Читать книгу Desire of the Heart - Barbara Cartland - Страница 2

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.

The footman sprang from the box and then opened the door. No sooner had the carriage stopped than a butler appeared at the top of the steps leading into the house. There were two liveried and powdered footmen behind him, bowing to her uncle and taking his hat and stick.

“Come to the library, my dear,” Lord Bedlington said. “Your aunt will be down to greet you in a moment or two.”

The room was luxurious and grand beyond anything that Cornelia had imagined a room could be. Heavy velvet curtains were draped across the high windows. There were sofas and chairs of brocade and great gilt mirrors interspersed between bookshelves.

Cornelia wondered if it was correct to express her admiration or to say nothing when Lady Bedlington came into the room.

Cornelia stared at her in astonishment. She had not expected anyone so lovely, so pink and white, so elegantly dressed, so perfectly poised or indeed anyone who looked so young.

“So this is your niece, George. Will you please introduce me?” she heard a sweet rather affected voice ask.

“This is Cornelia, Lily,” Lord Bedlington remarked abruptly.

“How do you do?” Cornelia said quietly as she took her aunt’s hand.

“Well, now I can leave Cornelia with you, Lily,” Lord Bedlington said pompously but with relief as if he was glad to be rid of something exceedingly tiresome.

“Yes, of course, George. You had better go to The Palace, see the Lord Chamberlain and arrange for me to take Cornelia to the next Court. The lists were supposed to be closed months ago, but I am quite sure you can manage to pull strings. If not I can speak to the King myself. I shall see him at Londonderry House on Tuesday night.”

“Better do it officially.”

“Yes, of course, my dear, if it is possible,” Lily agreed.

“Do you mean I am to be presented to the King and Queen?” Cornelia asked in sudden horror. “Must I do that? I would much rather not.”

She had a vision of herself at Court, gauche and inexperienced, doing the wrong thing, being laughed at by hundreds of Courtiers as elegant and as awe-inspiring as her aunt

“But, of course, you must be presented,” Lady Bedlington said emphatically. “It will be a tremendous rush to get you a dress, but I daresay it can be managed. I expect you want lots of new clothes anyway.”

Her eyes flickered over Cornelia’s old-fashioned coat and hat that had been fashionable five years earlier.

“Yes, I am sure I shall want a lot of new clothes. It is not easy to buy things in Ireland, and anyway I never had time to go to Dublin.”

“I don’t think that Dublin fashions would be exactly what you need in London,” Lily said. “You had better order my carriage, George. As soon as Cornelia is rested, we will go to the shops and see what we can find for her.”

Cornelia gave a little sigh.

She hated clothes. There were so many other things she would rather do at this moment than go shopping.

“I expect you would like to wash, Cornelia,” Lady Bedlington said, “and change into something lighter than your travelling clothes.”

She hesitated a moment and then said what was obviously uppermost in her mind,

“Those spectacles, do you have to wear them?”

“Yes,” Cornelia answered firmly, “I injured my eye when out hunting last winter and the oculist said I must keep them on for at least nine months.”

“It is a pity,” Lady Bedlington said, but somehow she did not sound as if she was sorry. “My maid will show you to your room. She is waiting for you in the hall.”

“Thank you – er – Aunt Lily.”

Cornelia walked from the library into the hall where a rather austere-looking woman in a small white apron was waiting.

“Come this way, please, miss,” she began briskly.

In the library Lily sank down on one of the chairs.

“My dear George, what have you produced? Did you ever see such clothes! That coat must have come out of the Ark and, as for the hat, it is a museum piece!”

“Now, Lily, don’t start being difficult,” Lord Bedlington pleaded. “As you know, the poor girl is an orphan and Rosaril is in the depths of the country. What opportunity would she ever have of buying clothes?”

“It is not only her clothes, George. Those spectacles! You heard what she said that she intends to wear them for another three months.”

“Well, you must make what you can of her. There is plenty of money for you to spend at any rate.”

“That is the only possible consolation, but then don’t expect me to perform miracles, I am not a magician.”

“Her mother was a pretty woman,” Lord Bedlington said, “and Bertie was always the Adonis of the family and for all that he was a rip. No reason why their child should not turn out good-looking if you take a bit of trouble over her.”

“I have already said I am no magician,” Lily replied coldly, “but don’t worry, George. I have everything arranged.”

Lord Bedlington turned to the door, then stopped, hesitated and looked uncomfortable.

“You have spoken to Roehampton, I hope?”

“Yes, I have spoken to him and I have told him what you said, George, but don’t forget if we are bringing out a debutante, he is by far the most eligible bachelor in London today. He must be asked to any parties we give for Cornelia as a matter of course.”

“As long as he will confine his attentions to Cornelia that is all that concerns me,” Lord Bedlington insisted, “but don’t believe that I am such a damned fool as to believe that young Roehampton’s thirsting after any debutante at the moment.”

He slammed the library door behind him as he went out. Lily sat for a moment after he had gone, then rose and walked across to look at her reflection in a gilt-framed mirror.

For a moment she stared at herself and then she began to smile.

Finally her lips parted in a gurgle of laughter.

“Spectacles!” she cried aloud. “Oh, poor, poor Drogo!