Light of the Gods

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1860-1

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1860Sacha was arranging the flowers in the sitting room when she heard the sound of wheels outside the front door.

As Nanny, who looked after her, and her father were out, she quickly put down the flowers she was holding to smooth down her gown and took a quick look in the mirror over the mantelpiece to see whether her hair was tidy.

As she had been busy all the morning with household chores in the Vicarage, she had not at all been concerned with her appearance and she hoped now that whoever had arrived, presumably to see her father, would not be anyone of importance.

At the same time there were few people in the Parish who drove in carriages.

The farmers had high wooden carts and the doctor drove a gig in the summer to which in the winter was added an aged leather hood that gave him some protection against the weather.

Whoever it was had stopped at the front door and there was a rat-tat on the knocker.

Sacha hurried from the sitting room and saw to her astonishment coming through the open door a vision in pale pink who looked like a flower from the garden.

“Deirdre!” she exclaimed.

“Good morning, Sacha.” her cousin, Lady Deirdre Lang, replied. “I expect you are somewhat surprised to see me.”

“Very surprised!” Sacha agreed. “I thought you were in London.”

“I was, but I returned home the night before last.”

Deirdre walked into the sitting room ahead of Sacha and looked around it rather disdainfully before she said,

“Close the door. I want to talk to you.”

Sacha looked at her questioningly.

Deirdre was her first cousin and they were almost exactly the same age, but since they had grown up she had found the closeness that they had enjoyed as children had vanished.

Instead, when Deirdre came to see her, which was not very often, she always felt uncomfortably aware that she was the poor relation and both Deirdre and her parents despised her father.

It had been different when her mother was alive, but she had died three years, ago and since then Sacha was very aware of how uninteresting the daughter of the Vicar of Little Langsworth was, except that the Patron of his Living was her uncle, the Marquis of Langsworth.

When Lady Margaret Lang, the only daughter of the second Marquis, had insisted against strong paternal opposition on marrying the Reverend Mervyn Waverley, her relations had metaphorically washed their hands of her.

“How can you be so foolish as to waste your looks and your position in life on a Curate?” they had asked,

They had not listened when Lady Margaret replied that she was head over heels in love with the best looking, the most charming and the most attractive man she had ever met.

It was not surprising that they did not believe her, because Lady Margaret had been a great social success in London and had a number of suitors for her hand.

In fact her father was considering whether to accept a very distinguished Peer or a Baronet whose income and estates far exceeded his own.

But Lady Margaret had asserted that either she must be allowed to marry the man she loved or she would run away with him, which would undoubtedly cause a scandal.

After months of argument, tears and pleadings, which Lady Margaret ignored, her father had capitulated.

She was married quietly with no congratulations and few presents and two blissfully happy people settled down outside her father’s Park gates in the small Vicarage, which fortunately had just become empty.

The old Vicar who was over eighty had died and the Marquis thought that the least he could do for his daughter was to provide her with a roof over her head and her husband with a Living.

He was not, however, very generous as regards the stipend of his new son-in-law, nevertheless the bride and bridegroom were too happy to concern themselves with anything except each other and had no wish to see their relatives or be entertained by them.

It was only some years later that Lady Margaret realised she was depriving her daughter of many pleasures that should be hers by right and, as her brother had now become the third Marquis, his daughter and Sacha shared a Governess.

This meant, as far as Sacha was concerned, that she could enjoy many luxuries that she would otherwise have missed.

There was a magnificent early Georgian house to roam over, a superlative library filled with books for her to read and a stable full of horses, which she could ride with Deirdre.

The new Marchioness, however, followed the attitude of her predecessors in thinking that Lady Margaret had made a fool of herself and took every opportunity to make her aware of it.

“Whenever I sing, ‘The rich man in his Castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high or lowly’,” Margaret Waverley had once said to her husband, “I am thinking of Alice who is so very conscious that God made her ‘high’ when we chose to be ‘lowly’.”

Her husband had laughed, but he said,

“If it really upsets you, my darling, I will ask for a transfer to another Parish. I am sure that the Bishop will be sympathetic and provide me with another Living if I ask him urgently.”

“No, of course not,” Lady Margaret replied. “Anyway, if we went away, Sacha would have none of the advantages that she has now for you know perfectly well that we cannot afford the sort of horses she rides or the Teachers she enjoys with Deirdre.”

She knew if she was honest that it was Sacha who most enjoyed the music lessons that the girls had from a very experienced teacher who had been a professional musician until his health broke down.

It was Sacha who really loved the dancing lessons that took place in the ballroom of The Castle in order that Deirdre, when she went to London, could learn to dance at all the smartest balls with a grace that she did not have naturally.

It was Sacha too who was very grateful for the books in the library and was really the only person in the house who made full use of them.

“Do you know, Papa,” she had said to her father when she was fifteen, “the Curator told me today that I am the only person who has ever taken a volume from the Ancient Greece shelf and there are a large number of books that you don’t have here.”

Her father had looked interested.

“I wonder if they would be useful for the translations I am doing?” he questioned.

“I will write their titles down for you, Papa,” Sacha had said, “or better still bring them home for you to have a look at.”

There was a little pause before the Vicar replied,

“I am not sure that we should borrow books without the permission of your uncle and quite frankly I am not very keen at the moment to ask any favours of him.”

Sacha smiled.

She knew that her father was having a disagreement with his brother-in-law over the condition of some of the cottages where the old pensioners were living.

In spite of his great wealth the Marquis could be very cheese-paring over things that did not concern him personally and her father had pointed out firmly that some of the older pensioners were suffering in their health as a result of roofs that leaked and windows that did not fit.

“It’s all right, Papa,” Sacha said. “Mr. Cornwall the Curator is so thrilled that I am as interested in the books as he is that he will let me borrow anything I want.”

She did not listen to her father’s protests, but brought back any of the books in Ancient Greek that she knew would help his studies.

The Vicar had in the last five years started to supplement their very inadequate income by writing books, mostly translations from the Greek, which had a small sale amongst scholars and University Libraries.

Nevertheless, as Lady Margaret had said, ‘every little helped’ and she was also exceedingly proud that her husband was acclaimed by intellectuals as being an authority on Ancient Greece.

At Langsworth Hall, however, they were interested only in the Social world in which as soon as she was a debutante Deirdre shone brilliantly.

She was not only exceedingly pretty with the beauty of an English rose, but was dressed by the most expensive dressmakers in London and entertained for on a grandiose scale at Langsworth House in Berkeley Square. So it was not surprising that she was acclaimed and courted.

To Sacha her emergence from the schoolroom had changed her life overnight.

There was no longer the daily visit to The Hall. The lessons that she had enjoyed while Deirdre grumbled about them stopped automatically, as did her dancing and her riding.

Even more to be regretted it was now difficult to borrow books from the library. While Mr. Cornwall would be only too pleased to see her, she was well aware that if she met her aunt she would ask for an explanation of her presence in a way that would make it very clear that she was an interloper in the house.

Now that Deirdre was grown up Sacha was expected to keep her place in the village.

Without her mother’s support it was impossible for her to do anything but try to forget all the delights that she had enjoyed at Langsworth Hall and just be grateful for the years that they had been available to her.

Fortunately there was a great deal for her to do at home.

With Lady Margaret’s death the small allowance that she had received from the Langsworth Estate came to an end and Sacha and her father had to live entirely on his stipend and the proceeds from his books.

This meant that they could no longer afford any extra help in the house and what Nanny, who was getting on in years, could not do fell on Sacha’s shoulders.

She was always happy to be with her father and was perfectly content to sit talking to him in the evenings.

That they were both busy during the day made the hours slip by quickly until they could enter into one of their spirited discussions on historical subjects that inevitably ended up in their talking about the Greeks.

Her father’s knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and of the Gods and Goddesses they worshipped was so fascinating to Sacha that she could never hear enough about them.

She also tried to help him with his translations, sometimes surprisingly finding the best English equivalent of a word more quickly than he did.

It was, however, a very restricting life for a young girl, especially one as lovely as Sacha was at eighteen.

“If you ask me, Vicar,” Nanny had said to him bluntly a few days ago, “it’s a cryin’ shame that his Lordship doesn’t do somethin’ for his niece, seein’ as how she and Lady Deirdre was so close when they were children.”

The Vicar looked up from his desk to ask a little vaguely,

“What do you mean by ‘something’, Nanny?”

“I mean, sir, that it would be only right for Miss Sacha to go to a few balls and meet gentlemen who’d admire her in the same way as they admire Lady Deirdre. There’s not much difference between them, seein’ as how Miss Sacha is the livin’ image of her mother and Lady Deirdre takes after her father. They might almost be twins.”

“I suppose there is a resemblance,” the Vicar agreed vaguely.

“There would be if Miss Sacha had one decent gown to wear instead of those cheap cottons that are the best I can make her.”

After a pause the Vicar pointed out,

“You know, Nanny, we cannot afford to spend any money on clothes at the moment.”

“I knows that, sir,” Nanny replied, “and even if you bought Miss Sacha a gown from Bond Street, where could she wear it, except to dazzle the sprouts and cabbages and the few villagers what comes to Church on a Sunday?”

The Vicar did not reply and after a moment Nanny carried on,

“It be a real shame that pretty child is slavin’ away here and never asked to any of the entertainments takin’ place up at the Big House. I’m ever so sure if her Ladyship was alive she’d have somethin’ to say about it and I only wish I could give his Lordship a piece of my mind!”