“No?” An icy calm overtook him. “Then, much as I shall regret any breach between us, I must tell you that I have every intention of marrying Cordelia with or without your approbation. If she will have me.”
“If she will have you!” His uncle barked out a dry laugh.
“She has already refused me more than once.” This was not the moment to reveal that at the time she had thought him a penniless rascal. Though James had his hopes, he was still far from certain of her true feelings towards him. Was the note he had left in her chamber presumptuous? “If she will not be my wife, I shall accept the new mission I’ve been offered. England will hold no charms for me; I’ll be off to Japan.”
* * * *
Enveloped in a cold mist of misery, Cordelia had packed half her new belongings in her new valise before she saw the note on the dressing table.
Dear Girl—As far as I can discover, your father is not in Town. Tomorrow I shall procure a Special Licence, and then we can be married at a moment’s notice, here or in Norfolk, as you choose.
Ever your most humble, devoted servant—J
Humble! James! It was only a form of words, of course, like the “devoted,” yet she couldn’t help smiling. Her lips trembled so she pressed them tight together. If only he had not started “Dear Girl”—but after all, he often called her “my dear girl” when he was annoyed with her.
She put the note in the valise, piled the rest of her things on top, and closed it.
She had rejected him when she believed him to be an outcast. How could she accept him now she knew herself to be an outcast? Even if he loved her...but the talk had all been of debts and duty and his wretched sense of honour.
Haunted by her mother’s scandalous behaviour, she was no fit bride for a gentleman. Well, she had no desire for marriage, she thought defiantly. The Polite World might damn her with her permission. She would go and live quietly with her father in the country, where London gossip could not reach her.
As she trudged down the stairs, the footman in the vestibule was called away to perform some chore. Cordelia slipped out of the house unseen.
At the inn, she had over two hours to wait before the Mail coach was ready to pick up its passengers and proceed to Lombard Street to collect the mail and its guard. Sitting in a retired corner of the busy coffee-room, she sent for pen, ink, and paper. With much thought and crossings-out, she wrote to James. She glanced often at the door, unsure whether she dreaded or hoped that he would guess her plans and somehow find her.
Inexorably the hands of the clock marched onward. The Mail passengers were called. Cordelia hastily signed and sealed her latest, briefest effort, which said all—and nothing—that was in her heart.
Dear Sir,
I am going to my father’s. I cannot marry you, but I shall never forget you. Thank you for everything.
Ever your most humble, devoted servant,
Cordelia Courtenay.
Perhaps he would smile when he read that last line, echoing his. He could not know how humble she had become in the past few hours. He would never know she was too devoted to ruin him by becoming his wife—not that it mattered. The marquis and marchioness had given him reason enough to withdraw his offer.
Giving a boy sixpence to deliver the letter, she stepped wearily into the coach.
It was raining when she reached Norwich next morning, and it continued to rain as the gig hired from the Rampant Horse carried her east. The land was flat, almost treeless, and unspeakably dreary under the relentless drizzle. The ostler driving the gig spoke with an accent quite different from the French smuggler captain’s Cornish, but equally incomprehensible. He soon gave up trying to be friendly.
After a while, they turned off the Yarmouth turnpike. The lane ran along the top of a dyke, with water-meadows and marshland on either side, criss-crossed by drainage channels. The rain stopped, but the grey clouds stayed and a cold wind blew from the north-east. Ahead, a hill rose from the fens.
Little more than a hummock, it was crowned with a building. As the gig approached, Cordelia saw a four-square house in the starkest early Georgian style. The ochre brick and flint walls were pierced by uncompromisingly regular rows of windows, many false to avoid the window tax, and roofed with slate-grey pantiles. No trees broke that inflexible outline, though sombre yews and hollies ringed the base of the mound. The rest of the slope was grass, except for a cluster of dark, flowerless rhododendrons half way up on the southern side.
No garden. Had her mother’s desertion so grieved her father that he dug up all her roses? Or was she mistaken? Perhaps this was not her destination.
“Hill House, miss.”
This time, Cordelia understood him all too well.
She must not let mere appearances dismay her. King Lear’s Cordelia had been faithful to her father through thick and thin. If Sir Hamilton was wrapped in gloom, still mourning his faithless wife, it was his daughter’s duty—would be his daughter’s joy, she vowed—to cheer and comfort his declining years.
She paid the ostler and dismissed him. After all, she was not a visitor who might be turned away. She was coming home.
Squaring her shoulders, she knocked on the door. The butler who opened it stared at her, stony-faced.
“I have come...I’m....” Oh, why had she not waited to write rather than arriving out of the blue? “Please tell Sir Hamilton Miss Courtenay is here. Cordelia Courtenay. His daughter.”
He left her in the hall, stone-flagged and almost as chilly as outside. The only furniture was a heavy oak table with a silver salver and a horsewhip on it, so she stood. Several minutes passed before the butler returned, still expressionless.
“Please to come this way, miss.” He led her along a passage, opened a door, and announced, “Miss Courtenay, sir.”
Dark panelling, dark furniture, dark-bound books, lowering clouds outside, Cordelia’s eyes took a moment to adjust. Then she saw a tall, thin man with thin grey hair. He stood by the bookshelves, open book in hand, perusing it. She waited, hands clasped tight, for him to notice her.
He turned. His face, too, was long and thin, his eyes cold, his thin-lipped mouth a straight line. He looked Cordelia up and down. “So you’re Drusilla’s brat.” His tone was utterly indifferent. “What do you want?”
“I’ve come home, Fath...sir!”
“Home?” Dispassionate enquiry. “Is it not rather late to call Hill House your home?”
“I have no other, sir. My mother is dead.” In spite of her efforts to keep it even, her voice quavered on the last word.
“Gone, is she?” He still sounded uninterested, though a corner of the rat-trap mouth twitched. “I suppose I can hardly throw you upon the charity of the Parish. You may tell your aunt I shall permit you to stay.” He crossed to his desk, sat down, picked up a quill, and started writing.
Mama! Cordelia cried silently, closing the door softly behind her, is this what it was like? Is this what you ran from?
Chapter 33
“I trust you realize, Cordelia,” said Aunt Tabitha coldly, “that nothing you can do will wipe out the stain of your mother’s behaviour. You may hope, if you conduct yourself henceforth with the utmost propriety and circumspection, to avoid open censure.”
Sir Hamilton’s sister was quite unlike him in appearance, short and plump, with a round face and rosy cheeks. However, a second glance at this comfortable exterior revealed tight pursed lips and eyes every bit as icy as her brother’s. Worse, Cordelia soon discovered that whereas her father ignored her—thank heaven he had not asked about Mama’s death, for she simply could not have told him the true story—her aunt actively enjoyed browbeating her.
“Answer when I speak to you, Miss!” From her, “Miss” was a slap in the face.
“Yes, Aunt. I beg your pardon.”
“And you had best call me ma’am, not aunt. Hamilton chooses to recognize you so I am forced to, but I cannot wish to stress so mortifying a relationship.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Cordelia bowed her head over her needle. She hated the drab brown stuff she had been given to make herself a few new gowns.
“I am at home on Friday mornings. News of your arrival will undoubtedly have spread, so the busybodies will come. Drusilla was wont to chatter on in a lamentably frivolous fashion whenever we had callers. You will preserve a dignified silence unless spoken to. Do I make myself plain?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Drusilla was—unfortunately!—the lady of the house. You are not. If I see anything amiss in your manners, you will be sent to your room.”
“Yes, ma’am. May I walk in the shrubbery until your visitors arrive?”
“I suppose so.” Aunt Tabitha’s beady eyes surveyed her. “It will not do to have you fall ill, with all the fuss and the expense of a physician. Be sure you tidy your hair when you come in, though, to be sure, it is too short to look anything but unkempt.”
Cordelia swallowed a sigh of relief as she left the stiffly formal parlour. To escape for half an hour into the sunshine was the most she could expect. Her aunt had informed her that genteel young ladies did not roam about the countryside.
The sun shone, the rhododendrons kept off the wind, but Cordelia felt chilled to the bone. Tears rose to her eyes as she recalled the warm affection in which Zio Simone, a mere honorary uncle, had always enveloped her. She had felt more human warmth from James’s Uncle Aaron—even from Captain Hamid—than from her own relatives. She blinked back the tears. Drusilla, Aunt Tabitha said, always burst into tears at the least rebuke, thus proving herself irremediably childish and unworthy of being the wife of Sir Hamilton Courtenay of Hill House.
Why had she married him? The portrait on the stairs of the baronet as a young man showed a tall, well-built form, a devastatingly handsome face. So young herself, scarce out of the schoolroom, poor, pretty, loving Drusilla would not have recognized the insensitivity, the lack of humour in that face. And then, to have Miss Tabitha Courtenay as a constant companion...
No wonder she had fled to the arms of a lover! Cordelia no longer felt the slightest urge to condemn Mama. Instead, she was deeply grateful not to have been left to grow up at CHill House.
If she had a lover—if James came after her—she would go with him without a backward glance, whether he still offered marriage or not. But he would not chase after her just to make her his mistress, especially now she was at her father’s house, and the Wyvancourts had talked him out of marriage.
The Reverend and Mrs. Turley arrived. The vicar’s wife gave Cordelia a look of sympathy and squeezed her hand while welcoming her kindly to Fenny Sedgwick. Then she meekly subsided with her workbasket and said no more. The vicar, striding about the room with his thumbs in his lapels, preached an impromptu sermon on the sin of lust and the virtue of obedience to one’s father. Of mothers he made no mention.
Next to arrive were the Misses Browne, unmarried sisters past their first youth who lived in the village with their bedridden mother. They found it quite impossible to address a single word to Cordelia, turning red and fanning themselves when she made her curtsy. Thereafter, chatting with the elder Miss Courtenay about domestic matters, they sent her niece frequent sly glances followed by giggles behind the fans.
They were still present when Mrs. Swathely-Connaught surged in. A massive woman upholstered in mustard satin, she announced that Mr. Swathely-Connaught had taken himself off to speak to Sir Hamilton about cattle. “And I did not bring the girls today, Tabitha.” She turned a bright, curious, unwinking gaze on Cordelia. “Young girls are so impressionable. One must have a care whom they meet.”
Giggling, flushing, fanning vigorously, the Misses Browne took this stricture to themselves and departed. Cordelia only wished she could do likewise.
So much for being the respectable daughter of the respectable Sir Hamilton Courtenay, Baronet. That longed-for goal was as unattainable as her father’s love.
She could go to James, since she was certain he would not come to her. She still had money enough for her fare back to London, and a few weeks’ lodging if he had gone out of town. But after that she would be penniless. Pride rebelled against throwing herself on his mercy. What would he say if she told him she was willing to be his mistress because the only other choice was the living death of Chill House?
She knew him too well to imagine he would laugh at her, at least not unkindly, nor would he spurn or abandon her. If he still wanted her, he might accept, however much he despised her. More likely his desire had been a passing whim, a result of unavoidable proximity, and he would offer her money to go away.
The pain and humiliation of that would be a hundred times worse than anything her father and her aunt could inflict.
Only a few days had passed since she arrived in Norfolk, she reminded herself. There was still an outside chance James had been delayed by his duties at the Foreign Office and would come to beg her to marry him. But the days continued to pass without a word from him. The fragile hope withered and died.
And then the letter came, a letter with the unknown name of Rothschild on the outside, and a London address: New Court, St. Swithin’s Lane. Braving Aunt Tabitha’s wrath—”I, or your father, should read all your correspondence, Miss, and decide whether it is fit for your eyes”—Cordelia hurried up to her tiny, bleak bedchamber to read it.
Madam,
It is my pleasure to inform you that we are in receipt of a considerable credit forwarded to your account by Mr. Aaron ben Joseph of Istanbul. In view of the amount, we hesitate to forward the funds to you directly. Please inform us of the name of your bank, or otherwise advise us of your wishes.
If you find yourself in this vicinity, be so good as to call in and Mr. Rothschild himself, in consideration of Mr. Aaron’s personal recommendation , will be happy to discuss possible investments.
Please find enclosed a receipt and statement of your account, and a letter from Mr. Aaron.