Barbara Cartland: Never Forget Love

When I wrote this book, the house I was talking about as ‘Lyn’ is really Longleat, one of the most beautiful ancestral homes in England.

Longleat, which belongs to the Marquis of Bath, is the most perfect example of Italianate Elizabethan architecture in the British Isles.

It began as a Priory built by the Augustinian Canons and sold for fifty-three pounds to Sir John Thynne in 1515 when King Henry VIII dissolved the Monasteries.

It is so beautiful and ethereal that one expects it to float away into the sunshine.

The Great Hall with its lovely stone-flagged floor and hammerbeam ceiling support is unchanged since 1559. In the Red Library there is a copy of Henry VII’s Great Bible of 1641.

Queen Elizabeth I was entertained royally in the State Dining Room in 1574 and, of course, there is a ghost.

I have not written about the Longleat ghost, but it came to me in a dream and I find it really fascinating.

“You are late!” Nerissa cried out as her brother came in through the front door and threw his riding whip down on a chair.

“I know,” he answered, “but you must forgive me. I was riding an animal that at least has spirit in him and I was making the most of it.”

Nerissa smiled.

She knew that to obtain a horse of any sort to ride was a delight that Harry prized above everything else.

Sometimes, when she was struggling with housework or the stove in the kitchen, which was so old that it was always going wrong and a dozen other problems that cropped up every day, she would imagine that one of her father’s books had suddenly become a success and overnight he was famous and they were rich.

It was such an impossible dream that she laughed at herself for being so childish.

Yet she longed above everything else for Harry to have the horses he wanted and the clothes that would make him as smart and fashionable as his friends at Oxford University.

No one could be more handsome, she thought, although he was wearing a threadbare old riding coat that he had worn for years and which she had mended and darned until she had thought that there was little of the original material left.

It was not surprising because their father, even though he was now grey-haired and his face was lined, was still an extremely good-looking gentleman.

Nerissa sometimes wondered to herself why after her mother had died some woman had not tried to capture her father’s heart.

Then she laughed again at her fantasies because it was doubtful if Marcus Stanley was aware that there was a woman in the world when he was concentrating on his books, which examined and recorded the development of architecture in Great Britain.

Harry had admitted quite openly that he was not clever enough himself to understand his father’s work and, although Nerissa loved him, she at times did find his long descriptions somewhat dull.

They were, however, greatly acclaimed by the Architectural Society, although the sales amounted to such an infinitesimal number of volumes that the income derived from them was almost non-existent.

Nevertheless she was proud, as she dusted the shelf in the library, to see the row of five large volumes all bearing her father’s name.

Harry was pulling off his riding boots, which were covered with mud, and Nerissa said,

“I hope you thanked Farmer Jackson for giving you one of his horses to ride.”

“He thanked me,” Harry replied. “He said that, having bought the horse, he was almost afraid to get on its back and had been looking forward to my coming home. He knew that, if anyone could break the animal in, it would be me!”

Nerissa looked at the dirt not only on his boots but also on his breeches and her brother knew just what she was thinking.

“All right. He threw me twice! The second time I had a bit of a job to catch him, but by the time I took him back to the farm he was beginning to realise that I was his Master.”

There was a relish in Harry’s voice that Nerissa did not miss and she suggested,

“Come into the dining room as soon as you have washed your hands and I will tell Papa that luncheon is ready as, incidentally, it has been for over an hour now.”

“I don’t suppose Papa will have noticed,” Harry remarked and Nerissa knew that this was indeed true.

She went into the kitchen where there was a savoury smell of stewed rabbit and an old woman with rheumaticky hands was taking the hot plates somewhat unsteadily out of the oven.

“Let me do that, Mrs. Cosnet,” Nerissa said quickly, knowing how many things had been broken by her in the past.

She saved the plates at what she thought was at the last moment and carried them into the dining room before running back to lift the stew off the stove and pour it into a china dish.

Having set it down on the dining room table, she ran across the small hall to the study where her father was working.

“Luncheon is ready now, Papa,” she said, “and hurry because Harry is back and he is hungry.”

“Is it luncheontime?” her father asked vaguely.

Nerissa resisted the temptation to retort that luncheon was long overdue and, if Harry was hungry, then so was she.

Reluctantly leaving the manuscript he was writing and the book that he was using for reference on top of his desk, Marcus Stanley rose and followed his daughter into the dining room.

“You have done a good morning’s work, Papa,” Nerissa said as she put some of the rabbit stew on his plate, well aware as she did so it was over-cooked. “You must take a short walk after luncheon before you go back to work. You know it is bad for you not to get some air.”

“I have just reached a most interesting part of my chapter on the Elizabethan period,” her father replied, “and, of course, it is easy for me to quote this house and to describe how the bricks, although they have mellowed with the ages, have defied the weather as well as the years and are in far better shape than bricks made two hundred years later.”

Nerissa did not answer because at that moment Harry came into the room.

“Sorry to be so late, Papa,” he said, “but I have had a splendid ride on a horse that was as wild as a coot until I began to make him see sense.”

Marcus Stanley’s eyes rested on his son’s smiling face reflectively as he responded,

“I remember when I was your age finding an unbroken horse an irresistible challenge.”

“I feel sure you would still enjoy it now,” Harry suggested.

As he spoke, he took the plate his sister was handing him and started to eat ravenously.

Watching him Nerissa wondered wistfully if she could manage during the University vacation to have sufficient food in the house to keep Harry satisfied.

It was difficult enough when he was away to stretch the very meagre amount of house-keeping money, which was all her father could allow her, to supply them with their needs.

But with Harry ‘eating them out of house and home’, as she expressed it to herself, it was impossible not to run into debt or, even worse still, to fear that her brother, although he never complained, was left hungry.

Rabbit was really their staple standby at all times of the year, but she was thinking that the farmers would soon be shooting the pigeons that destroyed young crops and Harry often claimed that he enjoyed the way she roasted them.

She could not help thinking plaintively that baby lamb was now in season, but it was a very long time since they had tasted one.

What she could usually afford was an old sheep later on, which would be knocked down in price because it would be tough unless very carefully cooked.

It was a blessing, she thought, as she put a mouthful of rabbit to her lips that her mother had been an exceptionally good cook.