The Duke Comes Home

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1875-2

The way Ilina spoke made Mr. Wicker aware that she was worrying about the estate, the pensioners and the few people they still employed who were really too old for a long day’s work.

“I am sure that His Grace will not be ungenerous,” he said hoping that what he was prophesying would be the truth.

“Supposing he is as hard up as I am?” Ilina asked. “I know his father did not have much money and the reason Cousin Sheridan went abroad was that he could not afford the gaieties he wished to enjoy in London.”

Mr. Wicker had no reply to this. He was only thinking that it would require a very rich man to restore Tetbury Abbey to what it had been in the past.

Originally until the time of King Henry VIII it had been a Monastery. Then every successive owner had added to it and altered it until it was difficult to believe that there had ever been anything sanctified about the building.

Even so Ilina often imagined that there was an air of Holiness about the Chapel, although it had been rebuilt and the cloisters, which had been preserved even when the rest of the house had been altered.

The first Duke had employed the leading architect of his time to practically rebuild the house altogether and its Palladian appearance was very impressive.

And yet there were parts dating from Queen Anne, Charles II and even Queen Elizabeth tucked away behind the great facade which made it, Ilina thought, very lovable and different from anybody’s else’s ancestral home.

Whatever her difficulties and unhappiness with her father, she had always felt as if she was part of The Abbey, that it protected her and as long as she was underneath its roof nothing could really harm her.

And yet now a stranger had inherited it, a stranger who was coming here to take her father’s place and every instinct in her rebelled against asking him to support her.

‘What can I do?’ she asked herself wildly and knew that Mr. Wicker was asking the same question.

Aloud she said,

“I shall have to find employment of some sort.”

“That is impossible.”

“Why?”

“I could give you a number of reasons,” Mr. Wicker replied. “The first is because you are who you are, and secondly you are far too lovely to earn your living in any way and to attempt to do so would be dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” Ilina queried.

Then she said,

“I suppose you are thinking that I might be – pursued or – insulted by men.”

“Of course I think that,” Mr. Wicker answered, “and you know that, if your mother was alive, by this time you would have made your curtsey to the Queen and had a Season in London. And doubtless by now you would be married.”

Ilina laughed and it was a very musical sound like the song of a bird.

“Oh, Mr. Wicker, you are a romantic! And even if Mama had been alive, I doubt if there would have been enough money for a Season in London and, if there are any eligible bachelors in this part of the world, I have yet to meet them.”

“You have not had the chance.”

As that was an indisputable fact, Ilina did not argue.

She only thought of how gloomy it had been, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, tending a sick man who growled and shouted at her and who refused to allow anybody to come into the house.

Her father had always been quarrelsome and after his accident he had a horror of being seen or pitied.

Looking back Ilina could only remember the doctor and Mr. Wicker and occasionally a local farmer or two ever coming to see her.

“It has been very depressing,” she said frankly, “but I cannot see that things will be very much better if I have to live in one of the cottages in the village. Fifty pounds will not keep me from starving for ever and I have to feed Pegasus.”

The urgency in her voice when she mentioned her horse was very obvious and Mr. Wicker answered,

“Yes, of course. We must not forget Pegasus.”

Then, as if he had made up his mind, he bent forward to say earnestly,

“Quite frankly, Lady Ilina, there is nothing you can do but stay here and, as there is nobody but you to run the house and the estate, I feel that the new Duke will find you very useful.”

“I doubt it. If he is like most people he will be a new broom wanting to sweep clean and the last thing he will want is somebody like me hanging round his neck and telling him how things were done in the past.”

The Solicitor did not reply and after a moment she asked him,

“There is not much – alternative – is there?”

“I am afraid not and quite frankly, Lady Ilina, you cannot be here on your own, as you must be well aware.”

“I shall be twenty-one in a month’s time.”

“Even at that great age,” Mr. Wicker said with a smile, “you cannot live by yourself or as you suggest, earn your own living.”

“It is really ridiculous, is it not,” Ilina asked, “that although I am well educated and without being conceited very well read, I cannot earn anything with my talents.”

“Ladies are not expected to earn their own living.”

“I am sure that most ladies enjoy playing the piano, sketching and entertaining their friends,” Ilina said, “but those comforts are what I cannot afford.”

Mr. Wicker sighed.

“I am afraid then you will have to ask the new Duke to look after you. After all that is what is expected of the Head of the Family.”

Ilina gave a little start.

“I have not really been thinking of him as the Head of the Family. Do you think when he arrives that the cousins and the other relations I have not seen for years will gather round him and perhaps also make demands on his purse?”

“If so, I can only hope it is a large one!” Mr. Wicker said a little cynically.

Ilina jumped up again from the chair where she was sitting.

“I will not do it! I could not bear to be an encumbrance on anybody else, least of all on somebody whom Papa hated!”

As she spoke, she could hear him raving wildly from his bed,

“Do you realise that Roland’s son will reign here in my place and they are both as crooked as corkscrews! Roland I loathe and detest. He always cheated when we were at Eton. I would not be surprised if he was instrumental in having David killed.”

“Please – Papa,” Ilina had pleaded, “you must not say such things. You know they are not true.”

“I hate him! I hate them both!” her father had shouted, “and that damned son of his, who has been skulking about in some obscure part of the world and is doubtless riddled with opium and vice, will wear my coronet.”

As her father had not worn his coronet for more than ten years, Ilina could not understand why this should perturb him.

But he referred to it again and again and assumed that since Sheridan Bury had lived in the East he took opium and indulged in every sort of exotic vice.

It was impossible when her father raved on and on not to create a picture in her mind of somebody debauched and horrible in every possible way.

Although she told herself that it was foolish and entirely lacking in substantiation, she could not help being afraid of what the new Duke would be like.

She had written to him, when the doctors had told her that it was unlikely her father would last many more months, to ask him to come home.

It had been very difficult to trace his whereabouts, but finally Mr. Wicker had been in touch with the Bank nearest to the house where Sheridan’s father used to live and they had given him an address in India.

Ilina told her cousin in her letter that her father was dying and, as he was the heir to the Dukedom, it would be wise for him to come home.

She had written simply and she hoped pleasantly.

Because she had made a great effort to be as nice as possible, she had resented the fact that Sheridan Bury had neither answered her letter nor acceded to her suggestion that he should return.

It was easy enough to excuse him on the ground that he might not have received the letter.

But as she had addressed it care of the Bank, she could not believe that it would not reach him eventually. Was he in fact not interested in his future prospects?

Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, instead of taking as much as three months to reach India, it was now possible for a ship to travel from Bombay to England in just under twenty days.

Her father had lingered for six months after the doctors’ announcement that there was nothing more they could do for him and now nearly three weeks after his funeral there was still no sign of the new Duke.

Because it was impossible to sit still Ilina once again walked across the room.

Then, as she looked up at one of the pictures of her ancestors on the wall, she told herself that it was impossible for her to go away and leave The Abbey.

How could she abandon everything that was familiar and the only home she had ever known to enter a frightening world where she would be completely alone and practically penniless?

No, however humiliating it might be, she would stay.

Then it suddenly struck her that it might not be a matter for her to decide. The question was whether the Duke would want her in the house.

It was something that had not occurred to her before and she knew that even if he gave her a small yearly allowance she would still not know what to do or where to go and would be terrified of being alone.

It was really frightening to realise how little she knew about her relations since her father had cut off communication with them.

She was not even certain which of the older ones were still alive while the only two cousins who had come to the funeral had been old men of her father’s age, who were, as it happened, both widowers.

The late Duke had married first a woman, who for some reason the doctors could not ascertain, was incapable of producing a child.

She had died when he was fifty and he had then married a very sweet and lovely person, who had not been married before because her fiancé had died unexpectedly a week before their wedding.

The two bereaved people had fallen in love with each other and in their own way had been happy even though the bridegroom often had difficulty in controlling his temper and only his wife was capable of coaxing him out of one of his black moods.

The new Duchess had been thirty-eight when she married and she produced two children, David, the boy who was born a year after their Wedding and then Ilina, who was born a year later.

The Duke had been so thrilled at having a son that as the servants often said,

“The sun rises and sets on Master David.”

Everything centred round David and his whole training and upbringing was for the time when he would take his father’s place and become the sixth Duke.

Unfortunately soon after the children were born things began to go wrong financially.

Because the third Duke had been extremely extravagant, there was not as much money available as there might have been although the house was in perfect order with two new wings, which proved eventually to be quite unnecessary, and the stables had been enlarged to take forty horses.

As to their investments, Ilina thought that while her grandfather might have been ill-advised, her father was obstinate and pig-headed enough to put money into Companies which promised ‘get rich quick’ results, but invariably more often sooner than later went bankrupt.

Gradually, as the years went by, they grew poorer and poorer while the house went unrepaired and there were very few horses in the huge stables.

Because, as children they were so happy and their home was both beautiful and entertaining, Ilina had never realised until after her mother’s death how much skimping and pinching she had had to do.