Revenge Is Sweet

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Steeplechasing was originally an impromptu horse race with some visible Church steeples as a goal.

  It was a horse race across open country, but now it is run on a course with artificial fences.

  Steeplechase and hurdle racing trace their origins to the chase and the Field of War where the necessity to clear formidable obstacles was the object of the exercise.

  The earliest horse race recorded in England was one held about A.D. 210 at Wetherby, North Yorkshire, among Arabians brought to Britain by Lucius Septimius Severus A.D. 146 - 211 the Emperor of Rome.

  In the Georgian days the bucks and beaux used to have midnight steeplechases, which were extremely dangerous because they had often drunk far too much and gave themselves ridiculous handicaps such as riding blindfold or with one arm tied to their sides.

  The Grand National Steeplechase which had begun in 1837 as the Grand Liverpool Steeplechase became the most famous and prestigious steeplechase throughout the world.

  The course, an irregular triangle, must be covered twice for a distance of four miles, eight hundred and fifty-six yards and a total of thirty jumps, among which the most spectacularly hazardous are those known as Becher’s Brook and Valentine’s Brook.

  The Jockey Club, which controls all the horse racing in England, was formed in 1750.

  Chapter One 1836

  Valessa 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 b
ecame 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.

  They paid a few shillings for the little Dresden china figures and the statues of heathen Gods that her father had collected on his travels.

  When they were all gone, she was reduced to bartering the blankets and sheets from the beds for food.

  She had known then that everything and the entire contents of the house would come to an end sooner or later.

  It was only at the beginning of this week, however, that she had faced the fact that she must die.

  There was no possible way she could earn money and certainly nobody in the village wanted her when they were poor themselves.

  ‘The Big House’, as it was called, where the Squire had once lived, was empty and had been for years.

  The villagers subsisted on what they could grow and sell in the market and the town where it took place on Saturdays was three miles away.

  Valessa thought that, if she had some money to pay the fare, she might travel to London and see if she could find employment in some capacity or other.

  Then she doubted if anyone would engage her and she was too frightened to venture out alone.

  It had been different when she was travelling with her father and mother. Then she had been protected and looked after.

  In the last year before her mother became ill she had been aware that men looked at her in what to her was a frightening manner.

  They not only bought her chocolates and other small presents, but they would put their arms around her and try to kiss her if her father had not interfered.

  “You leave my daughter alone!” he would say.

  “She’s too pretty,” one man had replied. “You will have to keep her in a cage, Charlie, when she gets a bit older!”

  “I will certainly keep her locked away from Casanovas like you!” her father answered.

  Valessa remembered everybody laughing.

  After that she had been sent to bed early when her father and mother entertained.

  When they were in France she was never allowed to go out alone without somebody being with her.

  As she looked in the mirror, she thought that it was doubtful if anybody now would think her pretty.

  She had grown so thin that her eyes were far too big for her face and, because she was permanently hungry, it was difficult t
o smile and quite impossible to laugh.

  Her hair had in the past always seemed to shimmer as if the sunshine was in it. While still very long, it was now dull and limp.

  There was no longer the sparkle in her eyes, which were like her mother’s.

  Slowly, because it was too much of an effort to move quickly, even though she was feeling well fed, Valessa began to dress.

  Her clothes, which were all old and threadbare, were hanging in the wardrobe.

  She wondered which would look best when, sooner or later, they would pull her out of the river.

  She felt it was likely that some children would be the first to see her or perhaps it would be one of the farmers looking for a hare or a rabbit to fill his pot.

  Valessa had tried to set up a snare for the rabbits in the garden, but she had not been successful.

  All she had caught was a magpie, which she was sure was a sign of bad luck and when she turned it loose it flew away.

  Afterwards she thought that she could have eaten it, but doubted if it would have been very tasty.

  She took down from the wardrobe what was the best of a bad bunch.

  It was a gown that had been her mother’s and it was too big for her, but she thought at least she would look decent when she was dead.

  She had sold everything, but her mother’s clothes had fetched very little.

  She knew that the only reason why she had any of her own gowns left was that nobody was thin enough to wear them.

  The only decent thing left in her wardrobe was a warm coat that she intended to wear as she walked to the river.

  She had thought of exchanging it for a piece of meat to go with the eggs that she had just eaten.

  Then she was afraid that if it was a cold day she might collapse before she reached her destination.

  Anyway the weight of the coat when wet would make her drown more quickly than she would without it.

  She had never learned to swim and the river, swollen from the rain that had fallen the previous month, was very deep just before it reached the weir.

  Someone had once said that drowning was ‘a quick and pleasant way of dying’.

  Valessa had also heard that your life passed before your eyes like a kaleidoscope displaying your sins and your virtues.

  She did not think when she thought about it that she had many sins but perhaps as they appeared in front of her she might be surprised.