A Golden Lie Read online

  The butler, whose name was Hitchin, laughed.

  “Well, you’re saying that at the right moment. His Lordship’s gone off to the town, as he always does once a month. So come in now, miss, and I’ll show you around.”

  “You are very kind,” Devona said. “I have to admit that I am very curious.”

  She walked into the house and realised that at one time it must have been magnificent, but now she could see that it had fallen into disrepair.

  Everywhere she looked she could see that endless ceilings, walls and floors needed attention.

  There were some very fine paintings on the walls.

  She had learnt to appreciate the famous artists of the world, but the pictures here needed cleaning. The gold had also faded on practically every frame and in some of the rooms the panes in the windows were cracked.

  The rooms themselves were enormous and, when it had first been built, the house must have been, she thought, worthy of a King.

  The furniture was all antique and some of it was generations old, but the sofas needed recovering and so did the chairs while most of the carpets were threadbare.

  They had been through several rooms before she was brave enough to say to Hitchin,

  “Why has the pretty wallpaper in this room, which is peeling off, not been replaced?”

  “You can ask that in every room,” he replied. “His Lordship says he hasn’t the money and as far as I can make out, nothin’ much had been done before this War started.”

  He took her down a wide passage where there were some very fine inlaid chests and carved tables. At the end of it, he opened a door and Devona gave a cry of delight.

  There was a library.

  It was a very large library with a balcony running round half of it and anyone could climb up it by a twisting stairway.

  “How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Do you think that his Lordship would let me read some of the books?”

  “He don’t read them himself,” the butler answered, “and if you enjoys books, there’s plenty of them for you.”

  “That is what I was thinking,” Devona said. “Oh, please, please ask him if I can come here sometimes. It would make me so happy and my parents too.”

  Hitchin smiled.

  “I’ll do what I can, miss, but then I don’t make no promises.”

  Devona walked round the library with joy.

  She could see that none of the books were up to date and some of them were very old indeed, but she knew that she would enjoy reading a great number of them and was already praying that it would be possible.

  Hitchin then took her up the stairs to see the State bedrooms. They all had huge four-poster carved beds with canopies sometimes in gold and sometimes in embroidered silk.

  They were very impressive, but the ceilings in the rooms were cracked and again the walls needed painting and the window panes replacing.

  What delighted her almost as much as the library was the Long Picture Gallery that ran the whole length of one wing of the house.

  There were paintings that she knew must have been collected for generations by the Earls of Narbrooke and she wanted to spend hours looking at them and admiring the styles they were painted in.

  “These must be very valuable,” she commented.

  “I’m sure they be that alright,” Hitchin replied.

  Devona hesitated a moment and then she asked,

  “Why does his Lordship not sell one of them so that he can do up the house?”

  Hitchin laughed.

  “That be not possible. They all have to go on to the next Earl, just in the same way as they’ve come down to this one.”

  “Oh, of course, I understand that they are entailed,” Devona said. “It’s silly of me not to realise it.”

  She thought that it must be frustrating to see such valuable pictures gradually decaying and not being able to spend any money on them.

  “Does his Lordship have any children?” she asked, thinking it odd that there was no sign of them and nor had anyone spoken of them.

  Hitchin shook his head.

  “No! His Lordship has never been married and he’s quarrelled with his brothers and the rest of his family.”

  “Do you mean he never sees them?” Devona asked.

  Hitchin nodded.

  “I’ve been here,” he said, “for nigh on ten years and there’s never been a relation of any sort who’s come here or as far as I knows has ever written to his Lordship.”

  “It does seem strange,” Devona said. “But surely the members of the family of which he must be the Head, want to come here to the family home?”

  “If they want to, his Lordship’ll not have them in.”

  It seemed to Devona very weird.

  Hitchin took her to the kitchen and she shook hands with his wife who was the cook.

  There was no one else there and because it seemed so peculiar, Devona enquired politely,

  “Surely you have help to look after this big house?”

  Mrs. Hitchin laughed.

  “You should say that to his Lordship and see what his answer be!”

  “It’s so big a place you cannot manage everything,” Devona remarked.

  “That’s just what I says to Mr. Hitchin,” the woman replied. “What we can’t do must be done sometime and I’m not cleanin’ them miles of corridors or them rooms as is never used, not for nobody!”

  Devona realised now why the rooms had so looked dilapidated and, although she had not liked to say so, very dusty.

  It would, of course, be impossible for two people, who were getting old, to clean all of them.

  But she wondered why the Earl could bear to see everything around him deteriorating and not do something about it.

  When she went back to their cottage, she told her parents where she had been and what a mess the house was in.

  “It is what I felt myself,” the Colonel said, “the day I arrived. And like you, Devona, I found it extraordinary that he only has those two people to run that vast house.”

  “Is he really so hard-up?” Mrs. Campbell asked.

  He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

  “I have already had difficulties in securing enough food for the horses,” he said. “They are nothing like what I expected or hoped to have in the stables.”

  “Do you mean to say, Euan, that when you came here you did not see the stables?”

  “His Lordship showed me one,” he replied, “and told me that there were some horses out to grass. It is only now I am actually here that I realise how few there are and how difficult it is to persuade him to buy any more.”

  Mrs. Campbell did not say anything, as she knew that her husband had been very grateful at finding a job that would interest him that he had not made any enquiries, but had accepted gratefully what he was offered.

  Devona found the stables very disappointing.

  There were just two good horses which she learnt as time went on, the Earl drove himself when he went to the town.

  His once a month visit, she learnt eventually, was to collect the wages for his small staff and to pay for the food that had been bought in the local shop.

  This was a very small amount, because, as he had pointed out to the Colonel, there were rabbits to be snared on the estate. There were also wild ducks on the lake that could be shot and vegetables in the kitchen garden.

  The unfortunate problem about the kitchen garden was that the gardener, who looked after it until two months ago, had been taken to hospital and there was apparently no chance of him returning.

  So the Colonel found himself planting potatoes and carrots, but still the huge kitchen garden, surrounded by a high brick wall, grew more weeds than anything else.

  It was Mrs. Campbell who was really determined that something should be done about her daughter.

  She made enquiries and found to her delight that there was a retired Schoolmaster living in the village.

  He was an extremely intelligent man who had been
a Master at Eton and had a degree from Oxford University.

  Because Mrs. Campbell was so persuasive and also very attractive, he promised to teach Devona and accepted a ridiculously small amount of money for doing so.

  “I do apologise for not offering you more,” Mrs. Campbell told him, “but my husband is very much hoping that his Lordship will be more generous to him than he is at present, once he realises how extremely capable and clever he is with horses.”

  Mr. Alton, the Schoolmaster, laughed.

  “I am afraid that is something which is unlikely to happen,” he pointed out.

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Campbell enquired.

  “I would have thought that you would have heard by now,” Mr. Alton replied, “that the Earl is what is known as a miser. At least that is what he is called locally.”

  “I have not yet been in the house,” Mrs. Campbell said. “My daughter has and tells me that it is in a very bad state of repair.”

  “And his Lordship will do nothing about it.”

  “Do you think he can afford to do anything?”

  Mr. Alton shrugged his shoulders.

  “Apparently, from all reports, even before the War he was cheese-paring and employing as few as possible.”

  He paused a moment before he went on,

  “Things are in a terrible state. Farmers have left their farms, the men who worked in the fields have either gone to the War or found the work too hard for too little and everything keeps getting worse instead of better.”

  Mrs. Campbell was very worried when she returned to the cottage.

  She told her husband what Mr. Alton had said and was aware that he did not seem surprised.

  “You knew all this, but you did not tell me,” she said accusingly.

  “I did not know until I came here,” he replied. “I knew that things were tough because of the War and the same applies to many estates all over England.”

  He gave a deep sigh before continuing,

  “But it certainly seems worse than I ever expected and with only old Bill to help me in the stables I can assure you that I earn every penny of my keep.”

  “Which is so very little, Euan. If it was not for the rabbits and ducks you bring me, we would all starve.”

  Her husband put his arm round her and kissed her.

  “It’s not as bad as that,” he said. “At least we have a roof over our heads. And I am so delighted that you have found someone to teach Devona.”

  Devona hugely enjoyed her lessons with Mr. Alton.

  She either had to walk every morning to his house, which was quite a long way, or, when it was possible, her father provided her with a horse.

  The Colonel pointed out strongly to the Earl that he must have more horses in the stables or he might find it impossible for he himself to have anything to drive.

  Finally, after a great deal of talk, he was able to buy two untrained horses at a local Horse Fair and thought that they were well worth the price the Earl had to pay for them.

  The Earl grumbled a great deal, but finally he had to admit, when the Colonel had broken them in, that they had been a good buy.

  What was so excellent from the Colonel’s point of view was that he was able to ride them and so was Devona.

  “My daughter can train them almost as well as I am able to,” he informed the Earl and this more or less made it impossible for him to protest.

  The woods, like the house, were in a bad state with no one to move fallen boughs or clear away a blocked path.

  As Devona loved riding in the woods and because there were no gamekeepers, they seemed to be filled with animals, birds and squirrels, who all chattered away at her.

  The woods to her had always been enchanted and at her first home she had only had two small woods to ride in.

  Now the wild unkempt woods on the Earl’s estate seemed to stretch for miles and miles.

  It was strange how isolated they were at The Hall.

  The village of Little Narbrooke consisted of a few thatched cottages much in need of repair and Devona learnt that so many people had left as there was no employment for them and the only shop had been closed down.

  So this meant a drive of over a mile to the nearest shop and it was not only inconvenient but the Earl resented the horses being driven unless it was absolutely necessary.

  “I feel sometimes, darling, that we are on a desert island,” Mrs. Campbell said to her husband one evening.

  “I am quite content for it to be that,” the Colonel replied, “as long as you are with me.”

  “I agree,” his wife smiled. “But it is very dull for Devona. She should have other children to play with.”

  She gave a sigh.

  “But no one seems to call on the Earl or have we no neighbours?”

  “I believe there are a very few and those there are have not been made welcome here by his Lordship, so they have given up coming.”

  “What a funny man he is, he must find it extremely dull being alone with himself in that enormous house and having no one to talk to at meal times.”

  “Perhaps what Alton said,” the Colonel replied, “is true. As a miser he only thinks of his golden coins.”

  “I only hope he has some,” Mrs. Campbell said. “He certainly does not spend them on us.”

  She felt rather bitter because she had gone herself to ask the Earl if he could make some small alterations to the kitchen in the cottage to make life easier for her.

  Because she looked so charming and pretty when she set off, Devona thought that it would be impossible for anyone to refuse her mother.

  But Mrs. Campbell came back to say that her effort had been a failure.

  “His Lordship told me,” she said to her husband, “that he could not afford it and I should be very grateful for what I have already. ‘Most men coming back from France had little or nothing waiting for them,’ he pointed out. ‘Your husband is very fortunate’.”

  Just for a moment Devona thought that her father might be angry, but he only laughed.

  “If you cannot coax a man, my darling,” he said, “into giving you what you want, then no one could. I will alter the kitchen myself. I am a really good carpenter when I apply myself to it.”

  “You have more than enough to do already. I just don’t believe his Lordship is as poor as he pretends.”

  “It is certainly like drawing a tooth to get a penny out of him and I have a suspicion that he has cut the wages and now gives the Hitchins less than they used to have.”

  “If he is in such a bad state, his relations should do something about it. After all he is the Head of the Family and they cannot all be in such a state of poverty.”

  “It seems funny that he never sees them,” Devona piped up.

  “He did tell me the other day when I mentioned something about it,” her father replied, “that he disliked all his family and was determined never to see them again.”

  “But it must be his fault,” Mrs. Campbell said. “Do you know anything about the Brooke family?”

  “There was one I do remember meeting in London, who was a little older than me. He was the Viscount Narr, but I have a feeling that he died two or three years ago.”

  “There must be others,” Mrs. Campbell queried.

  “Well, as we are not likely to meet them here, it’s no use bothering about them.”

  The Colonel rose from the table.

  “Now I have to go to tell his Lordship that we need more food for the horses and I am sure that he is going to give me a lecture!”

  The way he spoke made his wife laugh and, when the Colonel had left, she said to Devona,

  “I try to be sorry for the Earl, but I cannot help feeling that he is exaggerating his position or maybe as Mr. Alton believes, he really is a miser.”

  “What do misers do with their money?” Devona asked her mother.

  “They keep it all to themselves and it hurts them to spend it and let me tell you, dearest, it is something your father will nev
er be in a million years!”

  “Nor you, Mama.”

  “Unfortunately I don’t have any money to collect, so I cannot keep it to myself. Perhaps we are being very stupid, Devona. We should make things we could sell.”

  “The trouble is, Mama, we would have to buy the materials first to make the products and you know that we don’t have the money for that.”

  Mrs. Campbell sighed.

  It was true that they were finding it very hard to pinch and scrape as the Earl kept on telling them that they must.

  *

  But somehow the years passed.

  The War came to an end.

  “Now everything will get better,” the Colonel said.

  Sadly this did not happen.

  Although there were men returning to the country from the Army, many estates like the Earl’s needed a great deal done to them and there was apparently not the money available.

  As they were bored with sitting about with nothing to do, two of the men in the village would come up to the stables to talk to the Colonel and give him a hand.

  In return he somehow, almost by a miracle, could obtain a little material for them to mend their houses.

  But he complained to his wife,

  “It’s easier to fly up into the sky than to get any money out of my employer.”

  “He is mean. I know he is mean,” Mrs. Campbell said, “and you must speak to him again about the Horse Fair. You really need some new horseflesh to train. It’s no use saying that the horses you do have are not getting old.”

  The Colonel could not deny that this was the truth.

  He tackled the Earl once again and, because he was frightened that he would spend too much money, the Earl actually went with the Colonel to the Horse Fair.

  There was one horse that the Colonel particularly wanted, but there was also one that was cheaper and which looked nearly as good.

  Because the Earl had insisted on buying the cheaper one, the Colonel violently hated him from that moment on.

  *

  Devona could hardly believe that the horror of it all was true when her father’s body was found in a field.

  The horse he had been riding had not only thrown him but had fallen itself and rolled on him.

  A man from the village had seen it all happen and came running to tell them what had occurred and somehow with the help of everyone including Hitchin they managed to carry the Colonel back to the cottage.