Revenge Is Sweet

Chapter One 1836-1

Chapter One 1836Valessa stood gazing out of the window.

It was a warm day for the end of November and the sun was shining.

There had been a touch of frost during the night, but not enough to stop the hunting.

The trees were turning to red and brown and the leaves beneath them were a carpet of the same colours.

“It’s a nice day for dying,” Valessa said aloud.

She had a sudden impulse after all to stay alive and then knew that it was impossible.

She could not go on as she was and she knew that the sudden craving for life was merely because she had eaten something.

When she had decided yesterday that there was nothing else for her to do but to die, she had thought that she would at least have a good breakfast.

Otherwise it was unlikely that she would be able to walk as far as the river, or if she did reach it, to have the strength of will to throw herself into it.

She had therefore bartered her last sheet, with the exception of those she was using, for two eggs.

For a pillowcase that had been embroidered by her mother she received three slices of bread and a tiny piece of butter.

She would dress first, she decided, and then go down to the kitchen to eat what to her would be a feast.

But when she awoke, she was so hungry that she had gone downstairs in her nightgown.

She had eaten the eggs and the hot toast thinking that it was the most delicious meal she had ever had.

There had been nothing for her to drink but water, which at least she had been able to heat in the kettle on the fire.

She had, she thought, been very intelligent about the fires.

The only thing left that was free was the dead wood from the trees that grew all around the house.

She had managed to have a fire in her bedroom as well as the one in the kitchen and she kept the bedroom fire going all night.

In the morning she relit the fire in the kitchen by carrying a piece of burning wood in a scuttle downstairs.

The warmth from the fires had been, she thought, the only thing that had kept her alive.

Valessa had had less and less to eat until she realised that there was nothing more to sell.

Unless she wished to die slowly of starvation, it would be best for her life to end in the river.

It hardly seemed possible that everything should have happened so quickly and the house that had been her home was now an empty shell.

There was nothing in the rooms but the marks left by the pictures on the walls and the pieces of carpet on the floor were too threadbare for anybody to wish to take them away.

The house had once been a place of laughter and happiness.

They were poor, but there had always been, although it was plain, plenty to eat.

Looking back she thought that no man could have been more handsome and attractive than her father.

Yet she supposed that he was to blame for everything that had happened.

It had all started long before she was born when Charles Chester had quarrelled with his father.

“I am damned if I will go into the Army!” he had declared. “You have treated me as if I was a raw recruit ever since I was a child! I am going to enjoy life and see the world!”

“If you don’t do as I tell you, I will cut you off without a penny!” his father had roared.

Charles, however, was determined to do what he wanted.

He had run away from home two days later, taking with him all the cash he could find.

He had also taken, and this was more serious, a neighbour’s daughter, Elizabeth, whom he had been courting secretly for over a year.

He had nothing to offer her and to speak of his love for her to her father would, he knew, just be a waste of words.

He therefore told Elizabeth that he was leaving, but when he kissed her, she knew that nothing mattered but him.

They went off quietly, not even thinking of the chaos they left behind them.

On Elizabeth’s part it was certainly very serious.

Her father had given his approval to her engagement to a man of social stature who was far older than she was.

The marriage was to have taken place in two weeks’ time.

When Elizabeth left, on Charles’s instructions she took with her the jewellery that had been left to her by her mother.

Also the jewels that had been given to her as a Wedding present.

“We might as well be ‘hung for a sheep as a lamb’,” Charles had grinned, “and if they attempt to catch up with us, which is very doubtful, we shall be on the high seas.”

“Where are we going?” Elizabeth asked a little belatedly.

“As far as I am concerned, to Paradise,” he answered, “but actually, I thought first that we would visit Egypt and see the Pyramids.”

Elizabeth knew that all she wanted was to be with him.

When they had left, they did not care about the fury of their parents nor did they think of the shocked exclamations of their other relatives.

They were, as it happened, comparatively well off.

Elizabeth’s mother had left her money besides her jewellery in her will.

It amounted to nearly three hundred pounds a year and it enabled them to travel to a number of distant and unusual places.

Only just before Valessa was born did they come back to England.

They made no attempt to get in touch with their relatives who would not have spoken to them anyway.

Charles found a small black and white timbered house in Leicestershire, which he was able to buy for what he called ‘a song’.

Elizabeth made it very comfortable and, after Valessa was born, they stayed there for nearly two years.

Then Charles began to get restless and they set off again on their travels, taking their daughter with them.

Before she was old enough to understand what was happening, Valessa was happy to ride a camel or to climb a mountain because her father was determined to reach the top of it.

She had also travelled down crocodile-infested rivers and explored parts of Africa.

She had grown used to eating strange foods, sleeping in a tent and sometimes even in a cave.

Then they would be back in England where there were horses that she learned to ride as well as her father did.

It was horses he was obliged to fill his life with when Elizabeth became not well enough to travel outside England.

She had caught several tropical fevers unknown to doctors that very weakening.

It was now impossible for her to do any more than keep the house comfortable for her husband and daughter.

It was fortunate from Charles’s point of view that, as she grew older, Valessa was able to help him.

She could eventually train the horses he broke in almost as well as he could.

The horses were to be his only source of income when Elizabeth died suddenly and quietly in her sleep.

Valessa could hardly believe it.

One moment her mother was laughing with them and her eyes were filled with love for her handsome husband.

The next she was being carried in a small coffin into the churchyard.

It was after Elizabeth’s death that everything went wrong.

Later Valessa knew that it was a tragedy owing to the way that her grandmother had made her will.

It allowed her father control of the capital as well as the income that they lived on.

It took him three years to spend every penny of it.

First it was expended on the horses he bought, patronising Tattersalls instead of the Horse Fairs as he had done in the past.

Then, and Valessa recognised that it was because he was so lonely, he took to gambling.

There were two big houses in the neighbourhood where he had friends. He would not introduce them to her, and they would certainly not have been accepted by her mother.

They were hard-drinking, hard-riding men who enjoyed playing cards for high stakes.

They would, after they had a great deal to drink, bet on two flies crawling up a window.

It was too late to do anything about it when Valessa, having just reached the age of eighteen, found that her father had no money.

What he did have, however, was a multitude of debts.

It was then because the duns were at the door that he began to sell everything in the house.

It was agonising for Valessa to see first the pretty gilt-framed mirrors that her mother had loved taken down from the walls and then she found that the French secretaire at which her mother had written her letters had vanished overnight.

The rugs they had brought back from Persia were rolled up and taken away in a cart.

“We cannot go on like this, Papa!” Valessa had cried finally.

“I know, my poppet,” he had replied, “and I am deeply ashamed of myself!”

Then he had laughed his carefree laugh, which everybody who met him found infectious.

“I am going to a party tonight,” he said, “and I have a feeling that I shall win the jackpot.”

“Oh – no – Papa!” Valessa exclaimed.

But she realised that it was no use arguing with him. He hated the emptiness and quietness of the house now that her mother was no longer there.

She knew that he would be the life and soul of any party he went to, which was why he had so many invitations and she only wished that they were from people her mother would have liked.

Or alternatively that they would perhaps occasionally include her.

She was grown up, but she saw no one except the people in the village and Little Fladbury was a very small one.

There was, of course, the Parson, who had given her lessons and, as he was a very erudite man, she was well educated in the classics, and, of course, the scriptures.

There was the Schoolmistress who had taught her mathematics and geography when she was not busy with the village children who had no wish to learn anything.

But more important than anything else there was her mother’s library, which was surprisingly large for such a small house.

Her mother had collected books from all over the world because she loved reading.

She had taught Valessa French, Italian and also Spanish when they were travelling and, when they returned home, she would insist on her learning to read the books of the countries they had visited.

Valessa had a good brain and was very quick at picking things up and she could chatter away to her mother in different languages.

She would also read aloud from the books that filled the shelves.

The books were kept in what was called ‘the study’, which was a small room and the only one left where the walls were still furnished.

When her father was killed, Valessa was sure that it was intentional.

He had been riding home from the party where he had expected to win the jackpot.

Instead, she learned later, he had lost a large sum of money that he did not possess.

She never knew if it was because he was ashamed to tell her about it or whether he could not face being ostracised by his so-called ‘friends’.

A gambling debt was a debt of honour.

Either way she was sure that his death was deliberate.

Granted, he had had a lot to drink, but he had put his horse at an insurmountable jump. He had fallen, as was inevitable, and broken his neck.

It was then that Valessa’s world came to an end.

Her father’s tailor took the dining room table, the chairs and the sideboard and still grumbled that it was not enough.

His wine merchant collected anything of value out of the drawing room.

His saddler took the pictures on the stairs and the one of her mother that had hung in the study.

The bedroom furniture was collected by another creditor.

All that was left was Valessa’s own bedroom and a few things that the creditors had treated with scorn.

It was these, however, that had saved her for the last six months from starving.

First she sold off piece by piece anything that the villagers wanted.