Author’s Note
When I visited France in June 1983, I motored with my son to the mountainous fertile Dordogne. Passing along a narrow roadway I saw a magnificent Medieval Château, rising above a small river, very ancient but obviously still inhabited.
We drove closer and found behind it that there was a small attractive village with a lovely twelfth century Church exactly as I have described in this story.
That night we stayed in a very old Château, which had been converted into a hotel. My circular bedroom was in the tower.
It had a beamed ceiling and small windows in a three-foot-thick wall from which there was a panoramic view of the countryside.
Beneath me I was sure that there were dark haunted dungeons!
This story was born before I fell asleep.
Arletta was the name of William the Conqueror’s mother, who came from Normandy, and his grandfather, Duke Rollo, had three sons who became Kings of England.
The Granvilles, who are one of the oldest and most famous families in England, can trace their ancestry directly back to Duke Rollo.
Chapter One ~ 1886
“I am sorry, Lady Arletta. I am afraid it gives you very little time.”
“Very little, Mr. Metcalfe.”
Lady Arletta Cherrington-Weir gave a deep sigh and her blue eyes were wistful.
Mr. Metcalfe, a precise middle-aged Solicitor, thought that, if it was in his power, he would do anything to sweep away the worried look on her young beautiful face.
He had known Lady Arletta since she was an infant in a perambulator and had watched her grow up, becoming in doing so lovelier year by year.
He thought now that it was impossible for any young woman of twenty to be more enchanting and so completely unselfconscious and unaware of her own attractions.
This, however, was not surprising considering that for the past two years Lady Arletta had been obliged to nurse her father, the Earl of Weir, who had grown month by month increasingly querulous and disagreeable.
He had refused to have anybody else attend to him and treated his daughter, as the doctors and everybody else thought, as he would not have dared to treat a professional nurse.
But nurses were exceedingly difficult to find and in the quiet Counties of England, and especially in the villages, there were no nursing facilities except for the village midwife, who was usually old and fat and reputed to keep herself awake by imbibing large tots of gin through the dark hours of the night.
Arletta therefore had been obliged to nurse her father, who was suffering not only from heart attacks, which gave him excruciating pain, but also from gout, which was entirely due to the large amount of claret and port he insisted on drinking despite the many protests of his physicians.
“If I have to die,” he would say angrily, “I may as well have the comfort of feeling drunk and I am damned if I will have the only solace for my disgusting condition taken away from me.”
Arletta had long ago given up arguing with him. She merely agreed with everything he said and he then swore at her for being dull and spiritless.
Actually in his better moods he was exceedingly fond of his only child, although it was a bitter disappointment to him that there was no son to inherit the Earldom.
It would therefore pass to his nephew, whom inevitably he disliked.
Arletta did not like Hugo either thinking him a conceited young man who had his own ideas as to how he would run the estate and refused to listen to anything his uncle or she could tell him about it.
Now, two weeks after her father’s death, Arletta had been told that her cousin intended to move at once into Weir House and she was to remove herself and her belongings as quickly as possible.
The trouble was, as she had informed Mr. Metcalfe, she did not know where to go.
“You must have some relative you could stay with, my Lady,” he queried, “and, of course, if you wish, you can always live in the Dower House.”
“I know that,” Arletta replied, “and it is very kind of Cousin Hugo to offer it to me. But you know as well as I do, Mr. Metcalfe, that I would not be allowed to live there alone.”
She sighed before she went on.
“And I don’t think I could bear to see my cousin turn the whole estate upside down and manage it in quite a different way from Papa’s methods.”
“I am sure you would be wise to go elsewhere,” Mr. Metcalfe advised her quietly, “but, because of your father’s illness, you were not presented at Court, as you should have been a year ago and you never had the ball, which I know you were looking forward to long before you left the schoolroom.”
Arletta smiled.
“I always imagined my ball at Weir House would be a particularly splendid one. Mama used to talk about it when I was quite small and say that it would be the best that the County had ever seen and just like the times when my grandfather was alive.”
Mr. Metcalfe was well aware that it was the third Earl who had dissipated the Weir fortune with unbridled extravagance that and plunged the estate heavily into debt.
The late Earl had done his best to develop the land, make the farms pay and ensure that they lived within their means.
But he could not bring back into the family exchequer the revenue from the streets and squares of London that had been sold for what now seemed a pittance and the money that had been squandered by speculating in ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes that never materialised.
When her father had fallen seriously ill just at the time when Arletta was emerging from the schoolroom, all ideas of entertainment had been set on one side.
As he was extremely disagreeable to those who called to commiserate with him, he and his daughter became more and more isolated in the great house, which seemed unnaturally quiet after years of being filled with guests and a great deal of activity.
Since the Earl could no longer ride, the foxhounds had been taken over by another landowner in the County, the fête, which was one of the great local events of the summer, was held elsewhere and the archery competition no longer took place on their long green lawns.
The whole estate then seemed to be enveloped in a fog of depression and anticipation as to how long the Earl would live.
It was, in point of fact, due to his daughter’s care that he had lived longer than expected, but now the end had come and Mr. Metcalfe thought optimistically that it might be a new beginning for Lady Arletta.
“Now, let’s think this over sensibly,” he said in a business-like voice. “I know all your relatives and I hope you will not think it impertinent of me if I suggest who I think would look after you best and make you happy.”
“Of course, dear Mr. Metcalfe, I would be most grateful for any suggestions you can make,” Arletta replied. “The trouble is, as you well know, I have very few close relatives living in England.”
The Earl’s youngest brother, who was actually very much younger than the Earl, was Governor of Khartoum in Sudan and, as he was unmarried, it was not likely that he would want his niece to stay with him in such an isolated and troubled part of the world for any length of time.
Her only aunt, on the other hand, was married to the Governor of the North-West Provinces in India.
As she already had three daughters of her own and found them a problem, Mr. Metcalfe was certain that she would have no wish to have Lady Arletta added to her responsibilities.
There was then a long pause before he said,
“There is, my Lady, your cousin Emily.”
Arletta gave a little cry of horror.
“I will not live with Cousin Emily, Mr. Metcalfe! That would be too unkind. You know how she is given to good works and she disapproves of everything such as dancing and singing even if
people are happy. I cannot think of anything more depressing than having to live with Cousin Emily!”
Mr. Metcalfe laughed.
“I agree with you, Lady Arletta, so we must think of someone else.”
“But who?”
Arletta gave a little sigh before she added,
“I have often wished that I knew some of my grandmother’s relatives, but, because they were French, they never seemed to come to England and, although I was named after my grandmother, I have never been to France.”
“That is something I had forgotten,” Mr. Metcalfe murmured. “Of course ‘Arletta’ is a French name.”
“I have always been told that it was the name of William the Conqueror’s mother,” Arletta said, “and, because Grandmama came from Normandy, she had fair hair and blue eyes. So although I look English, I also look French.”
Mr. Metcalfe laughed.
“I am prepared to believe you, Lady Arletta, although I always think of Frenchwomen as having dark eyes and dark hair.”
“Not if they are Normans!” Arletta countered proudly.
Then she went on,
“Unless I am to write to Grandmama’s relatives whom I have never seen, who is there in England?”
“There is Lady Travers,” Mr. Metcalfe suggested.
Arletta made a little grimace.
Lady Travers was a cousin who in the past had occasionally visited Weir House, but only when she invited herself.
She was the type of middle-aged woman who was always suffering from some strange and unknown complaint that puzzled the doctors. Arletta had decided a long time ago that the only thing that was wrong with her cousin Alice was that she had not enough to do in her life.
She had enough money to live in great comfort, but she had no children and she therefore concentrated entirely on herself and her ailments.
She would spend months in Harrogate and then Cheltenham, until, finding that she was no better in either of these places, she would move on to Bath or just occasionally to some Continental Spa like Baden-Baden or Aix-les-Bains.
Arletta thought that, after two years of coping with one invalid in the shape of her father, it would be utter misery to start all over again with another.
Mr. Metcalfe watching her face knew just what she was thinking.
“Definitely not Lady Travers,” he said firmly. “I am trying to remember who else there is.”
“That is what I was doing too before you arrived,” Arletta admitted, “but I find it hard to believe that in such a distinguished family as ours there are so few of us left.”
“There must be somebody,” Mr. Metcalfe surmised desperately.
“I have some relatives who live in the very North of Scotland,” Arletta answered, “and I believe there is a distant branch of the family in Ireland, but I cannot imagine that they would be very pleased to see me after Papa has ignored them for so long.”
As this was palpably true, Mr. Metcalfe did not even trouble to agree with her.
He merely sat doodling on the block in front of him and seeing in his mind’s eye the impressive Family Tree that hung in the passage near the library.
Arletta suddenly jumped up from her chair.
“It’s no use worrying at the moment,” she declared. “I will move my things into the Dower House until I can think of somewhere where I can go.”
“You ought to be in London, my Lady,” Mr. Metcalfe said. “After all the Season has only just begun and there must be somebody, even though you are in mourning, who would see that you met young people of your own age.”
“You say I am in mourning,” Arletta replied, “but you will remember that in Papa’s will he said expressly that nobody was to wear black, nobody was to mourn for him and the sooner he was dead the better he would be pleased!”
Mr. Metcalfe, who had drawn up the will himself and thought that it was just the sort of thing that the Earl would say, did not reply.
At the time it had seemed rather bad taste and he felt now that spoken in Arletta’s soft musical voice it sounded almost cruel.
“No one could have worked harder than you, my Lady,” he said quietly, “to make your father happy in the last year of his life and I am well aware of what a difficult patient he was.”
“Terrible,” Arletta agreed.
Quite unexpectedly she laughed before she went on.
“The doctors could do nothing with him and neither could I. I think the only pleasure he had when he was in such pain was to defy us and do exactly the opposite of what was required of him.”
“I am afraid that the late Earl was always a rebel,” Mr. Metcalfe sighed.
“And I hope I am one too,” Arletta remarked.
Mr. Metcalfe looked at her in surprise and she explained.
“I do not intend to be crushed by what has happened to me and I mean somehow, now that I am free, to begin to live.”
She did not have to explain to Mr. Metcalfe that, looking after her father in the large, empty dismal house with nobody to talk to, had been to all intents and purposes a living death for a young girl.
“You are quite right,” he said aloud, “and somehow in some way you have to enjoy yourself. The first thing I think you should do is to buy yourself some new clothes. My wife always claims that there is nothing like a new gown to cheer herself up.”
Lady Arletta gave a spontaneous little laugh that was very attractive.
“I am sure that Mrs. Metcalfe is right,” she said, “and that is exactly what I will do. I will go up to London as soon as I have sorted matters out here and, however reprehensible it may seem, I shall buy myself some pretty gowns and, because I know that it would please Papa, they will not be black!”
Mr. Metcalfe picked up his papers that were on the table and put them into a leather bag.
“I think, my Lady,” he said, “that is the only sensible thing we have decided upon this afternoon. I promise you I shall think over your problem very carefully and hope eventually to come up with some sort of solution.”
He spoke with confidence.
At the same time at the back of his mind he knew that there was really no one who was congenial, understanding and kind in her family who this lovely young girl could appeal to for shelter.
When he said ‘goodbye’ and Arletta walked with him down the long passages that led to the hall, he thought that the whole house looked dismal and overwhelming and the sooner Lady Arletta was away from it the better.
She had taken on responsibilities this last year that would have seemed heavy and arduous even to a young man and, because he was very fond of her, Mr. Metcalfe wanted desperately to find some magical means by which she could be happy in the future.
‘There has to be a way,’ he ruminated as he drove away in his ancient pony cart drawn, however, by a young horse, which would make short work of the five miles that lay between Weir House and the small town where he lived and had his office.
When he had gone and Arletta saw him disappearing under the branches of the great oak trees that lined the drive, she walked back into the hall.
She was thinking, as Mr. Metcalfe had done, that the house seemed dismal and even the sunlight could not percolate through the windows to light up the portraits of the many Weir ancestors on the walls.
They needed cleaning and the stair carpet, which was almost threadbare, should have been replaced years ago.
She was well aware that the new Earl would find it all depressing and out of date.
She was quite sure that Cousin Hugo would have very strong ideas of how he could improve the house and had always thought ridiculous the sacrifices that his predecessor had made to restore what had been thrown away in the past.
“A few debts never hurt anyone!” Arletta had heard him say once.
She was sure that he had meant it as a joke.
At the same time she was certain that he did not have her father’s strict principles that had made him determined that he would never be in debt even for the smalles
t amount.
He had also sworn to make good any deficits that his father had left outstanding.
She was intelligent enough to realise that this was the reaction of a man who ever since he was a small boy had known that his father was spending more than he owned and that many people and small firms suffered in consequence.
And yet now it was hard to think that the ‘bad old days’ might return and she felt that she could not bear after so much pinching and saving to see her cousin Hugo being a spendthrift like her grandfather.
‘I must go away,’ she told herself firmly.
Slowly she walked back through the hall, where there were no servants, into the room where she had been sitting with Mr. Metcalfe.
It was a very pretty room because, as it faced South, there always seemed to be more sunshine in it than anywhere else and her mother had made it particularly her own.
She had accumulated in it all the furniture that was light, pretty and mostly French and pictures that were quite the opposite of the heavy portraits of the Weirs.
Winter or summer there were always flowers to fill the air with fragrance and make vivid patches of colour against the pale green panelling that had been installed in the reign of Queen Anne.
‘I shall miss this room,’ Arletta thought to herself.
Instinctively, as if she felt that she would understand, she lifted her eyes to the portrait of her mother that hung over the mantelpiece.
It was a very lovely picture of a very lovely women.
Looking at it, Arletta felt that the smile on her mother’s lips and the light in her eyes expressed not only her character and her personality but also her French blood, which made her so different from the Weirs, who could trace their ancestry back to Saxon times.
It seemed strange that her grandfather should have married a Frenchwoman and yet at the same time Arletta could understand that he was a rebel like her father.
His revolt had obviously been against the pomposity of his relations and perhaps too against the heavy atmosphere and gloom of the family house.
‘I wish I had known my grandmother,’ Arletta had often reflected.
Her mother had said to her,
Temptation of a Teacher Page 1
