Looking for Love

Chapter One ~ 1803-1

Chapter One ~ 1803“You’re quite certain you’ll be all right, Miss Gilda?”

“Of course I will, Mrs. Hewlett. Don’t you worry about me and I hope you enjoy your Wedding.”

“I’m right sure I shall, miss. It’s real lucky for our Emily, when she thinks she be on the shelf, for that farmer to come along and a very nice man ’e be too.”

Gilda Wyngate smiled, knowing that Mrs. Hewlett had been worried in case she would have to provide for her niece and was grateful as much for her own sake as Emily’s that the ‘nice farmer’ was ready to marry her.

Mrs. Hewlett was the worrying sort and Gilda often thought that she was the only person who really cared what became of her now that she was alone after her father’s death.

“Now leave everythin’ that needs washin’ up for me when I gets back on Monday,” Mrs. Hewlett was saying. “You don’t want to trouble yourself to do anythin’, but ’ave a bit of a rest.”

That, Gilda thought, was something she had been doing for a long time and the amount of washing up that would be left after her frugal meals would hardly make a pile even if she did leave it for Mrs. Hewlett.

But she knew that it was no use arguing or Mrs. Hewlett would be worrying about her while she was away in the next village attending Emily’s Wedding.

Having struggled into a heavy coat even though it was a warm day, Mrs. Hewlett picked up the wicker basket that she always carried whether there was anything in it or not and, taking a last look round the kitchen, lifted the latch of the door.

“Now take care of yourself, miss,” she admonished her, “and I’ll be back on Monday afternoon if the stagecoach be punctual, which it’s unlikely to be!”

When the door had closed behind her, Gilda gave a little sigh and, leaving the kitchen, walked down the passage to the front of the house.

It was only a short way, for the small Manor House where she had lived ever since she was born had at one time seemed only just large enough for her father, her mother, her sister and herself.

Now it seemed much too large for one person and she wondered, as she had been wondering ever since her father had died, whether she should try to sell the house and move into a small cottage.

It would she thought be the sensible thing to do. At the same time she could not bear to part with the furniture, shabby though it was, that she had known all her life and which seemed to be a part of herself and the only thing she had left.

Her father’s desk, her mother’s inlaid work table and the Chippendale bookcase were all like old friends and she felt that without them she would be even lonelier than she was already.

Equally she had to face facts. She had so little money that she could barely afford to buy enough food to eat unless she could supplement her tiny income in some way.

Her father’s pension had died with him. He had served in the Grenadier Guards and, when he was alive, his pension as a Major-General had kept them in comparative comfort or would have done if her father had not amused himself in his old age by investing in stocks and shares.

Gilda could understand the excitement of it, but, while General Wyngate might have been a very experienced soldier, he knew nothing about finance.

Invariably the Companies he entrusted his money to either went bankrupt or paid such tiny dividends that they were hardly worth the paper they were written on.

Now all that Gilda had was the very small amount of money her mother had brought into the Marriage Settlement and its income had been left to the children of the marriage.

Gilda had often wondered what would have happened if her sister had claimed her share.

After Heloise had gone to London to live with her rich Godmother, she had shown little or no interest in her impecunious relatives and Gilda sometimes thought that she was ashamed of them.

Sitting now at her father’s desk, Gilda pulled open a notebook as she was trying to jot down all her expenditures in it.

It seemed to her to come to an uncomfortably large total, despite the fact that she was trying to economise on food, clothing and in fact everything that was personal.

One economy she had thought of was to dispense with the services of Mrs. Hewlett, but when she had actually suggested this, Mrs. Hewlett had been horrified to the point of being insulted and had even offered to work for nothing.

“I’ve come ’ere for nigh on ten years,” she said, “and if you think you can do without me now, Miss Gilda, you’re very much mistaken. What’s more, your dear mother’d turn in ’er grave, she would, at the very idea!”

Mrs. Hewlett had been so voluble on the subject that Gilda felt that it was impossible for her to say anything more and she also admitted to herself that, without Mrs. Hewlett’s incessant good humour, she would be very lonely indeed.

In fact there would be no one to talk to at all except for the Vicar, who was growing very deaf, on an occasional visit and old Gibbs the gardener.

He was long past work but came because he liked to potter round the place where he had worked for so long and could not bear to see his labours being stifled by weeds or obliterated by overgrown brambles.

Gilda added up the total of what she had spent, checked it again and saw that there was no mistake.

It was too much.

‘What can I do?’ she asked herself.

She wondered whether she had any talent that could bring her in some money.

She was well educated compared with many other young women of her age. Her mother, who came from a Cornish family that had held very distinguished posts in the County for many generations, had seen to that.

The fact that her grandfather and great-grandfather and the generations before them had been High Sheriffs, Judges and even Lords Lieutenant, did not, Gilda thought, make her own brains any the more marketable.

Her father too had been an intelligent man.

His contemporaries who had visited him when he was alive always told Gilda that no General had more skill in deploying his troops or a better grasp of tactics in battle.

“Your father could always be relied on to inflict the maximum losses on the enemy with the minimum to his own men,” one of his brother Officers had told Gilda.

She had realised that this was high praise, but it did not solve her own problem.

‘I shall have to do something – I must!’ she said to herself and rose from the desk to walk to the window.

The Manor House stood back from the small country road down which it was nearly a mile to the village. It had a short drive to a gate that was badly in need of repair, while the gravel sweep in front of the house was overgrown with weeds.

Gilda, however, saw only the daffodils under the ancient trees, the lilacs white and purple just coming into bloom and the first buds on the almond tree, which by next week would be a poem of pink and white petals.

‘If only I could paint,’ she thought, ‘I could paint a picture that everybody would want to buy.’

But she knew that she could not afford either the canvass or the paints so the only person who could enjoy the miracle of spring would be herself.

Because the sunshine seemed to call her, she thought that the accounts could wait and the best thing she could do would be to go into the garden.

There was plenty of work for her to do there, not only amongst the flowers and shrubs but in the kitchen garden, where, unless she weeded the vegetables and planted those that she would want later in the year, she would be very hungry indeed.

At the same time she wanted to look more closely at the white lilacs that her mother had always loved and which, if she picked some and placed them in a chest in the hall, would scent the whole house.

There was a smile on her lips as she turned to leave the window.

Then as she did so, she looked down the drive and was suddenly still.

To her astonishment she saw a pair of well-bred horses coming through the gate.

Then she saw that the coachman driving them was wearing a cockaded high hat and incredibly there was a footman beside him as well.

No one in the County who was grand enough to have a footman on the box was likely to call and, as the horses drew nearer, Gilda thought that there must be some mistake and whoever was arriving must be coming to the wrong house.

As they came nearer still, she could see that the horses were drawing a very elegant travelling carriage with a Coat of Arms painted on the door.

‘There is a mistake,’ Gilda said to herself. ‘I must tell them so.’

As the carriage drew up outside the front door, she hurried from the sitting room, patting her hair into place as she did so, and conscious that she was wearing one of her oldest cotton gowns, which had been washed until the colour had faded and it was too tight and too short.

However, it was of no consequence for the visitor would not be for her and, when there was a loud rat-tat on the knocker, she opened the door, feeling not embarrassed but curious.

A footman, resplendent in a liveried coat embellished with crested silver buttons, was outside.

However, he was not waiting to ask whose house it was, but turned back to open the carriage door.

Then Gilda gave a little cry of surprise, for stepping out was a vision in blue silk taffeta with a lovely face framed by a bonnet surmounted by ostrich feathers of the same colour.

“Louise!” Gilda exclaimed and then quickly corrected herself. “Heloise!”

After she went to London, her sister had changed her name to one that she thought was more unusual and more aristocratic. She had written to her father saying that in the future she was to be addressed as ‘Heloise’.

“I am thrilled to see you!” Gilda welcomed her. “But you did not let me know that you would be coming.”

Heloise bent forward so that Gilda could kiss her cheek.

“I did not know myself until the last moment,” she replied.

She turned to the footman.

“Take my trunk upstairs, James,” she said in an authoritative voice, “and make sure you return here early on Monday morning. You are not to be late. Do you understand?”

“I understands, miss.”

He started to loosen the cords that bound the trunk to the back of the carriage.

Before Gilda could tell him which room to take them to, Heloise said,

“As Mama’s room is the best, that is where I wish to sleep. Tell someone to show him the way.”

“Yes, of course,” Gilda replied, “but Mrs. Hewlett is not here today.”

“Then you will have to show him yourself,” Heloise answered, “and make sure that he undoes the straps and opens the lid before he leaves.”

“I will,” Gilda agreed.

Heloise walked into the sitting room and Gilda waited in the hall until James came in through the front door carrying her sister’s trunk.

Then she went ahead of him up the stairs to open the door of the room that her mother had always used and which had been shut up after her father’s death. Hastily Gilda pulled back the curtains and opened the windows.

The room was clean, since Mrs. Hewlett ‘turned out’ every room in the house regularly whether they were used or not.

There was a Holland cover over the bed, which Gilda removed as the footman set down the trunk near the door.

“’Twill be all right ’ere, miss?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Gilda replied and thought that if it was not to Heloise’s liking she would move it for her.

She noticed that the footman looked round the room with a somewhat contemptuous air, as if he saw how shabby and worn everything was and compared it very unfavourably with the house where he was employed.

Then unexpectedly he grinned at Gilda and said,

“Nice to be in the country, miss. I were brought up on a farm meself and often misses it.”