Desire of the Heart

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWOWhen 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.