CHAPTER TWO

Valeta looked helplessly around the small but attractive drawing room which she always felt had never been the same since her mother died.

It was a room that was much lived in and therefore contained an accumulation of treasures that had been collected over many years.

There were not only pieces of china that had come from her mother’s old home but there were also small objects that Valeta had either made or bought for her parents as gifts for birthdays and Christmas.

There was also a number of skilfully executed watercolours, some framed and some unframed, and a number of silhouettes that Valeta had cut out and which had quite a professional touch about them.

Besides these there were books not only in the elegant Chippendale bookcase but, because it was overfull, piled on tables and even chairs that were not often used.

Valeta looked around and knew that, if the drawing room was full of a hundred things that she could not bear to part with, her father’s study was worse.

Because he, like her mother, enjoyed reading in that room too there were books everywhere piled high on the floor, on the chairs, on tables and however hard she tried to keep the room tidy it was a sheer impossibility.

‘How could I leave here?’ Valeta asked herself, ‘and if I did, where would I go?’

She knew that every room in the house was a part of herself and while common sense told her that now her father was dead she could not afford to go on living at The Manor, there was no answer to the question of where else could she go?

She had already discussed it with her old Nanny who had been with her ever since she was born and who had said in no uncertain terms that she was too old at her age to move about.

“But, Nanny, we cannot stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Because we have to pay the rent and you know as well as I do that without Papa’s pension we will not have enough to live on.”

“If his Lordship has any decency about him, which I rather doubt,” Nanny retorted, “then he’ll charge you nothin’ to live here, considerin’ it’s his fault with his wild ideas that your father’s not alive today!”

Nanny had said this over and over again and because Valeta felt that she could not bear it any longer, she had gone from the kitchen to hide the tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, Papa,’ she whispered when she took refuge in his study, ‘how can I live without you? What shall I do now there is no one to laugh with or talk to?’

Because she knew that her father had always hated women to cry, she fought back the tears that came to her eyes and walked to the window to look out through the diamond-paned casement onto the garden.

It was ablaze with flowers because both her father and mother had enjoyed working in it, while old Jake had quite enough to do in growing vegetables and potatoes for the house without wasting his time on what he called ‘them there flowers’.

It had been hard enough to keep her father happy, Valeta thought, after her mother had died, but because she had loved him they had somehow managed to hide from each other the ache that was always in their hearts and the inescapable feeling that something very vital was missing from both their lives.

‘Now I am alone,’ Valeta told herself and she realised that she had to face it with the courage that had been so characteristic of her father.

He had not only been outstandingly brave when he was in the Army, but h