Eva Ibbotson

It was now that Henry was able to express a little of his hatred. The General, unable to bear Stavely without his wife, left for the Himalayas on an extended botanical expedition and Henry the heir—now home from school for good—began to issue orders that were obeyed. Rom’s dog was forbidden the house; his unsuitable friends—children of the village whose games he had led—were banished. Most of the servants were loyal to the younger child and Nannie, now retired and living in the Lodge, had never been able to conceal her love for the “little foreigner,” but there were others—notably Grunthorpe the first footman, whom Rom had surprised in the gun room stealing boxes of cartridges to sell in the local town—who were only too glad to ingratiate themselves with the heir.

Henry’s triumph, however, was short-lived. The General returned; Rom was restored to his rightful place and presently he followed his brother to Eton, where he was safe from Henry’s tricks.

And then, in the year when Rom became eighteen, Isobel Hope and her widowed mother came to live in the village next to Stavely.

Isobel’s connections were aristocratic—her mother was the youngest daughter of the Earl of Lexbury; her father, who had died in the hunting field, had belonged to an ancient West Country family—but she was poor. As a small child Isobel had seen the great Lexbury estate go under the hammer, and her handsome father had lived on his Army pay and promises. Even before she met Henry, this lovely girl had decided that Stavely’s heir would make her a suitable husband.

She met him first at a ball in a neighboring house, but standing beside Henry on the grand staircase, relaxed and at ease, was his younger brother… and that was that.

The love that blazed between Rom and Isobel was violent, passionate and total. They met to ride at dawn, Isobel eluding all attempts at chaperonage, and were together again by noon to play tennis, wander through the gardens or chase each other through the maze. To watch them together was almost to gasp at their happiness; no one who saw them that summer ever quite forgot them. “A striking couple,” “a handsome pair,” “meant for each other”—none of the phrases that people used came anywhere near the image of those two: the slender girl with her shower of dark red hair, her deep blue eyes; the incorrigibly graceful, brilliant boy.

Rom had won a scholarship to Oxford, but he persuaded his father to let him stay at Stavely. He had inherited the General’s passion for trees and together they planned plantations, discussed rare hardwoods, spoke of a sawmill to supply the cabinet trade…

When Rom was nineteen he and Isobel became engaged. It was now that the General sent for them and told them of the will he proposed to make. Stavely was not entailed, but there was no question of disinheriting his eldest son. Henry would have Stavely Hall, its gardens and orchards, the Home Park… To Rom he would leave the two outlying farms—Millpond and The Grebe—the North Plantation and Paradise Farm itself.

Rom was overjoyed, for he had an intense and imaginative passion for land, and Isobel, though she still yearned for Stavely itself, was satisfied, for Paradise was a perfect Palladian house, pillared and porticoed, built by an earlier and wealthy Mrs. Brandon who had not cared for her daughter-in-law. Unless poor Henry married an outstanding woman—and this was not likely—Isobel knew she could soon make Paradise the social center of the estate.

Three months later the General died of a heart attack, sitting in a chair with a bundle of Toussia’s letters in his hand. When the funeral was over they looked for the will he said he had made, but it was nowhere to be found. Curiously the solicitor he had called in had gone abroad, and his clerk knew nothing of a later document. It was thus that the old will was declared valid—the will made before Rom was born—in which every stick and stone on the estate was left to Henry.

Why did Rom do nothing to save himself, people asked later? Why didn’t he insist on an inquiry or bring pressure to bear on his brother to make an equitable division?

It was pride of course, the fierce pride of the gifted and strong who will take nothing from anyone; perhaps also the knowledge that if Henry had practiced any kind of fraud the mills of God would grind him more surely than Rom could hope to do. But there was something else, something that Henry saw with a puzzled fury—a kind of exaltation, a glittering excitement at being stripped thus to the bone. To begin again somewhere else, to pit himself against the world, to make a fortune and a place for Isobel that owed nothing to privilege and class was a challenge to which Rom’s passionate nature rose with a kind of joy.

“We’ll start again somewhere quite different—somewhere in the New World. I shall build you a house fifteen times as grand as Stavely, you’ll see!”

“Oh, Rom—in that wretched Amazon of yours!”