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
