68. The Magic of Love

Chapter One 1842-1

Chapter One

1842As the ship slowly moved into the harbour, Melita stood on deck and looked with delight at the island ahead of her.

She had expected Martinique to be beautiful but it exceeded all her expectations and was in fact the most beautiful place she had ever seen.

The town of St. Pierre had been built in a crescent shape between a curving beach and a correspondingly curving hill, which was verdant green against the vivid blue of the sky.

Towering to the left of it was Mont Pelée, which Melita had learnt meant, ‘Bald Mountain’, due to a bare spot near its summit.

An unromantic name, but the rest of it was vividly green with trees that included those she was longing to see like the mahoganies, gum trees and the ‘fromagers’, besides banana, mango and coconut trees.

All the way from England the Officers on board ship had regaled her with stories of the beauty of Martinique and its strange, mysterious rain forests.

Now she was entranced with the town of St. Pierre and, while she was standing looking at its white houses with their red roofs and the high twin turrets of what she thought must be the Cathedral, a ship’s Officer said at her side,

“It’s called ‘The Paris of the West Indies’.”

“It is very beautiful!”

“It’s also very gay,” he laughed and went on his way.

It had been a strange and at times very frightening voyage and yet Melita thought that she would never forget the kindness that had been shown to her by the ship’s Officers and the other passengers.

At first she had been too unhappy at the thought of leaving England and too frightened of what the future held to seek companionship.

She had stayed in her cabin feeling helpless and numbed by the swift tide of events.

Then, with the elasticity of youth, she had known that somehow she had to face what lay ahead and it was no use trying to avoid it.

So she had gone up on deck to feel the bitter December winds in her face and find that their very roughness gave her a new courage.

She had experienced a different kind of fear when they met a storm in the Atlantic, which had threatened to capsize the ship.

It had been so terrifying that Melita, like most of the passengers, had felt that their last hour had come.

And yet by sheer good seamanship they had survived and, when they had moved into tropical waters, the sunshine, the emerald and blue of the sea and the brilliance of the sky had swept away the memory of their terror.

But now Melita knew that she was afraid again, afraid of what she would find in Martinique – and most afraid of all of her unknown employers.

The very word sent a little shiver down her spine.

What would it be like to be employed? To have to do someone else’s bidding, to be ordered about knowing that one dare not answer back or refuse to obey.

For a moment it seemed as if the sunshine that enveloped the town ahead was dimmed and she wished that she could run away from what was waiting for her.

But where could she run?

She knew there was nowhere.

She could hardly believe it was possible that her life could have changed so dramatically from the first week in December.

It was then that her stepmother had told her what she had in her mind.

“I want to talk to you, Melita,” she said, and Melita had known instinctively from the hard note in her voice that what she was about to say was unpleasant.

She had known as soon as her father married again that her life was not going to be easy and that between her and this strange woman who was attempting to fill her mother’s place there was already an antipathy.

She had known it as soon as the new Lady Cranleigh came flouncing into the house in Eaton Place and had seemed so large and overbearing when Melita compared her to her small, gentle, sweet-faced mother.

“So this is Melita!”

There was something disparaging in her tone, something that told Melita all too clearly that her stepmother was not impressed by her appearance.

“My dearest,” her father had said, “you received my letter?”

“Yes, thank you, Papa. You told me you were to be married. I, of course, wish you every possible happiness.”

“I am sure we will be very happy,” her father had replied a little awkwardly.

Melita knew that he was embarrassed and had no wish to talk about his marriage.

Responsive as she always was to her father’s moods, she said,

“There are sandwiches and drinks waiting for you in the study, Papa. I thought you would not wish for anything very substantial as dinner will be ready in an hour-and-a-half.”

“I shall need a bath and someone to unpack for me,” the new Lady Cranleigh answered almost aggressively, as if she suspected that she was being neglected.

“A housemaid is waiting upstairs,” Melita explained, “and the footmen are carrying the trunks up at this moment.”

“Perhaps I had better see to it.”

“There is really no need,” Melita answered, but even as she spoke she realised that she had said the wrong thing.

Her stepmother had no intention of allowing her, a mere child of seventeen, to arrange anything for her and she made that abundantly clear in the days that followed.

When Melita was alone with her father, she longed to ask him why he had married again and why he had chosen this bossy self-assertive woman, who was in complete contrast to everything her mother had been.

But there was no need to ask the question.

She learnt all too quickly that her stepmother had money and what was more she was related to a number of very important families, including that of the Foreign Secretary.

Melita had always known that her father was ambitious, but now she realised how far his ambition could carry him, although she was quite certain that in the first instance he had been the pursued rather than the pursuer.

‘I shall just have to make the best of it,’ she told herself with a sigh.

None of them, neither Melita, her father nor Lady Cranleigh, had envisaged how little time there was to be to make the best or even the worst of the situation they found themselves in.

A year after he had married for the second time and a year ago this Christmas Sir Edward had died.

It had been such a shock that, even after Melita had followed her father’s coffin to the graveside, she could hardly believe it was true.

Always when she came back to the house she expected to hear his voice and at night she would sometimes go to his bedroom to make quite certain that she had not been dreaming and that he was in fact there and alive.

Now in deep mourning only a year after she was a bride, the new Lady Cranleigh, as she said herself, ‘faced the tragedy with fortitude’.

She certainly had a large number of friends to console her and the fact that she looked extremely attractive in black was no doubt some compensation for the loss of her husband.

To Melita it was as if the light had gone out of her life.

She had thought when she lost her mother that nothing would ever be the same again, but, when her father went, it was as if the mainstay and prop of her very existence had been swept away from beside her with one blow.

She and her father had always been very close and wherever he was appointed in his diplomatic career Melita went with him and however busy he was he always had found time for her.

It was an agony after he died to look back on how happy they had been in Vienna and what trouble he had taken to explain to her in Italy the history of its great monuments and buildings.

He had made the past come alive because he was not only a very distinguished diplomat but also a notable scholar.

After he was dead Melita’s only consolation was to read the books in his study and try to imagine that he was explaining them to her as he had done during his lifetime.

It was perhaps, she thought later, because she found so much consolation and interest in reading that her stepmother had decided her future.

She had felt too unhappy and miserable to join the tea parties, which even while she was in mourning, Lady Cranleigh continued to give every Thursday.

She was seldom asked to join the small but amusing dinner parties that even a widow could give without outraging the proprieties.

Then, one December morning, when the sky was grey and even the big fires in every room at Eaton Place could not keep out the chill winds, Lady Cranleigh dropped what was to Melita a bombshell.

“I have been thinking of your future, Melita,” she began and her eyes, as she rested them on her stepdaughter’s face, held an undoubted expression of hostility.

This was due, Melita had realised without being conceited, to the fact that in the last two years she had grown very pretty.

Her fair hair which resembled her mother’s was like spring sunshine and her eyes, which were a very dark blue, seemed to fill her small face with its delicate pink-and-white skin which reminded people of Dresden china.

She was exquisitely made and walked with a grace that might have been envied by a ballerina.

“Thank God you move like a dancer,” her father had said once. “I cannot bear clumsy women who rise from a chair as if they are activated by wires.”

Melita had laughed, but she knew what he meant.

Her mother had seemed to float into a room as if she was a piece of thistledown and she always hoped that she emulated her.

She was in fact a complete contrast to her stepmother who was heavily built and likely in middle age to grow heavier still.

“My future?” Melita questioned.

“That is what I said,” Lady Cranleigh replied. “I don’t know if you have any ideas on the subject.”

“I don’t – think I – understand.”

She had imagined, because there was no alternative, that she would live with her stepmother and make her debut this Season, which she had been unable to do last year because she was in mourning.

It had always been planned that she would be presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, after which she would attend the innumerable balls and assemblies that supplied the background to other debutantes in the Social world.

“I think we had best be completely frank with each other,” Lady Cranleigh said, “and I will start by telling you that I have no intention at my age of being a Dowager or a chaperone to a young girl.”

Melita looked at her wide-eyed.

“I don’t – think there is – anyone else who would bring me out,” she said after a moment. “Papa always said he had very few – living relatives and Mama’s family, as you know, came from Northumberland.”

“I think you would find it difficult to inveigle anyone, even if you had a relative willing to do it, into introducing you to Society when there is no money to pay for it,” Lady Cranleigh snapped.

“No – money?” Melita questioned.

“I have been looking closely into your father’s affairs,” Lady Cranleigh replied, “and I find that, when everything has been settled and the mortgage on this house paid off, there will be nothing left for you.”

Melita clasped her hands together.

She had known after her mother’s death, when she was coping with the finances of Eaton Place, that it was in fact too expensive for them, but her father had not listened.

When she had suggested moving into a smaller house, he ignored her and so they drifted on hoping that something would turn up and that one day he would be solvent again.

Now Melita saw only too clearly that her father had been living in a fool’s paradise.

There had never been any chance of his making enough money to clear the debts that had steadily accumulated without a wealthy wife.

That was just what he proceeded to do and there was no doubt that in the year of his second marriage he had been more opulent than at any other time in his life.