Love Leaves at Midnight

Chapter 1 1883-1

Chapter 1

1883The train, which had left Victoria Station fifteen minutes late, was trying to make up time.

It seemed to Xenia that the carriage was rocking in a most unpleasant manner.

Although she had resented it at the time, she was glad now that Mrs. Berkeley had insisted on having the windows closed so that they would not be enveloped with black smoke.

Sitting opposite her employer Xenia thought for the thousandth time how fortunate she was to be crossing the Channel and visiting France, not that Mrs. Berkeley let her forget it for a moment.

“Most young women,” she said in her hard rather grating voice, “would be thrilled to see the Continent of Europe, but in your case you are particularly fortunate.”

Xenia knew this referred once again to the fact that she had been left penniless on the death of her father and mother.

While she had hoped that one of her relations might take care of her, it had in fact been a stranger, a woman who prided herself on her charitable impulses, who had taken her into her house.

The Honourable Mrs. Berkeley was the Squire’s widow in the small village where Xenia had lived all her life.

Most of its inhabitants were employed on the Berkeley estate, but her father had been the exception and she thought secretly that Mrs. Berkeley was resenting that she could not patronise him and her mother as she did everyone else.

There was, Xenia thought perceptively, something in the endless dispensing of her generosity that smacked of triumph.

It seemed impossible that Mrs. Berkeley with her money, her large estate and her magnificent mansion, should have been jealous of the quiet unassuming Mrs. Sandon who made no effort to assert herself in any way.

Yet Xenia knew that her mother, unlike Mrs. Berkeley, was beloved by everybody who knew her simply because of her sympathy, understanding and sweet personality.

Mrs. Berkeley had been determined to patronise the Sandons and the fact that their only child was left destitute had in some obscure way pandered to her vanity.

“What would you have done,” she asked Xenia over and over again, “if I had not taken you in and made you my companion, besides giving you a very adequate wage for the very little you do?”

This, Xenia thought, was unfair.

She found that in the position of companion to Mrs. Berkeley she was run off her feet from first thing in the morning to last thing at night.

There was always something to fetch and carry, there were always messages to be delivered, besides endless small duties that should really have been those of a lady’s maid.

Worst of all there were the hours spent having to listen to complaints and criticisms not only of herself but also of other people.

Mrs. Berkeley was never satisfied. She expected perfection, but Xenia often thought rebelliously that she would not recognise it if she found it.

She had been desperately miserable after the sudden deaths of her father and mother from a virulent form of influenza, which had swept the whole of England and had taken its toll even on the small village of Little Coombe.

A number of the old people had died, which might have been expected, but there were also children and even strong labourers, besides her father and mother.

It had all happened so suddenly that Xenia hardly had time to realise that she was alone in the world with nobody to care for and nobody to care for her.

Mrs. Berkeley, like an over-benevolent Fairy Godmother, had carried her off to Berkeley Towers and before her tears were dry she found herself being ordered around as if she was a raw recruit under the command of a Sergeant Major.

“Crying will do you no good,” Mrs. Berkeley said sharply. “I have learnt in life that it is no use fighting the unchangeable – of which death is one.”

She paused to say positively,

“Make up your mind once and for all that you are an extremely fortunate young woman in that I have taken you under my wing, and show your gratitude by trying to do what I require of you.”

It would have been easier, Xenia thought, if there had been some method or routine in Mrs. Berkeley’s requirements, but they changed not only day by day but hour by hour.

“But you told me to do that,” she would sometimes expostulate when she was scolded and called a ‘nit-wit’.

“Never mind what I said before,” Mrs. Berkeley would snap, “this is what I want now and I expect you to do it my way.”

Sometimes Xenia had begun to wonder despairingly if perhaps she really was as stupid as Mrs. Berkeley told her she was.

Her father had always considered her to be intelligent and her mother had loved her deeply so that it was almost impossible for her to find fault with such a beloved daughter.

It was after she had been with Mrs. Berkeley for nearly nine months that Xenia had come to the conclusion that a clue to Mrs. Berkeley’s continual fault-finding where she was concerned was that she was too attractive.

She was not vain, but it was impossible to alter the beauty that she had inherited from her mother or to conceal the fact that she looked different from other girls of her age.

People exclaimed at her appearance and paid her compliments, which she noticed made Mrs. Berkeley’s lips tighten in anger.

Her employer might now be well over forty, but she had been good-looking in her youth and there was no doubt that she resented the way that everyone who came to Berkeley Towers looked at Xenia in astonishment and kept on looking.

Sometimes Xenia asked herself, what was the point of having good looks if they were a more of a hindrance than a help?

But if she were honest, there were moments when a glint of admiration in a man’s eye, however old he might be, was a source of comfort.

‘Perhaps one day,’ she thought to herself, ‘I shall meet somebody who will love me – then I shall escape.’

She knew it was wrong not to be more grateful to Mrs. Berkeley, but all day long she heard her voice calling her, berating her, criticising and sometimes jeering at her.

It was all so unlike the happiness she had known at home.

It had been very quiet in their pretty thatched cottage, which whilst small had many comforts compared to the other cottages in Little Coombe.

“Really, this place is almost habitable!” Mrs. Berkeley had said when she came to the cottage after the funeral.

She looked around at the attractive way in which the small rooms were decorated and at the pieces of good furniture that Xenia’s father and mother had collected over the years.

It was Mrs. Berkeley’s condescension, Xenia thought, that she resented more than anything else.

She often had to fight back an impulse to tell the older woman the truth about her mother and watch with amusement her change of attitude.

But that would have been betraying what Xenia considered a sacred trust.

She was fourteen when her mother had said one day,

“You must have wondered, my dearest, why I have never talked to you about my father and mother or my family.”

Xenia had looked at her wide-eyed as she went on,

“Your father’s relatives all live in the North, although most of them are dead now, but I have a family too.”

“You have, Mama?” Xenia exclaimed. “Why have you never spoken about them to me?”

“Because my past is a secret and what I am going to tell you must be a secret, Xenia. You must promise me that you will never speak of it to anyone. Ever.”

“Why not, Mama?”

“When your father and I ran away together to make a new life of our own, I cut the links which joined me not only to my father and mother but also to my twin sister.”

“Mama!”

Xenia’s expression was one of sheer astonishment.

“You ran away with Papa?” she cried. “How exciting! How romantic!”

“It was,” her mother said with a smile. “Very very romantic and, Xenia, I have never regretted it. It was not only the wisest thing I have ever done but it also made me the happiest woman in the world!”

There was no doubt that her father and mother were exceptionally happy.

Xenia had only to watch the expression on her mother’s face when her father came into a room and see her father’s eyes soften in adoration to know that they lived in a blissful world of their own.

“I have often wondered where you came from, Mama, but, when I asked you, you never told me, although I know it was somewhere in Europe.”

“How did you know that?” Mrs. Sandon enquired.

Xenia laughed.

“People are always saying that your hair and mine is the colour of the Empress of Austria’s or else they say we must have Hungarian blood in our veins.”

“Both are accurate,” Mrs. Sandon smiled quietly,

“Then tell me – tell me everything, Mama, and I promise I will never reveal your secret to anyone.”

Mrs. Sandon had paused for a moment and then she said slowly,

“My father – your grandfather – is King Constantine of Slovia!”

Xenia stared at her open-mouthed.

“Is this true, Mama, or a Fairy story?”

“It is true,” Mrs. Sandon said with a smile.

“Then why have you no title?”

“That is just what I am going to explain to you, dearest. I gave up everything when I ran away with your father.”

Xenia clasped her hands together and listened intently as her mother with a faraway look in her eyes continued,

“I wish you could have seen your father when he first came to the Palace. He was so handsome, so attractive in his uniform and I felt my heart stop beating. I knew, I think, from that first moment I saw him that I was in love.”

“And did he fall in love with you, Mama?” Xenia asked.

“Instantly! He told me afterwards that it was as if I was enveloped in a white light and that I was who he had been searching for all his life and never found.”

“And he told you that he felt like that?”

“Not at once,” her mother answered. “It was difficult for us to be together, but somehow we managed it and, as we looked into each other’s eyes and his hand touched mine, there was no need for words, we knew we belonged to each other.”

“What happened?” Xenia asked breathlessly.

“We fought against it. We both fought against something which we knew would cause not only consternation but unremitting anger.”

‘You mean that your father, the King, would not think Papa a suitable husband for you?” Xenia asked.

“He would not have imagined such an alliance to be within the realms of possibility,” her mother replied. “It is doubtful if he even realised that your father existed.”

“Why was he at your Palace?”

“He had come to Slovia as one of the aides-de-camp of an English General who was on a Military Mission.”

“It must have been difficult for you ever to meet,” Xenia said sympathetically.

“It would have been impossible if my twin sister had not looked exactly like me – ” her mother explained.

“You never told me that you had a twin sister,” Xenia interrupted accusingly.

“If you only knew how much I longed to tell you about her and to talk about her. I suppose it is inevitable, since twins are closer to each other than any other relations, that when I left home with your father, even though I loved him overwhelmingly, one little part of me was left behind with Dorottyn.”

“What a pretty name!” Xenia said. “I have always loved yours, Mama – Lilla.”

“I wanted to change it to Lilly when I came to England,” her mother answered, “but your father would not let me. He said Lilla suited me and you know I always do what he wants.”

“As he does what you want,” Xenia laughed.

“I have been so very very lucky,” Mrs. Sandon said softly.

“You don’t ever regret leaving a Palace and all your family behind?”

“I miss Dorottyn,” her mother replied, “and I find it hard to forgive my father and mother for wiping me out of their lives and behaving as if I no longer existed.”

“How could they do that?” Xenia asked indignantly.

“I suppose, looking back, my behaviour was outrageous from their point of view,” Mrs. Sandon said. “I had not only fallen in love with a commoner, but had refused a very advantageous alliance they had arranged for me that they thought would benefit our country.”