141. An Angel from Heaven

By Barbara Cartland

The beautiful Lady Diana Dinsdale’s father has died and shortly afterwards her mother dies as well and she is heartbroken at the loss of both her beloved parents.
After the Earl of Dinsdale’s death, her mother had married again to William Walker, a rich businessman who is cynically seeking to improve his standing socially to help his financial interests to make him even richer.
And now Diana is all alone except for her grasping stepfather.
When she learns that he is arranging for her to marry an American millionaire friend of his, whom she has never seen, merely because she has a title, she is absolutely horrified. She has always dreamt of marrying a man she deeply loves as he loves her.
Although she feels obligated to her stepfather because he helped her parents when they were almost bankrupt, she cannot go ahead with this marriage.
So she plans to escape the appalling prospect by running away and hiding from her dreadful stepfather.
With the help of her father’s old butler, Simpson, she becomes the Governess to Eric, the young brother of Lord Anthony Clayton.
Eric has had a succession of Governesses who leave as soon as they arrive because the boy is almost uncontrollable and refuses to learn anything from anybody.
How Diana teaches the boy to become a young gentleman.
How she helps Lord Clayton with his domestic and financial problems.
And how she unexpectedly finds the love of her life is all told in this romantic novel by BARBARA CARTLAND.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M-Y Books
• Release date: Dec 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781782138778

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE ~1880

As they neared London, Lady Diana Dale thought that the horses drawing the carriage she was travelling in were stepping into a new world.

She was frightened at what lay in the future.

It seemed as if London, which had been where she had enjoyed herself enormously when she ‘came out,’ was suddenly a strange place where she was nervous of what she might find.

When her mother died, she had left London to stay with one of her relations.

But now, when she had settled down happily with the family and adored being in the country, her stepfather had sent for her.

I will not go, she had said when the letter arrived.

But her cousin who she was staying with said,

Don’t be so silly, Diana.  After all he made your mother happy and provided you with a lot of money.  You can hardly refuse to visit him just because you never liked him when he was your mother’s – husband.

Her cousin had hesitated a little over the last word.

Diana knew she was thinking that she had perhaps been jealous of her stepfather, which was the reason why she had been anxious to get away from him.

She had in fact, begged her cousin, when she came to the funeral, to have her to stay.

Having moved in, Diana had stayed there and never returned to the house in London.

Looking back on it she realised that everything had happened from the moment that William Walker had met and married her mother.

Diana’s father, who had been the Earl of Dinsdale, had fallen on hard times when he had unexpectedly lost most of his money.

He had found that investments he had made with the help of a man who called himself a ‘friend’ had failed utterly.

The only way he could continue to live with any comfort was to sell his large house, which had been in the family for nearly a hundred years and move into something much smaller.

His wife had wept bitterly, but it had not increased their Bank balance.

The Countess said that it broke her heart to have to move into a pleasant but inexpensive house at the far end of their estate.

The rest including the big house, the horses and the many acres of land had been sold to a man who her father summed up in one word as being ‘common’.

As Diana was still too young to worry much about her belongings, she had accepted all the changes to her life without it affecting her as it had affected her parents.

Her father died two years after they moved.

While she cried at his funeral, she knew, although she did not put it into words, it was somewhat of a relief not to hear him grumbling on and on as he had done every day because the house was too small for him compared to the big house that he had been obliged to sell.

The garden, pretty as it was, could not be compared with the very large acreage that had been theirs previously.

In fact the Earl had been so very difficult and so bad-tempered since they had changed houses that it was a joy not to hear him moaning and refusing to entertain their friends who wished to console him and his wife.

I am damned if they will come here again, she had heard her father say about their visitors.  "I will not be commiserated with because I was a fool to lose my money.  I suffer enough living in this abysmal hole without having people telling me what is happening at what was my home and the home of my ancestors."

If he had said it once, he had said it a dozen times.

Although she realised that it was wrong of her, she knew that she was much happier alone with her mother.

The Countess, however, took it in a very different manner.  She made friends with the local villagers who she had never met before when she lived in the big house.

She took an interest in the small school where the younger children were taught before they then moved on to a much larger one.

In fact Diana had a distinct feeling that her mother was happier in the small house than she had been for years in the large one.

As she had often said to her daughter, it was falling to pieces over their heads.

In actual fact she was not to be aware for long how things had changed since her father’s death.

Their large house had been bought by a man, who they were informed before they met him, had made himself a millionaire.

How has he done it? Diana had asked, only to be told by her father somewhat scornfully that the man who had bought their house had had his finger in every pie and he did not think it was too clean in the first place!

She did not really understand what this meant.

Although William Walker had paid a huge sum for their house and many people envied the Earl because of it, he could never bring himself to say a kind word about the purchaser.

He refused, once they had moved into the smaller house, to accept any invitation to visit his previous home.

I am damned if I will go there, he said to his wife and daughter, to see him sitting at my place at the table and at my writing desk in the study, and you are not to go either. You will stay here and put any invitation that comes from that man into the wastepaper basket.

Diana felt, when she had thought about it, that her father was being rather disagreeable considering that Mr. Walker had given him so much for the house and grounds.

Some of their close relations had said to her mother privately that her father ought to go down on his knees and thank God for finding someone who had been so generous.

It was only later when Diana met Mr. Walker that she thought, while her father had been rather hard on him, it was quite understandable that he was not in any way the sort of person who one expects to find in an historic house belonging to an ancient and distinguished family.

Then, when her father had died, William Walker became, almost overnight, a frequent visitor to their home.

He had sent to her father’s funeral a vast wreath of lilies which was larger and more impressive than any other.

Her mother had thanked the sender of every wreath and letter of condolence.

But she had felt obliged to write a longer and more effusive letter to Mr. Walker because he not only sent a large wreath and a letter which was written on three pages, but began a habit of sending them anything fresh from his garden.

This included fruit, flowers and vegetables and then after a week or two, eggs and chickens.

It is so kind of you and I can only say how grateful we are, her mother said in her soft voice.

Diana did not like to think what her father’s attitude would have been to receiving such generosity.

It never struck her until too late that Mr. Walker was pursuing her mother in a very different way from what she had thought.

There was certainly a very strong reason behind his kindness.

It was, in fact, after she had been to stay with one of her relations who thought she was being kind in asking the Countess and Diana to stay for a week or so.

Diana too felt that it was a kind act and she was certain that it would cheer up her mother after she had shed so many tears.

Somehow the house seemed dark, gloomy and very quiet now that her father was no longer there.

I don’t want to go, darling, her mother had said.  I don’t feel I can endure the parties Cousin Edith gives so frequently and I will, in my mourning clothes, make those who attend them feel rather uncomfortable.  But you can go.  I think it will be very good for you and I really want you to be friendly with your relations even though your father found most of them very boring.

The particular relation who was a cousin had a very charming house by the sea in Essex.

As it was summer, Diana soon put away her dismal winter clothes and borrowed light dresses and far prettier ones from her cousins.

She then made herself as attractive as she could and enjoyed herself enormously although she often felt that it was wrong of her to do so when her mother was alone and unhappy.

But when she arrived back after being away for over a month she found, to her amazement, that her mother was entertaining William Walker almost every day.

She was almost astounded at what he had brought into the house.

There was a manservant who her father had said that he could not afford.

However Mr. Walker insisted that it was a mistake for her mother to be alone at night without a man to protect her if she should be burgled.

There were also flowers, fruit, chocolates and lots of wine that Diana had not seen before and she soon learnt that Mr. Walker never called at the house without bringing her mother a present.

At first she felt overcome with his generosity and kindness and then she recognised in a way which made her feel uneasy that he was actually courting her mother.

If Diana entered a room unexpectedly, he would be beside her mother holding her hand.

Mr. Walker hardly ever spoke without paying her some compliment so volubly that Diana thought it would have made anyone blush.

However, her mother seemed to enjoy the attention that she was receiving.

It was not really such a shock as it might have been when she told Diana that Mr. Walker wanted to marry her.

Of course it is far too soon to even think of such a thing, she added quickly, when your dear father has not yet been dead for a year. But the nine months for mourning are over and I think we might go to the town and buy me a new dress which is either a nice mauve or white.

It somehow never seemed to occur to Diana that her mother would resent the mourning that she was wearing for her father.

But when they bought several gowns which seemed to her very expensive and one of them was neither mauve nor white, Diana felt as if the future was going to be very different from what she had expected.

Almost twelve months to the day the Countess was married quietly to William Walker with no one else present except her daughter.

By then it was no surprise to Diana.

At the same time she could not help thinking how much her father had disliked Mr. Walker however kind he might have been in buying their large house.

*

In the months that followed when Diana was at home from the expensive school her stepfather had sent her to, she found that he had managed in his own way, which had made him rich, to change everything at her old home.

So much so that she found it hard to recognise, but equally it was difficult to find fault.

Not being sensible enough to trust his own taste he employed the most qualified advisers obtainable.

The house was repaired, redecorated and added to and the estate which had been in a dismal condition and in need of much money being spent on it, was returned to its heyday when it had belonged to the Head of the Family.

The many workmen, who had been employed when her father could only afford a few, changed it until it was difficult to recognise the very place she had lived in since she had been born.

Diana first believed he had done this to please her mother, but she then discovered that it was her mother’s social standing, being previously the Countess of Dinsdale, that made William Walker able to entertain the people he had always wanted to know and who were useful to him.

But they had ignored him because he was, as her father had said, ‘a very common man.’

Now, out of curiosity, or she liked to think because they loved her mother, their relatives came to stay.

A number of distinguished visitors appeared almost every weekend and there were many dinner parties which included the most influential people in the County.

Diana finished her education at a school at which only the elite of London were accepted.

Although it was her title which put her there, it was William Walker’s money that paid every penny that was spent on her education.

It was then when it was all planned that she should ‘come out’ with a ball given for her in London and one in the country that her mother died unexpectedly.

She had never been particularly strong and, when she was old enough, Diana learnt that the doctors had said it was very dangerous