Set the Stars Alight

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

A thrilling novel of espionage and romance set agains the sultry, exotic Gold Coast of Africa. When the motion picture that blonde Gay Burnett was making went bankrupt, the beautiful English actress was stranded -and easy prey for the advances of the sinister director, Kurt Mulheim. Then she encountered a dissolute and reluctant saviour, Rick Morell. Rick, the ivory trader who vowed to distrust all women. But Mulheim had her kidnapped and sold as a white slave in darkest Ligati. Alone and terrified, Gay refused to give up hope that one day she would see Rick again-and tell him she loved him. A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1941, and available now for the first time in eBook.

Release date: August 14, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

IT was sweltering hot.

Gay Burnett lay on her narrow and none too comfortable bed under the mosquito netting of her bedroom, and gasped. She felt almost too hot, too languid, to fan herself. And she was wearing nothing but a thin cotton Japanese wrap. But oh, it was hot on the Gold Coast, and this cheap hotel was badly ventilated. She felt very tired, and when she closed her eyes she dreamed of an English spring and the cool of dew and dusk.

No use to dream of that. She was thousands of miles from England and spring. She was one of a small film company brought out to West Africa by a German-American who was supposed to be making a wonder-film with one of the loneliest, hottest parts of Africa for its setting.

Of course, he was crazy. Gay realized that. The weather conditions were all against them, and they hadn’t the capital to do things on the grand scale. All the members of the cast were complaining, and last night it had been rumoured that Mulheim, the manager, was ‘broke’. Gay shuddered to think what would happen if that were really the case.

She reproached herself for being foolish enough to come to such an outlandish spot as Liberia with Kurt Mulheim’s company. She was playing only a very small part because she had little experience, no particular talent, and only her beauty to recommend her—and her pay was small. But she had been so keen to get away from the dreary and fruitless search for work in London.

Her mind reverted to the years behind her, and her memories were not altogether happy ones, and did not cheer her up. Somehow she seemed always to have been alone. Her first remembrances were of a big house, an old greystone vicarage in the depths of the country where she was born. The Cotswold hills. Her grandfather had been Vicar there. Her mother, widowed in the first year of the Great War, had returned to her old home soon after Jack Burnett found an untimely grave ‘somewhere in France’. But when little Gay became aware of life, she was not the spoiled darling of grandfather and mother, the happy little girl that one might expect to find. Neither did the big ivy-clad house which stood on the crest of a hill, braving wind and rain in the long winter months, ring with her childish laughter.

The Reverend Theodore Lawton was a man of fanatical ideas, of harsh and unbending principles. He had disapproved of his daughter’s marriage to her soldier, who, although a gentleman by birth and education, was a ranker, and had died as a ‘Tommy’. Mr. Lawton, for all his religion, had been a snob. He had meant that his only child, Margaret, should marry well. He had refused to give her wedding his blessing, and to meet her husband, from the hour of their marriage. Only when Jack Burnett died a hero’s death and received a Military Medal did the reverend gentleman relent, and consent to take his daughter back to the vicarage, and harbour her child when it was born.

But it was a severe and humourless atmosphere into which Gay was ushered. Gay! Ironic name for poor Margaret Burnett to have chosen for her fatherless babe. But she had wanted passionately for the little daughter to get the happiness, the joy out of life, that she, Margaret, had known only for a few short weeks with her Jack, and then lost again.

Alas, her ambitions for the baby Gay did not materialize! For when Gay was four years old Mrs. Burnett followed her husband to the grave. And one of the child’s first recollections was being taken by her grandfather, the tall, austere, terrible old man, to the very graveside, and made to stand with him there and watch the earth being shovelled on to her mother’s coffin. The child hardly understood what was happening. She only knew that she was terrified and lonely, and that when she screamed wildly and begged to be taken home her grandfather reprimanded her and preached her a sermon on the necessity to learn self-control early in life.

That grim funeral day, when the Cotswolds were white with snow and a bitter wind was blowing, was never to be forgotten by Margaret Burnett’s luckless child. And the years that followed were as bitter, as unrelenting, as the sharp east wind. Loneliness was Gay’s portion. Always alone, except for a succession of dreary nursemaids, none of whom stayed long, because they disliked the rigours of the cold, bare vicarage, where indoors every conceivable economy was practised, and outside the garden was overgrown and decayed. Little Gay was, therefore, flung to the mercy of servants, or those of the Vicar’s parishioners who took pity on the little girl who had been orphaned at such a tender age.

When Gay was in her teens she was lovely to look at, with all the grace, the gold and white and pink beauty which had been her sole heritage from a lovely mother and a father who, in his university days, had been known as ‘Beau Jack’. But it was a beauty which was little asset in the vicarage, where Gay was taught that beauty was a woman’s curse, and that she must avoid temptation to pander to vanity; where all mirrors were discouraged and the money allowed her by her grandfather for clothing herself was almost negligible. Gay learned at an early age to buy a few yards of cheap material and run up her own dresses, and to knit and sew for herself.

But that state of affairs, almost Brontë-like in its grimness, its solitude, came to an end when Gay reached her twentieth birthday. The Reverend Mr. Lawton died, and his living and the vicarage passed with him.

Then Gay, a much-repressed creature, timid, lacking in self-confidence, utterly ignorant of life, was suddenly plunged into an altogether new era. A life in London, which, after her convent-like existence in the Cotswolds, came to her as a staggering revelation.

She was offered a home by a second cousin of her father, one of the few relatives he had possessed. A widow who lived in a small house near Paddington Station and had at one time been on the stage. At forty she was still good-looking, and sometimes obtained small character parts in film studios.

From the moment that Gay was established in Gladys Burnett’s house she was rid of all the repressions and inhibitions caused by that aimless and destructive existence which her old grandfather had forced her to lead. There was no more loneliness for Gay. No more pinching and scraping, although Cousin Gladys, as Gay called her, was far from well off. But she had small private means and a nature which encouraged her to spend twice as much as she possessed. She was the exact opposite of Theodore Lawton, and had he known her he would undoubtedly have condemned her to burn in the fires of hell. Gay was well aware of that. Yet Cousin Gladys was far from bad. She was a good creature, one of the most generous and kindly women Gay had ever met, and, for the short, dazzling year that Gay lived with her she was both the mother and friend that Gay had always needed.

The little house was always filled with people, mostly young and of the theatrical and film world. Gay soon lost her shyness, became aware of the fact that she was beautiful and that men admired her, and aware also of the fact that she had the natural ability to sing and dance. She had not been with Cousin Gladys a month before she had received some strenuous private coaching from that old trouper, and was taken by her from one film studio to another to get ‘tests’ and try for ‘walk-on’ parts if she could not do better.

It was a glorious year for Gay, on the whole. Life after the death-in-life existence in the vicarage. But it ended all too soon. A chill seized Cousin Gladys, and pneumonia followed. Death once more left the girl alone in the world. This time a much more experienced Gay, and not the ignorant, terrified, shrinking young creature whom Gladys had first taken under her wing. But still a Gay of complete innocence. Among the many men whom she had met in film studios and her cousin’s house, not one had attracted her to anything more than ordinary friendship. Love—the overwhelming, passionate kind of emotion which had driven her mother into the arms of a penniless soldier twenty-one years ago—had not yet come Gay’s way.

The death of Gladys revealed a sea of unpaid debts, and the sale by creditors of her home and its contents. And Gay was once more without funds, without work, and with all the difficulties to face which usually beset a pretty girl who has no family.

It was then—hanging round one of the lesser film studios—that she met Iris Power, who introduced her to the German-American Mulheim, who had formed this company and brought them all out to Liberia.

It had sounded an enticing proposition. The glamour of the East, and a certain job. Gay had no ties and was ready and willing enough to sail with the others who signed Mulheim’s contract.

Well—here she was in Africa; with all the glamour she had wanted; sunshine, colour, natives; wonderful scenery. But the glamour faded somewhat when one was so hot, so badly fed and housed, and doubtful about the success of the company.

The bedroom door burst open. A tall, red-headed girl with a white, frightened face, burst into the room. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and a big hat of coarse native straw. She flung the hat on the bed and rushed at Gay.

“Well—that’s done it!” she said.

Gay sat up, startled.

“Iris—what’s up?”

Iris Power, one of the ‘walk-ons’ of Mulheim’s Company, made her way under the mosquito netting, sat on the bed and put her head between her hands.

“Mulheim has just been seeing the whole company.” she said. “We’re done—busted—stranded, kid. Isn’t it a shame?”

Gay’s heart gave a twist. She felt queer and sick. So it had happened. The rumour had not been without foundation. She stared blindly at Iris.

“Oh, lord—what’s it mean?” she asked.

“A week’s pay and dismissal. Mulheim says he’s sorry, but the company’s failed. All the work we’ve done out here this last four weeks is wasted. Rotten management, that’s what I call it. And anyhow, I don’t trust that German. He’s nothing but a rotten German twister who calls himself a Yank, and we were fools to come out with him.”

“But it’s frightful, Iris!” said Gay. “We can’t pay our own passages home again.”

“I know that,” said Iris bitterly. “And not only that. Mulheim says there’s trouble brewing in Europe. Britain may be at war with Germany soon. I think that is what is getting old Kurt.”

“What’ll you do?”

“Well, Billy Freeland’s got a bit of cash and he’s crazy about me. He says if I like to marry him he’ll take me to South Africa, to a place called Port Elizabeth, where he has pals, and see if we can get a job together there.”

“Are you going?”

“Yes.”

Gay’s brain felt sticky; as though her thoughts could not flow. She got up and began to dress, slowly. Iris would go to Port Elizabeth with Billy Freeland—one of the ‘supers’ in the company, and the only one with private means. So Iris was all right. And the others, the bigger parts who got bigger pay, would be all right. But she—with a few pounds in her pocket—what in heaven’s name could she do, stranded on the West Coast?

Stranded! An ugly, terrifying word.

“Mulheim was asking for you, kid,” said Iris wearily; “better go down and see him and get your pay.”

Gay finished dressing. She regarded her reflection in the small cracked mirror of the dressing-table—bamboo, like the rest of the furniture—before she left. Even the heat, hard work and conditions of the last four weeks had not destroyed that radiant white-and-gold beauty that had induced Kurt Mulheim to give the English girl a part, despite her lack of serious film experience. In the thin white linen dress with a scarlet belt round her waist, she looked a child; slender, graceful, exquisite, with her pale skin and soft gold hair cut short and waving naturally back from her forehead. Her wide-set eyes, very blue and limpid and black-lashed, were curiously innocent. The eyes of a young, eager girl not yet disillusioned or cynical. That innocent, almost virginal appearance was Gay’s chief charm. Men went crazy about her.

These few weeks in Liberia in Mulheim’s film company had depressed her, but her spirit was by no means daunted.

Everybody in the company had been nice to her—the ‘kid’ of the company. The only thing that worried Gay was that the German himself had been too nice. A few nights ago when they had met on the stairs in the hotel as she was going up to bed he had stopped her and told her that she looked like an angel, ascending heavenwards. He had touched her arm, given her a look, whispered a word which even she could not fail to understand. Innocent she might be, but by no means ignorant about life and men, after her travels with this somewhat rough company. She had bidden Mulheim good night haughtily; but she had not escaped him before he had said:

“One day I am going to make you kiss me good night, you Golden Girl … meine Liebchen.”

She detested him; the rather plump blond man with his straw-coloured hair, his red lips, his too-perfect clothes, his light-coloured eyes behind the thick lenses of his powerful glasses. He might be a good film-producer, but he was a hateful personality. There was something brutal about him which all the girls feared. Well, now he had failed with the company—he was still more contemptible.

Gay’s interview with Kurt Mulheim took place on t. . .