighteen or so, he gave her a winning smile and introduced himself in broken English, asking her if she would like a guide to show her the city.
Firmly Beth refused, relieved when he immediately accepted her refusal and walked away. The Square was only a few yards away now, right at the end of the street she was on, but even though she had seen the photographs, and read the enthusiastic descriptive guide to it, she was still not totally prepared for its magnificence, nor for the sense of stepping back into history that walking into it gave her.
Here, surrounded by the stall holders displaying their wares, it was almost possible to feel that she had stepped back into the medieval age... A juggler juggling brightly painted balls winked at her as she walked past him; in the centre of the Square a quartet were vigorously playing classical music. A little boy clung nervously to his mother as a fire-eater leant backwards to swallow the licking flames of fire he was holding. A few feet away acrobats tumbled, reminding Beth that the Czech Republic was famed for its highly skilled circus acts.
But it was the stalls that gripped her real attention, taking her back to her childhood and the wonder of visiting antiques fairs with her grandparents. Here it was once again possible to capture that age-old magic. At one stall a man was actually making sets of armour as his customers waited. At another a dark gypsy woman was displaying hand-made jewellery. But it was the stalls selling glassware that predictably drew Beth like a magnet.
Slowly she wandered from one to another, trying not to feel too desperately disappointed when she realised that there was nothing for her to buy.
‘You are looking for something special?’ one stall holder asked her encouragingly. ‘A gift, perhaps...?’
Beth shook her head.
‘No. No, not a gift,’ she told her. ‘Actually, I’m here on business. I have a shop at home in England and I want...’
She paused, not sure just why she was confiding in this dark-eyed gypsy woman with her insistent manner.
‘I have seen a piece of glass in the gift shop of my hotel—very Venetian...baroque, crimson, painted...gilded...
‘Ah, yes, I know just what you mean,’ the woman told her enthusiastically. ‘We do not sell such pieces here, but I know where to get them. If you would be interested in seeing some I could get some for you to look at, say for this time tomorrow...’
Beth stared at her, hardly daring to believe her luck.
‘Are you sure we’re talking about the same thing?’ she began doubtfully. ‘All the glass I have seen so far...’
‘Is like this. No...’ The woman finished for her, rummaging in a large box and triumphantly producing a book which she handed to Beth.
Beth stared at the photograph the woman was showing her, scarcely able to contain her excitement. The goblets depicted in it were exactly what she was looking for: heavy, antique, made in richly coloured glass.
‘Yes...yes, that’s exactly what I want,’ she agreed.
But Beth was no fool.
‘But these here in this photograph are genuine antiques,’ she felt bound to point out.
‘These are, yes,’ the woman agreed after a small pause. ‘However, there is a factory where they specialise in making such glass—but only to special orders, you understand.’
Special orders. Beth looked doubtfully at her, remembering the price she had been quoted for the lustre in the gift shop.
