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
