Diona and a Dalmatian Read online

  Diona and a Dalmatian

  Sir Hereward Grantley is angry, as usual. A bad tempered man with little to commend him, he is determined that his niece, the orphaned Diona, will understand the great favour he has done by offering her a home. Never missing an opportunity to mention Diona’s penniless status and dependency, her uncle is an arrogant bully.

  Diona, aghast at being thrust into a world of unkindness and bullish behaviour after the love in her parent’s home, mourns their loss and clings to the last thing that her popular, horse-loving papa gave her  her beloved Dalmatian, Sirius.

  But no misdemeanor is safe from the mean attentions of Sir Grantley, especially when his sly son Simon is there to pour fuel onto the fire. So when Sirius accidently breaks an ornament, Simon sees his opportunity to avenge Diona for rejecting his fumbled attempts to grab a kiss, by telling his father that the dog is a menace and should be shot.

  Traumatised at the thought of losing her dog, Diona decides that she can no longer take the misery of Grantley Hall and flees. Scared, but certain that fate is guiding her to safety she seeks refuge with the handsome Marquis of Irchester.

  A confirmed bachelor and friend of the Prince of Wales, the Marquis has become used to a life of pleasure amongst the Beau Monde following the privations of the war in which he distinguished himself. A prized catch amongst Society debutantes and wealthy widows alike, he has so far managed to evade being trapped, whilst enjoying the companionship of some of the most beautiful women in London.

  But when touchingly innocent, educated and ethereal Diona begs him for a job, she provokes protective feelings in the Marquis that he didn’t realise he had. Accepting her wish to remain anonymous, he admires her determination to save her beloved dog, and swears to prevent anyone harming her or Sirius.

  But can Diona remain anonymous once her uncle starts looking for her? And just how far will the Marquis go to protect a girl he doesn’t know? As fate throws Diona an unexpected wild card the pressure is on and faith, loyalty and true love will all be tested to the ultimate limits.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Orion was famous for his beauty and he was also a giant. He was endowed with prodigious strength and was passionately fond of hunting. He was always accompanied in his favourite sport by his dog Sirius.

  Orion's love-affairs were dramatic and concerned many beautiful goddesses.

  When he was killed, he was transported to the sky, where in golden armour, sword in hand, his constellation shines on winter nights. Of course, Sirius is with him.

  Dalmatian dogs are aristocrats and have been in England for more than two centuries. Their country of origin has never been decided; some experts say Dalmatia, while others say India or Spain.

  They were trained for generations to follow under carriages, and they are also gun-dogs. They are easily trained, are devoted companions and reliable guards, and bark only at persons, not at noises.

  Chapter One

  Sir Hereward Grantley lowered himself with difficulty into the large armchair, and wincing with pain he lifted his gouty foot onto a stool.

  Then, breathing somewhat heavily, he leant slowly against the back of the chair.

  As he did so, a Dalmatian dog trotted across the room towards him, wagging his tail.

  He brushed against a glass of brandy that had been placed beside Sir Hereward on a low table and knocked it to the floor where it smashed into several pieces.

  Sir Hereward burst into a roar of rage.

  “Will you control that damned dog of yours!” he shouted at his niece. “ I have told you before, it has no right to be in the house. I will not have it here, it can stay in the kennels!”

  Diona ran across the room to pick up the pieces of glass and put them into the wastepaper basket.

  “ I am very sorry, Uncle Hereward,” she said as she did so. “Sinus did not mean it. He was only coming to greet you because he is fond of you.”

  “ I have enough dogs of my own without yours. Either he goes into the kennels or he will be destroyed!”

  Diona gave a cry of sheer horror, and a voice from the other side of the room said,

  “I think that is a good idea, Papa! As you say, dogs are a nuisance in the house. I have also seen Sirius chasing through the woods, which would undoubtedly have upset the birds which are nesting there.”

  “That is not true!” Diona replied. “Sirius has never been anywhere without me, and because I know it is the breeding season, we have not been near the woods.”

  “I saw him with my own eyes!”

  As he spoke, Diona knew her Cousin Simon was lying and the reason for it.

  Ever since she had come to live in the great ugly house that belonged to her uncle, Simon had pursued her with his attentions.

  When she had made it clear she would have nothing to do with him, he had become spiteful and made trouble for her.

  She was well aware that he was now getting his own back over Sirius because two evenings ago he had attempted to kiss her at the top of the stairs.

  She had struggled against him, and when she realised he was stronger than she was, she had stamped violently on his foot, making him yell with pain.

  She had run away from him, saying as she did so,

  “Leave me alone! I hate you, and if you try to touch me again I will tell Uncle Hereward!”

  Because Simon had been waiting for his revenge, he rose now from the table where he had been greedily eating a large breakfast after everybody else was finished and came towards his father.

  “Have the dog put down, Papa,” he said. “I will tell Heywood to shoot him as he shot Rufus when he grew too old to work.”

  “You will not shoot my dog!” Diona exclaimed angrily. “He is young, and he does not mean to be clumsy. In fact, this is the first thing he has ever broken in the house!”

  “You mean the first thing we have noticed!” Simon retorted.

  Diona looked at her uncle.

  “Please, Uncle Hereward, you know how much I love Sirius and how much he means to me. He is the only thing I have left that was given to me by papa.”

  As she spoke, Diona knew she had made a mistake.

  Sir Hereward Grantley had always disliked his younger brother because he was much more popular in the County, and also because he was a better sportsman, a better shot, and far more handsome.

  Sometimes Diona thought her uncle had actually been glad when her father had been killed schooling a wild, untrained horse over a high fence.

  It was the sort of accident that could only have happened once in a hundred times, and it seemed impossible, since her father had been such an experienced horseman, that it should have happened to him.

  The whole County had mourned Harry Grantley, and Diona thought afterwards that her mother had died at the same moment that he had!

  She had actually pined away and been buried within a year of his death.

  This had meant, since her uncle was her Guardian, that Diona had been forced to leave the house where she and her parents had been so happy.

  Her home had always seemed to be filled with sunshine, while the huge, draughty, and cold ancestral Manor House where the Grantley family had lived for three hundred years was dark and gloomy.

  She had not been there long before she realised that her life was to be made a misery by her cousin Simon.

  The only point in which Sir Hereward thought himself superior to his brother was that while Harry had a daughter, he had a son.

  Unfortunately, Simon was not a son of whom any father would be particularly proud.

  Although he had now reached the age of twenty-four, he had the mentality of a rather stupid boy of sixteen.

  He managed to excel at nothing except in his greed for foo
d and in eating more, Diona thought, than any three men could manage to do.

  Simon would be the sixth Baronet when his father died, and as there was no chance of her aunt, who was a semi-invalid, ever having any more children, Sir Hereward did everything he could to make the best of it.

  He indulged Simon in every way, spoiling him, hoping that by encouraging him to be more selfish than he was already, in some miraculous manner it might turn him into a man.

  It took Diona, who was very perceptive, only a few days to understand her uncle’s feelings, and then she felt sorry for him.

  But that did not make things any better where she was concerned.

  Because in addition to being exceptionally lovely she was also intelligent, she soon realised that she irritated her uncle, and he resented her, just as when his brother Harry was alive he had resented him.

  Nothing that she did pleased him, and seldom a day passed when her uncle did not swear at her, usually for some imagined fault, or just because he wished to release his pent-up feelings on somebody.

  His wife lay upstairs, whining and complaining and making no real effort to recover from her ill health.

  Simon was a continual disappointment, and because Sir Hereward drank too much, he was continually in pain with gout. It had swollen his leg to double its proper size and was now spreading to his hands.

  Now, as if the culmination of his anger burst like a boil, he growled to his son,

  “You are right. Tell Heywood to dispose of the dog this evening. I have no intention of having my shooting spoilt this autumn!”

  Diona knelt down beside her uncle’s chair.

  “You cannot mean that, Uncle Hereward,” she said. “You cannot mean to be so – cruel when you know how – much Sirius means to me.”

  Because her voice was very soft and anguished as she pleaded with him, she felt for a moment as if Sir Hereward might relent.

  Then Simon said,

  “That dog chases everything! I saw him after the chickens yesterday, and if we get no eggs for breakfast it will certainly be his fault!”

  “It is a lie! It is a lie!” Diona cried.

  But it was Simon’s intervention that made up Sir Hereward’s mind.

  “Give Heywood the order!” he said to his son. “And tell him to make sure the keepers shoot any animal, cat or dog, they see in the woods.”

  The way he spoke made Diona know that it was no use pleading with him any further.

  She wanted to scream at the injustice and cruelty of what her uncle had just ordered.

  She was well aware that there was a look of triumph and spiteful satisfaction in her Cousin Simon’s eyes as she rose to her feet and walked with what she hoped was dignity from the breakfast room.

  Only when she was outside in the hall and the door was shut behind her did she run frantically up the stairs with Sirius following her.

  Not long before his death, her father had bought her Sirius as a present when he was a small wriggling puppy with, because he was more than two weeks old, the black spots already beginning to show on his white fur.

  His eyes pleaded for love in a way which made Diona clasp him closely in her arms and know that he was exactly what she had always wanted.

  When first her father and then her mother had died, it was Sirius who had comforted her.

  He had licked her cheek and cuddled against her as she had cried helplessly and despairingly, knowing that she was completely alone in the world except for him.

  There were of course other Grantley relations, but most of them did not live in the same county, and none of them were prepared to offer her a home, especially as she had no money.

  Her father had spent every penny of his small capital on the horses he bought with the intention of training them, then selling them for what he hoped would be first-class prices.

  The first three or four horses he bought exceeded even his expectations, and he bought more.

  “It may seem extravagant,” he had said to his wife, “but I have the opportunity of buying some quite unusually well-bred animals from the Estate of an old friend in Ireland who has just gone bankrupt, and I would be a fool to miss it.”

  “Of course you would, dearest,” his wife had replied. “And nobody is cleverer than you are with horses. I am sure they will all show a huge profit.”

  Thinking of those of which he had already disposed, Harry Grantley was confident that this was true, and when the horses arrived they looked even more promising than he had hoped.

  They were of course very wild, and breaking them in entailed patience and very hard work.

  It had been great fun to watch him, Diona thought.

  He would never let her ride a horse until he considered it safe, and she knew that she was an exceptionally good rider simply because she had ridden ever since she had first begun to toddle.

  It was one of the horses from Ireland that had killed her father, and because most of the rest of them were still not broken in, they fetched very little money when her mother sold them.

  Nevertheless, they managed to live quite comfortably during the months that followed her father’s death.

  At the same time, Diona was aware that her mother was growing thinner every day and found it difficult to take an interest in anything except her daughter, and it had become an effort for her to smile, let alone laugh.

  Although her composure during the day was heroic, Diona was sure that she spent most of the night in tears, mourning the husband she had loved and lost.

  Afterwards Diona could not help wondering if there was anything she could have done to save her mother. However, she knew that her mother had not really been physically ill.

  Hers had been a mental and spiritual collapse which made it impossible for her to live without the man she had loved and who had filled her whole life to the exclusion of everything else.

  ‘At least they were happy together!’ Diona thought in the cold and misery of her uncle’s house.

  She had never realised before that it was not bricks and mortar which made a home, but the people who lived in it.

  Grantley Hall should have been a beautiful house inside because her uncle was a rich man and the furniture and paintings he had inherited were fine examples of the various periods in which they had been added to the family collection.

  But because he was a difficult and disappointed man and there was no happiness in his life, the whole place always seemed to Diona to be dark, gloomy, and as cold as the hearts of those who lived there.

  The servants were old and surly, resenting the way they were spoken to and the manner in which they were given orders, but too afraid of losing their jobs to protest.

  Outside in the stables there were some excellent horses, and in the kennels there were dogs.

  But even they, Diona thought, because nobody cared for them as individuals, seemed to be different from the horses her father had owned and the dogs which had meant so much to her.

  At first her uncle had accepted that Sirius should always be with her, sleeping beside her bed and following her wherever she went.

  Then she knew that it was Simon who was putting her uncle against the dog, so that he cursed Sirius if he got in his way, remarking disagreeably, “that damned dog is eating us out of house and home.”

  This of course was a spiteful reference to the fact that Diona had no money of her own, and in fact, as her uncle never ceased to remind her, he had paid her father’s debts after her mother’s death.

  Before that, Mrs. Grantley had struggled to pay off month by month anything her husband had owed, so there had not been a very large accumulation of bills.

  Nevertheless, they were enough to make Sir Hereward very unpleasant about them.

  He had also, Diona thought, been extremely mean about the servants her father and mother had employed, three of whom had to be pensioned off, while an elderly couple were left as caretakers in the house.

  “You can stay here,” Sir Hereward had told them, “until I
find a purchaser to take this property off my hands. Then I suppose I shall have to try to find you a cottage, or else it will mean the Workhouse.”

  The way he spoke made Diona cry out in protest, but there was nothing she could do.

  Although she thought it was unlikely that Sir Hereward would carry out his threat of sending them to the Workhouse, she knew how much the possibility would upset and worry them.

  They would not sleep at night for fear of what was going to happen to them.

  Before she left, she assured them that she would do everything in her power to help them, if and when the house was sold.

  “Personally, I think it is unlikely,” she said to cheer them up. “Not many people would want to live in such an isolated district as this, and Papa loved it only because it was such a perfect place for riding.”

  She knew it was also because her father had thought it would be pleasant to be near his brother in the family house where he had been very happy as a boy.

  He had told her so often that in his father’s time there had always been a welcome for him and his friends before he went into the Army.

  He had fought for a number of years before, having married somebody with whom he was overwhelmingly in love, he decided to settle down.

  It was then, during the year of peace between England and France in 1802, that her father had moved into the small Manor and been ready, as he had said optimistically, to “start a large family.”

  He must have been disappointed that he was blessed with only one child, and that a daughter, but he had never let Diona be aware of it.

  Actually, it was only after her father’s death that she thought perhaps he would have preferred her to be a boy with a chance eventually of succeeding to the Baronetcy.

  Of course, there was no reason why Simon would not do that, except that he was obviously not quite normal, and her uncle had no other children.

  But she had told herself so often that there was no use in looking back and thinking of what might have been.

  She had somehow to face the misery of everyday life at Grantley Hall and wonder frantically if she had any future.