Stars In My Heart

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1876-2

For the first time she asked herself by what right should she and her demands be ignored while he was served? She was not only a woman, she too was one of the gentry, one of ‘the ruling classes’ – to repeat a phrase that her father was fond of using.

‘The ruling classes!’ She almost laughed aloud at the irony of it. She, who was nothing more or less than an unpaid servant in her own home. She, who must wait on her stepmother, who must bear insults and blows without complaint. And yet, as far as her antecedents were concerned, she was as blue-blooded as any of those who were accorded respect and attention.

But it seemed to her now that even Fred Tyler and the shopkeepers of the town knew how little it mattered where she was concerned.

Blindly, on a sudden impulse, she followed the saddler from the shop, going out into the cold windy street just as the carriage, which had been standing outside, drove away.

She could not miss the magnificence of the pair of chestnut bays that drew it, of the coachman with his many-tiered driving cape, the impudent footman beside him on the box or the crest emblazoned on the polished panel of the door.

She had another glimpse of the dark arrogant face inside, of the finely chiselled nose silhouetted against the upholstery, of lips set in a hard line above a square chin.

And then the horses were moving away with the jingle of silver bit and bridle followed by a clatter of wheels.

Fred Tyler did not see Gisela slip behind him and turn down the street. He was staring after the coach, a look almost of rapture on his face.

Gisela, battling with the March wind, had no desire to draw his attention to her. She had left one errand unfulfilled, but what did it matter?

But in some way it only accentuated the resentment in her heart against the stranger in the coach, and, in contrast, her own invidious position.

There was no carriage to carry her home. She had come into the town in the old family barouche, which was used on market days but seldom at other times. But her stepmother had sent it on an errand on the other side of Towcester and Gisela had said that she would walk back when her errands were done rather than wait for its return.

It was only a walk of two miles to the Squire’s house, The Grange, which was just outside the town and Gisela was used to walking. It was seldom that a carriage could be spared to take her anywhere. The horses were always better employed than conveying her. And, indeed, she would not even have been allowed to hunt had it not suited her father to use her as a second or third groom and let her help to keep the horses exercised.

As she walked now along the muddy road, trying to keep the hem of her skirt clean and at the same time prevent her bonnet from flying off her head, Gisela dreamt only of the hunt. She found herself remembering the conversation of the two farmers.

Who was the woman who went like a bird? she wondered. And then, despite every resolution to the contrary, she found herself thinking of the stranger. Who was he? Would she see him out hunting? She hoped, she thought fiercely, that she would never see him again and wondered why she felt so violently about him.

There was something irritating, she thought, in a man who was obviously so eaten up with his own pride. And yet perhaps there was an excuse in the fact that he had something to be proud of.

She was proud – and about nothing, as her stepmother told her often enough.

Gisela gave a little sigh. It was not often that she allowed herself to wallow in self-pity, and yet sometimes it was impossible not to compare her position with that of other girls of her own age.

In three months’ time she would be twenty-one and she would come of age.

Her lips curved a little scornfully at the thought. What would she come of age to? More days of drudgery, more months of servitude, more years of never being able to go anywhere or do anything!

Why did her stepmother hate her so? She wished she knew the answer.

Once she had asked Lady Harriet that very thing.

“Why do you hate me?” she demanded through her tears, after she had been beaten for something she had not done.

“Hate you?” Harriet Musgrave had enquired. “I don’t hate a stupid little slut like you. Why should I? You are not worth hating, my dear. You are too stupid, too plain and insignificant for me to feel anything about you except irritation.”

Too stupid and insignificant! The words had stung because, as Gisela admitted to herself, they were true. And yet, what chance had she to be anything else?

Lady Harriet nagged at her morning, noon and night. She might deny hating her, but it was true enough. Gisela knew that. And her father had long since given up trying to protect her.

He had indeed given up arguing with his second wife in every possible way. Instead, when he was not hunting, he was drinking – drinking himself to a comfortable oblivion of nagging voices, of women’s quarrels, of poverty, of everything, in fact, that might trouble or disturb him.

“Papa, why do you drink so much?” Gisela had asked him when by a lucky chance they were alone together and he had been in one of his good moods.

“What else is there for a man who has grown old? And thank the Lord your grandfather had the sense to lay down a good cellar,” he had said.

“But it’s not good for you, Papa.”

“It’s good for me to be at peace with God and man,” he answered. “And I assure you, Gisela, that after two bottles of this port I am at peace with the devil himself.”

Lady Harriet did not accept his explanations so easily. Sometimes their rows would make the chandeliers shake and tremble above their heads and Gisela would slip upstairs to bed rather than hear their harsh voices shouting abuse at each other.

“You drunken sot,” Harriet Musgrave screamed once when he had accused her of being unfaithful to him. “Do you imagine I am content to sit here and watch you sousing? I am young, I want to enjoy life, I want to have fun. I didn’t marry you to be an old man’s nurse.”

Gisela did not hear her father’s reply, but the next night when he had come in from hunting he had drunk himself into insensibility in the smoking room while Harriet had flirted in the drawing room with her latest young man.

She was finding it harder and harder as the years went by to command attention. She had never been very attractive, with her heavy, angular features, a sallow skin and a figure that one disagreeable old gossip had described as, ‘a lamp post with a waist’. Being the fifth daughter of an old County family, she had had difficulty in finding herself a husband and the widowed Squire Musgrave had seemed her last chance. There was no doubt at all that she had been in love with him when she married him. She would, in fact, have been in love with any man who had so much as glanced in her direction.

But marriage had not brought her the ardent inexhaustible romance that her heart and body craved for. She did not hunt, being afraid of horses, and she resented the utter absorption of her husband and practically every other man in the neighbourhood in a sport that seemed to her merely a ridiculous waste of time.

She was the type of woman who wanted everyone’s attention to be focused on her and she could never forgive the Squire for returning to the chase as soon as the honeymoon was over and being content to spend three-quarters of every day in the company of his horses rather than in her own.

She had loathed Gisela from the moment she had set eyes on her.

The fact that the girl had not yet discovered the reason for it was due to a modesty that was instinctive as well as being hammered into her.

*

The drive to The Grange was long and overgrown. The avenue of heavy oaks dripped onto the worn gravel and into the puddles formed through lack of repair and briars and brambles sprawled over the grass on either side.

When the house came in sight, it was easy to see that it too needed both redecorating and repair.

The paint was blistered and worn round the windows. Several panes of glass were cracked or missing in the front of the house and the stone portico was crumbling away. Ivy climbed over the red brick of the house itself and there was a general air of dilapidation about the whole place.

Gisela was, however, too used to her home to notice anything particularly wrong with it at the moment. The morning rain had, in fact, washed the front doorsteps cleaner than usual, although there was dried mud on the scrapers and the footprints of several dogs travelled over the steps onto the polished floor of the hall.

The hall itself was large and dark, its oak-panelled walls hung with pictures of the Musgrave family dating back to the reign of King Charles II.

It was very cold in the house, for the fire had not been lit, although fresh logs had been thrown into the huge open fireplace.

Gisela gave a little sigh. It was always the same if she went out. James saw to nothing. He was really almost mental, but where else would they get a footman so cheaply?

Hill, the butler, was long past work. He would be seventy-five next birthday and was already partially blind and almost completely deaf. The only thing he was capable of doing was to bring up the bottle of wine that her father required as soon as he came into the house and she suspected that he usually sampled it himself before he decanted it and finished off in the morning anything that was left.

She pulled her cape from her shoulders, threw it on a chair and knelt down to light the fire.

As she did so there came a voice from the top of the stairs,

“Is that you, Gisela?”

Gisela hesitated. It was an almost instinctive hesitation of someone who longs not to answer and who hopes against hope that they can pretend not to be there.

“Gisela!”

The voice was sharp and penetrating.

“Yes.”

“I thought I heard you come in. Why don’t you answer at once? Where have you been?”

“To Towcester. You know that I had to go there.”

“Well, why have you been so long? Come upstairs at once. I want you.”

“I was just going to light the fire.”

“Never mind about the fire. Come up here.”

Gisela rose from her knees, brushed the dust from the hearth off her dress and, as she did so, she had a sudden vision of the man in the saddler’s shop walking royally and with a conscious dignity across the wooden floor.

What would he do in such circumstances? she wondered. And then she knew that never, under any circumstances, would he find himself in such a position or remain in it. He would fight his way out and battle down his opponents by sheer force of will and personality.

“Gisela!”

The call was imperative.

“I am coming,” Gisela said. “I am coming.”

She almost ran up the stairs, frightened now with the silly childish fear that her stepmother always aroused in her. It had started when Harriet first came to the house and nothing had happened in the years to take away that first sense of fear and helplessness with which the child, Gisela, had regarded her stepmother.

Lady Harriet was standing now in the big bedroom that opened off the top of the stairs. In it was the huge mahogany four-poster in which she and the Squire slept when he was not so drunk that he spent the night in his armchair in the smoking room.