A Dream from the Night Read online

  CHAPTER ONE

  1898

  “The letter has come, Mama!”

  “What letter, Olinda?”

  Lady Selwyn tried to sit up but failed.

  Her daughter hurried to her side and deftly but gently lifted her mother higher in the bed and patted the pillows until she was comfortable.

  It was a very sweet face, even though it was lined with pain, which looked up and said apprehensively,

  “Do you mean in answer to yours?”

  “I do, Mama. You will remember we read the advertisement together and decided it was something that I could do.”

  “They are sending you the work here?”

  “No, Mama. That is what I wish to talk to you about.”

  Lady Selwyn’s thin white hands clasped themselves together as if she anticipated that she was to receive a shock.

  Her daughter smiled at her reassuringly before she sat down on a chair by the side of the bed and said quietly,

  “Please, Mama, don’t get agitated about this before you hear what I have to tell you. You know as well as I do that I have to earn some money somehow – otherwise we will just starve to death.”

  She smiled as she spoke, as if to take the sting from the words, but Lady Selwyn gave a little shudder and Olinda went on quickly,

  “You may not agree, but I think this sounds an excellent opportunity and I shall not be away very long.”

  “Away!” Lady Selwyn echoed faintly, fastening shrewdly on to the one word that Olinda knew would upset her.

  Hastily she opened the letter that lay on her lap and read aloud,

  Kelvedon House, Derbyshire.

  May 19th, 1898

  “Madam,

  In answer to your letter of the 15th instant, I am empowered by the Dowager Countess of Kelvedon to inform you that she would wish you to travel here as soon as convenient to inspect the embroidery that requires restoration.

  If it is within your capabilities, which it appears it would be from the sample you have provided, her Ladyship would desire you to start the work immediately.

  The nearest railway station to Kelvedon House is Derby.

  A conveyance will be ordered to meet you there on receiving a reply as to the time the train in which you will be travelling will arrive.

  Yours respectfully,

  James Lanceworth,

  Secretary.”

  Olinda finished speaking in her soft musical voice and looked inquiringly at her mother.

  “You see, Mama, I shall be working in a Noblewoman’s house and the home of the Dowager Countess of Kelvedon must be very respectable.”

  “But you will be employed!” Lady Selwyn said. “You will be treated as if you were a seamstress, Olinda!”

  “That will be all the better, Mama,” Olinda replied. “I suspect actually I shall be placed in the same category as a Governess. That means I will not come in contact with the dashing, dangerous gentlemen you always suspect are waiting for me just around the corner!”

  She gave a little laugh before she added,

  “You know, Mama, if I listened to all your fears and anxieties about me, I should grow quite conceited!”

  There was in fact every reason for Olinda to be conceited, except that she had no one but an adoring mother to pay her compliments.

  She was very lovely with large grey eyes in a small pointed face and hair the colour of ripening corn. She was slim and graceful and her long fingers, like the expressions in her eyes, proclaimed a sensitive nature.

  This showed itself in the gentleness and compassion she extended to everyone she came into contact with.

  But actually her contacts with either men or women were very few.

  For the last two years, since she had grown up, Olinda had devoted herself to caring for her sick mother and in fact seldom went outside the garden of the small manor house where they lived.

  It was an isolated part of Huntingdonshire and there were few neighbours to call on Lady Selwyn, especially after she had become so ill that she could only receive visitors in her bedroom.

  The Vicar’s wife was an occasional visitor and so were several old ladies who lived in small cottages in the village. Otherwise weeks went by when Lady Selwyn and Olinda saw no one but themselves.

  Olinda never complained. She loved her mother very deeply, but she realised that Lady Selwyn was growing very frail. Only expensive food could tempt her appetite, many items of which were beyond their means.

  “We have to do something, Mama,” she had said firmly two weeks ago.

  While Lady Selwyn had cried out in horror at the idea of her daughter trying to earn money, Olinda had said with practical common sense,

  “There is no alternative, Mama. We could sell the house, but I doubt if anyone would wish to buy it. There was an article in the newspaper the other day saying properties for sale are a glut on the market.”

  Lady Selwyn did not answer and Olinda went on,

  “And if we did sell The Manor, where would we go? And it’s not the house that eats up our money, it’s the food we eat ourselves!”

  “The food I eat,” Lady Selwyn commented unhappily. “Do I really have to have so many chickens, Olinda? So many eggs, so much milk?”

  “It is what the doctor ordered, Mama, and you cannot live on air or the few vegetables we grow in the garden.”

  She paused before she said,

  “Of course we could dismiss old Hodges, but you know as well as I do that he would never get another job and Nanny never receives her wages anyway, except at irregular intervals.”

  “We could not do without Nanny,” Lady Selwyn said quickly.

  “Well, then, you have to consent to my finding some sort of work,” Olinda said, “and, as I am completely unqualified, it’s going to be difficult.”

  It was Nanny who solved the problem of Olinda’s capabilities by reminding her that the one thing she could do exceptionally well was embroidery.

  “Perhaps if I embroidered some silk underclothes or muslin handkerchiefs like the ones I made Mama,” Olinda had said reflectively, “I could find a shop that would buy them from me.”

  Lady Selwyn had given an exclamation of horror.

  “How could you possibly go to a shop hawking the items you have made?” she asked. “I cannot bear even to consider it, my dearest.”

  “I was thinking,” Nanny said, “that there must be ladies and gentlemen in big houses who require the embroidered curtains on their beds or perhaps even their pictures repaired. Do you remember, Miss Olinda, how skilfully you restored the picture belonging to your grandmother?”

  Olinda had turned to look at it hanging on the wall. It was a very lovely example of the French seventeenth century woven in silk and metal thread.

  She had found it in the attic with a great number of objects that had been sent to the house after her grandmother’s death, but which they never seemed to have time to sort out.

  “How exquisite it would be, Mama!” she had exclaimed to Lady Selwyn, “if it was not so damaged!”

  It certainly was a beautiful picture, representing the figure of Summer holding a sheaf of corn and encircled with a wreath of roses, cornflowers, poppies and honeysuckle. In the background there were garlands of fruit symbolic of the season entwined with small cupids and ornamented with birds.

  Lady Selwyn, before she had become ill, had herself been an extremely clever embroiderer. She had been taught by her mother who was half-French and had been brought up in France.

  It was Lady Selwyn who had taught Olinda that the art of embroidery had developed in France after the Crusades.

  “Louis XI and Charles VIII summoned Italian embroiderers to France,” she said, “and most of the exquisite work to be
seen on vestments and altar fronts was done by noble ladies under the supervision of the ecclesiastical experts.”

  “How fascinating!” Olinda had exclaimed.

  “In the eighteenth century,” Lady Selwyn went on, “Madame de Pompadour set the fashion for Tambour work, and the superiority of all French embroidery became so widely recognised that there was a demand for it in all other European countries.”

  “I can understand that,” Olinda said.

  “In the reign of Louis XV,” Lady Selwyn said, “the designs had become gay, frivolous and gracious. After the King’s death, Madame de Maintenon established a school for girls at St. Cyr where a great deal of their time was spent in needlework.”

  “Is any of their work still in existence?”

  “Alas!” her mother replied. “Many embroideries of the Church and Palace were destroyed during the French Revolution, when the embroiderers were ordered to pick out the gold and silver thread.”

  “How petty-minded!” Olinda exclaimed.

  Because Olinda was so interested that she made her mother teach her the stitching she had been taught when she was young and soon she could embroider as skilfully as Lady Selwyn herself.

  When she was not reading, she would sit making amusing patterns, which she evolved out of her head, for handkerchiefs or cushions or to recover chair seats that were, as she pointed out, all in need of new coverings.

  At the moment Lady Selwyn was too frail to work herself, but she liked Olinda to sit beside her bed so that they could talk together while she worked and she was in fact her daughter’s most severe critic.

  There were many examples of Olinda’s work in the house, but when it came to the point of sending a sample of it to the Dowager Countess of Kelvedon, it was difficult to know which to choose.

  It was Nanny who had suggested that they look through the advertisements in The Times to see if there was anyone requiring embroidery in any shape or form.

  “There might be ladies needing handbags,” Nanny had suggested, “or a runner for the centre of the table.”

  “Or cushion covers,” Olinda added. “They are easy to do and I like copying the old designs that I have found in a book of Papa’s.”

  The advertisement was in fact for a form of embroidery that she had not thought of before. It read,

  “Lady of Title requires a skilled and experienced embroiderer to repair the hangings of period beds. Write to The Secretary, Kelvedon House, Derbyshire.”

  “That means you will have to go to Derbyshire!” Lady Selwyn had exclaimed when Olinda read her the advertisement.

  “I know, Mama, but I am sure for that sort of work they would pay well. I suspect the curtains will be either sixteenth or seventeenth century and, as you know, I can do that particular embroidery quite easily.”

  “Why can they not send the curtains here?” Lady Selwyn enquired.

  “Because they would be very bulky and very valuable,” Olinda replied. “Besides, why should they put themselves out? An embroiderer should be only too willing to go to them and, quite frankly, I would like to see Kelvedon House.”

  “Have you heard of it?” her mother enquired.

  “I am sure it is a very fine and impressive mansion,” Olinda said. “Somewhere at the back of my mind I feel I have seen a picture of it. Perhaps in the old copies of The Illustrated London News Papa kept. I will have a look through them and see if there is anything I can find out.”

  “Yes, do that, darling,” Lady Selwyn said, “but I have not yet decided whether I will let you go.”

  Olinda put out her hand to lay it on her mothers.

  “Do you suppose that I would leave you Mama, if it was not an absolute necessity?” she asked gently.

  “Are we really down – to our last penny?” Lady Selwyn asked with a quaver in her voice.

  “Very very nearly,” Olinda replied, “and there are another two years to go before we are clear of debt and your pension will be your own again.”

  The two women were silent, thinking of the shock it had been after Gerald’s death to find how much he had owed.

  Olinda’s brother, six years her senior, had been killed three years previously fighting on the North-West Frontier in India.

  When they had learnt that he had died in a skirmish with tribesmen that was too unimportant even to be reported in the newspapers, something in Lady Selwyn had died too.

  She had ceased, Olinda thought to herself, to go on fighting to live or to get better.

  She had adored her son and, although she loved Olinda, it was Gerald who brought a light into her eyes and who had sustained and comforted her after her husband’s death.

  There was a pension, which had been just enough to keep Lady Selwyn in comfort, and on which she could have saved to give Olinda the clothes and entertainments that were her right when she made her debut.

  But after Gerald’s death they found that not only did he owe a large amount of money because most Subalterns in India lived well above their means, but he had in a moment of mistaken generosity backed the bill of a brother Officer who was in trouble from his creditors.

  It must have been one of those coincidences, Olinda thought, that happen so often in real life but which people expect only to happen in books.

  The very week Gerald was killed on the frontier, his brother Officer, who had been sent on a special mission to Calcutta, died of cholera.

  The bill that Gerald had guaranteed, thinking presumably that he would never be expected to pay it, was then brought to his mother by the firm it was owed to.

  There was nothing Lady Selwyn could do but honour her son’s commitment and the only way she could pay off the bills he had left behind him was to mortgage three parts of her pension for the next five years.

  It had left her and Olinda, they had thought, just enough money to struggle on at The Manor and pay the wages of old Hodges in the garden and Nanny in the house.

  “We must be very economical,” Olinda had said, “but we will manage.”

  It meant, of course, that there were no new gowns for her and no chance, as her mother had planned, of her staying in London when she became eighteen with one of their relatives for a month or so during the Season.

  She did not mind that, but, as Lady Selwyn’s health grew progressively worse, the special food that the doctors ordered for her, together with her medicines, made it impossible to make ends meet.

  The knowledge of their financial insecurity gave Olinda’s voice a firmness as she said now,

  “I shall go to Kelvedon House, Mama. But you are not to worry about me and I promise you I shall work so quickly that I shall be back loaded with golden sovereigns almost before you realise that I have gone!”

  It took a great many hours of persuasion to make Lady Selwyn understand that it was the only possible solution.

  But finally Olinda had written back to Mr. James Lanceworth to say that she would arrive at Derby Station at five o’clock on Wednesday, May 30th.

  When she was dressed for the journey and the gown in sapphire blue batiste that she had made herself was covered by a travelling cape of the same colour, she looked so attractive that Lady Selwyn had reached out her hands to say,

  “You ought not to go alone, Olinda! Supposing some – gentleman makes himself – unpleasant to you?”

  “I will travel in a compartment for ladies only, Mama,” Olinda said reassuringly. “And, as for the gentlemen at Kelvedon House, I am quite certain that they will be far too grand to look at a humble seamstress.”

  “I have heard tales,” Lady Selwyn said in a low voice, “of Governesses being insulted in houses where they were working. Promise me that you will lock your bedroom door very carefully at night.”

  “Of course, Mama, if you want me to do so. And, if I even see the shadow of a gentleman coming up the back stairs, I will lock myself in and scream for the Police.”

  “I am not joking, Olinda!”

  “I know, dearest Mama. You are just worrying yourself
over your small wee chick who is going out into the world all by itself. But have you forgotten I am nineteen and not a silly schoolgirl?”

  She smiled.

  “I shall behave with the greatest propriety and I promise that if there is any difficulty or unpleasantness I will come home at once.”

  “Do you swear you will do that?” Lady Selwyn insisted. “All the money in the world, Olinda, is not worth your being insulted or treated in a manner that would make your Papa angry with me for having let you go on this mad escapade.”

  “You make it sound a frivolous and luxurious jaunt, Mama,” Olinda laughed. “I promise you that it is just going to be hard work, but I am determined it shall be very highly paid and that is what matters.”

  She pushed forward her small chin a little as she spoke and for a moment Lady Selwyn was reminded of Gerald when he wished to get his own way.

  As usual when she thought of her son the pain of his loss was there and she was silent as Olinda went on,

  “Nanny will look after you, Mama, and I have told all our friends in the village that they must come in and see you. Mrs. Parsons will read to you and the Miss Twitlets will take it in turns to arrange the flowers from the garden in your bedroom and do any shopping you may require.”

  She sighed.

  “Everyone has been very kind. I expect when I return that I shall find you have not even missed me!”

  “I shall miss you every minute of the day, my dearest,” Lady Selwyn said, “and I shall not feel happy until you are back here with me safe and sound.”

  “And rich!” Olinda added as she bent down to kiss her mother.

  She had, however, not felt quite so confident when she reached the Railway station and found what a crowd of people there were waiting to catch the train to London.

  It would have been impossible to make her way by train across country, the only practicable route was to take an express to Derby from King’s Cross, although it meant leaving Huntingdon at a very early hour in the morning.

  Lady Selwyn had talked so much about the misadventures or the troubles in which she might be involved that Olinda was relieved when she found herself safely in a Second Class compartment for ‘Ladies Only’ and the train left the great Metropolis for Derby.