Love Is a Gamble

chapter one ~ 1817-1

chapter one ~ 1817Idona walked back from the garden with a basket on her arm filled with narcissi.

She was thinking how she would make them into a wreath to put on her father’s grave.

Because of her name, which was Norse and meant ‘The Goddess of Spring,’ she had always felt a close affinity with the spring flowers and they meant perhaps more to her than the more flamboyant roses of the summer and the colourful chrysanthemums of the autumn.

She was in fact thinking as she often did of the story of Narcissus, which her mother had told her when she was very small.

She could imagine the beautiful young man worshipping his own image reflected in a forest pool and then trying to reach it only to fall into the water and be drowned.

Idona could remember giving a little cry of horror when her mother had told her this, but Lady Overton had smiled as she went on,

“Echo, a nymph who had loved Narcissus in vain, came weeping with her sister nymphs to remove the body, but it had disappeared.”

“How sad,” Idona had murmured.

“Only a white flower floated on the still pool,” her mother continued, “and you can still hear Echo calling for Narcissus in deserted places.”

The story had captured Idona’s imagination even though she had been only six or seven at the time.

After that, when she was alone in the garden or the woods, she would call out, thinking when her own voice seemed to come back to her that it was really Echo calling for the lost Narcissus.

As she reached the beautiful black and white Tudor house that was her home, she forgot the flowers in her basket as she remembered whom she had picked them for.

Even though it was now a week since her father had died, she still found it impossible to believe that she would never see him again.

He would never again come walking towards her looking so handsome and at the same time somewhat raffish, just as he did when he went out hunting with his tall hat a little to the side of his dark head.

He rode superbly so that, even though his horses were not as fine or as well-bred as those that some of the other Members of the Hunt owned, he was always one of the first in the field.

“How could I have lost you, Papa?” she asked beneath her breath.

She went into the house by the garden door and walked slowly towards the room where all the vases and bowls were kept and which was known as the ‘Flower Room.’

It was here that the gardeners, the maids or in later years her mother and herself had arranged the flowers which had always seemed to scent the house with fragrance so that there was none of the mustiness of age about Overton Manor that Idona had noticed in other houses of a similar age.

She put her basket down on the deal table that stood in the middle of the small room.

The narcissi, she thought, looked so fragile and beautiful, almost like stars that had fallen down from the sky, that it would be a pity to break their stems and tie them into a conventional wreath.

Instead she decided to arrange them in a low bowl and place them on her father’s grave in the same way as they might have stood on one of the polished tables in the drawing room.

Then, as she took the first narcissus from the basket, she heard a knock on the front door.

She expected that old Adams, the butler, would not hear it as he was getting very deaf and Mrs. Adams at this time of the morning would be upstairs making her bed and brushing the passages.

Since last year it had been one of the things that Idona had often done herself, for there had been no money to pay the large number of servants there had been in the house when her mother was alive.

The only consolation she had felt when she learnt that her father was dead and he had been brought back from London to be buried with his ancestors in the churchyard was that he was beside her mother.

Even now, after two years without her, it was hard to think of her mother without the tears coming into her eyes.

For her father when she had died that cold winter, when nothing they could do and however much wood they burned seemed to make the house any warmer, it had been as if his whole world had fallen in pieces.

They had been so happy together and had seemed not only to Idona, but to a great number of other people, as if they had stepped out of a Fairytale.

No one, Idona had thought, could be as lovely as her mother and, while she had been small, sweet and very feminine, her father had been in contrast tall, handsome, raffish and very masculine.

Although they were not rich, Lady Overton received an allowance through a Family Trust that had kept them in comfort until when she died it was a shock to learn that the allowance died with her.

It was in fact an arrangement made by her father, the Earl of Hampstead, who had been expecting his only daughter to marry somebody far more important than the man he described contemptuously as an ‘impoverished Baronet’.

Not even when the years proved that Sir Richard Overton was making his daughter ecstatically happy had he relented or changed his will.

When Sir Richard had recovered enough from the blow of his beloved wife’s death to speak of other things, he had said to Idona,

“This means, my poppet, we will have to tighten our belts and fend for ourselves in a way we have never had to do before.”

There had been one shock after another and what had concerned Idona more than anything else was to keep her father from going almost out of his mind.

He was not the type of man to take to drink, but he raced his horses in a more reckless manner than she had ever known him do before, taking jumps that were too high for them and riding from dawn until dusk until the horses were almost too exhausted to plod back to the stables.

It was then, which was very unlike him, that he took to leaving her for a week or so at a time while he went to London.

They lived not far North of London, so unfortunately it took little less than an hours’ driving from the Manor House to the Clubs of St. James’s.

Idona could understand her father’s longing for his friends’ company to help him to forget the emptiness of his home, but the difficulty was that they could not really afford his periodical excursions into the gaiety and the inevitable extravagance of the world that her father enjoyed.

It was a world he had known well before he married.

Although he had always been, in his own words, ‘poverty-stricken’ compared to most of his friends, a handsome bachelor could get along quite comfortably without having to put his hand too frequently into his own pocket.

Sir Richard’s friends had welcomed him back enthusiastically.

They were older now, as he was, but they had grown up sons who appreciated a man who could ride well, was a crack game shot and had a kind of joie de vivre that was so often missing amongst the bored cynical bucks and beaux who circled round the Prince Regent.

Sir Richard would make them laugh and laughter in the Beau Ton was a more valuable and precious commodity than wealth.

Equally however little money he spent Idona knew that they could not afford it.

By the time she was eighteen she was doing her best to economise, as she was sure that her mother would have done, so that her father could enjoy himself in London.

It meant dispensing with most of the gardeners except for the oldest, who were willing to work for very little because they had nowhere else to go and managing in the house with only old Adams and his wife.

There was also Nanny, who was so much a part of the family that Idona could not imagine what it would be like without her.

It was Nanny who did the cooking when her father was at home and who was skilful enough to create almost exactly the same dishes that he had enjoyed when they had employed an experienced cook.

Yet as the months passed, Idona knew despairingly that the cooking, however delicious, and the horses which she kept well exercised were not enough to keep him interested in a house that was haunted by the ghosts of the past.

Lying alone in the great bed in what was known as the ‘Queen’s Room, he missed her mother so unbearably that his only thought was to get away.

“I have to go to London, Idona,” he would say after a week or so. “I cannot stand the silence here. Buckmaster allows me to ride his horses and they are so much better than anything I own myself.”

Idona did not argue with him, understanding the pain in his eyes when he looked at her mother’s portrait in the drawing room and the way he deliberately avoided going into the little sitting room that Lady Overton had made her own.

It was there Idona sat when her father was away, because amongst the elegant pieces of French furniture, the pale blue brocade covers on the chairs and the petit point on the stool in front of the fire, she could still feel that her mother was near her.

“What can I do, Mama?” she would sometimes ask after her father had driven away looking exceedingly smart in clothes that he had not paid for and with that buccaneering expression in his eyes which told her that there were amusements waiting for him in London which he would not discuss with her.

“To be truthful, Mama,” she would go on, “there is very little here for Papa to do, the horses are growing old and we cannot afford to buy new ones.”

She would give a deep sigh as she thought that they could not afford the servants either.

She had spent the housekeeping money for several weeks on special food to please her father, which meant that they would have to be very economical indeed until his return.

“It’s no use, Miss Idona,” Nanny had said sharply this morning. “We can’t go on like this. It was bad enough when your father was alive, but now he’s left us, God rest his soul, you’ve got to find out what money there is to live on or, make no mistake, we’ll all be in the churchyard.”

It was typical of Nanny to say the things Idona had thought but had not dared to put into words.

She had left the kitchen and gone into the garden, trying to force herself to think and decided that she should send for her father’s Solicitor in Barnet.

It was something, she thought, that she ought to have done several days ago.

Because she was sensible enough to know that she was still suffering from the shock of his death, she had done nothing but try to control her tears and somehow with a childlike trust believed that something would turn up sooner or later.

What she had yet to learn was exactly what had happened in London.

That her father had been shot in a duel seemed incredible, because she had always believed that duels between gentlemen, which were a question of honour, seldom resulted in a fatal wound.

A good marksman wounded his opponent in the arm and at the first sign of blood honour was considered satisfied and the Referee stopped the duel.

Because her father was an outstanding shot it seemed unbelievable first that he should not have won the duel he was engaged in and secondly that his opponent should have actually killed him.

When he was brought home by two of his friends, they had merely told her briefly that her father had died instantly from a bullet in the heart.

Because they knew that he lived near London, they had brought him back in a closed carriage.

Her father’s body had been carried upstairs and, on Idona’s instructions, was laid on the big canopied bed where he had always slept.

Then saying very little except that he had been killed in a duel, they had driven away before she could compose herself sufficiently to ask them any further questions or even learn their names.

Afterwards she chided herself for being so foolish, but at the time she was stricken almost as if she had received a blow on the head and it was just impossible to think clearly.