Love is Invincible

Chapter one ~ 1887-1

Chapter one ~ 1887Riding very fast Lucille put her horse at a high fence and leapt over it in style.

Patting the horse’s neck, she exclaimed,

“That’s a good boy! I am very pleased with you.”

She pulled him in gradually.

As she did so, a man on a large stallion came from beneath the shelter of some trees where he had been watching her.

He then swept his tall hat from his head and she saw that he was exceedingly good-looking and very elegantly dressed.

She recognised that at last she was meeting the Marquis of Shawforde.

“May I congratulate you on the way you took that fence,” he said. “I was just about to put my own horse at it, but I feel he would not do as well as yours.”

Lucille smiled at him and he saw that she had two dimples, one on each side of her mouth.

She was in fact one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen.

Her fair hair was the colour of sunshine and her eyes as translucent as a mountain stream, she was just fantastic.

He thought that she must be a visitor to this part of the country.

There was a silence between them for a moment.

And then Lucille said,

“I am waiting to watch your Lordship’s performance.”

The Marquis raised his eyebrows.

“If you know who I am,” he replied, “I can only ask you to be kind enough to introduce yourself.”

“My name is Lucille Winterton.”

He wrinkled his brow as he concentrated before he responded,

“I have not seen you in London for, if I had, I should not have forgotten you.”

“You have not seen me in London,” Lucille replied, “for the simple reason that I have not yet been there!”

“You live here?” he asked incredulously.

“I live just outside the village and not far from your Lordship’s main gate.”

“Then I shall not lose you again.”

She laughed as if she thought it somewhat presumptuous of him.

Drawing his horse nearer to hers, he then said,

“I must suppose that, as you are riding on my ground, it is something you ought not to do.”

“It may be your ground technically,” Lucille replied, “but for years, if not centuries, it has been the local Racecourse. Everybody in the village and many people in the County as well race and jump their horses here.”

She gave him a quick glance and added,

“If you forbid us to do so, I think there will be a revolution!”

The Marquis laughed.

“I promise you I shall not do that, especially as I have met you here this morning.”

He accentuated the word ‘you’.

Lucille’s eyes were twinkling as she replied,

“If you only knew how envied I shall be by everybody in the vicinity.”

“Why?” the Marquis enquired.

“Because they have all been looking forward to meeting you and were very disappointed that when you gave exciting parties at The Hall they were not invited.”

The Marquis laughed.

“Is that what they were expecting?”

“Of course they were, my Lord,” Lucille said. “They thought when you inherited that things would change at the Big House, only to find that, where your neighbours are concerned, it is exactly the same as it was before.”

“That is certainly something that shall be remedied,” the Marquis declared. “When will you dine with me?”

“Now you are making me embarrassed, my Lord. It sounds as if I was fishing for an invitation.”

“I promise you will be invited, whether you were fishing or not.” the Marquis retorted.

He looked at her intently, as if to make sure she was real, and added,

“Are you telling me that there are more beautiful young women like yourself living at my gates? It is something I can hardly believe.”

Lucille laughed and replied,

“You will have to find out for yourself. All I am waiting to do now is to gallop home and cry, ‘I have met him! I have met him!’”

“Now you are making me feel as if I have behaved badly,” the Marquis complained.

“Which, of course, you have!” Lucille answered.

He looked at her in surprise before he laughed again.

He was thinking as he did so that this young woman was prettier than anyone he had seen in London or anywhere else.

She was also very different from the gauche girls he always avoided at the balls he attended.

He had always understood that they were shy and tongue-tied.

“Are you going to answer my question?” he asked aloud. “I invited you to dinner.”

Lucille looked away from him.

“I very much doubt that I shall be allowed to accept.”

“Who will prevent you from doing so?”

“My sister and if Papa was alive, I am sure he would have made me refuse.”

“Why? Why?” the Marquis enquired.

“Because Papa felt that your father was behaving badly to some of the poorer people in the village and my sister considers your parties an insult!”

“An insult?” the Marquis exclaimed in surprise. “What does she know about them?”

Lucille laughed.

“Surely you are aware, my Lord, that everything you do at Shaw Hall is known in the village, almost before it happens and is repeated and re-repeated around the County as if on the wind.”

“I had no idea of that.”

“Well, we had nothing much to talk about until you arrived,” Lucille said frankly, “and I am quite certain that what we have heard has lost nothing in the telling.”

She was thinking that the footmen, whose number had increased since the Marquis had inherited last year, all came from the village.

They regaled their families, as all the young housemaids did, with stories of the Marquis’s behaviour and they kept everyone from the Vicar downwards in an almost permanent state of shock.

The last Marquis had died after a long and lingering illness and this meant that his huge house had always seemed to be enveloped in gloom.

Everybody had attended his funeral in the village Church that stood in a corner of the Park and was where a large number of the family were buried.

It had been like the end of an era.

“Things will be better now,” the locals maintained optimistically.

But they were not prepared for the impact that the young Marquis made.

Two months later he had held his first party and filled the house with his London friends.

Generous-minded people said it was not surprising that he should want to enjoy the company of beautiful women and to dance in the ballroom, which had not been opened for many years.

Who could expect him to sit as his father had during his long illness, refusing to see visitors and just waiting to die?

“But a party be one thing, an orgy another!” Mrs. Geary who kept the grocer shop said tartly.

Everybody who listened agreed with her. There were stories that the gentlemen drank too much and that ladies with painted faces and crimson lips took part in ‘high jinks’.

They slid down the banisters and danced, when it was a moonlit night, on the roof.

They wore, it was said in a shocked whisper, their nightgowns!

Games were introduced like ‘Hunting the Fox’ through the huge State Rooms after dinner with the gentlemen blowing hunting horns.

The ‘fox,’ or rather the ‘foxes in question, were the women.

They hid themselves in strange places and then ‘belonged’ to whoever captured them.

What happened then was considered too outrageous for any of the young women’s ears.

Certainly not for the daughters of the Squire, as Colonel Robert Winterton had always been called.

His estate was a small one compared to that of his neighbour, the Marquis.

But The Manor House of Little Bunbury had been known as the Squire’s house, even before the Wintertons inhabited it. They had now lived there for over a hundred years.

The advent of the young Marquis, fifth in the line of succession, had definitely cheered up Little Bunbury.

Yet so far no one had met him personally and everything that was known about him was hearsay.

He had not spent his childhood at Shaw Hall as might have been expected.

His father and mother had separated when he was quite a small boy, but there had been nothing so vulgar as a divorce.

But the Marchioness had taken her son to live with her parents in the North of England.

And the Marquis had stayed, when he was at home, alone at The Hall.

When he was younger, this was not very frequent. He was in the Diplomatic Service and had no intention of retiring when he inherited his father’s title.

Instead he went from Embassy to Embassy, preferring those in the Far East to any other part of the world.

He only returned very briefly at long intervals to the family mansion and it had therefore housed only two old aunts who were unmarried.

They gradually grew too old to take part in any kind of entertainment and the house became like a morgue.

The local people, therefore, had high hopes that things would change when the new Marquis arrived.

There were naturally, a great number of rumours circulating about him.

He was exceedingly handsome, enjoyed the nightlife of London and was a good rider to hounds.

“We shall see him out hunting,” Lucille had said excitedly to her sister.

She was to be disappointed.

When the hunting season came, it was learned that the young Marquis had opened his Hunting Lodge in Leicestershire.

He had joined the smartest pack of hounds in the County, which was the Quorn and there was no way that Little Bunbury in Hertfordshire could compete.

They could only wait hopefully, month after month.

When they had almost despaired of ever seeing their elusive landlord, the Marquis arrived.

It was then, the village realised, that he had discovered that Shaw Hall was within easy driving distance from London.

It was therefore an excellent place for him to enjoy a weekend.

The first party was awaited with excitement.

And there was also the hope that the Marquis would call on some of his tenants.

The farmers were looking forward to telling him about their crops and the shepherds about their flocks.

The grooms, who were all growing old, were hoping that the stables would now be filled with well-bred horses.

The grooms’ one wish did come true.

Lucille had listened with delight to the description of horses that had Arab blood in them and they had each cost an astronomical sum.

Although she had not told her sister, Delia, what she intended to do, she had ridden to the stables as soon as the Marquis had returned to London.

She coaxed Hanson, the Head Groom, who had been at The Hall for over forty years, to show her his new tenants.

“They are absolutely marvellous, Delia,” she had exclaimed. “You have never seen better horses!”

Her sister had given her a long lecture on going to The Hall uninvited and Lucille had therefore not told her what she was doing on her subsequent visits.

Now, seeing the Marquis mounted on one of the horses that she had most admired, she suggested,

“Shall I race you? If we start at the end of the field, we can take three jumps and then circle back to the starting place by going behind that clump of rhododendrons.”

She pointed out the way and the Marquis asked,

“What is the prize?”

“A ride on one of your horses,” Lucille replied.

“I can think of something more exciting than that,” the Marquis answered, “and I will tell you when I have won.”

“Never count your chickens!” Lucille warned him.

They took their places at what she told him was the traditional starting place.

It was an exciting ride.

Lucille knew, as she took the last fence half a length behind the Marquis, that she had never enjoyed herself so much.

It was by a superb feat of riding on her part that she was only just behind the Marquis at the Winning Post.

They were both laughing as they pulled in their horses.

It had been a wild gallop to the finish.

“You ride better than any woman I have ever seen!” the Marquis exclaimed.

“Thank you,” Lucille answered a little breathlessly, “but actually my sister is a better rider than I am.”

“If you also tell me she is more beautiful than you, I shall not believe you,” was the reply.

“Well, she is. And perhaps one day you will condescend to meet her.”

“Are you telling me that I should have called on you before now?”

Lucille laughed.

“It is what a great number of people living near you expected.”

“Now we are back where we started,” the Marquis said, “but I shall enjoy it, now I have met you.”