Stars In My Heart

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1876-3

It was a room curiously at variance with Harriet’s appearance, for it was a frivolous feminine room with curtains of rose-pink satin, with a muslin frill decorating the dressing table, with cupids flying over the painted ceiling and tiny spindle-legged gold chairs which she had brought there from one of the rooms downstairs.

In the middle of it, Lady Harriet, tall, angular, her dark hair falling in ringlets on either side of her high cheekbones, seemed an intruder, but there was no mistaking who owned the room or the house.

“How could you be so long, you tiresome girl?” she stormed at Gisela as soon as she entered the room. “You know as well as I do that I want to wear that purple gown tonight to dine at The Castle. The lace is torn at the bottom. I told you to repair it a week ago.”

“I don’t think you did,” Gisela said timidly. “I don’t remember you ever mentioning it to me.”

In answer Lady Harriet strode across the room and seizing Gisela by her forearm, with fingers that bit into the flesh, she dragged her roughly to the bed on which was laid the purple gown in question.

“Look for yourself then,” she said, giving the back of her stepdaughter’s head a good slap. “Look and see. You put the dress away. Haven’t I told you over and over again to see if anything wants doing before you hang it up?”

She shook Gisela roughly as she spoke, her fingernails digging so sharply into the girl’s arm that she gave a little cry of pain.

“Oh, please, you are hurting me.”

“I will hurt you a jolly sight worse if you don’t get busy this moment on the dress,” Lady Harriet replied. “You lazy little dolt. You cannot do a single thing you are asked to do. What good you are in the world I would like to know. Get your needle and thread and you don’t leave this room until it is finished.”

“Could I have a cup of tea first?” Gisela asked. “It was so cold in Towcester, my fingers are frozen.”

“Work will unfreeze them,” Lady Harriet retorted. “I have told you what you are to do. There is no time for cups of tea. Hurry, do you hear me? I have got to wear that dress tonight or I’ll give you a beating you won’t forget in a lifetime.”

As she spoke, she gave Gisela a push that sent her flying across the room towards the door.

With an effort she kept her footing, opened the door and fled upstairs to her own room. She threw her cape and bonnet down on the bed. She knew her hair looked a sight, dishevelled by the wind and the pressure of her bonnet. But she dare not stop to tidy herself.

She picked up her work-basket and tore downstairs, hurrying back along the passage to her stepmother’s bedroom and to her relief when she got back into the room Lady Harriet was not there.

Quickly she drew a chair up to the bed and. with tiny almost invisible stitches, started to sew on the lace flounce where it had been torn away from the elaborate frills at the bottom of the dress.

It was only as she sat down that Gisela was aware that her arm was bruised and a little painful where her step-mother had gripped it. She could still feel too the sharpness of those bony fingers on the back of her head.

Tears gathered in her eyes. Why, she wondered, was everything she did always wrong? Why had something always been forgotten?

She tried really hard to placate Lady Harriet, not only for her own sake but also for her father’s and for the sake of everyone in the house.

“I cannot think why you don’t make an effort to please your stepmother,” her father had said to her more than once. But she could not explain to him that whatever she did Lady Harriet would never be satisfied.

He had no idea how cruel she was with her continual slappings and pinchings. And, ever since Gisela was a child, Lady Harriet had made every possible excuse for beating her.

A broken cup, a forgotten errand, a chance remark that was twisted into an impertinence, would all result in Lady Harriet bringing out the thin wiry little dog whip she kept in her bedroom for this very purpose.

As the years went by, Gisela tried to protest that she was too old to be punished in such a humiliating manner. But, small and delicately boned, she was powerless against the superior strength of her stepmother. She had learnt too from bitter experience that protesting or screaming merely incited Lady Harriet to whip her harder and more violently.

On such occasions there was a glint in the older woman’s eye and a cruel smile on her lips, the reason for which even Gisela did not understand and which frightened her as being both unnatural and evil.

Now, as she sewed, Gisela wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. How stupid she was to mind! She had told herself often enough that Lady Harriet was of no real consequence in her life.

Why did she not think instead of her mother? So gentle and pretty. How happy they had been when she was alive! The house had seemed full of laughter, the food had been delicious, the servants had worked willingly and cheerfully.

They had not been any richer, but the money had gone much further. It was not spent, as it was now, on Lady Harriet’s outrageous gowns, on furs, bonnets, jewellery, fans and fripperies. All to try and enslave any stupid young subaltern from the nearby Barracks or some adventurous gentleman in need of a free meal and a bedroom he need not pay for.

Money that should have been spent on the house and the garden was all expended by Harriet on trying to preserve or create a beauty she had never possessed. It would have been pathetic if anyone could feel sorry for the hard-voiced virago who made their lives a continual hell.

‘Oh, Mamma, Mamma,’ Gisela sobbed in her heart. ‘Why did you have to die?’

She could see that night only too well.

Her mother had been so well the previous week and she had looked more beautiful than ever. Beautiful because she believed that she was about to have her heart’s desire.

“I am going to give you a little brother, Gisela,” she said, putting her arm around the ten-year-old girl.

“Oh, Mamma, when?” Gisela asked.

“Very soon, darling.”

They had talked about it excitedly and then her father had come into the room.

“Have you told the child, Stephanie?” he enquired.

Her mother looked up at him with shining eyes.

“She is as happy as I am, George.”

“You must not be disappointed if it is a daughter,” he said and Gisela had known by the sudden gruffness in his voice that he was trying to hide his feelings, trying to conceal the delight that he too was sharing with them.

“It will be a son,” his wife answered. “A son for you, George, because you want it so much, because I have been so ashamed it was the one thing I have not been able to give you.”

“Do you think I want anyone but you?”

Her father knelt down by her mother’s chair and put his arms around her. They had both forgotten the little girl watching them.

That night when she was in bed Gisela had heard a scream. It was the next morning before she learned that her mother had fallen when going downstairs to dinner and had rolled from the top of the stairs to the bottom.

The baby was born prematurely that night. It was a son and both he and his mother died as the sun came up over the distant hills.

Everything had changed from that moment. At first Squire Musgrave had behaved like a maniac, raving about the house, demanding doctors and more doctors, specialists, anyone who could bring his wife back to life.

And then after the funeral he had sunk into a drunken despair from which no one could rouse him.

For several months he had been in a hopeless condition until the hunting season came round and then they had persuaded him to go out cubbing for the sake of his horses. It had been the saving of his sanity.

Gisela had never quite known how or where he had met Lady Harriet.

As a child she had only watched her come increasingly often to the house, uninvited, ‘taking a chance’, as she herself put it, of finding the Squire at home.

There were long séances in the smoking-room when they sat talking and laughing, evenings when she brought a few friends over to dinner and more occasionally persuaded Squire Musgrave to drive over to her home.

And then, finally, the evening when Gisela, playing the piano in the drawing room, looked up to see them both standing in the doorway. Her father was drunk – she knew that by the rather stupid expression on his face, by the way he swayed into the room as he walked towards her. There was nothing exceptional about it and she took it as a matter of course.

But Lady Harriet’s attitude had changed. She sensed that as she rose, shy and a little awkward, to her feet.

“I-I was practising,” she said almost as if some explanation had been demanded of her.

“Your father and I have news for you,” Lady Harriet said.

There was a note in her voice and a glint in her eye that told Gisela the truth almost before she said it.

“We were married this morning.”

Five words that were almost like a death blow.

She found herself standing and staring stupidly and voicelessly.

“Are you not going to congratulate us?”

There was a satisfaction and yet a taunting note in Lady Harriet’s voice that seemed to strike Gisela like a whip.

“No, no! It’s not true! It cannot be true!”

She heard her own voice, shrill and frightened. It was a nightmare – a nightmare from which she must waken at any moment. But even as she cried out, even as she turned helplessly from one to the other, she knew that it was the truth.

Papa had married Lady Harriet. There was someone else in her mother’s place!