LITMIR.BIZ

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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 They fitted her well enough, but long before she reached England she realised how out of date they were.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

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