Love in the Ruins

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1884-1

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1884Mimosa Shenson stared at the letter in her hand, finding it impossible to believe what she read.

The small house her father had rented in Tunis had been looked after by a Tunisian woman while they were away.

The place was clean and tidy, but Mimosa felt constricted, as if she was suddenly imprisoned.

She went to the window and the blazing afternoon sun poured in.

It made her instantly feel too hot and she brushed her hair away from her forehead.

She then looked down at the letter in her hand and read it again.

Could it really be true?

It just seemed impossible.

She looked at the date and realised that it had been written some weeks ago.

In fact it must have arrived immediately after she and her father had set out for Thuburbo Maius in Tunisia with their caravan of camels.

Her father had been determined to incorporate an account of what had been a Roman City in the book that he was writing.

However, only a little of the ancient site had been excavated so far.

They had seen the men erecting their tents on some level ground outside the area of the excavations. It was something that Mimosa had experienced at many other Roman sites.

She knew exactly how excited her father would be by what he would find and what he knew would furnish new material for his book.

It was immediately after her mother had died nearly four years ago that he had said to Mimosa in a harsh voice,

“If you think I can stay here missing your mother every minute of the day and night, you are very much mistaken!”

Because she knew how much he was suffering, Mimosa answered him,

“What do you want to do, Papa?”

“I am going abroad,” he said. “I will write a book, which is what I have always intended to do, about the countries conquered by the Romans and perhaps that will help me in some way to live on without your mother.”

The agony in his voice was very moving.

Mimosa had known that there was nothing she could do but agree with everything he suggested.

It seemed impossible that her mother should have died so quickly and so unexpectedly. She had contracted pneumonia during the cold winter and had refused to take it seriously until it was too late.

Mimosa had looked around the attractive Elizabethan-built house that had been her home all her life.

She could not believe that her father really meant to leave it forever.

Sir Richard Shenson however, sold it together with the small estate on which it stood to the first person who offered to purchase it.

When they left England, they took with them nothing but the clothes necessary for their journey.

It was an impulsive action that was characteristic of Sir Richard.

It was the way, Mimosa knew, in which he had swept her mother off her feet when they first met.

He had persuaded her to run away with him.

It was a romantic story that she loved hearing over and over again ever since she was a child.

She thought now that her father would have chosen to die as he had. Suddenly and unexpectedly from snakebite among the Roman ruins.

He would not have been happy lingering on to a slow and boring old age.

The bite of the native snake was known locally to be very poisonous and it had ensured his death after only a few hours.

It was then that Mimosa realised that she would have to take charge.

The Tunisian camel-men were in such a state of consternation that they could hardly bear to touch her father’s body.

It was this attitude that had decided her not to have him taken back to Tunis.

Instead he was buried among the ruins of Thuburbo Maius, which had so delighted him from the moment he had set eyes on them.

He had already gathered a great deal of useful material for his book.

When they had left England, they had visited, first the many Roman sites in the South of France.

From there they had sailed to Egypt, then to Libya, from where they had come to Tunisia.

To Mimosa it had been a joy and she was thrilled by the history of the way the Romans had conquered so much of the ancient world.

She was also happy because her father now seemed a little less miserable.

Nothing, she knew, could ever compensate him for the loss of his wife and he had adored her from the first moment he saw her.

It had been at a ball that Mimosa’s grandfather had given at Crombe Castle for her mother and her twin sister.

It was his son, the Viscount Crombe, who mattered more to the Earl of Crombefield than any of his possessions.

He had, however, felt it his duty to launch his two extremely beautiful daughters on the world in the conventional manner.

He had poo-pooed the idea of giving a ball for them in London.

If Society, he asserted, was interested in meeting his family, they could make the effort to come to Crombe Castle.

It was where in his own way he reigned like a King.

Intolerant, arrogant and overwhelming, he expected what amounted to a feudal obedience. Not only from those he employed but also from his children.

His son had escaped from his father’s domination by going first to Eton and then to Oxford University.

After that he joined the Grenadier Guards, which was the family Regiment.

For the girls, Lady Winifred and Lady Emily, there was no such escape.

If they wished to rebel there was nothing they could do about it.

The ball, Lady Winifred had told her daughter, had been a wild excitement from the first moment it was proposed.

It was to be a splendid and important occasion because the Earl recognised that it was expected of him.

He never did anything by halves and everyone in the neighbourhood was required to accommodate as many guests as could be packed into their houses.

The Castle itself was filled with the most distinguished of the Earl’s many social acquaintances.

Of course there were also gentlemen who he considered to be eligible bachelors.

From the time his daughters were old enough to be presented to Queen Victoria he began to consider what would be the most suitable marriages for them.

“But, suppose, Papa,” his daughter Winifred had asked, “we don’t fall in love with the men you choose to be our husbands?”

The Earl scowled at her.

“Love will come after marriage,” he said. “What is your duty as my daughter is to marry somebody suitable, whose blood is as blue as ours and who can keep you in the manner to which you are accustomed.”

The way he spoke made his daughter Emily, who was the more timid of the twins, shiver.

But Winifred, being braver, objected,

“I think, Papa, I would be unhappy if I had to marry a man I did not love.”

“You will marry whoever I tell you to marry!” the Earl declared firmly. “I will have none of this modern nonsense of a girl choosing her own husband when she has a father to do it for her.”

Lady Winifred did not argue any further.

When she fell in love with Richard Shenson, she knew that her father would never approve of him.

He was, in fact, the best looking and the most attractive man she had ever imagined.

He had been brought to the ball by some neighbours who lived only a short distance from The Castle.

After he had danced three times with Lady Winifred, he persuaded her to meet him the following day.

They would not be seen in the woods that lay between the Earl’s estate and that of Richard Shenson’s friends.

Richard told Lady Winifred that he had fallen in love with her from the moment he saw her.

“It may seem strange and improbable to you,” he said, “but I swear to you on everything I hold sacred that you are the woman I have been looking for all my life. My only chance of being happy, really happy, is if you will marry me.”

As Lady Winifred felt the same about him, she knew that he was telling her the truth.

What she also knew was that her father would not consider him for one moment as his son-in-law.

The Earl had already told her that she was to be particularly charming to the Marquis of Burford, who was the elder son of the Duke of Belminster.

Lady Winifred had danced with him.

But she had known from the moment he put his arm round her waist that she could never, even if her father crucified her for it, accept him as her husband.

The Marquis was a squat, fat and exceedingly plain young man with an obvious awareness of his own importance.

He spoke to her in a condescending manner that she resented.

As she told her sister, it ‘made her hackles rise’.

As they moved over the dance floor, she had seen her father talking earnestly to the Duke and she had known by the way the eyes of the two men followed her exactly what they were planning.

She then tried to tell Richard Shenson that their love was hopeless.

But he simply put his arms round her and kissed her and the words had died on her lips.

“I love you!” he said. “I will speak to your father immediately.”

“It will be – useless,” Lady Winifred managed to murmur. “He will – never allow me to – marry anyone who has not a title and who he – does not think is of – equal standing to himself.”

“I will be a Baronet when my father dies,” Richard pointed out, “but that may not be for perhaps twenty years.”

Lady Winifred looked up at him with tears in her eyes.

“How can – this have – happened to – us?” she asked in a broken little voice.

“That we have found each other is the only thing that matters,” Richard Shenson declared, “but it does mean, my darling, that you will have to be very brave.”

Lady Winifred looked at him enquiringly, not understanding what he was saying.

“It means,” he explained quietly, “that we will have to elope. I will get a Special Licence and, once we are married, there will be nothing your father can do about it.”

“He will – never forgive – me,” Winifred murmured.

“Does that really matter so much?” Richard Shenson asked.

There was no need for her to answer.

They had then run away.

Richard Shenson organised it so cleverly that they were married and on their way to France before the Earl was aware of what had happened.

His rage had echoed round The Castle like a hurricane of North wind.

He was so furious that the staff in the kitchens were trembling and even the dogs hid under the tables, as if they were afraid of what might happen next.

The Earl swore that he would never speak to his daughter again.

Sending for his solicitors, he cut her out from his will immediately.

It was perhaps inevitable that Lady Emily should follow the lead shown by her twin sister.

They had always done everything together and they were so much alike and so much a part of each other that they were more like one person than two.

Lady Emily kept very quiet about it and hid her sister’s letters.

The Earl had no idea how frequently she heard from her.

Two months later she followed her sister’s lead and ran away with the man she in her turn had fallen in love with.

This time it was an even worse blow to the Earl.

His daughter Winifred had defied him to marry the man she loved, but at least he was an Englishman.

Lady Emily, to his horror and indignation, had chosen an American.

Clint Tison was visiting England and at twenty-five, with a number of love affairs behind him, had not expected to lose his heart so completely.

But he knew at once that without Lady Emily his world could never be complete as he so wanted it to be.

He wooed her in a manner that left her breathless with her heart turning endless somersaults.

He told her he wanted to lay the world at her feet and that he could not live without her.

After the insipid overtures and the unimaginative compliments of her English suitors, Lady Emily found Clint Tison irresistible.