A Wish Come True

Chapter One 1824-1

Chapter One 1824Olivia Lambrick looked into her purse and sighed.

She realised that they were growing very short of money.

Sooner or later she would have to approach the new Earl of Chadwood.

She had hoped that he would call on her or at least send a message inviting her to Chad Hall.

But so far they had heard nothing from him and she knew that it would be a great mistake to push herself on him as soon as he arrived.

After all, as she was well aware, everything was new to him and he had never expected to inherit the title.

A distant cousin, he was soldiering in the East when he had been informed that the fifth Earl had died and his two sons had been lost at sea.

Both William and John were keen on sailing and they had gone to the estate in Cornwall that their father owned.

Daringly they had put to sea when there was a huge storm blowing up.

They had both been drowned and it had been a body blow for the Earl who was already in bad health.

It had also distressed everyone on the estate.

They had loved William and John and had watched them growing up with the same interest and affection as they had for their own children.

Olivia found it hard to believe that they were dead.

The two young men had been like brothers to her and part of her life since she was born.

After their father died, nearly a year passed before the new Earl arrived from the East.

Nobody knew anything about him except that he was a cousin.

They had hoped that things would go on on the estate as they always had done.

The old servants at Chad Hall looked after the great house as if it belonged to them personally and the farmers and workers on the estate strove to make it the envy of every other landlord,

For Olivia it had been a miserable year.

Not only because the old Earl had died, as she had always thought from a broken heart, but so had her father.

He had been driving his chaise, drawn by one horse, to visit a sick parishioner.

As he had reached the end of the village, a large phaeton with four horses swept round the corner.

The driver, a smart buck from London, was drunk and reckless.

The vehicles collided and, while the buck survived, the Vicar was killed.

The Reverend Arthur Lambrick had been the Vicar of the Parish and Private Chaplain to the Earl for just over twenty-four years.

He was an extremely intelligent as well as a good-looking man, but he too had never recovered from the shock of losing his wife.

She had died the previous year of a fever that had swept over the countryside.

People claimed that it was the beginning of a new plague, whilst others averred that it was the punishment of God for the wickedness and immorality that was rife in London.

However, after killing a number of old people as well as the beautiful and much loved wife of the Vicar, it faded away. There were no more cases for the doctors to shake their heads over.

Olivia, who was nearly nineteen, found herself with no one to turn to for help.

She had with her at home her small sister Wendy and her brother Anthony during the school holidays.

Anthony, who was always called Tony, had just finished his schooling at Eton.

The old Earl had promised to send him to Oxford University where his father had been an undergraduate.

He was due to go there in October and Olivia was praying that the new Earl would carry out the commitments of his predecessor.

The difficulty was that until he arrived she was desperately short of money.

Until he did so, the Solicitors had refused to continue her mother’s allowance.

She had been a Wood and had always received an allowance of two hundred pounds a year from the Head of the Family.

It was the tradition in England that all the money belonged to the man who bore the title and he normally shared out what he could afford amongst his relatives.

This kept them living happily and comfortably in the way that they had become accustomed to.

Without her mother’s allowance and with no pension for her father, her life, Olivia found, was becoming desperate.

There had been a small amount of money in the bank, but this was now practically finished.

She was uncomfortably aware that, almost as soon as the new owner took up residence, she would have to speak to him.

‘I am sure he will understand,’ she told herself optimistically.

At the same time she felt very nervous.

She counted out what was in her purse and it was very little.

Then she took out half a sovereign, which was Bessie’s wages for three weeks.

She felt embarrassed at not paying her recently, but she had to keep some money for the food they ate and Tony had a large appetite.

They lived on the rabbits that the village boys snared in the woods, which had been neglected after the old Earl’s death.

Otherwise Olivia knew they would often have been very hungry.

Now she supposed the gamekeepers would no longer turn a blind eye to what was happening and she could not afford even the cheapest cuts of meat from the butcher.

There were a large number of people in the village in the same plight.

The new Earl’s Solicitor had been very firm that he had no authority to pay out any money without instructions.

In her father’s absence it was Olivia who had pleaded with him almost on her knees.

How could he, she asked, not continue to provide the old people with the small pension they had received every week?

“If you do not do so,” she said firmly, “they will die, and that will be on your conscience for the rest of your life!”

“You are asking me to do something that is illegal, Miss Lambrick,” the elderly Solicitor replied.

“Illegal or not, it is merciful,” Olivia said, “and, as you are aware, it is a miracle that with so little food some of the older people survived the winter.”

She had finally persuaded him to give them half their pensions and somehow they had managed.

She thought, however, that the whole village looked thin and pale.

She could only pray every night that the Earl would be home soon and he would then understand that something needed to be done immediately.

‘I expect Papa would have talked to him by this time,’ she told herself, ‘but it is very difficult for me. I don’t want him to think I am interfering.’

Actually she knew that she was already rather frightened by what she had heard about the new Earl.

He had at last come home.

Of course nothing else had been discussed in the village since his arrival.

She learnt from Bessie when she came in to clean the house and cook that the old servants thought him a very strange man indeed.

“‘There be no warmth in ’im,’ Mr. Upton says,” Bessie related.

Upton the butler had been at Chad Hall for nearly forty years.

Olivia knew that he was a good judge of character.

Then she learnt that the new Earl was looking through the account books. These had been kept very neatly for years by the secretary to the estate, Mr. Bentick.

It seemed strange that he should be first concerning himself with the estate’s expenditure when he should be meeting his tenants, farmers and employees who were all longing to see him.

Olivia told herself that she must not criticise. It would be a mistake and something her father would deplore.

She shut her purse.

Putting it in her handbag, she laid it by the desk in the sitting room wondering what she could do.

Should she go up to the ‘Big House’ this afternoon and introduce herself?

“It is too soon!” she said aloud.

Even as she spoke, she heard a heavy knock on the front door.

She went from the pretty sitting room into the hall.

Standing outside was one of the older boys from the village who sometimes ran messages for her.

He was red in the face and breathless as if he had been running.

“What is it, Ted?” she asked.

“It be terrible news, Miss Olivia – terrible!” Ted gasped.

“About what?” Olivia asked nervously.

“Mr. Tony.”

Olivia gave a little cry.

“What has happened? He is not – hurt?”

“’E’s bin arrested, Miss Olivia! Arrested by two of them new grooms up at the Big ’Ouse! They’re accusin’ ’im of stealin’!”

“Stealing!” Olivia exclaimed. “What can you mean?”

“Mr. Tony went ridin’ orf with one of the ’orses as belongs to ’is Lordship. A big black stallion, it were. ’E takes it over the jumps, ridin’ like what ’e always do!”

Ted paused for breath and Olivia urged him,

“Go on!”

“They goes after ’im and takes ’im straight up to the ’ouse and shuts ’im in the stables and goes and tell ’is Lordship as ’e’s a thief!”

“I have never heard anything so ridiculous!” Olivia cried.

She was most relieved that Tony was not hurt.

But it was very unfortunate that the new grooms had not understood that Tony had always been allowed by the previous Earl to exercise the horses.

He would also have thought it a great joke if one was left unattended to jump on its back and ride off on it.

“What was the horse doing with no one holding it?” she asked.

“I sees there be three grooms exercisin’ the ’orses,” Ted explained, “and they ’ears a rabbit screamin’ in a trap in the wood.”

Olivia guessed that it was one of Ted’s traps, but she did not say so and he went on,

“One of the grooms goes and sets it free and the other two goes into the wood with ’im.”

He grinned as he finished,

“Mr. Tony sees a big stallion tied to a post, jumps on ’im and rides away!”

Olivia could see it happening.

Tony had been very restless this last week since the Earl was in residence and she had told him that he could not ride the horses as he always had.

“We must wait for the new Earl’s permission to borrow his horses from the stables,” she had said firmly.

“How is he to know that is what I do if I don’t meet him?” Tony asked subtly.

“You will meet him sooner or later,” Olivia replied, “and you know that it would be a mistake to ask for favours the very moment he arrives.”

Tony instead of riding had therefore walked in the woods or sat about the house grumbling.

“Farmer Johnson thinks it extremely remiss of his Lordship not to have called on him yet,” he had announced. “And Lady Marriott sent him an invitation to have tea with her and he never replied to her.”

Lady Marriott was very old and almost blind, but Olivia could not help feeling slightly sympathetic at the Earl’s delay in answering her invitation.

At the same time it was quite unnecessary to be rude.

“The Woods have always had the most beautiful manners,” her mother said when they were children, “and I would not wish you to be the exception to the rule.”

They had therefore been brought up to think of other people rather than themselves.

They were charming to everybody, as their mother and father were, from the highest to the lowest.

Olivia now said,

“Thank you, Ted, for coming and telling me at once! I will go up to the Big House and explain to his Lordship that Mr. Tony was not really stealing the horse.”

“I ’opes as ’e’ll listen to you, Miss Olivia,” Ted said. “Them as ’ave met ’is Lordship says as ’e gives ’em the cold shivers!”

Olivia was not listening to him.

She was hurrying upstairs to fetch her bonnet.

Having told Bessie where she was going, she set off the quickest way through the Park to Chad House.

In fact Green Gables, the house where they lived, was on the very edge of the Park.

She did not therefore have to go out into the road or even through the gates to reach her destination.

Instead she walked under the great oak trees and she moved so lightly that she hardly disturbed the spotted deer that were lying in their shade.

At any other time she would have appreciated the beauty of the lake, which reflected the blue of the sky.