A Dream from the Night Read online

  It all seemed to dazzle her eyes, as did the mirrors, which reflected each other and the huge crystal chandeliers sparkling overhead.

  She had therefore walked the whole length of the salon and reached the Dowager Countess before she could really look at her. When she did, it was with difficulty that she prevented herself from starting in surprise.

  The lady on the sofa was much younger than she had expected and certainly did not resemble in any way her mental picture of a frail elderly woman, not unlike her mother.

  The Dowager Countess of Kelvedon’s brilliant red hair, fashionably dressed high on her head, was too vivid and too striking to be entirely natural.

  She had also, to Olinda’s astonishment, undoubtedly used cosmetics to darken the long lashes that fringed her green eyes and to deepen the colour of her lips.

  She was beautiful and she must have been outstandingly, almost fantastically beautiful when she was young and Olinda found it hard not to stare rudely instead of dropping her eyes as she curtseyed.

  “How do you do, Miss Selwyn,” the Dowager Countess said. “You are a great deal younger than I expected.”

  It sounded like an accusation and Olinda replied almost apologetically,

  “I am sure I am not too young to do the work that is required, ma’am.”

  “You actually did the cushion cover you sent us as an example of your work all yourself?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Olinda had not been certain as to whether she should address the Dowager Countess as a girl of her own class would do or whether she should use the more formal ‘my Lady’ as was expected of the servants.

  “I am surprised, Miss Selwyn,” the Dowager Countess commented.

  Her eyes seemed to flicker over Olinda as if she expected that she was an imposter. Then a voice from the other side of the fireplace asked,

  “If she can restore the curtains, Rosaline, does it really matter what she looks like?”

  Olinda started because she had not realised that there was anyone else in the room.

  It was so large and so filled with furniture that she had not perceived as she walked towards the Dowager Countess that there was a man on the other side of the hearth.

  Now she looked at him and wondered if he was the Mr. Hanson who Mrs. Kingston had spoken about.

  He was a well-built youngish man with a small moustache and bold eyes, which she felt were looking at her somewhat impertinently.

  “I suppose not, Felix,” the Dowager Countess replied. “At the same time it seems to me extraordinary that she could do such intricate embroidery when she can have had very little experience.”

  “Well, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, will it not?” Felix Hanson asked with a laugh. “Put her to the test, Rosaline. If she can’t compete with what you ask her to do, then she can be sent away.”

  Olinda felt as if she were a bale of cloth or a bundle of rubbish that they were disposing of, but she stood still, facing the Dowager Countess.

  “Well, I suppose I must give you a chance,” the Dowager said grudgingly.

  “I shall be very grateful, ma’am, if you will do so,” Olinda replied, “and I am quite certain that I shall please you.”

  “You will please me if you work hard and finish the jobs that require doing as quickly as possible!” the Dowager Countess said.

  Again there was that sharp note in her voice that Olinda had noticed when she had referred to her age.

  “I understand that I am to start first thing tomorrow,” Olinda said.

  “That is right. Mrs. Kingston will show you exactly what is required.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Olinda curtseyed again and walked the long way back across the salon towards the door.

  It was only as she nearly reached it that she realised Mr. Hanson had followed her and as she touched the handle his hand covered hers.

  She felt the warmth of his fingers and because it was unexpected, she started. Then she heard his whisper almost beneath his breath but just loud enough for her to hear,

  “You are very pretty, mind you don’t fail!”

  His fingers squeezed hers. Then between them they had opened the door and Olinda walked into the hall with the colour flaming in her cheeks.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “This is the Queen Elizabeth room,” Mrs. Kingston said and Olinda gasped.

  It was more fantastic than she had anticipated and she only wished that her mother could see it.

  It was an enormous room with a beautiful gold-embossed cornice and the walls were covered with panels painted with flowers and buds.

  The great bed with its heavy carved gilt canopy was hung with curtains embroidered in a manner which she knew must be unique.

  “It is very beautiful!” she exclaimed.

  “I thought you would think so,” Mrs. Kingston said proudly.

  Olinda had already learnt that Mrs. Kingston and all the senior servants felt that the treasures at Kelvedon House belonged to them almost as much as they belonged to the family.

  It was in their blood and Mrs. Kingston had told her that not only had she come to the great house to work when she was a child of twelve, but she had followed in the footsteps of her mother, her father and her two sets of grandparents who had all worked on the estate all their lives.

  Her hair was now going grey, but her face was hardly lined. Yet she had an authority that Olinda was sure seemed awe-inspiring to the younger girls she trained under her.

  “There is not very much to do to this bed itself,” said Mrs. Kingston. “But now I think of it, there is a stitch or two required on one of the curtains.”

  She paused.

  “Oh, yes, here it is! You will see that where the fringe joins the embroidery some of the threads have worked loose.”

  “I can do that here quite easily,” Olinda remarked.

  She was feeling almost bewildered with the beauties of the house, because Mrs. Kingston had started at the beginning when she showed her round the Great Banqueting Hall with its walls covered with murals painted by Verrio.

  They were so lovely that Olinda felt that she could have stayed there all day long looking at the intricate detail of the artist’s paintings and feeling almost as if the mythical figures he had depicted could walk down from the walls and talk to her.

  The State drawing room was, Olinda thought, not so attractive as some of the other rooms.

  Perhaps it was because one felt overshadowed by the huge figures on the tapestries, woven at the Royal Factory at Mortlake in 1635 after the celebrated cartoons by Raphael.

  She wished, however, that her mother could see them, knowing that she would have been thrilled with them, as she would have been by the Chinese furniture which one of the Earls of Kelvedon had brought back from China.

  The lacquer cabinets seemed to fit into place even in an English home.

  However, the library delighted her more than any other room.

  Here there was a magnificent ceiling by Laguerre with gilded plasterwork and she learnt that the room was actually used as a gallery until the beginning of the century.

  She thought not only that it had beauty and atmosphere, but the fragrance of ancient leather had an attraction all of its own.

  It was when they came to the State bedrooms that Olinda tried to forget in bewilderment the pictures, furniture, objets d’art, ceilings and murals downstairs, so as to concentrate on what would be her task here in this fabulously, unbelievably beautiful house.

  Mrs. Kingston took her first to see what she called ‘the Master suite’, which had been designed by the original builder of the house for the first Earl of Kelvedon.

  ‘He was certainly determined,’ Olinda thought, ‘to sleep as well as he lived.’

  The huge four-poster bed was so high that it nearly touched the painted ceiling and the headpiece was carved with the Kelvedon coat of arms, which shone against the curtains of blood-red velvet embroidered with gold thread.

&
nbsp; Carved and gilt wall mirrors displayed the Kelvedon Coat of Arms and the landscapes painted around the cornice depicted different parts of the estate.

  The only modern painting was a magnificent picture of the Dowager Countess over the carved mantelpiece.

  Looking at it, Olinda realised again how outstanding she must have been when she was young.

  Her red hair and green eyes against the transparent whiteness of her skin made her seem somehow even more alluring than the Venuses who rioted above her on the ceiling.

  “Her Ladyship was very lovely when this was painted,” Olinda said aloud.

  “She was proclaimed the most beautiful girl in England when his late Lordship married her,” Mrs. Kingston replied.

  “I can understand that,” Olinda answered. “And she is still beautiful now.”

  “We all have to get old,” Mrs. Kingston said with a sharp note in her voice, “although some people find it difficult to accept the fact.”

  She paused and then said,

  “I will show you her Ladyship’s room.”

  She moved towards a communicating door as she spoke and Olinda, taking a last glance back at the huge velvet bed, realised for the first time that the room she was leaving was actually in use.

  There were ivory brushes on the dressing table, a pair of slippers under an armchair and various small objects on top of the chest of drawers such as a wallet and a magazine.

  On one of the armchairs a pair of riding gloves must have been thrown down since the valet had tidied the room.

  As if she realised what Olinda had noticed, Mrs. Kingston said nothing but seemed to hurry her along the communicating passage that led to the next room.

  “The cupboards here were used by the Georgians as powder closets and now hold her Ladyship’s clothes,” Mrs. Kingston explained.

  She opened the door and Olinda stepped into another fabulous bedroom, this one decorated all in soft blues and pinks.

  The painted ceiling depicted cupids rather than Goddesses, the furniture and the posts of the bed were all of carved wood covered with silver.

  “How lovely!” she exclaimed.

  She thought, as she looked round, it must be extremely becoming to the Dowager Countess’s vivid red hair and green eyes.

  “The bed hangings were originally in rose pink,” the housekeeper explained, “but they were removed and replaced as you can see with a pale blue taffeta silk. So this room, Miss Selwyn, will not require your services.”

  “I am sad about that,” Olinda replied with a smile, “because it is so lovely I should have liked to work here.”

  “I think you will also admire the Duchesse de Mazarin’s room where there is a great deal for you to do?” Mrs. Kingston said.

  Olinda was just about to follow her when she saw that on one side of the mantelpiece there was a portrait.

  It was of a young man with dark hair and a handsome face. She had already seen so many portraits in the house and could not help wondering why this one arrested her attention.

  “Who is that?” she asked.

  “His Lordship, the present Earl, painted by Sargent,” Mrs. Kingston replied.

  “He is very good-looking,” Olinda observed.

  “He was a beautiful baby and the most attractive young man it was possible to imagine,” Mrs. Kingston said with a warmth in her voice that had not been there before.

  “Does he live here?” Olinda asked.

  There was a pause and she felt that she had asked something indiscreet before Mrs. Kingston said in a very different tone,

  “His Lordship has been abroad for the last two years.”

  “Without coming back?” Olinda asked in surprise. “How could he bear to leave this wonderful house for so long?”

  “His Lordship doubtless has his own reasons,” Mrs. Kingston said stiffly and Olinda realised that indeed she had been indiscreet.

  “I am sorry if I seem curious,” she said hastily. “But the house fascinates me and, of course, the history of its owners.”

  Mrs. Kingston seemed to soften.

  “You must ask Mr. Thompson, the curator, to find you a book telling you about the house and the history of the Kelvedons down to the present day.”

  “I read about the late Earl in The Illustrated London News,” Olinda replied. “It said how distinguished he was and how many important posts he occupied.”

  “He was a great gentleman, Miss Selwyn. We all admired his Lordship and were proud to work for him. It was a sad day when he left us.”

  There was no doubt about the sincerity in what Mrs. Kingston said and Olinda could not help wondering whether she was disappointed with the present Earl.

  At the same time there had been a warmth in her voice when speaking of him that was unmistakable.

  ‘There is something strange here,’ she thought to herself.

  Then, as they moved into the next State room she could only give yet another cry of astonishment.

  The walls of the Duchesse de Mazarin’s room were covered with tapestries depicting nymphs rioting in woodlands, while the bed with its embroidered curtains was even more magnificent than she had expected it to be.

  During the night when she had been thinking of Hortense, the Duchesse de Mazarin, Olinda had remembered her background and why she had come to England.

  Hortense, one of the three nieces of Cardinal Mazarin, had been unusually gifted and besides being exquisitely beautiful, was one of the richest heiresses in France.

  The Cardinal had chosen for her husband Armand de la Porte de la Meillaraye, who agreed that, when he married Hortense, he would take the name of Mazarin and the Dukedom that went with it.

  She had brought her bridegroom her exquisite Italian beauty, an inexhaustible fountain of passionate love, together with the Cardinal’s wedding gift of thirty million francs.

  Unfortunately soon after they were married her bridegroom began to show signs of incipient madness and, while he was infatuated with his wife’s beauty, he fought against it because he believed that all physical delights were the road to Hell.

  He began to find relief in religious ecstasy, which took the form of interminable and exhausting acts of repentance for his fleshly sins.

  He would wander around the Palace intoning prayers, striking at priceless antique statues with a hammer and daubing black paint on the pictures that he considered were indecent.

  Hortense bore her husband a son and three daughters in the space of seven years, but their father was so intent on stamping out the lusts that beset him that he ordered apothecaries to pull the front teeth of his daughters so that they should be ugly.

  The Duchesse managed to prevent this happening and bore her appalling life with patience until finally she could stand it no more and ran away.

  The Duc then tried to have her incarcerated in a prison-convent for prostitutes and fallen women.

  He brought hundreds of indecent and foul charges against her, until finally after a series of bizarre and dangerous adventures she reached Rome. But she was to find no rest there.

  Again and again she had to flee for her life to different parts of Europe, finally reaching the Netherlands and Amsterdam and from there she set out for England.

  When she arrived in London, King Charles II welcomed her in person. At thirty years of age, Hortense was one of the loveliest women Charles, a connoisseur of beautiful women, had ever seen. He was fascinated not only by her beauty but by her mind.

  Charles at forty-five, tiring of life mentally, physically and emotionally, found in Hortense someone who infused him with a new vitality, new youth and new ideas.

  For the first time he found that all the phobias, frustrations and yearnings that had niggled at his brain and churned his conscience with the eternal question of right or wrong, could be discussed with the woman he also loved.

  To the King she represented a new horizon in his affairs with women.

  It was not only her beauty that held him captive and aroused him to an ecstas
y he thought he had never known before but her mind seduced his.

  She made him think that for a brief while he had found the glorious, compelling, understanding, ecstatic love that he had sought all his life.

  The story of Hortense de Mazarin, when Olinda had first read it, had thrilled her because it had seemed to her so different from the other love stories that she had read.

  Here was not the capture of a beautiful woman by a passionate and masterful man, but a meeting of minds, of hearts and perhaps souls.

  Looking at the Duchesse’s bed, it seemed to her that she could almost see framed by the exquisite embroidered curtains a lovely oval face with a straight little nose, a splendid and intelligent forehead and expressive curved lips.

  All these combined with a brilliant intellect had aroused within the King a love he had thought would always elude him.

  Olinda had stood silent for so long that Mrs. Kingston asked almost in surprise,

  “You admire the bed, Miss Selwyn?”

  “I have never seen anything like it,” Olinda replied truthfully.

  The embroidery of silver and gold thread, with the silks of every colour of the rainbow interspersed with huge pearls, was on black velvet. The headboard was an embroidered shell of silver executed in silk, depicting Venus rising from the foam.

  Where Botticelli’s Venus had been adorned only by her hair, this one wore a necklace of tiny diamonds round her neck and diamonds and pearls glittered in her hair.

  There was hardly an inch on the black velvet that was not embroidered with birds and flowers and cupids and garlands, phoenixes and stars.

  It was a riot of colour, a kind of emotional ecstasy portrayed in needlework.

  “It is quite wonderful,” Olinda sighed at length.

  “There are quite a number of repairs required on this bed,” Mrs. Kingston said briskly. “The coverlet is the worst and when you are ready to repair it, I can have it brought to your room.”

  “Thank you,” Olinda said.

  “But someone at some time has torn the base of the curtain near the bed table,” Mrs. Kingston went on, “and that must be done here.”

  She showed the pieces that were damaged as she spoke.