Only Love

Chapter 1 ~ 1903-2

Iola could remember how Aunt Margaret had wept in sympathy for his bereaved family.

“He was such a charming young man! It seems cruel that he should have been killed and now there is no heir to the Barony, she has wailed.”

“I believe there is a distant cousin,” the General had reflected, “but Stoneham has never liked him. It’s not a question I care to discuss with him at the moment.”

“No, of course not, Alexander!” his sister agreed at once.

“Damned hard on the fellow losing his son, but then it’s a mistake to have only one, especially when you have an important name to carry on.”

The General had spoken with just a touch of satisfaction in his voice.

He had two sons, one in the Army serving with his Regiment in India, the other in Canada and he was justifiably proud of them.

Iola had been born when her brothers were both more or less grown up. George was at Oxford and Richard just leaving Eton.

She had often heard her Nanny referring to her as ‘an afterthought’ and for a long time she could not understand what the word meant and had puzzled over it, thinking it meant that there was something wrong with her.

Once she had realised what Iola was worrying about, Nanny swept away her apprehension.

“Now don’t you go worryin’ your head over the things I say,” she had smiled. “I talk too much and it’s always been my worst fault. My mother’s told me that a thousand times.”

“What does ‘an afterthought’ mean, Nanny?”

“It means that your father and mother prayed very hard that they would have a daughter and then just when your mother thought that she be too old, God sends you down from Heaven as a special present for her.”

“Did He really, Nanny?”

“Look in the mirror and you’ll see for yourself.”

“And was Mama pleased?”

“Very very pleased,” Nanny said, “and so was I because I could come and look after you.”

“And I was the first baby you ever looked after, wasn’t I?”

“You were and I were lucky to get the position. I was afraid I were too young, but your mother took a chance on me and, though I says it and shouldn’t, she’s never regretted it.”

Iola had never regretted it either. She had loved Nanny Dawes more than anybody.

Her mother was beautiful, kind and loving when she had the time, but she was often away from home or, when at home, too busy to spend time in the nursery. But Nanny was always there.

Nanny was young enough to run with her in the woods, to play hide-and-seek amongst the trees, to invent stories that there was a dragon lurking in the pinewoods, fairies dancing on the lawn and there were toadstools to show that they had been there.

There were gnomes burrowing underneath the hills and nymphs interwoven with the mists over the ponds and streams, especially first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Nanny knew all about such fairy creatures and it was Nanny in fact who had made Iola aware of men.

“Who was that who said good morning to us?” she remembered asking, when they passed a smart groom riding up the drive with a note for her father and mother.

“That’s Fred,” Nanny replied. “He’s a handsome fellow and he knows it! He thinks every girl in the County’s after him.”

“After him for what?” Iola asked.

“Now don’t you go askin’ questions like that. I shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.”

“But I want to know what he is after.”

“What all men are after. A pretty girl when he sees one.”

“He smiled at you. Does he think you are pretty?”

Nanny tossed her head.

“It’s just like his cheek if he did. I know too much about Master Fred to be taken in by his eloquent eyes or his wily tongue!”

If it was not Fred it was Jim, Clem or Ben who gave Nanny what Iola learnt was known as the ‘glad Eye’, but Nanny would have none of them.

As Iola grew older, she became frightened that she might lose Nanny and there was one man called Sid who really worried her.

“You will not marry Sid, will you, Nanny? Promise me! If you do, you will leave me and I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“He’d be lucky!” Nanny said enigmatically.

“I don’t want him to be lucky,” Iola asserted. “I am lucky to have you and I love you, Nanny. Promise me, promise me you will not marry Sid.”

Then she learned that he was in trouble that concerned another woman who was working in the house of Lord Hartmakin, who was a friend of the General.

There was a great deal of whispering between Lady Hartmakin and Aunt Margaret.

It was all rather mysterious and Iola gathered that the servant in question had been dismissed without a reference and Sid was sacked too.

She thought that Nanny was rather quiet for about a week.

She had a headache that made her cry at night, but to Iola’s relief there was no further sign of Sid and after a little while Nanny cheered up and was her usual happy self again.

The most terrible day of Iola’s life was when Nanny left.

“She is not to go! I will not let her go!” she had stormed to her mother when she had heard that Nanny was leaving and her place was to be taken by a Governess.

“She has stayed much longer than I intended in the first place,” her mother had replied, “but she has taught you quite a lot of your elementary lessons. Now you really must have a proper education. I was quite ashamed when I realised the other day how well the Castleton girl, who is younger than you, can speak French.”

“I will learn French, I will learn anything you like if you will let Nanny stay.”

“I am sorry, Iola. You will like the Governess I have chosen for you. She is a very capable woman and your father approves of her too.”

“I hate her! I will always hate her because she has made Nanny go away!”

Iola cried and Nanny cried too.

Her mother found her another position and Iola had said pleadingly on the morning before she went,

“Promise me, Nanny, that you will not love the new children you are going to more than you love me.”

“Of course I promise,” Nanny answered. “You are my first baby. First babies are very very special. I could never forget you or stop lovin’ you.”

“And I will never love anybody more than you,” Iola replied.

Nanny had laughed.

“One day you’ll get married and have babies of your own and you’ll love them and they’ll come first in your life. But always remember that there’s plenty of love for everyone, me, them, your father and mother, and lots of other people.”

“You are first! You are first!” Iola had sobbed.

Nanny had hugged her and then she said,

“Now don’t forget you promised to write to me and I’ll write to you whenever I gets the chance. I shall want to know all you are doin’ and how much you are learnin’ with the new – Governess.”

Just for a moment Nanny’s voice had broken on the words.

Then she had been driven away in the landau that was kept for the use of the servants and Iola had rushed up to the nursery to cry on Nanny’s bed until her eyes were too swollen to see out of them.

Nanny kept her promise and wrote to Iola, but her letters became fewer as the years passed.

Iola had written regularly, sometimes long, sometimes short letters, and they had always been written with love.

She thought now that only Nanny would understand what she was feeling. Nanny had always understood as nobody else had ever been able to do.

Her Governesses, and there had been three of them over the years, had been kind and sensible, although only one had the gift of teaching, but they had never awoken Iola’s imagination as Nanny had been able to do.

‘I suppose what I really want in the man I marry is somebody whom I will love in the same way as I love Nanny, but more intensely,’ Iola reasoned to herself.

She learnt to be analytical when she was alone because nobody else had understood.

She was intelligent enough to realise that Nanny had not only awoken her imagination and her idealism, but also in some strange way, made her give the best that she was capable of at the time.

Nobody else had had that capacity and it was something, Iola reckoned, that was a mixture of the intellectual, the physical and the spiritual.

‘It was with Nanny,’ she thought, ‘that I came alive as a person and could see and feel, as I could not do with anybody else.’

As she had grown older, she thought that it was that capacity for living fully that she would find with the man she loved.

She wondered sometimes if, although Nanny had meant so much in her childhood, the influence she had on her was imaginary and would not be there if they met again.

Two years ago Nanny had written to say that her parents had died and left her their cottage, which was in a village only eight miles away from The Manor.

With her employers’ permission she was going down for a week to put the cottage in order and shut it up until she would need it on her retirement.

Would it be possible for her to come to The Manor and see her ‘first baby’?

From the moment Iola read the letter she was wild with excitement.

It seemed almost too good to be true that she would see Nanny again, talk to her and she would understand, as she had always understood.

She could tell her how unhappy she had been at the loss of her mother, how the house seemed empty without her, how difficult her father was at times and how it could never be the same having Aunt Margaret in her mother’s place.

The General had good-humouredly said that the brake could fetch Nanny from the village of Little Waywood to The Manor.

Unable to wait, Iola had travelled in the brake, tense with excitement, feeling as if the horses were moving infuriatingly slowly along the dusty lanes.

Nanny’s home was a small thatched cottage at the end of a little village that centred round a Norman Church and an ancient inn.

It was just, Iola thought, the sort of village that she had imagined as a background for Nanny, a village that might have come straight out of a Fairytale book.

When the brake had stopped outside Primrose Cottage Iola was running down the flagged path to the front door and Nanny was waiting for her.

She looked older, Iola had forgotten that even those we love, age, but her smile was the same, her brown eyes as soft and loving as they had ever been.

“Nanny! Nanny!”

Iola’s arms were round her and she was hugging her and, because she was so happy there were tears in her eyes and a break in her voice.

“Now let me look at you,” Nanny said. “Goodness me, you’ve grown into a pretty girl, just as I always knew you would!’’

“Oh, Nanny, I have missed you so much. It has never been the same without you. Do you still love me?”

“You know I do. You were my first baby and a first baby is like a first kiss. It’s something one never forgets.”

Just for a moment Iola looked surprised and Nanny laughed.

“I remember everything about you,” Iola said, “and now I can see your cottage. It’s lovely! Just like the one the Gingerbread Witch lived in.”

“Fancy you rememberin’ that story!” Nanny laughed. “I suppose when I told it to you I was thinkin’ of my home.”

It was a small cottage. The door opened onto a flagged kitchen with a rather poky little sitting room behind which was a room that Nanny called ‘the parlour’ and upstairs there were two bedrooms.

Iola found it enchanting and Nanny showed it to her with pride.

“It belongs to me!” she said, “and when I’m too old to go on lookin’ after children I can come back here. It’s nice to feel I’ve a roof over my head. It’s what everybody should have.”

“And when you are here I can come and stay with you – that is – if you will have me,” Iola said.

“You know you’ll always be welcome,” Nanny replied.

*

Iola could hear her voice saying it now and then she remembered something else.

A letter had come only this morning, but her father’s announcement at luncheon had put it out of her head.