The Island of Love

  Author’s Note

  When I visited Hawaii in 1983, I found it very very beautiful. I saw the Iolani Palace built by the ‘Merry Monarch’, King Kalakaua, and the famous Waikiki beach.

  In 1889 His Majesty lent the Royal Beach House, which I mention in this novel, to Robert Louis Stevenson.

  The author was, on his arrival in Hawaii, greeted as a celebrity and struck up a warm friendship with the King and they frequently gave luaus and informal parties for each other.

  The details of King Kalakaua’s Coronation, which lasted for two weeks, are correct and it took place in 1883, nine years after he had been elected to the throne by the Legislative Assembly.

  Hawaii although over-built and over-populated is still magical and, when at Diamond Point I looked out at dawn and dusk, I found myself repeating Rupert Brooke’s sonnet,

  “And her stars burn in the ancient skies

  Over the murmurous soft Hawaiian sea.”

  Chapter One ~ I883

  Sir Robert Westbury came into the morning room where his two daughters were arguing.

  This was nothing unusual because, whatever Lydia said, her sister Heloise always contradicted it.

  After years of trying to placate Heloise, Lydia had found it was simplest to agree to what she said and thereby prevent what, she often thought, was an undignified and rather vulgar exchange of words.

  Heloise Westbury was so beautiful that from the moment she became aware of her own face she felt that the world was made for her to walk on.

  She was about fifteen when she realised that she had only to look at a man from under her long eyelashes for him to talk to her in a different tone from the one he had been using before and to have what she often described to Lydia as a ‘swimming look in his eyes’.

  Last year when she had appeared in London as a debutante, she had been acclaimed, fêted and extolled by everybody except the girls of her own age who were trying to compete with her.

  She had come back reluctantly to the country for Christmas only slightly appeased by the certainty that she would be the belle of every Hunt Ball and that a great number of her admirers in London contrived to stay either at Westbury Park if Heloise could arrange an invitation for them or at other houses in the neighbourhood.

  All this meant a great deal more work for Lydia who, since her father had become a widower for the second time, had run the house for him besides being expected to dance attendance on her half-sister.

  Lydia’s mother had died soon after she was born and Sir Robert had quickly married again, hoping for an heir to the Baronetcy.

  He would have been even more disappointed if Heloise had not been so lovely even when she was in the cradle, but it had been a compensation to know when he learnt that his wife unfortunately could give him no more children that at least he had an exceptional and outstandingly lovely daughter.

  Although it was very unfair, he vented his anger and disappointment on his elder daughter rather than on his second child.

  “Why could you not have been a son?” he would ask furiously. “It would have simplified everything!”

  “I am sorry, Papa,” was all Lydia could say meekly.

  She thought at times that he looked at her with positive dislike because she would not be able to follow, in his footsteps and become the fifth Baronet.

  Although she tried to tell herself sensibly that this was something she could not help, it often preyed on her mind.

  When two years ago her stepmother had died after a long lingering illness during which time she would ordinarily have made her own debut, she hoped that her father would marry for the third time.

  He had, however, last year when mourning was over, seemed to be obsessed with presenting Heloise to the Social world.

  Lydia thought that perhaps once Heloise was safely married she would have another stepmother and then there might be a chance of escape from what had become a monotonous treadmill.

  All day long it was, ‘tell Lydia to do that!’ – ‘why does not Lydia see to the arrangements as she should do?’ – ‘Send for Lydia!’

  If the food was not appetising enough, if the gardeners had neglected part of the garden, if the footmen failed in their duties, it was Lydia who had to cope with it.

  It was Lydia who had to soothe down ruffled feelings and especially to keep her father from losing his temper.

  It was not surprising that she was very thin and there was a permanently worried expression in her large eyes.

  She never had time to think about herself and, if she did, she merely shrugged her shoulders and said truthfully that nobody would look at her when Heloise was there.

  Heloise was every man’s ideal of what a young English girl should look like.

  “She is a perfect ‘English Rose’,” was how her admirers described her and it was indeed an accurate description.

  She had hair the colour of ripening corn, eyes as blue as a summer sky and her complexion was the perfect pink and white that every artist aspired to put on canvas.

  It was unfortunate that, when the fairies bestowed their gifts on her at her Christening, two qualities had been inexplicably missing.

  Nobody who lived with Heloise for long could have failed to realise that she was not very intelligent.

  She never read a book and her conversation was limited to one subject – herself.

  What was more, ‘unselfishness’ was a word that could not be found in her vocabulary and certainly not in her heart.

  “I am tired, Heloise,” Lydia had said to her once, having run up and down the stairs for what seemed like a hundred times before Heloise was finally ready to attend a ball.

  “Tired?” her half-sister had repeated. “Why should you be tired? Anyway it’s your duty to look after me and do as I want.”

  Lydia wanted to ask why, but she knew it would only annoy Heloise, who would then be very rude and fly into one of her tantrums, which upset everybody except herself.

  Now, as Sir Robert came into the morning room, the girls’ voices faded away.

  Lydia’s cheeks were a little flushed with the argument, Heloise was looking sulky and her cupid’s bow lips were turned down at the corners.

  Sir Robert walked across to where they were sitting in the window and said,

  “A note has just been brought to me by a groom. You have pulled it off, Heloise!”

  “I have, Papa?”

  Heloise gave a scream of excitement and jumped up from the table.

  “Tell me what he says!”

  “The Earl has asked for my permission to pay his addresses to you,” Sir Robert replied, “and hopes that he may call this afternoon to discuss a very important matter with me.”

  Heloise gave another scream.

  “Oh, Papa, I was so afraid, even after what he said at the ball last night, that he would not come up to scratch!”

  “Well, he has and I am delighted, my dearest,” Sir Robert said, “and very very proud of you!”

  He put his arm round his daughter and kissed her cheek.

  Lydia, who was watching, realised that Heloise stiffened in case he should crease her gown or untidy her hair.

  Then she asked quietly,

  “Are you saying, Papa, that the Earl of Royston has proposed to Heloise?”

  “He has asked my permission to do so,” Sir Robert replied.

  “It’s wonderful! I am so happy!” Heloise cried. “I shall be a Countess with a traditional position at Court, besides being hostess at Royston Park and all the other houses the Earl owns.”

  She spoke with a lilt in her voice that made it sound almost an exaltation.

  “I am so glad, Heloise, that you will be happy,” Lydia said.

  “Happy? Of course I shall be ha
ppy!” Heloise retorted. “This is what I have been working on for a long time. Of course I was quite certain that I would get him in the end.”

  She did not notice Lydia wince as if the way she spoke jarred on her.

  Sir Robert glanced down at the note in his hand.

  “I am going to answer this,” he said, “and tell Royston we shall look forward to seeing him at teatime. We must certainly have a bottle of champagne ready on ice to celebrate!”

  “Yes, of course, Papa,” Heloise agreed. “But mind that you leave him alone with me first. He has not asked me formally and that is what I want to hear.”

  “It is formal enough for me to announce your engagement in The Gazette,” Sir Robert replied in a tone of satisfaction.

  He walked out of the room as he spoke and, when the door had closed behind him, Heloise crowed,

  “There! I told you that I would marry the most prestigious man in England, and that is what I am going to do!”

  “Do you love him, Heloise?”

  There was just a little pause before Heloise replied,

  “Where marriage is concerned, it’s important to marry a man in the right position.”

  Lydia looked at her half-sister searchingly before she commented,

  “You did not think of that yourself. It’s something Lady Burton taught you.”

  “It is something I have always thought,” Heloise said defiantly.

  Lydia however, knew that she was lying.

  Heloise wanted to be important, but she would not have put it in those words.

  Lydia thought, as she had thought before, that it had been a mistake for her father to ask Lady Burton, who was a distant cousin, to present Heloise at Court and chaperone her during her Season in London.

  She knew, if she was honest, that she had disliked Lady Burton from the first moment she had met her.

  Worldly-wise, avaricious, greedy for anything she could gain personally by chaperoning Heloise and as hard as nails, she had, Lydia was convinced, entirely the wrong attitude to life.

  Lady Burton, like her father, had taken for granted that Lydia should run the house in London as an unpaid housekeeper where she was at everybody’s beck and call for anything that was required.

  It was assumed that so demanding a responsibility made it out of the question for her to take part in any of the social activities that occupied Heloise from dawn until dusk.

  She, of course, had luncheon and dined with the family unless the party consisted of an odd number of guests, in which case she was expected to eat elsewhere.

  Lady Burton seldom addressed her unless it was to demand something or give her an order and she could hear her indoctrinating Heloise with the idea that the only thing that mattered in life was a social position.

  She also heard her say that Heloise was so beautiful that she could pick and choose amongst the gentlemen who admired her.

  She should assess their qualifications entirely by how many quarterings there were on their escutcheon and how many generations could be counted on their family tree.

  Besides this, of course, they had to be titled and extremely rich.

  Nothing, in Lady Burton’s estimation, could be worse than poverty.

  If Heloise had been self-centred and ambitious before she went to London, by the time she returned to the country she was echoing Lady Burton and determined that her marriage should be sensational.

  And yet, even allowing for her loveliness and the fact that it seemed almost impossible when she was in the room for a man to notice that there was any other woman present, it seemed incredible to Lydia that she should, in her own words, have ‘caught’ the Earl of Royston.

  Lydia knew a great deal about him because, as Royston Park was not far from their own house, she had often seen him out hunting.

  The one activity in which she had a close affinity with her father was the fact that she rode well and during the Hunting Season they attended every meet.

  She was well aware that this favour would have been denied her if Heloise had shown any desire to hunt.

  But, while she would ride elegantly in Rotten Row, she was so frightened of having a fall and in any way damaging her beautiful face that she had refused categorically since she was seventeen to ride anything but the most docile of horses and to go no further than Hyde Park.

  “If I had a son, he would appreciate the way I have built up my racing stable and acquired some of the finest hunters in the County!” Sir Robert often said. “They are wasted on women! Absolutely wasted!”

  This was not true as far as Lydia was concerned, but then she did not count and she knew that her father genuinely did not realise what a good rider she was.

  She could control, as well as he could, any horse, however wild.

  When she had first seen the Earl of Royston, she had realised that he was exactly how she thought a man should look.

  It was not only that he was extremely handsome and undoubtedly a brilliant rider but also that he had a fascinating buccaneering face that complemented his reputation.

  He looked, Lydia told herself, rather like the explorers and English pirates must have done in the reign of Queen Elizabeth when they had gone out to discover new worlds, fight the Spaniards and bring home cargoes of treasure richer than anything that had ever been seen before.

  Watching the Earl in the hunting field, she had thought that he should in fact be galloping towards new and distant horizons, rather than being confined, as it seemed, by the small English fields, the social life of the County or even that of London.

  Only once had she dined in the same room with him and that was when he had come to dinner at Sir Robert’s house in London before a ball that was being given for Heloise.

  As the most important person present, he had sat on her right and, looking at them sitting side-by-side, Lydia thought it would be impossible anywhere in the world to find two people who were each so outstandingly beautiful in their own way.

  This she knew was a strange adjective to apply to a man.

  Yet it seemed fitting because the Earl had so positive a personality and his whole being was far more arresting than that of any other man she had ever seen.

  She had, however, learned more about him and what she heard was not altogether surprising.

  At twenty-nine he had turned the heads of a great number of beautiful women and captured their hearts.

  He was celebrated for being convincingly elusive and every ambitious mother had known even before they started the chase that they had no hope of catching him.

  Because he was a great landowner and possessed some of the finest racehorses in England, as well as being an outstanding sportsman who held a great number of personal trophies to show for it, other men admired and envied him.

  But it had never entered Lydia’s mind for a moment that he might marry Heloise.

  Lydia did not herself talk very much, as nobody seemed to wish to hear what she had to say, but she was a sympathetic listener.

  The Earl, because he lived near them, was a frequent topic of conversation in the County and in London his various love affairs were agreeable titbits of gossip.

  Lydia learnt more and more about him, until she felt that she could write a book about the Earl of Royston and still fill another two volumes.

  Everything about him was intriguing and perhaps even his nickname by which he was always known had added to the aura that encircled him.

  The story was that when he was born his father was out hunting and a groom was sent from Royston Park to inform his Lordship that he had an heir.

  Unfortunately, breathless from the speed at which he had ridden and also rather nervous of his Master, the groom blurted out the news that the Earl listened without a great deal of interest.

  Then, as he turned away, the man asked,

  “Is there any message for her Ladyship, my Lord?”

  For a moment the Earl looked at him in surprise.

  Then he said,

  “Good God! Are
you telling me that it is her Ladyship who has given birth? I thought it was one of my hunters!”

  This statement was overheard by several of his friends who roared with laughter.

  Then one of them remarked,

  “If he is your son, undoubtedly he will be a good hunter and what could be a better name for him?”

  The present Earl of Royston had therefore always been known as ‘Hunter’ and the more Lydia heard about him the more she thought that the nickname appropriate.

  He hunted not only foxes but also beautiful women, although she had the feeling that once the chase was over, he was often no longer interested.

  And yet now, although it seemed incredible, without very much of a run for his money he had hunted and caught Heloise.

  “You are very lucky!” Lydia said aloud.

  As she spoke, she wondered if in fact Heloise was as lucky as everybody would think she was.

  Heloise was, however, so excited that she forgot for a moment her affectations.

  “I am to be married, Lydia!”

  She danced around the room, her full skirt swinging out, making her look so graceful and so lovely that she might have stepped down from Mount Olympus to bemuse poor mortals.

  Then she sat down in a chair and said,

  “I must start planning my trousseau. I shall have the most glorious clothes that any bride has ever possessed and, when my friends see them, they will be green with envy!”

  “When do you think you will be married?” Lydia asked.

  “As soon as possible!” Heloise replied.

  Then she hesitated.

  “What is it?” Lydia enquired.

  “I have just remembered that the Earl will be in mourning for another three months.”

  “Of course!” Lydia exclaimed. “I had forgotten that too.”

  The Earl’s mother, who had never been very strong and therefore was seldom seen at any social function, had died nine months ago.

  She had long been bedridden and so her passing had gone almost unnoticed, except formally in the social columns of the newspapers.

  Thinking back now, Lydia remembered that her funeral had been private and had taken place in the small Church in the grounds of Royston Park.

  Her father had not attended, although he had instructed her to send a wreath. It had been made up by the gardeners and a carriage had carried it to Royston Park early on the morning of the funeral.