Love Joins the Clans

Chapter One ~ 1885-1

Chapter One ~ 1885As the train carried her across England, Clova sat beside the window, thinking that what was happening could not be true.

It seemed incredible that only a few weeks ago she was in despair, fearing that her mother would die of starvation before she did from the wasting disease that the doctors had diagnosed.

Then she herself would either have to face the cold waters of the Seine or surrender to the evils that were all too prevalent in Paris.

As the train moved swiftly through the countryside, she realised that she had forgotten how green England had looked the first time she saw it and wondered if Scotland would perhaps be more familiar.

She had been seven when her mother, the beautiful laughing Charlotte McBlane, had run away with Lionel Arkwright, who had come to Scotland year after year to shoot grouse on her grandfather’s moors.

Even as a child Clova had thought that Lionel Arkwright was a charming man, gay and witty and very different from her father, who always appeared to be serious and disapproving of everything.

Looking back now to when she was very young, Clova recognised that she had always been afraid of him.

Perhaps if she had been older she would have known it was merely his Scottish ‘dourness’ that had made him seem so frightening.

Her mother, she could understand, had found him dull.

It had been a brilliant match for the daughter of an unimportant retired English Colonel to marry the younger son of the Marquis of Strathblane.

But Lord Alister McBlane had been fascinated and then captivated by the eighteen year old Charlotte Burton, who was always called ‘Lottie’.

As soon as Lottie looked at him with her huge blue eyes, he had known at once that she was very different from the girls he knew in Scotland.

Lord Alister had been a guest of the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire for the Doncaster Races.

Lottie, who had been invited to the balls that were given to entertain the race-goers from the South, had undoubtedly stood out even though the other women were far more significant socially than she was.

Her figure was like thistledown and her laughing eyes and golden hair made her the focus of attention from the moment she walked into any room.

Lord Alister was not the only man to be bowled over by Lottie, but he was undoubtedly the most important.

When the Races ended, he engineered quite blatantly an invitation to stay with Colonel Burton on the pretext that he wanted to see the rather indifferent horses he kept on the small estate that encircled the house where he lived.

Mrs. Burton had been in a flutter.

“How could you possibly ask anyone so grand,” she enquired of her husband, “when you know that the servants are hopeless and I cannot find a decent cook?”

“I don’t think his Lordship will be so much concerned with the food,” Colonel Burton said dryly.

He already realised from Lord Alister’s behaviour at the three balls they had attended that Lottie was the inducement for his inviting himself to stay.

More than once Lottie was to be swept off her feet by the men who came into her life.

In an incredibly short time, almost indecently so it was said in the countryside, Lottie was travelling to Scotland to live in the ugly rather uncomfortable house on the Marquis’s estate, which was considered quite good enough for a younger son.

Lord Alister did not complain.

He was used, Lottie found, to putting up with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table, in his case that of his father and of his elder brother, who was the heir to the Marquisate.

He accepted it, while later Lottie was to rage against the injustice of the relatively small allowance he received, the inferior horses he had to ride and the uncouth untrained servants who were all they could afford.

But looking back, which was difficult, because she had been so young at the time, Clova thought that Lottie had been happy or at least more or less content, until The Honourable Lionel Arkwright came to stay with the Marquis.

Lottie was always prepared to accept any man who was available unless there was one better to be ensnared.

It was difficult now for Clova to remember when she first became aware of Lionel Arkwright.

There were always quite a number of gentlemen staying with her grandfather in the shooting season and invariably they soon found their way into her mother’s house because whatever their age Lottie drew them like a magnet.

By the time she was seven Clova was used to gentlemen who smelt of tweeds and expensive cigars putting their arms around her and saying,

“She is going to be as pretty as you, or very nearly, when she is grown up.”

Her mother always laughed and replied,

“You must not turn the child’s head with your compliments!”

The invariable answer was,

“I wonder if it would be possible to turn yours?”

When they spoke to her mother in a voice that was somehow deeper than usual and had a caressing note in it, Clova would watch her mother look at them from under her eyelashes.

She smiled in a way that appeared to have something shy about it and yet was incredibly fascinating.

Clova realised that when there were gentlemen present her mother seemed to blossom and look more beautiful than she did when she was alone with her father.

Then there were often long meals when he would hardly speak and her mother would say impatiently,

“Are you listening to me, Alister?”

“Yes, dear, of course.”

“What am I to do about Clova’s pony? She is really too old for it and at her age she needs something larger and more spirited.”

“I will see what I can do.”

Clova knew from experience what this always meant because her father could not afford it or else he would forget once he had left the dining room what her mother had been talking about.

He was immersed most of the time in breeding from the mares he bought in the South, but which did not always flourish in the cold bleakness of the North.

Yet he had persisted in trying to produce outstanding foals simply because, Clova decided now, there was little else for him to do.

His father, the Chieftain of the McBlanes, would not allow him to play any part in the running of the estate.

What the Marquis did not do himself, which was a great deal, was entrusted to Rory, his elder son, whom he obviously adored while Alister bored him.

The two brothers had very little in common and, while Rory resembled his father, Clova had always believed that Alister took after his mother, who had died soon after his birth.

By all accounts, confirmed by her portrait, she had been a plain woman, but had brought with her a sizeable dowry and belonged to a Clan that was favoured by the McBlanes.

It was Lottie who had opened her daughter’s eyes years later as to the truth about their situation in Scotland.

“They despised poor Alister for having married a Sassenach and one moreover with no money,” she said. “Of course, as he had made his bed, he had to lie on it and, if it was hard and uncomfortable, those unyielding Scots were determined that it was what he deserved for having been such a fool as to marry me!”

“But he loved you, Mama.”

“Of course he loved me,” Lottie replied, “as much as he was capable of loving anyone. He was not a very emotional man and I have often wondered what he really felt when I ran away.”

It was impossible for Clova to enlighten her because, when her mother ran off with Lionel Arkwright, she had gone with them.

“I am not going to leave my baby behind me,” Lottie had said in a burst of sentimentality, despite the fact that Clova was seven. “She is so pretty and so much like me that I just know that the McBlanes would make her suffer for my sins and that I could not bear.”

But Lottie herself had suffered for them.

At first everything had been wonderful. Lionel Arkwright was rich and he took them to Paris, where they had a delightful house just off the fashionable Champs-Élysées.

Lionel had a great many friends in the gayest Capital in Europe and, if most of their wives refused to meet a woman who was ‘living in sin’, having dared to flout the conventions by running away from her husband, their husbands were only too eager to fête Lottie and to flirt with her.

Lionel Arkwright bought her clothes that were more expensive and certainly more beautiful than anything she had ever imagined, which made her look even more alluring than she was already.

When, glittering with jewels, she said ‘good night’ to Clova, the small girl used to think that her mother looked like a Fairy Queen in the picture books that her Governess had read to her.

If her mother found Paris entrancing, she did too and she realised for the first time that beauty could tug at her heart with a feeling that was almost pain.

The fountains playing in the Place de la Concorde, the chestnuts bursting into bloom in the Champs-Élysées and the Seine moving silver and slow under the bridges, all seemed to speak to her more eloquently than any words.

She also enjoyed her lessons, finding they opened up new horizons that she had never known existed with her Scots Nanny who had taught her first her alphabet, her arithmetic and then her prayers.

When she was ten disaster struck!

Lionel Arkwright’s father died and he came into the title, inheriting an ancestral home and a large estate that was waiting for him in England.

Although he promised to return, Lottie knew that this was the end.

Behaving like a gentleman, which he undoubtedly was, he settled on her quite a considerable amount of money.

Unfortunately not content with living in Paris, Lionel had taken her every spring to Monte Carlo.

It was fashionable to be there and all their friends seemed to move with them, as did all the most famous actresses and the demi-mondaines whose hats were covered with osprey feathers and their necks with long strings of pearls.

They were as important a feature of the much-decried Capital of Monaco as the illustrious social figures who crowded into the small Principality where the main attraction was, of course, the Casino.

Lottie found the roulette and the baccarat tables irresistible and the first year after Lionel left her was not difficult.

There were always men whom she had known in Paris who were only too willing to pay her losses and allow her to keep her winnings and theirs as well.

When the season was over and they returned to Paris to the house where she had lived with Lionel Arkwright, Lottie found that he had sold it.

He had put some of the money obtained from the sale into the Bank in her name, but, as Clova thought sadly, it was not the same as having a home, which the house had always meant to her.

Now she learnt that there were places where one could gamble in Paris also and Lottie continued to dress in the same way she had when Lionel Arkwright had been with her.

Slowly and inevitably things became more and more difficult.

“I am afraid we shall have to move, darling,” her mother would say.

It was a statement that Clova had heard before.

“Oh, not again, Mama!”

“It’s ridiculous how much we are paying for this apartment and it is not worth it. It’s dark and uncomfortable and the bedrooms are too close together.”

Clova knew that this was important, because, when her mother came back late at night, she would wake up and hear her talking to a man who spoke in the same deep-voiced velvet tones that she had heard before.

Then suddenly they were rich again.

They would then move into far more pleasant surroundings and there would be another man whom she would be told to address as ‘uncle’.