A Hazard of Hearts

Chapter One ~ 1808Serena, looking from the window, thought that the miracle of spring at Staverley became more breathtakingly beautiful year by year. Never had the dew-drenched lawns been greener or the lilacs more luxuriant with their branches weighted with white, mauve and purple flowers. The laburnums were fountains of golden rain and the fruit blossom lay beneath the trees in a pink-and-white snowdrift. On the lake the darkness of the water was gradually being hidden by the verdant rounded leaves of the water lilies and soon the lilies themselves in all their smooth exotic beauty would be in bloom. Serena felt her heart reach out towards such loveliness. It was part of her, an indivisible part of herself, and it seemed to her at times that her love of Staverley quickened and throbbed within her as if it was a living thing. “’Tis the hour for your chocolate, Miss Serena.” A deep voice startled her and she turned with a little exclamation. “I was daydreaming, Eudora. I did not hear you come in.” If Eudora’s voice was startling, her appearance was even more so. At first sight one supposed her to be a dwarf, but on a second glance it was obvious that her deformities were due not to an abnormality of birth, but to some disablement that had twisted her back and left her hunched and distorted. Her head was a normal size and yet it seemed unusually large on the tiny withered body. It was difficult to guess how old she was. Lines of pain were deeply etched from her pointed nose to her mouth and beneath her deep sunk eyes. Her eyes themselves were surprisingly dark and alive and seemed to miss nothing, often expressing strange and violent emotions so that Serena as a child imagined that Eudora’s spirit, wild and untamed, was imprisoned within her dwarfed foreshortened body. Serena had known Eudora all her life. There had never been a time when the little woman had not been beside her, looking after her, tending to her wants, loving her with a passionate almost animal-like devotion and guarding her fiercely and jealously. Serena took the chocolate now from the silver tray and sat down on the broad low window-seat. “Is it eleven of the clock already?” she sighed. “And I have a vast amount to occupy me.” “Mrs. Beaston asked me to inform you, miss, that if Sir Giles arrives this evenin’ there will be no roast in the house for dinner.” “Oh yes, there will be,” Serena replied. “I ordered a lamb to be killed four days ago. It should be nicely hung by now. Sir Giles is partial to lamb, as you know, Eudora, and tell Mrs. Beaston we will have baked carp dressed in the Portuguese way, two Davenport fowls, stuffed, parboiled and stewed in butter, some soup to start with and a fruit pie as a remove. It will be a small dinner but just the sort my father enjoys.” “And if Sir Giles fails to arrive?” Eudora asked. “I can manage with one of the fowls,” Serena smiled. “I will carry your instructions to Mrs. Beaston,” Eudora said. “Yes, do,” Serena said, “then come and help me pick some flowers. Those in the big vase in the hall are fading.” She turned her head as she spoke and looked out of the window. “It’s such a perfect day, I want to be in the garden.” “My heart is heavy,” Eudora volunteered. Her voice was always strange and rather gruff, but now there was a throbbing note in it and a roughness, as if she spoke from some impulse that she could not control. “Oh, Eudora, why?” Serena asked. “I know not,” the hunchback answered. “But last night when I lay awake, I felt as if a cloud, a dark cloud was approachin’ nearer and nearer.” Serena stood up quickly. “Spare me, Eudora! I am afraid of these moods of yours. It’s a good time since you have had one and yet always when you talk like this it makes me apprehensive and afraid.” “I am sorry, Miss Serena. Yet I can but speak of what I feel and know.” Eudora spoke dully, almost sullenly. “Yes, I know, Eudora dear, but how I wish you did not feel such morbid things, not on such a day as this. I want to be happy! I am happy! My father should be home soon and let’s pray that his journey to London will not have proved – ” Serena hesitated for a word and then almost in a whisper to herself added, “very costly.” Her eyes roamed round the room. It was a lovely room, but somehow inadequately furnished. There were patches on the wall where it was obvious that once upon a time pictures had hung, there was the discoloured outline of their frames and the nails they had been suspended from. The room held sofas, chairs and occasional tables, but on looking closer one wondered why there were no cabinets. A space between the windows seemed made to hold a console table and the alcove on the opposite wall was obviously designed for a bureau. Yes, the room was strangely empty. And, as Serena turned and went from the drawing room into the hall, there too was a similar emptiness and similar faded patches on the brocaded walls. The hall was dark after the sun-filled drawing room and Serena shivered a little. “You frighten me, Eudora. Go and give my message to Mrs. Beaston and bring me my pelisse from my bedroom, we are going out into the sunshine to forget your gloomy forebodings.” “Very good, Miss Serena.” Eudora bobbed a curtsey, which necessitated a strange distortion of her twisted body and then she moved across the marble floor, her feet making a strange uneven patter as she walked. Alone, Serena linked her fingers together and stared up at a great blank space over the marble mantelpiece. “Oh, please let him have won,” she whispered. “Please, please! Besides – there is nothing left to sell.” There was a passion and intensity in her voice and in the pressure of her twisted fingers. With a deliberate effort she turned towards the door. She pulled it open and the sharp, sun-kissed spring air came flooding in at her. A breath of wind rustled her hair and she turned her face towards it as if it could blow away the apprehensions of her mind. The door was at the top of a long flight of stone steps leading to the gravel drive. Beyond was a stone terrace and beyond again was a great Park, which enclosed Staverley Court, stretching as far as the eye could see and enriched with fine oaks planted there a century earlier. A flight of pigeons winged its way across the blue sky. There were several swans moving slowly and majestically on the lake. How beautiful it was! How beautiful! Yet Serena knew that Eudora’s words had thrown a stone, as it were, into the placid calm of her mind. She was afraid, terribly afraid. The servants had always said that Eudora was a witch and Serena laughed at such statements, yet in her heart of hearts she was often afraid that they might be right. Eudora was different from other people. No one knew, for instance, who her parents were. Serena’s grandfather, driving his chaise at breakneck speed from London to Staverley, had rounded a corner sharply in the twilight, his horses had knocked down a woman walking by the roadside and the wheels of the vehicle had passed over her. He brought her home to Staverley, but she died the following morning after she had been delivered of a child. That the child was twisted and abnormal was due, the midwife said, entirely to the injuries sustained by her mother immediately prior to her birth. All enquiries had failed to find out who the woman was or where she had come from, so Eudora had been brought up at Staverley, becoming, first of all, maid-of-all-work at the beck and call of the servants and then, largely by her own insistence and determination, personal maid to Serena. She had adored the child from the moment she was born and no amount of complaints or even scoldings could keep her from the nursery. Serena’s Nurse had said again and again that Eudora gave her the creeps and she would not have her up there ‘frightening the baby’, but that in itself was a slander because Serena never was frightened by Eudora. As soon as she was old enough to recognise anyone, she had smiled and held out her arms to the strange misshapen creature from whom most people shrank away in disgust. But the times were coming when Serena and other people too at Staverley were to be thankful for Eudora. Numbers of servants left never to return, a few old retainers stayed on and often went for months without wages, remaining, so they said, because of their affection for the house, but also because they had nowhere else to go and could not imagine a life which did not hold the background of Staverley for them. Eudora became invaluable. She was personal maid, housemaid and general factotum in the house and once, when Mrs. Beaston was taken ill and there was no one else, she even became cook for a few days. And yet she was never too busy to look after Serena. However short-staffed they were, her gowns were pressed and her hair dressed skilfully. ‘I could not do without her,’ Serena had often said to herself. She said it again out loud to the spring wind as she stood on top of the steps that would lead her down to the garden. Yet she wished with all her heart that Eudora would keep her forebodings to herself. It was uncanny the way Eudora’s warnings came true. Once she had said, “I can smell danger,” and it seemed too as if she could smell trouble long before it appeared. ‘What can it be? What can it be?’ Serena wondered and knew that she was already worried because her father was three or four days overdue. She looked forward to his return and yet she dreaded it. She would know from the moment she first saw him driving up to the front door in his yellow-wheeled curricle whether he had won or lost. If he had won, he would spring out like a man half his age, throw his reins to the groom and come bounding up the stone steps to shout for his daughter as though she were not already waiting for him in the hall. “Serena! Serena!” At the sound of his voice, which she would often have been waiting for for days, the relief would be almost overwhelming. “It is beyond anything great,” he would say. “We have a fortune! We will give a party, a ball and you must buy yourself some new gowns. We will restock the cellar and now, for the Lord’s sake, let them serve dinner and I will recount to you the whole tale.” He would be bubbling over with excitement like a child and, because his cheerfulness was so infectious, Serena would forget everything but his happiness and they would sit far into the night planning the things they would do, the improvements they would make to the house and the money they would spend on the estate. How enjoyable they were, those moments of feeling rich, when no extravagance was too fantastic and nothing was out of reach of their pockets! And yet Serena had known after these occasions that all too quickly Sir Giles would say, “The money is going, my pockets will soon be to let! I will travel to London on Thursday. When I return, we will consider the plans for the new wing to the house. We must empower Adam to do it for us.” “Oh, Father, don’t go yet,” Serena would beg, but she would know it was hopeless even while she pleaded with him. There was some urge within him, some need within his blood, which could not be denied. He craved the feel of the cards between his fingers as a man dying of thirst craves water. He had to go. But as the years went on the times when he won grew fewer and fewer. It seemed to Serena when she was young that they were fairly frequent, but, as she grew older, Sir Giles’s return from London was generally a very different story. The curricle would come slowly up the long drive, even the horses seemed lethargic, and when they drew up at the front door Sir Giles would descend very slowly, almost reluctantly, it seemed to Serena, as if he was afraid to face her. If she was waiting for him at the top of the steps, he would kiss her in silence, then he would pass into the hall, relinquish his hat and coat to the butler and look searchingly round him.