Chapter One ~ 1886

“I am sorry, Lady Arletta. I am afraid it gives you very little time.”

“Very little, Mr. Metcalfe.”

Lady Arletta Cherrington-Weir gave a deep sigh and her blue eyes were wistful.

Mr. Metcalfe, a precise middle-aged Solicitor, thought that, if it was in his power, he would do anything to sweep away the worried look on her young beautiful face.

He had known Lady Arletta since she was an infant in a perambulator and had watched her grow up, becoming in doing so lovelier year by year.

He thought now that it was impossible for any young woman of twenty to be more enchanting and so completely unselfconscious and unaware of her own attractions.

This, however, was not surprising considering that for the past two years Lady Arletta had been obliged to nurse her father, the Earl of Weir, who had grown month by month increasingly querulous and disagreeable.

He had refused to have anybody else attend to him and treated his daughter, as the doctors and everybody else thought, as he would not have dared to treat a professional nurse.

But nurses were exceedingly difficult to find and in the quiet Counties of England, and especially in the villages, there were no nursing facilities except for the village midwife, who was usually old and fat and reputed to keep herself awake by imbibing large tots of gin through the dark hours of the night.

Arletta therefore had been obliged to nurse her father, who was suffering not only from heart attacks, which gave him excruciating pain, but also from gout, which was entirely due to the large amount of claret and port he insisted on drinking despite the many protests of his physicians.

“If I have to die,” he would say angrily, “I may as well have the comfort of feeling drunk and I am damned if I will have the only solace for my disgusting condition taken away from me.”

Arletta had long ago given up arguing with him. She merely agreed with everything he said and he then swore at her for being dull and spiritless.

Actually in his better moods he was exceedingly fond of his only child, although it was a bitter disappointment to him that there was no son to inherit the Earldom.

It would therefore pass to his nephew, whom inevitably he disliked.

Arletta did not like Hugo either thinking him a conceited young man who had his own ideas as to how he would run the estate and refused to listen to anything his uncle or she could tell him about it.

Now, two weeks after her father’s death, Arletta had been told that her cousin intended to move at once into Weir House and she was to remove herself and her belongings as quickly as possible.

The trouble was, as she had informed Mr. Metcalfe, she did not know where to go.

“You must have some relative you could stay with, my Lady,” he queried, “and, of course, if you wish, you can always live in the Dower House.”

“I know that,” Arletta replied, “and it is very kind of Cousin Hugo to offer it to me. But you know as well as I do, Mr. Metcalfe, that I would not be allowed to live there alone.”

She sighed before she went on.

“And I don’t think I could bear to see my cousin turn the whole estate upside down and manage it in quite a different way from Papa’s methods.”

“I am sure you would be wise to go elsewhere,” Mr. Metcalfe advised her quietly, “but, because of your father’s illness, you were not presented at Court, as you should have been a year ago and you never had the ball, whi