Rescued by Love

CHAPTER ONE 1895-1

CHAPTER ONE

1895It was growing very dark and it was difficult for the two people climbing up the mountain to see ahead clearly.

“I cannot imagine why you are taking me here,” the girl kept saying.

The man merely replied,

“Come on, hurry! I want you to get to the top.”

They climbed further in silence.

Then with a sigh of relief she realised that she had reached the top of that particular mountain, although there were others nearby that were higher still.

Their tips, covered with snow, reached towards the stars.

She sunk down almost exhausted and sighed,

“I cannot imagine, Ivor, why you have brought me here at this time of night. I will be very tired tomorrow.”

“I want you to look down below you,” Ivor replied.

She wondered what he was talking about.

But because she was feeling breathless she was not prepared to argue with him.

She looked below to where she could just see the outline of their big house and the extensive garden beyond it.

It looked to her as it always had done, an isolated building on flat land that slipped down for several miles before it reached the sea.

Then to her surprise she could see lights at what she knew was the entrance to the drive, which was bordered, almost in English fashion, with trees on either side of it.

Now she could see lights moving between them.

“Look!” she exclaimed in astonishment. “There are lights going up the drive! Who can it be and why are they going to the house at this time of night?”

“That is what I brought you up here to see,” her brother answered.

“But surely we should be there to receive them?” the girl questioned. “You know that Papa cannot do so and there will only be the servants in the house.”

“I think, if they are wise, the servants will already have left,” her brother commented.

“What are you talking about?” the girl, whose name was Weena, asked. “I just don’t understand, Ivor.”

“You will understand very shortly,” was the reply, “when they set fire to the house!”

Weena gave a little scream.

“Set fire to the house! What on earth can you be talking about?”

“I have brought you here not only to save you,” he answered her, “but to convince you that after tonight we will have no home as it will be burnt to the ground.”

“But Papa – ” she began. “Papa will be burnt too.”

“He will know nothing. I gave him a pill before I left that will make him unconscious for twenty-four hours. By that time he will be buried in his own house which I actually believe he would prefer to being buried anywhere else.”

His sister was staring at him incredulously as if she thought it impossible to understand what he was saying.

Because Ivor knew just what she was feeling, he rose and moved closer to her.

“Now listen, Weena,” he said, “I have not worried you with this before, but I have known for some time that things were becoming increasingly uncomfortable for us in the neighbourhood.”

He paused for a moment before he continued,

“They hate Papa as they hate all those who are in a position of authority and privilege.”

“I don’t understand what you are saying,” Weena wailed.

“Well, to put it very bluntly,” Ivor told her, “we are going to have a Revolution all over Russia, not all at once, but slowly until eventually it disposes of the Czar and all those who toady to him.”

“I think you must be mad!” Weena gasped. “How can that possibly happen in a country as huge as Russia?”

“There have been Revolutions happening all over,” Ivor replied, “and because I realise that our people feel the same I have recently been seeing a girl whose family is one of them, so to speak. Because she was intimate with me, she told me the full truth.”

“That they intend to kill our beloved Papa?” Weena said incredulously. “I just don’t believe it!”

“You are now going to see it happen and because I did not want you to be distressed or to do anything foolish like pleading with these people, which would have been useless, I have brought you here.”

“I cannot believe – you are telling me – the truth,” Weena muttered, stumbling over the words.

At the same time she was still looking down at their house below.

She could see that the flaming torches had reached the end of the drive and she realised her brother was right in saying that they were going to burn down her home.

For a moment the mob came to a halt.

Then they started moving towards the house so that one group of the torches went to the North of it while the other went to the South.

It was then that Weena gave a cry.

“Oh, Ivor, Ivor – you must stop them!”

“No one can do that,” he said quietly. “In fact there is no one we can turn to for help, who could come in time to save us.”

“But if you knew about it,” Weena protested, “you could have told someone in the Police or in the Army who would have made those revolutionaries, whoever they are, behave.”

Her brother gave a little laugh that had no humour in it.

“No one could do that!” he ejaculated, “just as no one will be able to stop these people from rebelling all over Russia.”

He sighed before he went on,

“We are at the edge of the country so that no one will worry unduly when they find out that our home is burnt to the ground and Papa is dead.”

Weena gave a little sob, but he continued,

“That is why you and I have to go away now to a new country and that is England.”

He realised that he was speaking almost to himself.

His sister was mesmerised by the growing flames below.

Now she saw that, after standing for a moment so that the first man waited for the last, someone must have given an order and the mob rushed forward.

The burning torches burst through the windows of the drawing room.

Some of them flared up inside the building and then more were lit to follow those that had gone in first.

It was an agony that she could not even express to realise that the hall was now alight and the kitchen quarters were beginning to blaze.

Then the fire was bursting out in the dining room, the sitting room, the two drawing rooms and eventually, and she could not bear to look at it, the library was burning as well.

How could they do it?

“Now they will burn Papa,” she cried frantically.

The words seemed to break from her lips as if she could not prevent herself from uttering them.

She hid her face against her brother’s shoulder.

“He will know nothing and feel nothing,” he tried to comfort her. “I promise you that he was completely unconscious before I left him. You know, as well as I do, I would not want him to suffer in any way.”

“I know that,” Weena sobbed. “But it’s our lovely ancestral home and now we have nothing.”

Her brother’s arms tightened round her.

“We only have what I had the foresight to hide away,” he replied, “which will, I sincerely believe, at least keep us alive for some time.”

There was silence for a moment.

Then Weena asked,

“Is that why you made me give you all Mother’s jewellery?”

“I put it in a safe place, where we can collect it. There are also all the clothes you gave me last week which were, I hope, your best.”

“They were, because you had told me that we were going to stay with one of your friends,” Weena murmured, “who was planning to give a ball for us.”

“I had no wish to tell you why I wanted them, yet now we own only those dresses and what we now stand up in.”

“How could you possibly let them burn everything we owned and which we are so proud of?” Weena asked.

She was thinking of all the pictures that her mother had loved and the furniture that her father had always been so thrilled to have collected throughout his life.

Even as she spoke, the flames leapt through to the top of the house and the roof began to crumble until it was no longer visible.

Now in the light from the fire they could see men moving about below them throwing one torch after another into what was left of the house.

She realised now that her father’s bedroom where he was lying had completely disappeared.

She wanted to hide her face against her brother’s shoulder and not look at the unfolding tragedy anymore.

Yet it was impossible not to do so.

The fire was getting stronger and stronger and the flames were leaping higher and higher.

Now she could see people running from the village towards it.

There would be no chance of them being able to save it, even if they had wanted to help.

But she had the feeling when her brother told her that they were all rejoicing, they would no longer have to obey the orders given by her father who employed a large number of them.

Perhaps they had hated him as revolutionaries hated anyone they thought was socially above them and made them feel inferior.

She must have trembled because her brother’s arms tightened further around her.

“You have to be brave, Weena,” he said. “We have to find a new life for ourselves, a new way of living. As I have thought it all out, I will tell you about it as soon as we reach the ship that will carry us to safety.”

Weena looked round at the burning house.

“It’s a long way – to the sea,” she managed to sob.

“I know that!” her brother answered. “That is why two horses are waiting for us in a place where no one will see them. I brought them there this morning and left them enough food and water so that they will carry us safely to where we will escape from Russia. Never, I hope, to come back!”

He spoke with a bitterness in his voice that had not been there before.

Then Weena asked in a quavering voice,

“You really mean that we have now lost everything that was ours?”

“Not quite everything. “But our possessions, our land, our home and, as far as we are both concerned, there will never be a chance of us coming back here to claim our birthright.”

“You mean – we are exiled?” Weena asked slowly.

“We are indeed exiled and a large number of people would envy us because we have been well prepared for the inevitable.”

He rose to his feet as he was speaking and pulled her to him.

Then, holding her hand, he began to take her down the mountain on the far side.

They had not gone far before she realised that they were out of sight of the house.

But she knew by now that there would be little left except for the fire that would burn perhaps for a day or so before it finally died out.

Weena wanted to cry because it was her home.

She had been so happy there all her life with her father and mother.

She had really believed that all the servants who had served them for so long were their friends and not only respected but loved them.

‘I really cannot believe that Nanny,’ she wanted to say, ‘was one of the people who set fire to our house.’

Yet she was not certain.

There had been rumours for quite some time that the people in the village were discontented.

There had been a bad harvest last year, but it was not only that which was disturbing.

There were stories in all the newspapers and letters from their friends reporting that there was discontent over the whole country.

The Czar was unpopular and so were the rules and regulations by which the country was run.

Weena remembered now that when people came to stay with them, they had horrific stories to tell of people being murdered.

And of those in the Government being attacked in the newspapers and booed in the streets.

There was indeed a vast amount of disaffection in whichever direction they looked.

Weena had not attended to these stories very much.

But she realised when her brother came home that he was continually going into the village as if he found it more interesting than being at home with her.

She was not at all surprised because she knew that he must find it very dull at the house.