by Helen Magee
MASTER OF DRYFORD
Felicia found the strength to escape from her evil stepfather. But, without money or position, how could a single girl win the struggle to be independent in Victorian England? Then, a chance meeting with the debonair Charles brings Felicia to Dryford as governess. But the ancient family home is overshadowed by mystery, and she has to earn the trust of her new family before dramatic events reveal to her the whole truth – and her love for the Master of Dryford.
Books by Helen Magee
FALSE ENCHANTMENT
HELEN MAGEE
MASTER OF
DRYFORD
Complete and Unabridged
PIP POLLINGER IN PRINT
Pollinger Limited
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First published in Great Britain under the name of Elinor Dean
First Edition published by Robert Hale 1984
This large print edition published by Pollinger in Print 2007
Copyright © 1984 by Elinor Dean
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-905665-36-5
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without prior written permission from Pollinger Limited
For Aunt Mary,
with love
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
It was in the last rays of the setting sun that I first saw the keep from which Keep Dryford takes its name and I treasure the memory for I will never see it again. It was oddly comforting though a little frightening looming black and solid against the sky which flamed blood-red behind it and I felt at once a sense of peace at its timelessness and a thrill of fear at the violence it had seen in its time.
I was running away, escaping my past, and beside me stood the man who had made it possible. Behind me was fear but I did not think of that as I watched the sun slide from the sky and the dark outline of the Keep soften and merge into the dusk, or the gloaming as it is known here in Scotland. All I thought was that here was a new beginning, here I would be safe from threats and terror and fear but I could not have known how wrong I was. For me the fears were only just beginning. And perhaps that’s where I should start – right at the very beginning . . .
* * *
My childhood was a happy one. My parents, though not wealthy, were not poor either and I remember with affection the small Queen Anne house on the outskirts of London with its lawns sweeping down to the river. It was a long time before I was able to connect that much-loved stretch of water at the bottom of our garden with the majestic expanse of the Thames that I gazed at in awe on our infrequent visits to the great city. I remember the excitement of those visits. The great shops of Bond Street lit by gas jets and so splendid that they seemed like palaces to me, the stalls in the streets where in winter you could buy a bag of roasted chestnuts which warmed your hands as well as tasting strange and delicious. The flower-sellers in summer from whom Father would always buy a posy for Mother. The hiss of steam and the smell of the great railway station, the noise and clamour as the train pulled in seeming to my childish eyes like a huge dragon; and the journey home again, half-asleep with the wonder of it all and always, at the journey’s end home, never changing, safe and comforting. It seemed to me then that nothing could ever change. There seemed always to be laughter in my life, my mother’s sparkling like the river on a sunny day, my father’s full-throated and deep like the dark river pools. I don’t remember my father so very clearly now, only strong brown hands and laughing eyes as he swung me up in his arms and I seemed to touch the clouds or held me close to him when a childish nightmare disturbed my dreams. They called me Felicia which means happiness, and they taught me by their lives the meaning of the word.
My mother was devastated when he died. I remember she seemed to shrink a little as if without his energy and strength she somehow became less of a person. I was ten at the time and for the next year I watched as the mother I had known became more fragile, more vulnerable. Even the pretty colour seemed to drain out of her cheeks and it was not just that she was wearing black. It was more than that. Father had been her strength and she was quite simply lost without him. But even I did not realise the extent of her grief, not until a year after Father’s death when she came out of mourning.
I was playing in the garden when Mrs Larkin came to fetch me.
‘You’re wanted in the small sitting room. Miss Felicia,’ she said.
I looked up at her. Mrs Larkin was a small rotund woman who always seemed to breathe cheerfulness and good sense, but her face was almost grim as she spoke. She and her husband had looked after us as long as I could remember, she as cook housekeeper and he as gardener and odd-job man. I had never seen her look so stern.
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ I said.
Her lips pursed up in a thin line as she said,
‘That’s not for me to say. Your Mama wants to see you so come along and don’t go upsetting her, poor woman, as if she didn’t have troubles enough.’
She went on in this vein as we walked towards the house but even the unusual severity of her manner did nothing to prepare me for what was to come.
Mother was sitting on the sofa when I entered the room,
‘My darling, Felicia,’ she said drawing me into her arms, ‘I have some grave news.’
She looked up pleadingly at a tall thin man standing behind her. I had barely noticed him as I came into the room but I looked at him now and I did not like him. With all the stubborn prejudice of a child I hated him on sight. He looked down at her. His long thin face with its dead eyes and side whiskers made me shiver though I still stood within the circle of my mother’s arms.
‘The child must know, my dear,’ he said. ‘She is not an infant.’
I turned to my mother. There were tears on her long lashes and her mouth trembled as she spoke to me.
‘My love, the house will have to be sold.’ I was stunned. The house. My home. The only one I had ever known. The river at the edge of the lawns. The tree where Father had hung a swing for me, so long ago it seemed to me then. His study where I could still go and curl up in his chair and smell that familiar tobacco smell, where I could imagine I could hear his voice, his laugh. I clung to her. She was still speaking, explaining in words I could barely take in that we had no money. I was bewildered. Never before had either of my parents spoken to me of money. Never before had it even entered my head to think of it. I remember saying in wonder,
‘Money?’, as if it were a word in a foreign language, then he spoke again.
‘The reason, my dear. The child must know the reason,’ and for the first time I felt his cold eyes on me and shivered.
She looked up at him again and her voice was a whisper.
‘No, you cannot. She is only a child.’
He bent over her and she seemed to shrink from him. ‘If you do not then I will,’ he said.
She ran her tongue over dry lips. The tears were flowing freely now. ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘your dear father . . . ’
‘Leonora,’ the voice was hard and she flinched.
‘He left us very badly off,’ she continued. ‘There were debts that we cannot pay.’ She faltered to a halt and held me to her. ‘Oh, my darling, I am so sorry, so sorry.’
Then a hand gripped my arm. I looke
d at it as if it were some curious object in a museum. There were long black hairs on the back of it and underneath the skin was white and smooth. I looked up at the face so close to mine. There were hairs growing out of the nostrils and his lips were very full and very red. Behind them his teeth were long and pointed. Like a wolf, I thought, and suddenly into my mind came the thought of my father sitting me on his knee, his hands brown and square and his laughing eyes looking into mine as he told me the story of Red Riding Hood. He was speaking,
‘Your father was a gambler, Felicia, a gambler, do you hear? He lost your house, your security, your future on the turn of a card. You have nothing now. Nothing but the clothes you wear. Everything else will have to be sold. Your father died a bankrupt,’ he almost spat out the last word. The face came nearer, the teeth gleamed sharply and I thought, he’s going to eat me up.
It was then that I began to scream. I kicked at his shins and tore myself away. I took one last look at the hideous face and even my mother’s arms could not stay me as I ran out of the house and down the garden to the hollow tree that had been my refuge in time of trouble – when a favourite doll was broken or a bird was found dead on the lawn. But this was worse than a broken doll or a dead bird. This was my home, my life, all I had known. I had not understood all he had been saying. I did not know what bankrupt meant but I had understood that my life as I had known it was over and I had under- stood that he had been telling me that my father was wicked and that I would never believe. He was the wicked one with his wolf’s teeth and his cold eyes. I knew my fairy-tales. I knew that bad people always told lies about good people so I sat in my hiding place and I hated him with all my strength and as I rubbed the tears fiercely out of my eyes I wondered what his punishment would be for, child that I was, I still believed in fairytales.
If I was unhappy then, it was nothing to the waves of fear and loneliness that engulfed me when my mother eventually came to me. God knows how she had persuaded him to let her come alone, but she had. My eyes were dry. I had no more tears and she put her arms around me. Her face was white and her eyes huge with a fear that I know now was as great as mine.
‘Felicia,’ she said, ‘there is one more thing you have to know.’ I looked at her. I could feel nothing. Her voice trembled as she said it. ‘That man. The man you have just met. His name is Mr Petheridge and I am going to marry him.’
That was the end of my childhood. I was eleven years old when I grew up. Mr Petheridge was a good man, my mother said. He had helped her through the last year, paid our household bills, settled outstanding debts. She was greatly indebted to him. He did good works among the poor. He was a lay preacher with a small private income. She told me these things with a pale set face and I understood. She needed someone to look after her. She was a widow with no money, no home and a child to care for. It seemed to me later that I did all my growing up in that single afternoon while the bees hummed lazily in the long grass by the water’s edge and inside I was still screaming for my father.
So we left our beautiful home and went to live with Mr Petheridge in an ugly red brick house in London where Mr Petheridge ran our lives with a rod of iron and his sour-faced sister kept house. She had iron grey hair scraped back into a bun and her face was mottled. I never saw her smile. For three years I watched my mother fade and wither until she died, from despair I suppose, and I was left alone in an ugly house with ugly people. I was fourteen and I knew that he had killed my mother. He had bought her and he had killed her.
When she died my formal education stopped. I had always been ‘good at my books’ as Mrs Larkin used to put it and I found out very quickly that this talent for learning was a valuable weapon in my armoury against my stepfather. I was sent to a dingy day school for the ‘daughters of gentlefolk’ from which I would have emerged as ignorant as I arrived had it not been for him. He took great delight in setting me tests of knowledge and his scorn was poured unceasingly on me when I failed to meet the impossibly-high standard he set for me. It was not long before I realised that he did this to torture my mother who could not bear to see my misery at his taunts. Fragile though she was, she had a spirit that evaded him and that he knew he could never possess. So I scoured the meagre shelves of the school for books and tormented my inadequate teachers with my thirst for knowledge, spending long hours in my room poring over books when I should have been asleep until he could no longer reduce me to quivering inadequacy with his slights and between us grew up a hatred so strong that it frightened me with its intensity.
Even now I can hardly bear to think of the next four years, the years that followed my mother’s death. I helped Miss Petheridge in the house, eking out the meagre allowance my stepfather made; I wore my hair scraped back from my face and secured it as best I could in the unbecoming bun that he insisted on. It was a major source of contention with him, my hair, for I had inherited my looks from my father and it sprang away from my face in a torrent of dark waves. I used to sit by the light of my candle at night and let it fall over my shoulders and brush it. It was my best feature, that and the eyes that would become liquid as I thought of the happiness I had once enjoyed and would grow stormy and cold as I thought of my poor mother’s last years. But during the day my hair was scraped back and I went in fear lest a single strand should escape for I would be accused of shameful vanity and worse and my stepfather would mouth at me until I shook from the violence of it. I had learned to shut my ears to what he said but his eyes hypnotised me as a snake does a rabbit. The hairstyle suited me well enough for I had nothing to recommend me. I was too thin and my face was pale and pinched and the clothes I wore, of heavy dark material, did nothing to enhance my appearance.
I used to slip out as often as I could to see the Larkins. They had been dismissed of course when Mother married Mr Petheridge but they too had come to London. Mr Larkin had got a job as manager of a small private hotel not far from where we lived, due more to Mrs Larkin’s excellent cooking than to his managerial skills. Whilst mother was alive they had kept in touch by letter for their few attempts to visit her had been sharply discouraged by my stepfather. I had got into the habit of slipping round there on my way home from school when I knew my stepfather would be late home but now that I had left school it was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid him. Mrs Larkin always made us a pot of tea and gave me hot buttered muffins, shaking her head over how thin I had become.
‘It’s feeding up you want, Miss Felicia,’ she would say and, one day, her head on one side and sympathy in her eyes, ‘Such a pretty girl and such a waste. Still he’s a good man, I suppose. It’s the Lord’s work he does.’
Mr Larkin guffawed, ‘Lord’s work!’
‘Hush now, Larkin, she’s only a child,’ chided Mrs Larkin.
At the time I wondered what Mr Larkin meant. I know now. They were the only ones who showed me sympathy and even a little laughter during those long years and I looked forward to the visits I managed to pay them.
It was when I was sixteen that I was told I had to help my stepfather in his work. I knew he worked among the poor of the city but the nature of the work he did was uncertain. I saw a different London then
– a London filled with poverty and want, so different from the pretty city I had known with my parents and yet there was beauty there too in some measure. The people he went amongst, dispensing food and lectures, for the most part gave not a fig for him or for me either. We were looked on with mistrust, the things we brought taken from necessity. I would grow hot with embarrassment as I stood behind him while he lectured some poor woman, her children clinging to her skirts in fear of his voice, on the value of thrift and honesty. He would never give them money.
‘Money,’ he would say to me, ‘is only a temptation to them. They spend it on drink while their children go hungry and barefoot or worse still,’ and he leaned towards me, ‘they gamble, and you know what that leads to, do you not, Felicia?’
It was a perpetual theme with him. Gambling was the greatest sin, th
e worst kind of evil and he never let me forget what my father’s gambling had done to us.
He was right in a way, of course. As I grew older I began to understand more about my father. I remembered the evenings he would come home lit up as if from inside with a glow that would warm us all and there would be a celebration, a special treat – a new hat for Mother or a pretty frock for me. There would also be the evenings he arrived back, his step leaden and all the light gone from his eyes and sometimes, just occasionally, a piece of silver or a particularly nice china figurine would disappear from my mother’s collection. I asked her about it once when I noticed that one of her favourite pieces had gone.
‘Oh, I never really liked that figurine so very much and your father’s business needs a little extra just at the moment.’
But I knew she had loved it and that it had been a very valuable piece. Oddly enough I never knew what my father’s ‘business’ was. I suspect there was none. Even my stepfather never enlightened me about that, only about the horrors of gambling. If he was trying to make me hate gambling as he did then he did not succeed. If anything it made me more sympathetic towards the gambler for I also understood by then that a gambler is as incapable of stopping as the world is from turning and if I had to choose between my dear adorable laughing father and this creature of evil who was supposed to be so good then I welcomed the gambling.
It was not until the night of my eighteenth birthday that I realised just how evil he was. I was sitting by the light of my candle brushing my hair and wondering what the future held for me. It was so bleak all of a sudden that I laid my head on my arms and began to cry, not for the future but for the fact that my eighteenth birthday had gone unnoticed in that house. The tears welled-up and spilled over and my sobs prevented me from hearing the door open. It was not until a hand was laid on my shoulder that I realised I was not alone. I turned my head and saw it lying there, pale and smooth with black hairs so close that my breath disturbed them. I could feel the clammy sweat of the hand through the thin cotton of my nightgown and I was afraid. I looked up and I would have screamed but the breath caught in my throat as I saw his face. It leered at me and the eyes glittered in the dim light. I saw it move even closer to me, the lips parting, and there were those long pointed teeth, only this time I did not think – ‘he is going to eat me up’ – as I had done when a child. I knew what it was he wanted even before he said.