chapter two

Idona rode away from the house in the spring sunshine thinking as she did so that the trees coming into bud and the fields beginning to turn green seemed more beautiful than she had ever known them to be.

She knew if she was truthful it was because every day was precious, just in case it was her last.

She tortured herself at night wondering if the Marquis when he did arrive would turn her out of her home or perhaps send her off to some remote village where she would know nobody and be of no consequence.

Even though her parents were poor everybody had looked up to them and respected them and she knew that if she had ridden along the road where the cottages were people would wave or run out to have a word with her.

Nearly two weeks had passed since Mr. Lawson had told her that The Manor no longer belonged to the Overtons but to the Marquis of Wroxham and that she was included in the ‘goods and chattels’ that her father had gambled away so recklessly.

Sometimes she thought that it must be just a nightmare that she would awaken from to find that everything was as it had always been.

She would hear her father laugh at something she had said or else his voice calling as he came into the house to tell her that he was home.

Nearly every week the money arrived which made her aware that she had become only a paid servant of the Marquis and was doubtless in his mind of exactly the same status as the Adamses and Nanny.

They, as it happened, were delighted to have money so regularly, even though it was only just enough to feed them with very little to spare.

Although they did not speak about it, she was aware that they were as anxious as she was about what would happen when their new Master arrived.

They were all very old and hanging over their heads was always the fear of the workhouse, because they would have nowhere else to go.

‘He must give them a cottage, he must,’ Idona would say beneath her breath.

But if the Adamses were homeless, she and Nanny might be in the same category and she did not dare to think what would happen then.

She busied herself going first through her father’s belongings and then her mother’s.

As she had expected, they had both kept every letter and note that they had ever written to each other and there was a great number of them.

When her father was away for the day attending a Horse Sale or taking part in a point-to-point or steeplechase, he always left his wife a little note before he went off, telling her that he loved her and would be counting the hours until they were together again.

Her mother had done the same if when he was out riding she had gone into the village or even to the woods just in case he should return home and be worried when he did not find her there.

They were so touching and, although Idona tried not to read what had been written because it was so intimate, the words seemed to jump out of the paper so that she could not help seeing them.

In other drawers there were small mementos of their lives together, programmes of the balls they had attended where they had danced more together than with other partners, the first tiny primrose of the spring which her mother had pressed and dated so that her father could keep it and there was always a rose from the bunch he gave her on the anniversary of their Wedding.

These were neatly labelled year after year while Idona knew that the bouquet itself would be made into pot pourri so that the fragrance of it would sweeten the house.

It was all very touching and every so often she was forced to wipe away the tears from her eyes.

But she could only think over and over that they were together again. And they at least were happy.

‘Remember me!’ she would sometimes cry out in her heart. ‘I am lonely and frightened without you and I need your help!’

Sometimes she would imagine, when she stayed late in the sitting room until darkness fell, that she could feel her mother beside her, talking to her and telling her not to worry.

That somehow in some miraculous way everything would come right in the end.

When that happened, she would go to bed happily and sleep peacefully, but in the morning the anxiety was back again and she knew that everything would not come right.

It was foolish to believe that it would and she should be planning for the future.

“But how can I do that?” she would ask aloud in her big bedroom, one of the State rooms that had been slept in in the past by Prince Charles when, after the execution of his father, Charles I, he was on the run from Cromwell’s troops.

But ancestors and ghosts could not help her now and, riding over the fields on Mercury, the horse that she had always thought of as her own, she wondered if the best thing she could do would be to run away.

But, although it seemed a tempting idea, she was far from certain that she would find the world outside easier to face than the Marquis and she knew that she could not abandon the Adamses and Ned the groom nor the elderly tenants in the thatched cottages at the gate without fighting for them.

Supposing the Marquis turned them out and put in his own people, which he might do as well in the house?

This was a new idea to her and so alarming that Idona polished the furniture, cleaned the rooms and washed the china so that if and when he came, he could not say the place was not being properly looked after.

Now there was a soft wind on her face as she rode and sunshine in her eyes and she still thought it would be very tempting to ride away over the horizon and never come back.

At least there would be no such problems to face there as awaited her at The Manor, no harsh words to be said and no fears of the man she legally belonged to.

‘I don’t believe it! It cannot be true,’ she said over and over again until she almost bored herself with her own words.

Yet it was impossible to think that Mr. Lawson had lied and anyway the whole thing was a debt of honour, which no one with the ‘blue blood’ of the Overtons in her veins could refuse to acknowledge.

As she rode on, she realised that she was going in the direction of a wood that she had always loved in the past but seldom had time to visit.

Known as ‘Hunters’ Wood’ it was large and spread out over quite a wide acreage with a road running through the middle of it.

It was Hunters’ Wood that was drawn first when the fox-hunting season started and Idona could hear her father saying,

“If we don’t find one anywhere else, there will certainly be a fox or two in Hunters’.”

She loved the wood best in the spring when she knew that there would be primroses under the trees, anemones coming up in the undergrowth and the first bluebells, which later would become a vivid carpet of blue more prolific than in any other place on the whole estate.

Because there were no gamekeepers now, Idona knew that she would see the birds she loved and doubtless a number of squirrels who would watch her from the branches of the trees as she rode beneath them on the mossy ground.

Because she was looking forward to what she would find in Hunters’ Wood, she urged Mercury on until, as they approached the path that lay between the ancient trees, she suddenly pulled him to a standstill.

Just ahead on the side of the wood she could see horses.

There were four of them and she stared in perplexity, wondering who they belonged to and why they were there.

They were unattended and, while two of them were tied to a fallen tree by their bridles, the others were free to crop the grass and were obviously making no attempt to wander away.

Watching them, Idona thought of a dozen possible explanations of their being there, none of which seemed at all probable.

It was too early for poachers and anyway the poachers, who entered their woods quite boldly since her father could not afford gamekeepers, were local men and always on foot.

Then she wondered if, by any chance, they were visitors from other parts of the County who had come into the woods to snare what game birds there were or to catch rabbits without asking permission.

‘Regardless of what they are doing,’ she thought, ‘I shall turn them away. They have no right to upset the birds that are nesting and, if Papa was alive, it would make him very angry.’

Yet she thought perhaps it would be a mistake to ride up boldly and demand an explanation.

Accordingly she rode round the comer of the wood, dismounted and tied Mercury’s bridle to a tree.

She thought that he looked at her reproachfully because they both knew that he would come the moment she called him.

But she did not want to be seen by the strangers before she knew who they were and she had therefore hidden him carefully behind a cluster of rhododendron bushes.

Moving very stealthily she went into the wood and, following the road that wound between the trees, moved towards the centre.

It was very quiet and there was no sign of the intruders.

After she had walked quite a way, Idona thought that the riders of the four horses must have moved off while she was tying up Mercury.

Then suddenly she heard the sound of a voice and stopped.

She realised as she did so that the voice came from in front of her either on the road that passed through the middle of the wood or very near it.

It was a man’s voice and now, listening intently, she heard another man answering him.

She moved forward wondering what they could be doing, having at the same time a feeling of danger that told her she should not be seen.

Keeping amongst the bushes or behind the trunks of trees,...