Lights, Laughter and a Lady

Chapter One ~ 1898-2

“Perhaps they would do so now,” Mr. Mercer suggested hopefully.

Minella shook her head.

“I am sure that it would not be the same unless Papa was there, making them all laugh at every party he attended.”

Mr. Mercer knew that this was the truth, but he merely suggested,

“Perhaps there is some kind lady who knew your father who would be willing to be your hostess, Miss Minella, and introduce you to the Social world that you should be moving in.”

“I don’t think I am particularly interested in the Social world,” Minella said reflectively, almost as if she was talking to herself. “Mama used to tell me about it, but I know I do not want to live with Aunt Esther, which would be very very depressing!”

Because there was a note in her voice that sounded as if she might cry, Mr. Mercer said kindly,

“You don’t have to make your mind up today, Miss Minella, when we have had so many depressing things to talk about. You can stay here at least until the end of next month. That will give you time to think of someone you can go to live with.”

Minella wanted to reply that she had been seriously thinking about it already.

She had lain awake night after night and unable to sleep going over and over in her mind the Clinton-Wood relations who were still alive and repeating to herself the names of her mother’s relations whom she had never met.

“There must be somebody,” she sighed, as she had sighed a hundred times before.

“I am sure there must be,” Mr. Mercer smiled encouragingly.

He rose to his feet and started collecting his papers that were lying on the desk in front of him to place them in the leather bag he carried.

It was old and worn and he had used it ever since he had first become a Solicitor in his father’s firm. Although his Partners and his office staff often laughed at it, he would not think of parting from something so familiar.

Minella rose as well and now they walked together over the worn carpet from the study where they had been sitting into the small oak-panelled hall.

Outside the front door Mr. Mercer’s old-fashioned gig was waiting, drawn, however, by a young horse, which would not take long to reach the small Market-town of Huntingdon, where his offices were situated.

He climbed in and the young groom who had been holding the horse’s head jumped in beside him.

They drove off, the wheels of the gig grinding over the loose gravel of the sweep outside the front door, which badly needed weeding.

Minella waved as Mr. Mercer drove away and then walked slowly back into the house.

As she closed the front door behind her, she thought it impossible that this was no longer her home. She did not own it and she had no idea where to go when she finally left it.

Except, of course, and the idea was like a menacing black cloud, to live with her Aunt Esther.

She could remember every word of the letter her aunt had written to her after her father’s death had been announced in the newspapers.

There was no warmth in the sentences her aunt had written. Then as a postscript she had penned,

“P.S. I suppose, as there are so few members of our family left, you will have to come and live with me. It will be an added burden but then, as I have had nothing else in my life, I am used to them.”

A burden!

The words seemed to haunt Minella.

With a pride that she had never realised she had, she had longed to retort that she would never be a burden to anybody.

‘And why should I be?’ she argued with herself. ‘I am young, I am well educated, I am supposed to be intelligent. There must be something I can usefully do to earn a living.’

There was no answer to that question.

As she then went back into the study, she remembered that, while she was talking to Mr. Mercer, she had thought that when he left she must take her father’s personal papers out of the desk and destroy them.

She had no wish for the newcomers to The Manor, who had just bought it for quite a reasonable sum with a great deal of the furniture as well, to pry into the personal affairs of the late Lord Heywood.

Minella was well aware that when the villagers, the farmers and their few neighbours in the vicinity of The Manor talked about her father, it was either with admiration because they wished that they could be as dashing as he was or with disapproval because of the way he enjoyed himself so much in London.

The stories of the smart and fashionable people who he associated with had inevitably reached the County sooner or later.

‘It is not their business.’ Minella had thought.

But she knew that if there were letters lying around they would read them and if there were bills they would ‘tut-tut’ over them.

If there was anything like a ball programme, a bow or a ribbon, a glove or a scented handkerchief, it would feed the tales they were already repeating about her father.

She knew what they were thinking by the way people in the local shops eyed her when she came in through the door.

She had not missed the note of irrepressible disapproval in the Vicar’s voice as he had read the Burial Service.

The old Vicar was a simple Godly man and, while he had always been grateful for the generosity her father had shown him and the fact that he never had to beg in vain, he had not approved of the life his Lordship had led since his wife had died.

Her father had laughed when she had told him that the village talked of nothing else but the gaieties that kept drawing him to London.

“I am glad that I give them something to talk about,” he had said. “At least it is a change from turnips, Brussels sprouts, the weather and that the Church steeple is falling down.”

“Oh, not again, Papa!” Minella had then exclaimed, knowing how much her father had already contributed towards the repairs to the Church.

“The only answer is to let it fall down,” Lord Heywood had said, “and, as falling is what they think I myself am doing, perhaps it would be appropriate.”

Minella had laughed.

“They like talking about you, Papa, and I don’t know what topic they would be left with if you vanished out of their sight.”

But indeed he had vanished and she felt that the conversation in the village would have to revert to turnips and Brussels sprouts!

She sat down at her father’s desk and pulled open the top drawer.

There was the usual miscellaneous collection of unsharpened pencils, pens that were unusable, stubs of cheque books, a bent penny and two threepenny bits in which her father had drilled a hole after they had been used in the plum pudding at Christmas and which her mother had told him were lucky.

“I will put them on my watch chain,” he had said at the time.

But, of course, he had forgotten to do so.

Now they looked tarnished and so did the buttons, which had once ornamented the livery of a footman.

The previous Lord Heywood, her dear father’s uncle, had employed no less than three footmen and a butler to wait on him.

When her father came to The Manor, they had a very efficient couple to run the house, a Nanny for her, a valet for her father and an odd-job man.

First the odd-job man had gone, then the valet and, when the couple grew too old and had to retire, they had been left with just Minella’s old Nanny.

She had looked after Minella’s mother when she was a child and had been the mainstay of the house until she had died at the age of seventy-nine shortly before Minella’s mother had passed away.

Minella often thought that, if Nanny had been alive, her mother would not have become so ill for she would have been able to warm the house better than they had.

After that there had been only daily women. Sometimes there were two or three of them but, although they cleaned the place most conscientiously, they were always in a hurry to get back to their own families.

Now there was nobody.

After her father’s death, Minella had deliberately ignored the dust accumulating in the rooms that they did not use.

She told herself that there was no point in spending money that she could not afford and she could manage quite well on her own without any help.

She pulled out of the drawer a piece of blotting paper covered with ink drawings, threw it away and collected everything else into a tidy heap, meaning to put it all into a box.

She was not quite certain what she would do with it but she would keep at least the silver buttons with the family crest on them and perhaps if she could not earn any money, she might even be grateful for the two threepenny bits.

Then, as she realised there was nothing incriminating or anything to make any ‘Nosey-Parker’ curious, she shut the drawer and opened one of the side ones.

This was very different and was stuffed full of letters. She realised that her father seldom answered letters but put them in the drawer, not as keepsakes but because he meant sooner or later to reply.

She started to open the letters systematically, tearing up those that were out of date and no longer of any interest.

A typical example read,

“Dear Roy,

We are expecting you to stay with us for the Hunt Ball. You know you are the only person who can make it enjoyable! We are also relying on you to bring the house party safely down from St. Pancras Station – ”

Minella did not bother to read any more but merely tore up the letter and threw the pieces into the wastepaper basket.

There were many others written in the same strain with addresses embossed on the top of the writing paper and surmounted by impressive crests or coronets.

But every invitation made it clear that her father was invited because he made the party ‘go with a swing’ or, as one invitation written in a woman’s hand, said,

“The whole thing will be a complete failure unless you are there as usual to make us laugh and, as far as I am concerned, to make me very happy – ”

Minella tore up the letter quickly as she had the feeling that anybody reading it would put an interpretation on the words that she did not wish them to do.

Then, because she herself had no wish to pry into her father’s private affairs, she tore up one letter after another without even taking them out of the envelopes or, if they were loose, without reading them.

She was just about to do the same to the last letter in the drawer when the name on the bottom of it caught her eye, ‘Connie’.

She looked at it, thought that she did recognise the handwriting and then with a second glance she was sure that she did.

Constance Langford was the daughter of the Clergyman in the next village to the one in which they lived.

Her father was a clever intelligent man who should never have accepted a country Living but should have been a Don at a University.

Her mother had persuaded him to teach Minella a number of subjects that were beyond the capabilities of the retired Governess who lived in their own village.

It had taken Minella a quarter of an hour riding across the fields to reach the Vicarage of Little Welham and the Reverend Adolphus Langford made her work very hard.