Desire of the Heart E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 401

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Having lost her parents in a tragic carriage accident, beautiful but innocent young Cornelia Bedlington, living in Ireland, has inherited an enormous fortune and her Uncle George decides that she needs a chaperone for the coming Social Season in London. Who better than her glamorous Aunt Lily who knows everyone smart! Unbeknown to George or Cornelia, though, Lily is in the throes of a love affair with the startlingly handsome Drogo, the Duke of Roehampton, who is struggling financially and she comes up with a Machiavellian deceit designed to make Drogo rich and save Lily the trouble of chaperoning Cornelia. Her suggestion is that Drogo marries Cornelia while secretly continuing his liaison with Lily! When this fascinating stranger, the Duke, suddenly proposes marriage, Cornelia is swept off her feet. And they are married in the most glamorous Wedding of the Season attended by the King and Queen. But just as love for the Duke blossoms in her heart, she is heartbroken to overhear her fiancé plotting their future together with Lily and then realises the horrible truth. Soon, though, amid the heady glamour of gay and exotic Paris, she enlists the help of a sophisticated Socialite, Renée de Valmé, in a desperate and cunning plan of her own to ensnare the dashing Duke's heart for herself alone!

Leseprobe

CHAPTER ONE ~ 1903

“Drogo! Thank God you have come!”

Lady Bedlington waited until the butler had closed the door and so she was now certain that she could not be overheard before she spoke, but even so, her voice was low, hardly above a whisper.

Yet there was no mistaking the dramatic intensity of it and the smile on the lips of the man watching her from the other end of the room faded.

It was perhaps one of the few occasions when Lily Bedlington was not thinking about her appearance and yet she had never looked more beautiful.

Suffering gave her face an almost spiritual loveliness and her blue eyes, that were often surprisingly vacant, were dark now with the violence of her feelings.

“What has happened?”

The question was quick and worried, yet somehow the Duke of Roehampton’s voice seemed to ease some of her tension and Lily gave a sigh and held out both her hands to him.

“Oh, Drogo! Drogo!” she cried. “I knew you would come as soon as you received my note.”

He took her hands in his and raised them to his lips.

She watched his face as he did so, the clear aristocratic features, the deep-set grey eyes beneath straight uncompromising eyebrows, the square chin and firm rather obstinate mouth. A handsome face, a face that had made so many women’s hearts beat more quickly when they looked at him, a face that had ensnared and captivated Lily Bedlington as she had never thought it possible to be ensnared or captivated by any man.

His lips were warm and insistent. Now he turned her hands over in his and kissed the soft palms lingeringly and passionately.

Lily Bedlington felt herself quiver. For a few moments she closed her eyes. Never in her whole life had she known such ecstasy, such a wild glory of love as with this young man, ten years younger than she was, had brought her.

Lily had been acclaimed as a beauty almost since she was a child. There had never been a time when she had not been pursued and flattered, admired and worshipped by every man she came into contact with. Her beauty had remained unrivalled and yet it seemed to her now that it had been an unawakened beauty, a beauty that must still wait for the kiss of a Prince Charming before it came to the zenith of perfection.

And then Drogo had fallen in love with her! She had known him, of course, almost since he was born, for his mother was a good close friend of hers. He had always been an attractive little boy, but she had not thought of him as a man until he came back from a world tour about six months before and they had met as if for the first time.

Then, Lily thought, she had learned what love really meant.

She opened her eyes and, taking one of hand from his, laid it against Drogo’s cheek. He still retained the other one and now he was kissing her wrist and the blue veins leading down to it, pushing back the frill of her sleeve to find the dimpled bend of her arm.

His eyes were raised to Lily’s as he did so, a daring invitation in them that she knew only too well.

Abruptly, with a little cry, she turned away from him.

“Don’t look at me like that, Drogo,” she commanded. “You don’t understand.”

With her back to him she drew a tiny lace-edged handkerchief from her belt and applied it to the corner of her eyes.

“Darling, tell me what this is all about,” Drogo asked her.

He stood watching her and the sun, coming through the window that overlooked Hyde Park, shone on her bent head, glinting on her skilfully arranged curls. When it was down, her hair fell almost to her knees and the Duke remembered how often he had buried his face in the silken fragrance of it.

No one could be more beautiful, he thought, watching Lily. The pink and white of her skin, the gold of her hair and the blue of her eyes were all essentially English.

“An English rose” was how she was described so often that it had become banal and yet it was true and there was something essentially English as well in the lovely flowing lines of her body. Her waist was tiny and she was inordinately proud of it, but there was grace and dignity as well as beauty in every movement she made and in every gesture.

“What is worrying you?” the Duke questioned impatiently.

Lily turned towards him.

“George has found out!” she whispered faintly and, as she spoke those fatal words, her lips trembled and two large tears ran down her cheeks.

The sight was too much for the Duke’s self-control. In two steps he was at her side and had taken her in his arms. For a moment he held her closely and in return she clung to him, the strength and urgency a comfort beyond words.

“Don’t cry, darling, I cannot bear it,” he muttered but, when his mouth sought hers, she pushed him from her.

“No, no, Drogo! You have to listen. It is serious, don’t you understand it? George has been very angry. He has forbidden us to see each other again.”

“But that is ridiculous and absurd,” the Duke asserted.

“Yes, yes, I know. I argued with him and I pleaded. I said everything I could think of, but it was hopeless. Someone saw us in Kew Gardens just last week. They told George and he remembered that, when he had asked me where I had been that day, I told him I had been at the dressmakers. I believe he has been watching us for some time and this has merely confirmed all that he has suspected. Drogo, what are we to do?”

In answer the Duke put his arms around her shoulders.

“Come away with me now,” he urged. “We can go abroad. George will divorce you and we can be married.”

“Are you crazy? How could I do such a thing? How could I endure the scandal and the horror of it? Of being cut by my friends and of not being able to go to Court? Oh, no, Drogo, you know such an idea is impossible.”

“But I cannot give you up – I will not!”

There was something desperate in the Duke’s tone now and, miserable though she was, Lily Bedlington felt a complacent sense of satisfaction. Yes, he loved her, loved her as much as she loved him, if not more, this handsome, elegant, eligible young man, whom all the ambitious mothers in London were besieging on behalf of their daughters. They had all tried to catch him, but he was hers, bound to her by a love stronger and more passionate than anything those old harridans had ever imagined in their wildest dreams.

“We have been so happy,” Lily moaned.

“How can I lose you now?” the Duke asked.

She freed herself from his arms and walked across to the fireplace.

“There is nothing we can do about it,” she said in a voice of despair. “Nothing! After George had spoken to me, I lay all night trying to think of a way out but there is not one.”

“Come away with me!”

The words were spoken urgently and roughly, yet even as he said them the Duke knew how hopeless it all was. Lily was not the stuff that heroines were made of. She would never stand being ostracised and he knew as well as she did that the Society they both belonged to would forgive an erring man but never an erring woman.

Even when she was his Duchess, doors would still be shut to her, faces would be turned away and voices would lash at her. It would be an unendurable crucifixion for someone who had all her life belonged to the most exclusive and elite Social set.

For perhaps the first time the Duke realised that love definitely took second place to being persona grata at Court and that love such as he felt for Lily and she for him would never stand up to the cold blast of Society disapproval.

For a moment he was overwhelmed by a bitterness that made him angry and indignant. Spoiled all his life, he was used to being denied nothing he wanted and at this moment he wanted Lily more than he had wanted anything else in the world. His lips were suddenly set in the hard, obstinate line that those who knew him well would have recognised as a sign of aggressive determination.

“I will not give you up!”

Lily put her fingers to her white temples.

“George is adamant. He talked of taking me away to the country and then he decided that was not convenient because I have to chaperone his niece. Yes, I am to be punished for our happiness. George will see to that.”

She threw out her arms with a sudden theatrical gesture and the bitterness in her voice deepened as she exclaimed,

“Think of it – a chaperone at thirty-four!”

Lily was actually thirty-eight as they knew, it but this was not a moment for argument.

“I didn’t know George had a niece,” the Duke said.

“I knew of it, but I had never dreamt of her coming here,” Lily replied. “She is Bertie’s daughter. You remember Bertie, George’s younger brother? Or perhaps you don’t. You are too young. He was always a tiresome irresponsible creature although he had great charm. He was an inveterate gambler and no one could stop him. George paid up time and time again until eventually he was sent off to Ireland to breed horses.”

He paused for moment before continuing,

“He married Edith Withington-Blythe, her father was the Marquis of Langholme. Her family were furious, but she ran away with him and there was nothing they could do about it. I never saw either of them after they left England. About two years ago they were both killed in a carriage accident. George went over to the funeral and he told me that there was a child and he had arranged for her to stay on with Edith’s cousin who had lived with them as a sort of housekeeper.”

“And now I suppose the cousin has died,” the Duke said.

He was listening to Lily’s story only out of politeness. It seemed more important to him to watch her face, to note the gestures of her hands and the movement of her head. Soon all these things would be taken from him, he would only be able to see her at a distance in her box at the Opera, moving up the stairs at Londonderry House and curtseying at Buckingham Palace.

She would be aloof and dignified, outwardly as cool and unemotional as her name and he only would know how she could be awakened to a passion as fiery and tumultuous as his own.

But now George Bedlington stood between them, with a drawn sword in his hand.

“Yes, the cousin has died,” Lily went on. “And what do you think? It now appears that the girl has been left a fortune, an enormous incredible fortune. No one knew anything about it, but she had an American Godmother, a friend of Edith’s. It appears that, when the child was born, this American woman put aside for her some shares in an oil well and then forgot all about them. It is one of those wells that has been exploited these past few years and the girl has been informed by lawyers that she is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“Good Heavens! What an extraordinary story!”

The Duke’s attention was arrested now in spite of himself.

“It is fantastic, isn’t it? Of course George should have been informed about this a year ago, but the old cousin was ill and did not bother and only now she is dead has it all come to light. George has arranged for the girl to come to England and I am to chaperone her for what is left of the Season.”

“You will be in London, we can see each other, we must!”

There was a sudden light in the Duke’s eyes and a lightness in his voice.

“It’s no use, Drogo. We dare not meet after today. George said I might see you once to tell you what he had decided and then it must be goodbye. He doesn’t want any scandal of course. He agreed that we should meet in the ordinary way at other people’s houses and that you should be invited here on formal occasions but, if he hears that we have met at other times, alone or in secret, he will insist on my retiring to the country. I just could not bear it, I could not! I hate the country. You know it bores me. To sit in Bedlington Castle, year in and year out, with only a lot of ghastly fox-hunting Squires to talk to would drive me insane.”

“But I cannot let you go like this!”

“You have to. There is nothing else for it,” Lily replied. “We will see each other across crowded rooms. You will be dancing with the debutantes while I am sitting up on the dais, a Dowager! Oh, Drogo!”

It was a cry of utter desolation and now blindly Lily put out her arms toward him. For some minutes they clung together like children lost in the dark and then her lips were turned to his and his arms tightened around her. His kiss grew fiercer, more possessive and after a moment Lily’s arms went around his neck.

“I love you! Oh, God, how I love you!”

The Duke’s voice was hoarse as he looked down at her. Her lips, rosy from the violence of his kisses, were parted a little and her breath was coming quickly. Her eyes were half-closed, dark lashes sweeping against her slightly flushed cheeks.

“I won’t give you up, I won’t!” he cried. “I am going to take you away with me now at once.”

For a moment, with her golden head resting against his shoulder, Lily let herself believe that it was possible. She thought of the lean athletic beauty of his body, of his hands reaching out towards her and of his mouth hungry for hers.

She thought of the times that they had been together, weekends in country house parties, secret meetings in London at Kew Gardens, the National Gallery, the British Museum and when George was away!

Her breath quickened as she remembered creeping up the stairs, the sleeping darkness of the house, the wild terror of a creaking board, the fright of a squeaking door! Then Drogo’s arms around her and the mad irresistible rapture of her surrender to his compelling strength.

She would go away with him and they would be together for ever! Then a vision of them wandering exiled and restless around the world, avoiding people, afraid of making new acquaintances, haunted always by the scandal in their past, dashed her elation from her as if she had been douched with cold water.

Lily gave an audible sigh and moved away from the Duke’s arms. She turned to look at herself in the heavy gilt mirror standing over the mantelpiece and gave a little exclamation of horror at the damage that had been wrought to her elaborate coiffure.

She raised her arms to her hair, pinning and patting the curls into place and was aware as she did so how the gesture revealed the exquisite curves of her bust, the tininess of her waist and the lovely flowing lines of her hips.

She loved Drogo, she thought to herself, loved him with all her heart, more than she had ever loved anyone before, but not enough to hide her beauty under a shadow, to live secretly in a hole-and-corner way and to know that everyone was talking about her not in admiration but with bated breath because of her impropriety.

Then, as she slipped a curl into place, an idea came to her that made her swing round suddenly to face the Duke as he stood behind her, sulky and disconsolate.

“Drogo, I have thought of something!”

“What?”

The monosyllable was abrupt, almost disinterested. The Duke was realising that he had failed, that Lily was lost to him and that nothing he could say or do could make her his.

“I have thought of something that will enable us to see each other and to be together as we have never been before.”

“What is it?”

Drogo did not sound hopeful. He knew now that Lily would never come away with him, no matter how much he pleaded. He had to face the truth that the Social world was more important to her than her love for him.

It was a blow to his self-esteem, even while at the back of his brain he had not expected her to make any other decision.

“I cannot imagine why I did not think of it before!” Lily exclaimed, her voice light and suddenly gay. “It is the obvious solution for both of us. You must marry this girl!”

“Marry! Who?”

“George’s niece, of course. The child who is coming here today.”

“Are you mad?”

“Drogo, don’t be dense! She is a millionairess. Think of it! Millions of dollars for you to spend on doing up Cotillion. You are always telling me how you cannot afford to keep the place as your grandfather did. Well, here is the chance. And if you marry her at once, I need not chaperone her or sit among the Dowagers or do any of the deadly horrible things George will make me do because he is angry with me.”

“It’s a crazy idea. You cannot be serious!”

The Duke spoke vehemently, but Lily was smiling.

“Darling Drogo, be sensible, it will solve everything. You have to marry sometime, your mother was talking about it only last week and saying that the tenants expect it of you. You have to have an heir and you will be twenty-nine next year. It’s time you did marry.”

“But I don’t want to marry unless I can marry you.”

“I know, darling. And I want to marry you more than anything else in the world, but George is as strong as a horse and he is likely to live until he is eighty. All the Bedlingtons do, there is no killing them off! But if you cannot marry me, why not the next best thing, George’s niece? Then you can come here as often as you like and George will not be able to say a word. How could he? We can be together and George cannot possibly object when you are married to his niece.”

“I am not going to marry George’s niece or anyone else,” the Duke stipulated positively.

Lily gave a little cry, flung herself down on the sofa and put her hands to her eyes.

“So you want us to part and never see each other again! How can you be so cruel and so unkind after all we have meant to each other. I love you, Drogo.”

“And I love you, you know that.”

He towered over her and clasped her wrists with a sudden show of strength that made her sway back against the cushions, pliant and yielding.

“Damn it, you drive me mad!”

“Don’t swear, darling. If only you will be sensible, we are saved! Saved!”

“I have told you already, I am not going to marry some idiotic girl I have never seen.”

The Duke spoke the words, but somehow they lacked conviction. He was looking down into Lily’s upturned face, her lips, soft and inviting, were raised to his, her eyes were half-closed and he knew that if he kissed her now he would feel a wild rapture rising within them both, uniting them with a flaming pulsating passion that would thrill them until everything else was forgotten.

“I will not do it”

“Then you will say ‘goodbye’?”

He knew there was no alternative for George, though complacent in some ways, was not a man to be weak where the honour of his family name was concerned. He had learned not to be jealous of Lily as a woman, but he was exceedingly sensitive of his name and position.

Fools that they were to think for one moment that they could keep this mad infatuation secret. They were both too well known and too good-looking to escape being seen.

“Darling, I cannot lose you.” Lily whispered the words beneath her breath but Drogo heard them.

He hesitated for a moment longer.

But the sight of her lips, parted and quivering, was too much for him. With a sound that was a half a groan, he bent forward and crushed her mouth beneath his.

As she surrendered herself to him, he felt a flame sear its way through his body and knew, as she trembled against him, that Lily felt it as well.

It was ecstasy, it was agony and the price he paid for it was his freedom, but somehow at this moment he did not care.

*

When the Duke had left the house, Lily slipped upstairs to her bedroom to tidy her hair before George returned with his niece.

As she stared at herself in the white-framed mirror over her dressing table, she noted with concern that a sleepless night had left her with dark lines under her eyes and the many emotions she had experienced that afternoon had undoubtedly taken their toll of her looks.

Nevertheless she thought with elation that she had had her own way and for the moment nothing else mattered. There would be other advantages too, for with the Duke married to George’s niece, they would be drawn even closer than ever into that exclusive Social set of which the Duke’s mother Emily Roehampton, was undoubtedly the leader.

There was only one rule in that particular clique, as Lily knew only too well. It was the only commandment they all obeyed, “thou shalt not de found out’. There were old-fashioned hostesses who regarded the Roehampton set askance, but Emily Roehampton was far too important, too powerful a personage to care what was said about her and the knowledge that the new King, Edward VII, was a frequent guest at Cotillion was enough to silence all but the most discordant voices.

There was always the chance, of course, that Emily Roehampton would stop her son’s marriage with an unknown girl whose upbringing, to say the least of it, was problematical.

But she would be very pleased about the money, Lily thought shrewdly. No one in the Roehampton set ever had enough money to go round and, although Drogo was undoubtedly wealthy, Cotillion was a monster so insatiable in its demands that it would have proved a drain on anyone’s fortune however enormous.

When she thought of the huge house, spreading over fourteen acres of ground with its Parks and gardens, its lakes and terraces, its farms and woodlands, Lily realised that Emily Roehampton would welcome a rich daughter-in-law and that wealth would cover a multitude of other discrepancies.

George never exaggerated and therefore, when he said that his niece was worth millions of good American dollars, he undoubtedly spoke the truth. There had as well, been an awed kind of note in his voice that had not escaped Lily’s notice and she was shrewd enough to realise that the news of this unexpected wealth had in part drawn George’s attention from her own misdemeanours so that he had not been as harsh with her as he might have been had he had nothing else on his mind at the time.

Perhaps, Lily thought philosophically, everything would work out for the best. It was obvious that Drogo would have to get married some time, if only to provide an heir to the Dukedom and she would have hated to see him marry one of the young girls who were flaunted before him every Season. It would have been such a scoop for an ambitious Mama, apart from the fact that she would have been wildly jealous of Drogo’s choice.

She could not help hoping, as she finished tidying herself, that George’s niece would not prove too attractive. It would be hard to surrender Drogo to a wife, whatever she was like, but almost intolerable if she was pretty.

And yet it was impossible for anyone to be as lovely as she was herself, Lily thought complacently. At thirty-eight she was still the most supremely beautiful woman in the whole of London Society. What was more many people considered her the most beautiful woman in all England and it was indisputable that a photograph of her in a shop window drew as large a crowd as those of the professional beauties.

Lily gave a sigh. One day, she supposed, it would pass but at this moment it was very pleasant to be a famous beauty and to know that she was admired wherever she went and was loved too.

Her hands went suddenly to her heart as she thought of Drogo, so tall, so handsome and almost as beautiful in his way as she was in hers.

What a perfect couple they made! If only she had met him when she was eighteen, she thought. Then she remembered that he had been eight at the time, playing with soldiers in the nursery at Cotillion while she had been downstairs, a member of Emily’s gay and frivolous house parties.

She experienced the stabbing pang of anguish that always came to her when she thought of her real age. Thirty-eight! In another two years she would be forty.

‘I am getting old.’

She felt herself shiver with sudden cold and then she threw up her golden head with an air of defiance.

She was not old yet and she could still drive men crazy with love of her. Because he loved her, Drogo was prepared to marry a girl he had never seen and because he loved her, she would not have to be a Dowager on the dais.

She heard a bell ring and a door open downstairs. George must have returned. Lily gave a last look at herself and turned to the door. She went down the stairs slowly, the froufrou of her silk petticoats rustling as she moved.

The servants were bringing in the luggage. The door of the library was open and she knew that George would be waiting for her in there and with him, his niece.

She walked quickly across the marble hall and into the library.

George was standing with his back to the fireplace and beside him was a girl.

For a minute Lily could only see an old-fashioned grey travelling coat and an ugly green felt hat trimmed with a feather but, as George spoke, the girl turned towards the door and Lily could see her face.

Then she laughed, a little light laugh of relief and at the same time of surprise, for the girl was wearing darkened glasses and there was nothing about her that was in the very least distinguished let alone attractive.

CHAPTER TWO

When Cornelia learned that she must travel to England, she had felt that the end of the world had come.

At first she tried to argue, to protest and to refuse and then, when she realised that nothing was to be gained by defying the Solicitor, she went in search of Jimmy.

She found him where she expected he would be, cleaning out the stables and whistling between his teeth. He was grey-haired, ugly as sin and there was not a bone in his body that had not been broken at some time or another by the horses he served.

Cornelia loved him.

“They are sending me away, Jimmy,” she said in a low voice and he knew by one look at her white face just what she was suffering.

“I was expecting it, mavourneen. You can’t stay here now Miss Withington, God rest her soul, has gone to Heaven.”

“Why not?” Cornelia asked passionately. This is my home, this is where I belong. These grand relations of Papa’s have never wanted me before, why should they want me now?”

“You know the answer to that as well as I do meself,” Jimmy replied.

“Of course I do,” Cornelia retorted scornfully. “It’s my money – money I did not want and that came a year too late to be of any use.”

Jimmy sighed.

He had heard this many times and the expression on his face made Cornelia recall how bitterly she had cried when she had first learned of the great fortune that her Godmother in America had left her.

It seemed so senseless and so pointless for her to be rich when she wanted nothing that Rosaril could not give her. She remembered how her father had cried out against his poverty and how her mother had yearned for pretty dresses. And too late, a year after they were both dead, money poured in on her when she wanted nothing.

It was a long time before she was able to laugh at the way Jimmy had taken the news of her fortune. She told him about it in a deliberately unemotional voice that denied the tears she had shed but a few hours earlier.

“I am rich, Jimmy,” she had said. “My Godmother has died in America and has left me a great fortune in oil shares. It comes to thousands of pounds in English money.”

“Begorra and what will you be doin’ with all that gold?” Jimmy asked.

Cornelia shrugged her shoulders.

“I have not the slightest idea.”

“Maybe we’ll be takin’ yet another peep at that dainty little lady that Captain Fitzpatrick was showin’ us only last Wednesday,” Jimmy suggested slyly.

In the end they paid twenty-five pounds for the mare after days of haggling and Jimmy had asked for nothing else.

Cousin Aline too had taken the news of Cornelia’s inheritance characteristically.

“It’s a great responsibility, dear child,” she said gently, “and you must pray for God’s guidance for you will find such responsibility hard to carry on your own shoulders.”

“I don’t want the money or the responsibility,” Cornelia said sulkily.

It was a week later that Cousin Aline had suggested that, if they could afford to employ Mrs. O’Hagan four mornings a week instead of two, it would be a great help.

For herself Cornelia had wanted nothing. In fact she had done her best to forget that the money was there. Letters came to her from the Bank in Dublin, but these she left unanswered on the untidy desk that had once been her father’s.

But it was good to know that she did not have to worry about the tradesmen’s accounts and that their bills could be paid as soon as they were presented. That in itself was the only benefit her fortune brought her and it made no difference in her life until with Cousin Aline’s death everything was changed.

Cornelia had never dreamt that the death of the elderly woman, who had lived at Rosaril ever since she could remember, was going to mean a revolution as far as she was concerned.

She had never imagined that old Mr. Musgrave, who came down from Dublin for the funeral, would write to her uncle, Lord Bedlington, in London to tell him that his niece was now living alone and unchaperoned in the middle of Ireland and that something should be done about it.

It was only when Mr. Musgrave arrived with Lord Bedlington’s instructions to bring her over to England as if she was a parcel that she realised what was happening to her and railed at him for interfering.

“It was my duty, Miss Bedlington,” Mr. Musgrave said quietly. “You are a young lady of importance. And if you will forgive my saying so, I have thought for a long time that you should take your place in the Social world that you belong to.”

“I belong here,” she cried and knew, even while she said it, that it was no longer true.

“You’ve grown up and we’ve been after forgettin’ it,” Jimmy said when she told him in the stables. “You were eighteen six months ago and though it seems only yesterday that you were so small I had to lift you up onto old Sergeant’s back and hold you there for fear you should fall off, time has passed by right enough. You’re a young lady, mavourneen, and ’tis ‘miss’ I should be callin’ you and touchin’ me hat.”

“And if you ever do so I shall hit you!” Cornelia cried. “Oh, Jimmy! Jimmy! Why must I go away? I love Rosaril. It is a part of me – I cannot live without you and the horses and the dogs and the rain blowing from the hills and the clouds driving in from the Atlantic.”

Tears were running down her cheeks as she spoke and she saw Jimmy turn away from her because there were tears in his eyes too.

From then on everything was a nightmare.

More than once she thought of running away and hiding herself in the hills and refusing to go back. But she knew that if she did they would easily punish her by selling the horses or refusing to pay Jimmy.

It would not be the first time he had gone without his wages, but she could not let him suffer now.

So she left him in charge and drove off with Mr. Musgrave to the Station with her eyes so blinded with misery that the whole world seemed grey and utterly desolate.

She was indeed as helpless as a child those last few days at Rosaril. It was Jimmy who thought of everything even of her clothes.

“You won’t be goin’ to London in breeches, mavourneen?” he asked.

For the first time in her life Cornelia had to worry about her looks. She had always worn breeches like a boy at Rosaril, for how else could one school horses? It had been impossible to dress as a girl while she worked with her father and Jimmy and her dark hair had hung down her back in a long plait.

There were a few neighbours and those were mostly hunting and racing men like her father, men who came to talk horses and who paid little attention to his leggy little daughter.

But her mother had always looked lovely, even when she helped with the housework or made the rough unkempt garden bloom with a profusion of colour and fragrance.

Sometimes when Papa had made money at the races, he would come home shouting as excitedly as a schoolboy. Then her mother would run up the stairs and pack her prettiest and best-preserved clothes in a trunk and they would go off to Dublin for a week’s holiday.

Cornelia never went with them, but she would hear glowing accounts of what they had done there, of the dancing and theatres, of the restaurants bright with lights and her mother would return with a new smart dress and a new hat covered with flowers and feathers.

She would show them to Cornelia, Cousin Aline and Jimmy and when they had admired and exclaimed about them, they would be put away in a cupboard to grow old-fashioned like the rest of the clothes there and be forgotten until another stroke of fortune came their way.

It was lucky that Cornelia could wear her mother’s clothes. They fitted her well enough, but long before she reached England she realised how out of date they were.

She was, however, so really miserable and so angry at having to leave Rosaril that her appearance was the very least of her problems.

The night before her journey had brought her the realisation that she was both afraid and shy of going out into the world that she knew nothing about. Here amongst her animals she was a Queen in her own right. The colts would come when she called them, the mares waited for her at the gate into the paddock and Jimmy loved her as much as she loved him.

She knew that by the way a smile would crack his weather-beaten wrinkled face as she came into the stable yard, by the light in his eyes and the sudden softness in his voice when he spoke to her, much the same as he used to a mare who was having a difficult foaling or to a colt that had pneumonia.

Yes, Jimmy loved her. And he was the only sure person left in her life. With Papa and Mamma dead and Cousin Aline gone too, Jimmy and Rosaril were all she had in the world. But now they were being taken away from her.

There was only one gleam of sunshine among the general darkness and that was the fact that Cornelia had learned from her lawyer that when she was twenty-one she would be her own Mistress.

Three years must pass and when those three years were over she could come home. The more she thought of her father’s relations, the more she hated them. She had heard him speak often enough of what he considered the high-handed way they had treated him and Cornelia knew too that few of her mother’s family had spoken to her since she ran away with a man they thought a ne’er-do-well.

“Ever since she had been old enough to know, Cornelia had heard her parents laugh at the smug respectability of Papa’s elder brother. She thought of him as being ridiculous and the short glimpse she had of her uncle when two years earlier he had come to the funeral of her father and mother had not made her change her opinion.

Stout and red-faced and pompous, Lord Bedlington had found little to say to his white-faced skinny-looking niece. He had thought that she was rather peculiarly dressed and this was due to the fact that she was wearing one of Cousin Aline’s dresses, which was too big in the waist and far too short for her.

She had been glad to see the shabby hired carriage carry her uncle away to the Station. She had never expected to see or hear from him again, yet now he was able to alter her whole life because, as Mr. Musgrave had informed her, he was her legal Guardian.

“I hate my English relations,” she said passionately to Jimmy.

“Well, don’t you be after sayin’ so aloud, mavourneen. Keep a civil tongue in your head. It does no good to be fightin’ with folks, especially when they are of your own flesh and blood.”

“No, you are right, Jimmy. I will not offend them till the day I am twenty-one and then I will tell them what I think of them and come straight back here.”

“It’ll be no use at all you sayin’ sweet things with your lips and then damnin’ ’em to the Devil with your eyes,” Jimmy cautioned.

Cornelia had laughed at that but she did know what he meant and, when she was getting ready to go with Mr. Musgrave to England, she remembered his words and stared at herself in a looking glass.

Her hair, despite innumerable pins, was already beginning to straggle down untidily at the back of her neck and she had a sudden longing to drag her hat from her head, to skip out of the enveloping petticoats and high-necked boned dress and to put on her riding breeches and be comfortable again.

All this dressing up and this feeling of being suffocated was the result of her relations having demanded her presence, because they were interested not in her but in her money.

“I loathe them!”

She said the words out loud and saw the sudden flash of her eyes reflected back to her. Jimmy’s words seemed to echo in her mind,

“Don’t you go damnin’ ’em with your eyes.”

Cornelia pulled open the drawer of the dressing table. At the back of it was a pair of spectacles with darkened lenses she had been forced to wear after she had been thrown from her horse out hunting and had bruised one eye so badly that she could not bear the light on it.

She slipped them on. The spectacles hid her eyes and at the same time gave her a sense of being armoured and protected against the world.

When she went downstairs, Mr. Musgrave exclaimed at her appearance, but when she told him her eyes were aching, she knew that he thought she was trying to hide her tears.

Let him think what he wished. The spectacles were a good protection and so she would wear them.

When they arrived at Euston Station in London, Lord Bedlington was waiting for them.

Behind her spectacles Cornelia could now study him as they drove to Park Lane, having thanked Mr. Musgrave for his services and dismissed him.

Lord Bedlington made an effort to be pleasant to his orphan niece,

“Your aunt will introduce you to young people of your own age,” he said. “There are plenty of balls that you will be invited to just as soon as it is known that you have arrived in London. You will enjoy yourself, my dear.”

“Thank you, Uncle George.”

She was resolved to say as little as possible in case she should say something wrong.

“You can dance, I suppose?” her uncle asked.

“A little,” Cornelia admitted.

She did not add that her only partner had been her father while her mother had played for them on the drawing room piano that was never tuned.

“It will be very easy to hire a teacher,” Lord Bedlington said. “There are perhaps many things you will want to learn now that you are coming out in Society. You must not hesitate to ask for anything you want.”

“Mr. Musgrave tells me that you wish me to live with you until I am of age.”

That is right,” Lord Bedlington agreed. “It is what your father and mother would have wished, I am sure of that, especially now that you have a small fortune behind you.”

Cornelia felt her lips twitch in a sarcastic smile. So that was what her uncle called small, she thought, those thousands of pounds pouring in to her account every quarter.

The smart brougham that they were travelling in was proceeding at a good pace towards the West End.

“I hope you will enjoy yourself,” Lord Bedlington was saying, “you have had a sad life, my dear, losing your father and mother and now your cousin.”

“I was very happy at Rosaril. I suppose it would not be possible for me to live there?”

“By yourself? Of course not. I could not hear of it,” her uncle responded sharply.

“I can go back when I am twenty-one.”

“If you wish, but long before that you will be married.”

“Married?” Cornelia uttered the word in surprise.

Then she shook her head.

“But of course,” Lord Bedlington said jovially. “All the young ladies should get married sooner or later. But it will be time enough to think of that after you have settled down. You will find London very gay and your aunt will introduce you to all the right people.”

“Thank you.”

Cornelia wondered what he would think if she spoke her thoughts aloud and retorted that she did not want to meet the “right people”. She only wanted Jimmy and the men like him who could talk about horses. Yet how could she say so? It was going to be difficult from now on to speak frankly and openly as she had always done since she was a child.

In London she would be only a girl who had just left the schoolroom, who should be respectful to her elders and who should be grateful for any kindnesses shown to her, whose main interest should be to attract young men so that among them she could find a husband.

No, there was nothing she could say, she could only feel herself hating everything and everybody. She hated her uncle, who was a pompous bore just as her father had described him, she hated her aunt whom she had not yet seen, she hated the brougham with its soft padded seats and elegant gaberdine rug, the coachman on the box in his crested top hat and the liveried footman beside him who had sprung up so agilely after he had closed the door.

It was all hatefully rich and luxurious, it was part of a world she did not understand and that instinctively she shrank from.

Her uncle cleared his throat and spoke after a long silence,

“We are passing through Grosvenor Square now, my dear. You will see that the houses are finely built.”

“Yes, I see,” Cornelia replied.

Again there was silence, broken only by the jingle of the harness and the horses’ hoofs.

“Upper Grosvenor Street” her uncle murmured. “In a moment we come to Park Lane.”

There was a congestion in the traffic ahead of them and the brougham came almost to a standstill while some carriages turned out of the Park.

Cornelia could see their occupants. The women were all resplendent with feathered boas and wide hats trimmed with flowers and carried gracefully decorated sunshades.

‘I must look ridiculous beside them,’ Cornelia thought to herself with a sinking heart.

The brougham was moving slowly forward again.

Suddenly she heard her uncle mutter a smothered oath beneath his breath and then stare intently out of the window.

She looked and then saw that on the other side of the road a yellow-and-black dashing phaeton had just rounded the corner from Park Lane.

It was the horses that held her attention for they were both chestnuts with an Arab strain showing in their arched necks and sensitive nostrils.

And then she realised that, fiery and over-excited, they were being superbly handled by the man who was driving, a dark broad-shouldered young man wearing a top hat at a dashing angle on the side of his head and sporting a large red carnation in his buttonhole.

He was good-looking, Cornelia thought, in fact better-looking and more handsome than any man she had ever seen in her life. She had not realised that a man could look so elegant, so exquisitely dressed and yet at the same time seem so utterly at home in a phaeton, driving his tandem with a skill that she instinctively paid homage to.

Cornelia and Lord Bedlington were not the only people staring at the young man whose horses were tossing and plunging about and looked at any moment as if they might upset the fragile vehicle that they were harnessed to.

Passers-by were stopping to watch the age-old battle between horse and man and then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fight was ended, the driver had won.

With a superb bit of horsemanship he drove the horses forward so that they settled again into the correct trot that was expected of them and the phaeton moved swiftly forward and out of sight.

“That was well done!” Cornelia cried a little breathlessly and then, as she glanced at her uncle’s face, she wished that she had not spoken.

There was a frown between his heavy brows and his lips were tight with anger. Cornelia might be inexperienced in many things, but she knew when a man was incensed to the point of explosion and she remembered the oath she had heard him mutter when the phaeton was first sighted. There was something about the driver that had annoyed him, she thought, and as there was tact in her make-up as well as many other qualities, she said quickly,

“Is that the Park ahead? How pretty it is.”

She saw the anger clear from her uncle’s eyes.

“Yes, that is Hyde Park,” he answered. “Our windows overlook it, so you will not feel homesick for the country.”

Cornelia had her own ideas about that, but she answered him politely and a few minutes later they drew up outside a porticoed front door.