“I hate that woman!” she had said once to her mother after a guest left. “She is bad!”
Her mother had looked at her in surprise.
“Why do you say that, dearest? I cannot say that Lady Bury is somebody I would wish to be my closest friend, but I know nothing about her to her discredit.”
“She is bad and one day you will know that I am right,” Imeldra had insisted.
Two years later the lady in question had been accused of cruelty to a stable lad who she thought was not looking after her horses properly.
She had beaten him so severely with a riding crop that the boy’s parents had taken him to the Magistrates to protest at the injuries he had suffered.
No charge was proved, but so much scandal had reverberated against Lady Bury that she had been forced to go and live abroad.
At school Imel
