The Karma of Love (Bantam Series No. 14)

THE KARMA OF LOVE

Barbara Cartland

Lady Orissa Fane fled England in haste
—
her only thought to escape her abusive stepmother
—and, enlisting her brother’
s aid, she booked passage for India under an assumed identity. Once there, she would join her uncle, Colonel Henry Hobart.

But on board ship was a very handsome and most unpleasant Army Major by the name of Myron Meredith who seemed intent on determining her true identity. Orissa feared she would be discovered and made to return home.

Yet the ocean voyage was to be only the first in a series of extraordinary adventures. When she arrived, India was in a state of turmoil. Her uncle and his forces were besieged on the frontier. And Orissa found that her fate mysteriously lay in the hands of that very same Major Meredith!

AUTHOR’S NOTE

On March 30th, 1885, the Russians attacked the Afghans in a border
foray called “The Battle of Murg
hab” and occupied the Panjdeh oasis. This brought Britain and Russia to the brink of war.

Some years later a holy man known as “The Mullah of Swat,” or more frequently “The Mad Mullah,” inflamed
the
whole frontier. Frenzied tribesmen thronged to him in their thousands. After great losses in killed and wounded, villages and crops destroyed, the Mullah fled and his followers surrendered.

CHAPTER ONE

1885

“You can get out and stay out!
I’
m sick to death of having you in the house looking down your nose at me and setting yourself up as if you were someone of importance. You’re a nobody! Do you hear me? Nobody! Let’s see how you fare without money and without me to look after you! If you freeze to death, all
the
better!
”

As she was speaking, the Countess of Lyndale, a large, fat, blowsy woman, thrust forward the girl she was holding by the arm so that she fell through the doorway onto the step outside.

The door behind her was slammed.

Lady Orissa Fane remained for a moment lying on the doorstep, conscious that her head was spinning from a blow her Step-mother had given her on her head, and that her arm was painful from the grip of fat, yet strong fingers.

She had been dragged from the Sitting-Room at the back of the house through the Hall and out through the front door.

It was impossible to fight against the Countess when she was drunk, as Orissa had discovered on previous occasions.

But never before had her Step-mother literally thrown her out of the house. Usually she had been able to escape upstairs to her own bed-room, and as the Countess in an inebriated state was unable to climb so many stairs, Orissa had been safe.

The row had started over nothing.

The Countess had always disliked her step-daughter and regularly accused Orissa of “looking down” on her.

Of humble origin and the widow of some petty official in the Indian Civil Service, she had managed with consummate cleverness to capture the Earl when he was returning to England bereaved and desperately lonely after the death of his wife.

The long voyage had given Mrs. Smithson an excellent opportunity to show the widower a warm enveloping sympathy which he had found in some degree comforting.

The Earl of Lyndale had always been a very reserved man and, apart from having been extremely happily married, had very little knowledge of women.

Mrs. Smithson, flamboyant, seductive and in those days good-looking, had managed to ingratiate herself to such an extent that three months after they arrived in England she had achieved the supreme triumph in her life when she became the Countess of Lyndale.

Orissa used to wonder whether, if she had been travelling with her father, she would have been able to prevent what proved to be a catastrophe not only for him but for herself.

But as she grew to know her Step-mother and realise that she had an iron-determination and an obstinacy that was unshakeable, she doubted if anyone, least of all herself, could have kept her father from being involved with such a woman.

“If only Papa could have stayed in the Regiment!” she had often said miserably to her brother.

Unfortunately his succession to the title while he was serving in India had made it imperative that the new Earl should return to England to make investigations concerning the state of the family fortunes.

It did not help him to discern on arrival there was practically nothing remaining!

His brother, whom he succeeded to the Earldom, had run through the small amount of money that had been left them by their father.

Mrs. Smithson found that while she might bear an honourable title, it did not really compensate for the pinched circumstances in which they had to exist, and the lack of servants.

Here however she could make use of her stepdaughter, and she proceeded to do so.

To Orissa her life became a nightmare from the moment her mother had died in India and she had been snatched away at ten years old from not only the only world she knew and loved, but also from her Ayah who had looked after her from babyhood.

She had been sent home to England ahead of her father because a Colonel’s wife who was leaving on an earlier ship had promised to take care of "the poor, motherless child.”

To Orissa, England seemed a cold, dark and miserable place in which she shivered and ached for the sunshine which in retrospect seemed part of her mother’s love.

At night in her cold little bed-room she would pretend she could hear the comforting noises of India, the chatter of sing-song voices, a baby crying, pariah dogs barking, the creak of the water-well.

“Mama ... Mama
...”
she would cry into her pillow.

It was her Step-mother who encouraged her father to drink away his troubles, having found in her previous married life it was a panacea for all ills.

Even when she was drunk the Countess seldom spoke of her first marriage, but over the years Orissa gained a very different picture from the one Mrs.

Smithson had presented so skilfully to the Earl when they had mingled their tears on board ship and talked sorrowfully of their joint bereavements.

It was excusable in the heat of India to find drink a solace, but in England it could destroy the health and character of those who, like the Earl and his new wife, drank constantly and continually.

It was Orissa who suffered most.

Not only was she in effect an unpaid servant in the tall, ugly house in which they lived in Belgravia, but she also had to endure the shame of seeing her father incapably drunk night after night and her Stepmother behaving like a virago.

No decent servant would stay in the house and the few friends the Earl had in England soon ceased to call.

Orissa found herself cut off from companions of her own age and even from contact with ordinary people.

It would have been a life almost of solitary confinement for the child if her brother, Viscount Dillingham, had not insisted that she should be educated.

He was with his Regiment in India, and he had returned home on leave to say in no uncertain terms that Orissa must either go to school or that a governess should be engaged for her.

Fortunately the idea of another woman in the house was more than the Countess could tolerate, and Orissa was therefore sent to a Seminary for Young Ladies not far from their home.

She felt of course that she was an outsider.

Having been brought up in India, she had no idea of what kind of things interested English girls, and the fact that she could never ask her friends to her home made it difficult for her to accept their hospitality.

She did however learn a great deal.

Her reports, which no-one read, often spoke of her as brilliant, especially in the subjects which she liked, such as History, Literature and Geography.

On going to school she also discovered that by
reading she could escape from the grumbling, bullying and what amounted to both mental and physical cruelty of her Step-mother.

There were no books at home. The Countess glanced through
The
Lady
and
The Gentlewoman,
and her father took
The Morning Post.
Otherwise no literature of any sort ever entered the house.

It took Orissa some time to discover that there was such a thing as a Lending Library, but it is doubtful if she could ever have persuaded her father, who by now was completely dominated by his wife, to pay the subscription.

However her Uncle, Colonel Henry Hobart, by chance gave her a
year’s
subscription as a Christmas present. Orissa’s effusive and almost overwhelming gratitude had moved him so much that he had renewed the membership year by year.

But even he had no idea that he had thrown his niece a life-line which kept her from sinking into the black depths of hopelessness.

What did not improve Orissa’s existence was the fact that, as she grew older, the Countess became jealous of her appearance.

She had always disliked the small fragile child with whom she had nothing in common. But that Orissa should become attractive to the point when people referred to her as “beautiful” was infuriating to a woman who was well aware that middle-age and too much drink had completely destroyed her own good looks.

Her cruelty to her step-daughter increased with the amount of gin she consumed.

It was then that all the hatred and resentment that seethed within her came to the surface, culminating, Orissa thought now, in this moment when her Stepmother had thrown her outside the front door.

She rose to her feet and shook her skirts free of the soft snow which lay on the steps to the house.

She was conscious as she did so that it was extremely cold, and the fact that she was wearing an
evening gown made her position more precarious than it might have been otherwise.

She looked behind her at the closed front door with its badly cleaned brass knocker and wondered what she should do.

To knock on the door would be useless.

The only person who would hear it would be her Step-mother, and in her present state of fury she would have no intention of opening it

By this time the two inadequate servants would have gone to bed on the top floor and their window faced the other way.

Even if they heard her calling, Orissa thought, it was unlikely they would come downstairs, fearful of upsetting the Countess when she was in one of her rages.

‘This means I have to find somewhere to go,’ Orissa told herself.

She tried to think, aware that her head seemed still to be ringing from the blows which the Countess always aimed at her when she was incensed.

It was at that moment that unexpectedly, because Eaton Place at night was usually very quiet, she saw a hackney-carriage stop two doors further up the road and a man alight from it.

He paid the cabman and walked up the steps to the house. The cabman transferred the money into his pocket, then tightening the reins whipped his tired horse into action.

The cab had actually to pass Orissa and impulsively she put up her hand.

“Cabby!”

The cabman drew his horse to a standstill.

When he looked down from his box-seat at Orissa, there was an expression in his face which she knew was only to be expected.

Ladies did not walk about the streets at eleven o’clock at night unaccompanied and in evening dress.

“Where d’you want to go?” the cabby asked
grudgingly, and Orissa knew he was in two minds whether or not to take her as a fare.

“I should be very grateful,” she said,
“
if you would be kind enough to convey me to twenty-four Queen Anne Street. It is behind Wellington Barracks.”

Her quiet, cultured voice seemed to re-assure the cabman that she was not the type of woman he had first supposed, and before he could get down from his box, Orissa pulled the cab door open and climbed in.

She sat down on the black leather-covered seat thankful for the moment to be out of the cold and conscious that she was already shivering.

Some of her discomfort was obviously due to her Step-mother's behaviour and the violence with which she had been handled.

She gave a deep sigh and sat back.

Charles would not be pleased to see her but there was really no-one else to whom she could turn at this time of night. So she must go to him and ask his help.

Her brother had arrived home from India but a week earlier and she had only seen him once.

He had in fact been so busy that she had not had time to tell him how desperate things had become in the house at Eaton Place or how intolerable was her existence.

Viscount Dillingham had returned to England, not on leave but because he was to be sent to join the British Expeditionary Force which, having landed in Egypt in September, was making unaccountably slow progress up the Nile to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum.

“It is a great opportunity!” Charles had said to his sister, “I am looking forward to it tremendously.”

“But it will be dangerous!” Orissa protested.

“All war is dangerous,” he answered with a smile, “but it will be a change from India and a real war is something I have longed to take part in.”

“Oh, Charles, please take care of yourself,” Orissa begged. “If anything should happen to you I would have ... no-one left.”

Charles had hugged her. Orissa had been waiting only until she saw him again before she told him her troubles.

It had been decided that the officers who were to reinforce Lord Wolseley
’
s army which had barely reached the Sudan were to undergo a special intensive course of instruction on the difficulties they had to face.

As Wellington Barracks could not accommodate them all, the War Office had found them accommodation nearby in Queen Anne Street.

“They are bachelor apartments,” Orissa thought to herself now. “Perhaps I shall not be allowed in.”

For a moment she wondered desperately what in that event she should do. Then she realised that at least she would be able to send Charles a message, and provided he was at his lodgings and not out at a party he would be able to help her.

It seemed to her that
the
cabman took a long time to reach Queen Anne Street, and when they at last arrived there she remembered thankfully that she had a
little
money with her.

One of
the
new maids engaged by her Step-mother was light-fingered. She was young, only a girl of sixteen, and she did not take jewellery or clothing, but any coins, whatever their value, left in a drawer or on a dressing-table vanished immediately.

Orissa, who had no money of her own to spend, and was only able to keep herself clothed by extracting a few pounds from her father at irregular intervals when he was in a good mood, could not afford to lose even a few pennies through petty pilfering.

She had therefore taken to carrying her purse about with her even when she went down to dinner. She drew it now from the pocket of her red dress and found with relief that she would have enough to pay the cab.