A Nightingale Sang Read online

  “They have indeed,” Aleta agreed, “and the house looks quite different.”

  She glanced around the drawing room as she spoke, thinking that with its new curtains and carpet it had a new beauty and she wished that her father could have seen it.

  The carpet was in fact only hired because it was a valuable Persian that they could not have afforded and Captain Cosgrove had, in his usual miraculous manner, supplied their need.

  Aleta had arranged masses of flowers in the house which brightened even the dullest rooms which they had not had time to redecorate.

  The same applied upstairs. A large number of the bedrooms looked very presentable, but there was still a lot more to be done, which was not surprising considering that Kings Wayte had over one hundred rooms.

  Nevertheless, as Harry had said, Johnson, the local carpenter and decorator, had collected workmen from all over the County and they had been wise to put their trust in him. He had known Kings Wayte all his life, loved it and had done any repairs they could afford ever since their father had inherited it from his father.

  Not only would he have been bitterly hurt if they had gone elsewhere, as Captain Cosgrove had suggested, but from no one else would they have received the same attention and interest.

  That also applied to their other arrangements.

  Aleta had been determined that the old servants who had been loyal to them all through the war should not be upset by the importation of London types who would doubtless have looked down their noses at them and made trouble.

  She had therefore insisted, even though Harry was dubious that it would be successful, on not only persuading many of their old pensioners to come back and help but on enlisting young girls from the village and other parts of the estate.

  “The older ones will teach them,” she said, “and I shall be there to see what must be done.”

  “I have been thinking about that,” Harry replied, “and I am convinced that you ought to keep out of sight as much as possible.”

  Aleta laughed.

  “That has been my idea too, but perhaps not for the same reasons.”

  “I consider it important because you look so young and are far too pretty. I cannot have our American guests making eyes at you.”

  Aleta thought the same and she had no desire to put herself into an embarrassing situation. What she had done therefore, was to persuade their former housekeeper, who had been at Kings Wayte for over forty years, to come back out of retirement.

  Harry had, at first, been horrified at the idea.

  “Old Mrs. Abbott?” he exclaimed. “I thought she was dead!”

  “No, she isn’t,” Aleta replied. “She is living with her sister in St. Albans. I will go and see her and tell her I want her to help.”

  “But she must be a hundred! “ Harry exclaimed, “at least that’s what I always thought when I was a child.”

  “She is getting on for eighty,” Aleta admitted, “but, as long as she can move on her two feet, I am determined that she shall be here. The Americans can then give their orders to her and she can pass them on to me.”

  Harry finally gave in simply because he did not wish to be bothered, having enough to occupy his mind in getting the stables repaired and engaging grooms and chauffeurs.

  He had been astounded, as Aleta was, at the amount of staff that Charles Cosgrove said the Americans would require.

  “Four chauffeurs!” Harry cried. “Besides the one who will bring them down? What can they want with so many?”

  “The very rich expect to spend money,” Charles Cosgrove had answered. “In America Wardolf has a private train, a fleet of cars, motor boats, yachts and even an aeroplane ready to carry him wherever he wishes to go at a moment’s notice.”

  “No one should be as rich as that!” Harry muttered, but Charles Cosgrove had laughed.

  “You would not refuse to be in the same position yourself, but you have something that Mr. Cornelius Wardolf will never have.”

  “What is that?” Aleta asked curiously.

  “A home that is not only a perfect architectural monument but belongs to you and yours, plus the fact that your Family Tree will turn him green with envy.”

  They all laughed, but Aleta, when she thought about it later, knew that Captain Cosgrove was right.

  No money could buy the history that lay behind her and Harry. No money could build a house like Kings Wayte with its atmosphere, its ghosts and its mellow beauty, which had come with centuries of time.

  ‘I love it!’ Aleta told herself, gazing at the sunshine on the lake.

  She knew as far as she was concerned that no other place could be so perfect, nowhere else would she feel as if she belonged.

  ‘Whatever sacrifices Harry and I have to make, they are worthwhile,’ she thought.

  She knew that she ought to be grateful, humbly grateful, for the fact that thanks to Mr. Cornelius Wardolf they would not have to worry so much about their future, at least for a year.

  After her father had died she had felt, when they learnt what the situation was, that she and Harry were fighting a hopeless battle in which inevitably they would finally be defeated.

  And yet now, like a blessing out of the blue, there had come a reprieve and she felt as if every nail that the workmen put into the ancient building, every tile they put on the roof, every pane of glass that was set into the casement windows brought her another little glimmer of hope.

  Perhaps somehow, in some unforeseeable way, they would be able to go on living at Kings Wayte and not have to watch it crumbling to the ground as she had thought they must do a month ago.

  “Thank You, thank You, God,” she prayed every morning as she rose very early to start work.

  She said the same words as she curled up in bed to fall asleep almost before she had finished her prayers.

  “What time are they arriving?” she asked Harry now and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, which was going for the first time since the beginning of the war.

  “In about an hour’s time. Is there anything else you want taken up to the nurseries? If so, I will do it for you.”

  “I think I have remembered everything,” Aleta replied.

  When they realised that they would have to move out of their own rooms, they had held a conference to decide where they should go.

  It was Aleta who felt she could not bear to move into the servants’ quarters and had the bright idea of opening up the nurseries on the third floor.

  “It’ll be rather fun to sleep where we did as children – at least the rooms are familiar and we will not feel like aliens in our own home.”

  Harry had agreed, but had not been particularly interested.

  But Aleta knew that there would doubtless be long hours when she would be alone and it was somehow comforting to think that she could sit in front of the nursery fire with its brass-edged guard in the chair that Nanny had always occupied with the screen covered in transfers and Christmas cards to keep out the draughts behind her.

  She had taken up all the possessions she could not bear anyone else to touch – things that had belonged to her mother and the books that had been her father’s favourites.

  One thing she regretted leaving more than anything else was the huge library.

  Even during the war she had insisted that the servants kept that room open and dusted it occasionally so that she could look over the books on the shelves.

  When she had picked one, she would curl up on the window-seat to read it.

  ‘I can still help myself to what I want,’ she thought, ‘because no one will notice. At the same time it will not be the same as sitting in the place I have always sat, knowing that, if the book does not please, there are thousands more to choose from.’

  These were minor regrets.

  What was so exciting was to see how different the old house looked with new curtains in the main rooms and hired carpets on the floors or rugs to cover the more threadbare patches.

  Charles Cosgrove
had the brilliant idea of going to the salerooms to buy curtains that, if a little worn, were not in the dilapidated state of those at Kings Wayte.

  “So many people have given up their big houses in the war or cannot afford to live in them now,” he said, “that you can obtain curtains and furniture at knock down prices.”

  “Who can afford to buy them?” Aleta asked.

  Captain Cosgrove smiled a little cynically.

  “Need you ask?” he said. “The Americans are bargain hunting in Europe. I am told that the Duke of Westminster, who is richer than any of the other Dukes, is selling his Blue Boy.”

  “Oh, no! How can he?” Aleta asked angrily. “That picture belongs to England. They have no right to let it go across the Atlantic.”

  Captain Cosgrove shrugged his shoulders.

  “I suppose he needs the money like everyone else and if you had not insisted on having local footmen, I could have produced any number of ex-Officers, who don’t deem it beneath them to wait on the nouveaux riches.”

  “Is it still so difficult to get jobs?” Aleta asked in her soft voice.

  “Almost impossible!” Captain Cosgrove replied. “And those who have sunk their annuity into chicken farms and suchlike are all going bankrupt. If I wanted to employ a thousand men, I could find them by raising one finger.”

  His words made Aleta wonder whether the man she had talked to over a year ago in the Temple in Berkeley Square had found the employment he was seeking.

  She had found it impossible to forget that strange enchanted night when she had been kissed for the first and only time in her life and when she had heard the nightingales singing in the trees overhead.

  Looking back it seemed to her like a beautiful dream from which she had not awoken too soon, but which had faded slowly into wakefulness, never to be forgotten.

  She went over and over again every word of the conversation she had had with the man who had sat beside her, but whom she had never seen.

  She wondered what he looked like and thought that, because his voice was deep and compelling and he was tall with square shoulders, that he would be dark and handsome.

  She was glad that she had not seen him, because then he would have seen her and, although he had said that because her voice was attractive, she must be attractive too and he might have been disappointed.

  Sometimes she looked at herself in the mirror and wondered how much she had changed since that night when lost, shy and very unsure of herself she had slipped away from her first ball and found in a little Temple in the garden a magic that was unforgettable.

  How could she have known, how could she have guessed such an adventure was waiting for her?

  But because of what a stranger had said to her, everything had seemed changed and she had gone back to the ball with a smile on her lips and had danced quite a number of times before her Godmother was ready to go home.

  After that the Society round had not been so difficult.

  She felt sometimes as if she had been in a little boat, which the man in the Temple had pushed out into the stream and she had found, because he had done so, that she could sail herself quite competently.

  She had not had a great deal of time to find out what London held for her, for a month after that dance in Berkeley Square she had received a telegram from home to say that her father was ill.

  She had hurried to Kings Wayte and one look at her father told her that he was very ill indeed.

  She had sent for Harry, who was in the process of leaving his Regiment and he too had rushed to his father’s bedside.

  Sir Hugo had caught the virulent influenza that had swept over Europe and had actually taken toll of more lives than had been lost in the war.

  In Sir Hugo’s case influenza had turned to pneumonia and it was from that disease that he had finally died.

  It was then that Harry and Aleta had learnt about their true financial circumstances. From then on there was no question of balls or parties, but of a desperate effort to live and to keep those dependent upon them from starving.

  There were pensioners to be paid, the old servants who looked on Kings Wayte as their home to be fed and, as Harry said despairingly,

  “Damn all to do it with!”

  Of course items had to be sold and each picture taken off the wall, each piece of silver taken from the pantry safe was, Aleta thought, like cutting off a part of their own bodies.

  She knew the history of everything that they had to dispose of and all of them seemed to have special links with her personally and she knew that Harry felt the same.

  When the pictures were collected by the dealer who bought them, Harry went out riding early in the morning and did not come back until it was dark.

  It was Aleta who had to watch them driven off in a van clattering over the stone bridge that needed repointing and up the drive where potholes made the vehicle rock from side to side, as the wheels ground in and out of them.

  ‘What else must go? What else?’ she had asked herself.

  She thought now that for a year it would not be a question that would be echoing in her mind.

  “You look all in,” Harry said solicitously. “I am going to fetch you a drink. What would you like?”

  “If you give me anything alcoholic I shall feel dizzy,” Aleta replied. “You know, neither of us has had time to eat anything today.”

  “Nor we have!” Harry said in surprise. “I did not even think about it. I was so busy.”

  He rose to his feet and then gave a sudden shout.

  “I have an idea!”

  “What is it?”

  “You and I are going to accept the hospitality of our tenant by opening a bottle of his very excellent champagne!”

  “Oh, Harry, you cannot do that.”

  “I have every intention of doing it,” Harry replied, “and, if you feel it’s dishonest, let me tell you that as I helped carry the crates downstairs I am at least entitled to the wages of an ordinary labourer and that would be a great deal higher than one bottle of champagne!”

  He left the room before Aleta could reply and, as she leant back against a newly covered satin cushion, she thought that she had never been so tired in her whole life.

  In the past after a hard day’s riding beside her father, she had been weary, but now every muscle in her body ached and her brain felt as if it no longer belonged to her.

  She realised that it was because she had been driving herself, as Harry had, practically twenty-four hours a day, but it was worth every moment of it to see Kings Wayte being restored to the beauty that they had known in her grandfather’s time.

  It had unfortunately not been his money that had enabled him to live in great style in the family house, but his wife’s, and he only had the spending of her income.

  When she died, her capital was retained by her own family.

  ‘Since then it’s always been save, save, save,’ Aleta thought, ‘and trying to make ends meet.’

  Then she told herself a little wryly that her father had not tried very hard. He had just gone on spending on what had seemed to him to be necessities, leaving them to clear up the mess after he was dead.

  ‘At least he enjoyed himself,’ Aleta thought, ‘as Harry will enjoy himself now for a whole year.’

  She knew that what had pleased her brother more than anything else were the horses he had been told to buy.

  “Does Mr. Wardolf ride?” he had enquired of Charles Cosgrove.

  “I have no idea,” was the reply, “but I gather that he expects every English facility to be open to him and that, as you well know, includes horses.”

  Harry needed no persuading to fill the stables and Aleta knew that whatever else happened he would take the opportunity of exercising the horses that delighted him by their breeding and by their performance over the jumps he had set up in the Park.

  “I have spent a fortune today,” he said when he returned from the sales at Tattersalls, “and Cosgrove paid up for everything I purchased with
out turning a hair!”

  “I only hope Mr. Wardolf will do the same,” Aleta said a little touch of fear in her voice. “Just suppose, Harry, he says that he does not like what we have bought for him and refuses to pay?”

  “That’s Cosgrove’s fault, not ours,” Harry replied. “Stop worrying. If you ask me, if there are any complaints it will be because we have been too sparing not too extravagant.”

  It was Captain Cosgrove who pointed out one shortcoming at Kings Wayte.

  “There is one thing the Americans are certain to miss,” he said, when he was complimenting them on everything that they had done.

  “What’s that?” Harry asked.

  “A swimming bath.”

  For a moment both Harry and Aleta looked blank and then Harry said,

  “Do they really find one necessary?”

  “Americans love bathing,” Captain Cosgrove replied, “but I am afraid that they will not think much of the only two bathrooms you have here. I don’t mind betting you he will order some more as soon as he arrives.”

  “I hope not,” Harry said. “We had enough trouble getting the pipes to work as it is.”

  “Americans are a very clean people,” Captain Cosgrove emphasised with a grin.

  “But who uses the swimming bath?”

  “Everyone!” he replied, “including those who go to the rowdy Hollywood parties and usually end up in them fully dressed.”

  “It sounds a very unpleasant way to amuse oneself,” Aleta said coldly.

  “I hope they are not going to have those sorts of parties here,” Harry said. “If they damage anything, they will have to pay for it.”

  “That’s agreed already,” Captain Cosgrove pointed out. “I put a clause in the lease to make sure of that. In fact, with any luck, when they leave you will get quite a lot of carpets and coverings replaced whether they damage them or not.”

  Harry saw Aleta look up as if she was going to protest and said quickly,

  “That’s all right. I know we can trust you, Charles, to look after our interests.”

  “I hope I’ve done that,” he replied, “and my own as well.”

  When he had gone, Aleta said to her brother,

  “I know he has been very kind, but I don’t really like Captain Cosgrove. There’s something about him that makes me feel that he thinks of everything in terms of pounds, shillings and pence.”