Love Solves the Problem

CHAPTER ONE 1855-1

CHAPTER ONE

1855“I am afraid, your Ladyship, I have bad news to tell you,” the man said slowly as if every word was difficult for him.

Lady Sheila Rosswood gave a sigh and replied in a low voice,

“I was expecting it. You mean that my father has left no money at all.”

“There are unfortunately,” the man added, “a few debts, but I feel sure that they will be taken over by the new Earl to the estate.”

Lady Sheila thought that this was doubtful, but she did not say so aloud.

She merely enquired,

“Is there anything left of my mother’s money which she left to me in her will?”

The man, who was a senior banker from the local bank, then looked down at his papers and answered,

“I was rather afraid that your Ladyship might ask that question. The answer is that the money was spent by your father in his last desperate gamble that proved, just like so many of the others, to be completely and hopelessly unsuccessful.”

Sheila sighed.

Then she rose from her chair and walked over to the window and stared with unseeing eyes at the neglected garden below her.

It seemed to her almost impossible that her father could have been quite so foolish as to risk everything he had in spurious ‘get rich quick’ Companies that inevitably failed, usually before they had been launched for more than six months.

He had been so certain that one or another of his schemes would, in his own words, ‘be triumphant’, that he continued to throw his money away even after his family and his friends begged him to be more cautious.

He had always, Sheila thought, looked on life as a bit of a joke.

The fact that he was growing poorer and poorer had merely made him take greater risks.

He then became even more careless in investing his money than he had been before.

And so now that he was dead, Sheila had to know exactly what her position was well before the new Earl of Rosswood arrived.

The Hall, which had been in the Rosswood family for five generations, was in a bad state of repair with rotten woodwork and even broken windows.

But it was undoubtedly a beautiful building and its contents, which were entailed, were extremely valuable.

It was very fortunate, as Lady Sheila was so aware, that her father had not been able to squander the family paintings and antique furniture in all his hopeless efforts to make himself a millionaire.

But, because he had been brought up since he was a small boy to believe that his family came first, he had not touched any of the fine paintings that hung on the walls of the house.

Nor the ancient silver that was the envy of a great number of other Earls who could not put on such a display.

They were therefore at a disadvantage when it came to boasting of what they owned.

It seemed incredible to Sheila that, having spent all her mother’s money that was quite a considerable amount and everything that had been left to her by her mother’s family, she was completely penniless.

She was now forced to rely on the kindness and generosity of the new Earl.

This situation was made even more difficult than it was already by the fact that her father had always disliked Thomas Ross and the reports on him from other relations had never been very much to his credit.

Sheila was thinking to herself that nothing could be more humiliating than to have to plead with him to support her in some way.

Although she had not met him in nearly ten years, she had always thought of him as being a grim and rather disagreeable man.

As she had been very young at the time, she might, of course, have been mistaken.

Yet she was almost sure that, as for years her father had deliberately ignored Thomas and avoided every chance of meeting him, he would hardly in the circumstances feel kindly towards her.

It also went against the grain in every possible way for her to have to ask anyone for money and especially so from a member of her own family.

Let alone a man who had been cold-shouldered by her father for so long.

Thomas had also, she understood, been particularly disliked by her mother.

Because she suddenly felt helpless, Sheila turned from the window to say to the man who had come from the bank,

“What can I do, Mr. Cole?”

It was, although she did not mean it to be, a cry for help.

The man who was middle-aged and of considerable standing in the banking world, looked at Sheila somewhat sadly before he was forced to say,

“I am afraid there is nothing that your Ladyship can do except ask the new Earl for his assistance.”

It was with difficulty that Sheila prevented herself from crying out she would rather die than do that.

At the same time she was well aware that she was almost in the position of having to starve or plead on her knees for charity.

It seemed extraordinary that there were none of the older members of her family left.

As her mother came from the North of Scotland, she had never been in touch with her relatives as they were so far away.

Some of them had written to her when her mother died, but the Countess had never travelled back to her old home to visit those of her Clan who were still alive.

Now there were only half a dozen who actually remembered her.

When her mother had married the ninth Earl of Rosswood, as it had been a marriage of love, no one had been happier than the Earl and his wife when they first moved into the ancestral home.

A year later Sheila had been born.

It was perhaps when the Earl learnt that his wife was unable to have any more children and so he would not have an heir that had made him in some strange way wish to become a millionaire.

His father had been to all intents and purposes a rich man.

But the expense of keeping up the large estate and the ancestral home had cost more at that time than it ever had in previous generations.

He had added a Racecourse to the estate as well as a number of fine pictures to the Picture Gallery, which he had bought in other countries.

These, like everything else in the house, had been entailed onto future generations.

When she was old enough to realise what he had done, Sheila thought that it was because he had no son that he was determined that her husband, when she did marry, would not be able to take anything other than herself from the Rosswoods.

It was more than a little complicated.

At the same time Sheila had realised that her father had had a very strange outlook on life.

Because he had no son to inherit, he wanted to die leaving those relations who had followed him something to admire him for and to be exceedingly grateful for because he had been so shrewd.

It was this sort of desire to shine as the ninth Earl that had made him gamble his money away in what now seemed an almost incredible act of stupidity.

Equally Sheila now realised that she had to face the brutal facts.

One fact was that she was completely penniless unless the new Earl was as generous as the representative from the bank hoped that he would be.

‘What can I do? What can I do?’ she asked herself.

She realised only too well deep inside herself that there was no answer to what was actually a cry from the heart.

“I have put down, your Ladyship,” the banker was saying, “every possible detail of where and on what your father invested his money. I thought I would give a copy of it to the new Earl when he arrives.”

“I think that would be quite unnecessary,” Sheila said coldly. “In fact I think that I will have to move from here and I have no intention of being an encumbrance that I am sure he would find me when he takes over.”

Looking at her the banker thought she was so pretty that it would be a very hard-hearted man who could refuse her.

As he could not express this view aloud, he said,

“I think, if you will forgive me saying so, my Lady, it would be a mistake to do anything in a hurry. After all this is a very large house and I feel sure that the Earl will understand that you have to plan for your future in every way before you leave.”

“Unfortunately I have no plans at present that are of any significance,” Sheila replied. “As you doubtless know, my father had very few relations still alive and I have never been in touch with my mother’s relations as they live in the very North of Scotland.”

The banker thought it extraordinary for anyone of such standing as the previous Earl to have so few friends.

But he had heard it said that he was a very strange man, who seldom entertained and was living alone except for his daughter.

He spent a great deal of his time in London where according to gossip he made friends with only those people who were promoting new Companies that needed money to produce new inventions, which once they started invariably failed completely.

Those who had invested in them were, like the Earl, astonished that any product that seemed so brilliant at first should fail so completely.

At the same time, because there was an excitement about innovation, they were absolutely convinced that the next investment would be a triumph.

They and her father were throwing their money into what finally appeared to be a bottomless pit.

‘How could Papa be so stupid?’ Sheila had asked herself again and again in the darkness of the night.

He had been very discreet about what he was doing simply because he truly believed that when he won, as he had so firmly set out to do, everyone would be amazed at his brilliance.

They would have to congratulate him whether they approved or not of what he had done.

When Sheila looked down the long list that had been prepared for her of her father’s endless losses, she had wondered how any man could be so foolish as to believe that Fate would suddenly turn his dreams into reality.

But he had gone on plunging and plunging, losing and losing, until it was only his death that had prevented him from what might have been an even worse Fate.

It struck the banker, when he saw the expression of despair on the pretty face of Lady Sheila, that there must be a number of men who would find her very attractive and the fact that she was penniless would not matter in the slightest.

He could understand that, as she had been shut up in this old house with its treasures from past centuries, her father had forgotten that she was young and beautiful.

And that she should be presented to the Society she belonged to in London.

It was impossible not to feel very sorry for her, but there was nothing he could do.

As he put the papers back into his briefcase, he was wondering what he could say that would give her some comfort and perhaps a little hope.

“Are you quite certain, Lady Sheila,” he now asked, “that there are no members of your family anywhere in the country, who would welcome the opportunity of getting to know you better?”

He paused before he went on,

“After all you have been here all alone with your father for a large number of years and they surely must be anxious to entertain you now that he can no longer look after you.”

Sheila smiled.

“It is a question several people have already asked me,” she replied. “The Vicar was one and the doctor was another, but after my mother died, my father left me to run the house and the estate while he went to London to make his fortune.”

She gave a little sigh.

“As you know, he failed utterly and it is only now that I begin to wonder why we have so few relatives and why they have never been to see us in the past years.”

“Have you an answer to that?” the banker enquired.

“It is only a negative one like everything else,” she answered. “The truth was that my father did not encourage his family to visit him. Now they have either died or have moved away to other parts of the country and even abroad. In fact I could hardly believe it when at his funeral there were no relatives at all to mourn for him.”