Chapter one ~ 1816

“It’s no use, Miss Alecia, you can’t make bricks without straw and I can’t cook food without havin’ the money to buy it!”

“I know, Bessie,” Alecia replied, “but Papa is very worried at the moment and I don’t want to trouble him.”

“That be all very well, miss, but we can’t go on as we are. And you asks me what your father needs is a piece of good beefsteak or a fat chicken or two.”

Alecia sighed because she knew that Bessie, who had been looking after them for over fifteen years, was speaking the truth.

But her father’s last book had sold so few copies that it had left them almost penniless and the one he was writing now would not be ready for at least another three or four months.

‘What am I to do?’ she asked herself and wished, as she had a thousand times before that the Earl of Langhaven had not died.

He had been her uncle, her mother’s brother, and because he was fond of his sister he had been unfailingly kind to them.

When Lady Sophie insisted on marrying Troilus Stambrook, her brother had been the only member of her family who did not rage at her and, as soon as he inherited his father’s title, he had given her and her erudite husband practical help.

Lady Sophie had fallen in love with the extremely handsome Troilus Stambrook when he came to tutor her brother before he went up to Oxford hoping, if not to get a degree, at least not to be sent down for total incompetence.

Troilus Stambrook was bowled over by the beauty of his employer’s daughter, who had already captivated London Society with her charm and her elegance.

Although Lady Sophie had a number of suitors, one of them in her father’s estimation extremely suitable and to whom he was prepared to give his unqualified blessing as a son-in-law, she found that once she had met Troilus Stambrook, no other man existed in the whole world.

A raging battle then ensued which continued until everybody was exhausted and which ended, because she was so deeply in love and was prepared to fight the whole world if necessary, in Lady Sophie getting her own way.

So Lady Sophie, the toast of St. James’s, married an obscure unknown writer whose only qualification was that he was a gentleman by birth and, because he was so clever, he had won a scholarship to Eton and another to Oxford University.

“You will rue the day you did anything so stupid!” the old Earl said to his daughter as they drove side by side to the small Church in the village where she was to be married.

But he was wrong, for Lady Sophie was blissfully happy until the day she died.

The only problem had been that she and her husband had so little money and, after their daughter Alecia was born, it was extremely difficult to make ends meet and she was too proud to keep asking her father for help.

When her brother inherited, everything was different.

First of all, because he loved his sister, he gave her and her husband a little Manor House on the estate where they lived rent free and saw that they were supplied with food from his farms and gardens.

There were peaches and grapes from the hothouses, any vegetables they required from the kitchen gardens and every week butter, cream and eggs came to the Manor House from the Home Farm.

There were also chickens, ducks, fat pigeons and in the spring, legs of lamb, which was one of the Earl’s specialities.

This made life very much easier and Troilus Stambrook could concentrate on his writing and not feel humiliated