68. The Magic of Love

Chapter One 1842-2

Looking back, Melita realised how many more luxuries they had then compared with the previous years.

Her father had not only given her delightful and exquisite presents, he had also spent a considerable amount of money on her clothes and the horses he gave her to ride.

Now uncomfortably Melita realised, as she had not understood before, that everything she received had been paid for not with her father’s money but with her stepmother’s.

Lady Cranleigh was watching the expression on her face.

“I see you understand,” she said, “and, while during your father’s lifetime, I was quite prepared to pay for his daughter, I don’t intend to continue to do so now he is dead.”

Her face hardened as she continued,

“What is more, I will tell you quite frankly that I don’t want you living here in this house with me.”

“Then – what am I to – do?” Melita asked helplessly.

“That is what I intend to tell you,” Lady Cranleigh answered, “and just so as you understand, Melita, you have no alternative but to agree to my suggestion.”

Melita waited apprehensively.

She had the feeling, although she could not be sure of it, that Lady Cranleigh was embarrassed by what she had to say.

Nevertheless she was determined to say it.

“When your father and I were in Paris three months before his death,” Lady Cranleigh said, “we met a charming man, the Comte de Vesonne. He told me that he has a small daughter he is apparently devoted to.

“He talked about her to your father and they both agreed that the most important part of a girl’s education is an ability to speak languages.

“When we parted he said to me, ‘when Rose-Marie is a little older, madame, I shall beg you to find an English Governess for her. I would wish her to speak English as well as French and, when she grows older, there are other languages I shall add to her curriculum’.”

Lady Cranleigh paused to say,

“I think you are beginning to guess what plans I have made for you.”

Melita was incapable of answering her stepmother, who went on,

“Last August I wrote to the Comte de Vesonne and told him I had found what I thought would prove to be an excellent Governess for his daughter. I received an answer two days ago. He has asked me to despatch the Governess as soon as possible to St. Pierre in Martinique!”

“Martinique?”

It was rather difficult for Melita to say the word.

“You mean – I should go there alone to live with people I have never – seen?”

“For Heaven’s sake, girl, you have to grow up sometime!” Lady Cranleigh replied.

“B-but it is – too far away,” Melita managed to say.

Lady Cranleigh shrugged her shoulders.

“That, as it happens, suits my purpose. I have no wish for people to say that I have driven you into earning your own living and there are certain to be those who because they are jealous of me will suggest that I ought to chaperone you and find you a suitable husband. But I am too young for that, Melita – far too young!”

She was, Melita knew, at least thirty-five, but she had the feeling these past months that her stepmother was determined to marry again and she could understand only too well that she did not wish the encumbrance or indeed the competition of a younger woman.

Melita had risen to her feet to walk across the breakfast room.

“Surely there is – something else I can – do?”

“You could go into a Convent. If you would prefer to incarcerate yourself in a kind of tomb, I certainly will not stop you.”

“No – no, I could not do that,” Melita said, “but Martinique – it is the other side of the world.”

She saw the expression on her stepmother’s face and knew that was what had recommended it to her as a decidedly suitable situation.

“I have – never taught anybody. What do I know about teaching?”

“The child is not very old,” Lady Cranleigh retorted, “and I should have thought with all that reading you do and the trouble and expense your father took over your education, you would know enough to be able to impart it to some little creole who is not likely to be very intelligent anyway.”

“But supposing the Comte and Comtesse do not like me?” Melita said. “What shall I do then?”

“You had better make sure they do, unless you are prepared to swim home,” Lady Cranleigh said.

She rose to her feet and looked at Melita with undisguised hostility.

“I have already replied to the Comte’s letter to say that you will be on the ship that leaves Southampton in two weeks’ time. I will pay your passage to Martinique and I will give you one hundred pounds. That is more than is left in your father’s estate so you should think yourself very lucky to have it!”

“And when that is – spent?” Melita asked.

She turned to face her stepmother almost piteously as she asked the question.

At that moment a pale gleam of winter sunshine came through the window to illuminate her fair hair almost as if it was a halo.

She looked very lovely and very insubstantial.

“You can starve in the gutter for all I care!” Lady Cranleigh said in answer to her question and left the room slamming the door behind her.

It had seemed to Melita in the days that followed that she moved in a nightmare she could not awake from.

As she supervised the packing of her trunks, taking with her not only her own treasured possessions but also everything she could that had belonged personally to her mother, she thought it could not be happening.

She could not be leaving England, perhaps for the rest of her life. She had visions of being so inadequate a Governess that she was dismissed and of seeing the one hundred pounds melting away before she found other employment.

‘I shall starve!’ she thought frantically.

Then she remembered almost as a comforting thought that there was always the sea.

It would not be too hard to die if she could join her mother and father. At least she would not be alone as she was alone at the moment in a hostile world where there was no one she could turn to for help.

Vaguely she thought of trying to get in touch with her cousins and any other relatives she must have in Northumberland. But then she remembered that to them she would be merely an encumbrance, an unattached woman without money, and she shrank from contacting them.

But there was in fact no time for her to do anything except obey her stepmother’s instructions, pack her boxes and travel to Southampton.

Because she suddenly felt extremely ignorant and quite incapable of teaching anyone, even a young child, she packed a number of her father’s books feeling that by doing so even in the new world she would not lose contact with him.

They made her feel even more alone and unhappy as she touched the well-thumbed pages and those that had been her childhood favourites brought tears to her eyes.

She could hear his deep voice reciting lines of poetry to her that he knew, because they were so close, she would enjoy as much as he did.

“Oh, Papa, Papa,” she wept, but she knew that there was nothing she could do except carry out her stepmother’s plans.

Up to the last moment she had had a feeling that perhaps a miracle would save her, but when the ship finally sailed out of Southampton Harbour she had been too blinded by tears to take a last glimpse of the land of her birth.

There had actually not been much to see because it was a grey drizzly day, the sky was overcast and the sea as dark as steel.

By contrast the great rollers breaking on the beach at Martinique were the colour of Melita’s eyes and the sky was a translucent blue that was unlike any colour she had ever seen before.

As the ship slowly nosed its way towards the long jetties, she saw innumerable little boats in the harbour, some of them with their sails up running before the wind, others moored to buoys and a large number of three-masted schooners anchored near the shore.

There were pennants and flags fluttering from their mastheads and they gave the harbour an air of festivity, which made it seem almost as if St. Pierre was en fête.

‘The Paris of the West Indies,’ Melita said to herself and then she knew that whatever the town was like it would not concern her.

She had learnt by studying the letter the Comte had written to Lady Cranleigh that the house or château where she was going was not in St. Pierre but some way outside.

‘I myself, will meet the lady you are sending us,’ the Comte had written in an elegant educated hand, ‘and I assure you, madame, we will do everything in our power to make her feel at home.’

‘At home!’ Melita thought scornfully.

How could she ever feel at home amongst strangers in a strange land?

And yet even if Martinique was strange. it was certainly beautiful.

Although she had been frantically busy with her packing, before she left London she had found time to go to Moody’s Library in Mount Street to ask if they had any books on Martinique.

The librarian, who had often helped her before in finding books that she and her father wanted to read, searched and searched, but could find nothing that was particularly helpful.

There were just a few paragraphs in an encyclopaedia and a map that he admitted was not likely to be very accurate.

Nevertheless the map had seemed to Melita to give her a better idea of the island than she had had before.

She found St. Pierre marked quite clearly and a little to the North of it there was Mont Pelée. To the South there was another town and harbour marked ‘Fort de France’.

The history of the island told briefly and baldly was that Christopher Columbus had discovered Martinique in 1502. Finding the natives, who were called Caribs, unfriendly, he did not stay there.

It was not until later that Martinique was colonised by the French and afterwards it had been captured several times and taken over by other foreigners including the English.

But finally it had returned to France and remained French territory.

Melita had visited Paris with her father, but he had never had a diplomatic post in France and she wished now that she knew more about the French.

They had seemed charming, delightful, courteous people, but she had not been grown up when they had visited Paris and she had met no one socially but diplomats.

What did she know of the ordinary people? She had a feeling that they were different in every way from the English. After all, their countries had been enemies and from time to time at war for many years.

‘Suppose they dislike me just because I am English?’ Melita said to herself apprehensively.

She knew she was nervous in a way that she had never been nervous in her life before, as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the jetty.

She went down below to her cabin and put on a cloak of silk taffeta, which had been made in the latest fashion before she left London.

She was determined that, whatever else, she would not appear in her new position looking like a crushed miserable Governess who was utterly dependent on the whims of her employer.

So she had sold a small diamond ring, which had belonged to her mother, and spent the proceeds on clothes.

When her stepmother realised what she had done, she sniffed and said scathingly,

“If you like to dissipate your only assets on personal adornment, I shall not stop you! But don’t ask me for more money, for I have no intention of giving it to you!”

Melita had not replied, but she had thought to herself that she would rather die than go begging to her stepmother.

For the last year while she had been in mourning all her clothes were black and those she had worn previously were either too young for her now or quite unsuitable to be worn by a Governess.