Secrets

CHAPTER ONE - 1805-1

CHAPTER ONE

1805“Stop arguing with me and do what I tell you!”

Lady Blackstone’s voice rose to a shrill shriek as she shouted at her stepdaughter.

Then she stepped forward and slapped her hard across the face with her open hand.

For a moment Sandra did not move, then slowly with an incredulous expression in her eyes as if she could not believe what had happened, she put her hand up to her cheek.

She had thought when she first met her stepmother that she was ill-bred and unrestrained.

But, although she had ranted and raged at her, this was the first time she had used physical violence.

Then, as if Sandra felt that nothing she could say would have the slightest effect, she turned and walked with what she hoped was dignity out of the room.

Ever since her father had married again life at the beautiful old Priory in which they lived had become more and more intolerable.

In a way Sandra could understand a little of what her stepmother was feeling, but it was hard to be found fault with, nagged and screamed at when her father was not there every moment of the day.

When his first wife died, Lord Blackstone had been inconsolable.

They had been very happy together, a happiness that was spoilt only by the fact that they were perpetually in debt, and never had enough money to live comfortably or to repair the ancestral home which had deteriorated year by year.

There was always the deep sorrow also that Lady Blackstone had only been able to give her husband one child, but they adored their lovely daughter who had contributed to their happiness together.

Then one cold winter when the house seemed filled with ice and, however many logs they heaped onto the fire, the rooms were freezing, Lady Blackstone developed pneumonia and died.

To Sandra it was as if the world had come to an end and she knew that her father felt the same.

Because he could not bear the loneliness of the house without his wife he had shut up The Priory and gone North to stay with some friends, first in Northumberland and then on the borders of Scotland.

He had sent Sandra, who was not yet seventeen, to her mother’s parents who lived in Devon.

They had been delighted to have her, but they were old, and Sandra had realised later that it would have been impossible for her to stay with them indefinitely.

Her grandfather, however, who was an extremely well educated man, had insisted that she should have the best teachers available and above all that she should speak French fluently.

The war with France had brought home to the English how insular they were, and how little they knew about other countries other than their own, especially when it came to speaking other languages.

“I have travelled with my Regiment all over the world,” Sandra’s grandfather said, “and I made it my business to be able to converse with the natives of every country I have visited.”

“It must have made it much more interesting for you, Grandpapa,” Sandra had remarked.

“It did,” he agreed, “and I am appalled today to find that few of our leading Statesmen and even fewer of our Members of Parliament can understand a word any foreigner says to them!”

“The Prince Regent is different,” her grandmother chimed in. “I hear that, although it is not well received he often speaks French during dinner at Carlton House and even has a French chef!”

Sandra had laughed.

“Most people would say that was traitorous!” she exclaimed. “However, now we have an Armistice with France and the newspapers say the English are pouring into Paris to look at the French and especially the First Consul, who is called Napoleon Bonaparte.”

“It is an Armistice that will not last!” her grandfather had prophesied.

Less than a year later he was proved right.

Because it pleased him and also because she enjoyed learning, Sandra studied French and Italian, and had started to learn Spanish when her father sent for her to return home.

She was glad to return because she loved him and also because away from The Priory she felt that she was banished from everything that had been familiar to her since childhood.

But when she arrived, she received a shock she had not expected.

“I have something to tell you, Sandra,” her father said after she had flung her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“What is it, Papa?”

“While I have been away in the North, I have married again!”

For a moment Sandra felt she could not be hearing right.

Then, as she stared at him, he said,

“I hope you will like your stepmother and she is anxious to do many things to The Priory that have been neglected for a long time.”

Sandra was quick enough to realise her father was telling her that his new wife was rich.

She was to find out later that her stepmother was very rich indeed and she fancied that she had been determined to marry her father long before he even thought of such an idea.

Isobel Fairbairn had been thirty-five when she met Lord Blackstone at dinner at a neighbour’s house.

It was only by chance that she had been included in the party, for the Fairbairns were not at all popular in the County, and Lord Blackstone’s friends did not think her aristocratic enough to be considered as anything other than an acquaintance.

However, when one of their guests fell ill at the last moment, Isobel, who lived with her mother only two miles away, had been invited to dinner.

The moment she saw Lord Blackstone and learnt that he was a widower, Isobel knew that Fate had answered her prayers.

She had been desperately trying to find a man to marry her ever since she was twenty.

Although he was exceedingly rich, her father was more or less ostracised by the aristocrats who lived near them.

Only because he contributed largely to the Hunt, to every charity, every orphanage, almshouse, or memorial to be erected was he even tolerated.

A self-made man, boastful and determined his money should buy him what he wanted, he was too thick-skinned to realise how much he was looked down on and despised.

Isobel’s mother was different.

She came from a respected family who had served their country in the County Yeomanry for several generations.

When her father had been killed in battle and her mother was left impoverished it, had been a Heaven-sent chance for a very pretty girl to marry a rich, if common man, who had been fascinated by her youth and her charm.

It was unfortunate that Isobel had not inherited her mother’s looks.

Instead she was thickset and resembled her father, except that she had large and eloquent eyes and very dark hair that curled naturally.

They were in fact her only assets and she had to teach herself the hard way to make herself attractive to people she met.

She would ingratiate herself so that they told themselves the only decent thing they could do was to be kind to ‘poor Miss Isobel Fairbairn’.

She paid heavily for the privilege of most friendships in one way or another, and while her father was alive he even threatened physical violence to the many fortune-hunters who inevitably pursued his daughter.

Only when he was dead did they close in, determined to help her spend her fortune.

By this time Isobel had learnt a little sense.

She had been desperate to marry and furious when her father prevented her from doing so, but she realised now that with his large fortune, which she found was far greater than she had expected, she could, if she was clever, pick and choose.

The fortune-hunters who had seemed so attractive when she was young she knew now were not the least interested in her as a person and once they had their hands on her money would neglect and perhaps even leave her.

She knew that any real gentleman would consider such behaviour unsporting.

She saw in the great families around her how, while most of them had married for the advantage of wealth, land or position, the husband was always scrupulously polite to his wife in public.

If he had other interests, there was no reason for her to know about them and they were not therefore an embarrassment.

The difficulty was that everybody in that part of the county had known her for too long and remembered her father.

But Lord Blackstone was a stranger and she sensed that his unhappiness had not only made him lonely, but also vulnerable in a way he had never been before.

She set herself out to charm and in the passing years Isobel had developed her charm to a fine art.

She had also been astute enough to copy the clothes of the Society ladies who nodded to her coldly and to patronise the same dressmakers.

She had an experienced lady’s maid, who arranged her hair every day and she also learnt to make the most of her eyes.

These were her best feature so that men forgot that her nose was tip-tilted, her nostrils too large and her lips slightly coarse.

It was easy with words of sympathy and by a show of understanding exactly what he was feeling, to make Lord Blackstone believe she truly admired and loved him.

Sandra thought later, knowing her father, that in actual fact Isobel’s fortune had been a secondary consideration to his need for a companion and the love he had lost when her mother died.

“I do understand, Papa,” she had said sincerely when her father apologised for having put somebody else in her mother’s place, “and I hope you will be very very happy.”

“It is not the same as being with your mother,” he said frankly, “but I could not stand the emptiness of the house without her and it will be interesting to see what it looks like when it has been restored and some money spent on it.”

If that was enough to keep her father interested, Sandra soon realised that Isobel wanted a great deal more.

She was Lady Blackstone, she had the position and the title she had always desired, besides a good-looking and charming husband.

What she did not understand was that his wife’s death had made Lord Blackstone withdraw into himself, and the one thing he had no wish for now was a social life that he had never been able to afford before.

Isobel spent her money on repairing and redecorating The Priory for one reason and one reason only, so that she could entertain what she thought of as ‘smart people’ and for the first time in her life move with the aristocracy.

There was, however, as far as she was concerned, only one definite snag that ruined all her plans, all her ambitions, and could be summed up in one word – Sandra!

Lord Blackstone had told her he had a daughter, but she had somehow imagined she was a little girl whom she could patronise and who would certainly take second place in every way to the children she intended to have herself.

The moment she saw Sandra she had been appalled.

She had never imagined that her stepdaughter would not only be grown up, but also a genuine beauty.

Isobel had enough of her father’s business shrewdness in her not to lie to herself and she knew that Sandra, looking as she did, constituted a definite menace to her own happiness.

Who was ever going to look at her, even if she was Lady Blackstone, when with her was a young woman so beautiful that she might have stepped out of a Greek frieze.

Sandra had developed during the long months that her father had been in the North, and, because in Devon she had been riding her grandfather’s horses and swimming in the sea every day, her figure was slim, athletic and, from any sculptor’s point of view, perfect.

She had an oval face, large eyes that were grey in some lights and purple in others and hair that for some unknown reason had a touch of silver, so that at times it seemed as if it had caught the moonbeams and held them prisoner.