Love is the Key

Chapter One ~ 1833-1

Chapter One ~ 1833Minerva called the children in from the garden. She could see them through the window.

They were both reluctant to leave the sandcastle they were making at the side of the stream.

She only hoped that they would not be wet and have to be changed.

As it was, she had a great deal to do.

Finally she called them for a second time.

David, who was the more obedient of the two, put down his spade and came towards the house.

He was a very good-looking boy. He resembled his older brother and his father, who had been a strikingly handsome man.

It was difficult to look at either of her brothers without Minerva feeling a deep pang of loss.

Her father was no longer with them.

She found that what she missed most of all was someone she could have a serious conversation with.

It was difficult when her older brother, Anthony, whom they always called ‘Tony’, came home from London.

He wanted to tell her of all the gaieties he had taken part in, especially the racing.

If there was one thing that Sir Anthony Linwood enjoyed more than anything else, it was riding.

Unfortunately there was only enough money for them to have two horses and a pony at home. They were used to convey Minerva and the children from place to place.

It was therefore quite impossible for Tony Linwood to afford stabling in London on a very small income.

He could only just afford the small lodgings he had taken in Mayfair.

As Minerva said laughingly, it was a good address if nothing else.

Personally, she thought, although she could understand that Tony found it boring, she would rather be at home at The Dower House.

It was easier than struggling to keep up appearances with friends who were very much richer than oneself.

She could understand, at the age of twenty-two that Tony found it all alluring.

But it meant, although she did not often say so, that she, David and Lucy had to deprive themselves of any luxuries.

There was not enough money to go round.

Now, as David came towards her, she realised that he was growing out of his trousers and there was a hole in his shirt.

What she said to him, however, was,

“Go and wash your hands, David, and hurry up or luncheon will be cold!”

She then looked again at Lucy, who was arranging a circle of daisies round the sandcastle.

“Come on, Lucy!” she called. “Please, dearest, David is hungry and so am I!”

Lucy stood up on her small feet.

Although she was six years old, she was still rather young for her age, but no one saw her without thinking that she looked like a small angel.

With her very fair hair, her blue eyes and her white skin, which never seemed to be burnt by the sun, she was lovely.

Everybody felt at first that she could not be human and must have dropped down from the sky.

She was, however, as she ran across the lawn with outstretched arms, a replica of Minerva.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Lucy said. “But I wanted to finish my Fairy castle!”

“You can finish it after luncheon,” Minerva replied.

She lifted Lucy up in her arms and carried her indoors to put her down at the foot of the ancient oak stairs.

“Now hurry and wash your hands,” she said, “otherwise David will have eaten everything and you will go hungry!”

Lucy gave a little cry that was half a laugh and half a protest and ran up the stairs.

It was a very impressive oak staircase that had been added to the ancient house long after it had first been built.

The newel posts with their strange bearded figures had been a joy to the children ever since they were born.

Minerva then hurried from the hall down several steps and along a narrow passage to the dining room. It was a small room that had diamond-paned casements opening out onto the garden.

With its heavily beamed ceiling and oak panelled walls, it was redolent of its history, not only of the Linwood family, who now lived there, but of the monks who had originally made it part of their Priory.

As Minerva ladled out the stew while David waited eagerly, her thoughts were not on the history that surrounded them but on her brother.

She was hoping by this time that he would have come to see her from The Castle.

Yet she expected that he was enjoying the party so much that she would be lucky if he popped in for just a moment or two.

He would, she told herself, be riding the Earl’s magnificent horses.

And doubtless he would flirt with the very lovely ladies he had told her were to be among the guests.

It did not strike Minerva that it would have been exciting if she had been one of the house party.

In fact the idea had never crossed her mind. She was so used to living quietly at home.

Since her father and mother had died she had looked after the younger children.

Not even in her wildest dreams did she imagine herself going to London. Or being presented to King William IV and Queen Adelaide, as her mother had originally planned for her.

That was a long time ago, when they had been very much better off than they were now.

Only The Castle was still there to remind them that the Linwoods had once been of great consequence.

“Can I please have some more?” David was now asking, holding up his plate to her.

There was very little left in the large china bowl that bore the Linwood crest.

Minerva scraped together the last spoonful of the stew and added a potato that had been brought in that morning from the garden.

She saw that the peas, and there had been only a few of them, were now all finished.

“I’se not hungry,” Lucy announced.

“Please eat a little more, dearest,” Minerva pleaded, “otherwise you will be too tired to play with David when he comes back from his lessons.”

“It’s too nice a day for doing lessons,” David said, “and I did not finish my homework last night!”

“Oh, David,” Minerva said reproachfully, “you know how much it will upset the Vicar!”

“I was tired,” David replied, “and I went to sleep after I had done only two pages.”

Minerva sighed.

The Vicar was teaching David because it was so important that he should receive a good education before he went to a Public School.

But she often thought that he expected too much from the little boy.

Yet she knew it was a mistake to say so.

They were, in fact, very fortunate to have the Vicar in such a small village.

He was an erudite man, who had taken a First Class Honours Degree at Oxford University and only because he had been devoted to their father did he agree to teach David the more complicated subjects.

These were beyond the capabilities of the retired Governess he had the rest of his lessons from.

At the same time Minerva actually wondered how they would ever be able to afford to pay David’s school fees.

When her father, who was the eighth Baron, had been alive, he had made quite a considerable amount of money each year from the books that he wrote.

Most of the books written by historians had a small sale.

They were too ‘heavy’ for what might be called ‘entertaining reading’ and they were, therefore, enjoyed only by scholars.

Sir John had managed to write history with a sense of humour. He made the periods he wrote about and the people who lived in them not only interesting but human.

He had started by writing a book on Greece when he was only a young man.

It had been rivalled a few years later only by the books and poems that Lord Byron wrote about that fascinating country.

When Sir John settled down because he had fallen in love, he had found plenty to write about where he lived.

For those who bought his books he made the County of Norfolk come alive.

It was Sir John who told them of their antecedents and described so vividly the Danes. They had invaded East Anglia for many years.

Minerva adored her father’s books.

She read and re-read the adventures of Lodbrog, the Danish Chieftain who was supposed to have been the first of the invaders.

He was as real to her as stories about George IV, who was King of England while she was a child.

It was Lodbrog who, having been driven across the North Sea by a storm, entered the estuary of the River Yare for shelter.

He was received at Reedham, near Yarmouth, by Edmund, King of East Anglia.

Minerva had often told the children that, hunting with the King and his Courtiers, Lodbrog enjoyed himself enormously.

Unfortunately he was too skilled in the chase and he caused Bern, the King’s huntsman, to be extremely jealous.

Bern, therefore, murdered the Dane in the woods, but his crime was discovered by Lodbrog’s dog, who, finding his Master dead, attacked Bern.

The huntsman was punished by being set adrift in an open boat, which floated out to sea.

King Edmund and his followers thought that they had seen the last of him.

However, after several days in the open sea he was blown onto the shores of Denmark, half-dead from exposure and starvation.

To explain his presence, Bern accused King Edmund of the murder of Lodbrog, the Danish Chieftain.

The Danes were furious and two of their Chieftains gathered together a great Army. Led by the murderer, it crossed the North Sea and landed in the estuary.

They ravaged East Anglia far and wide and, after years of fighting, made King Edmund a prisoner.

They then tied him to a tree and shot him to death with arrows.

And afterwards they established themselves as the Rulers of Eastern England.

Minerva had been told this story by her father when she was very young and when she had read his book, she realised what a thrilling story he had made it.

After his death she told it to the children and both David and Lucy would listen wide-eyed, especially when Minerva went on to explain to them why The Castle had been so important.

Finally the Danes were driven back to their own country and the English realised that they must defend the shores of East Anglia more vigilantly against more attacks.

“It was then,” she said, “that our ancestors built The Castle and there were watchers day and night on the tower looking across the sea for the first sign of the Danish ships.”

“It must have been very exciting!” David cried.

“As soon as they saw the sails,” Minerva explained, “they would light bonfires, which would be copied all along the coast and, when the Danes arrived, the English archers would be waiting, ready to strike them down with their arrows.”

Linwood Castle had, however, altered a great deal since it had first been erected.

The watchtower was still there, but in Elizabethan times a more comfortable house had been added.

It was demolished by a more ambitious Linwood in 1760 and in eight years he completed what was a magnificent building.

It was spoken of as one of the finest examples of Palladian architecture in England.

Sir Hector Linwood was determined to have the best of everything and he employed the finest builders and outstanding carpenters, including Grinling Gibbons, who was the ‘Chief Carpenter to the King’s Works’.

By the time the house was finished people came for miles, in fact from all over the country, to look at it.

Unfortunately its owner had crippled himself financially in erecting it and the costs were very high.

With the old Castle at one end and the great wings spreading out from a central building, it was beautiful, but undoubtedly a white elephant.

They struggled on until Minerva’s grandfather decided that he had had enough.

“We may live in grandeur,” he said, “but, if we die of starvation, the magnificence of our tomb is unimportant.”

He therefore, just before his death, sold The Castle, the gardens and the estate to a rich Nobleman who never lived there.