‘My silence,’ she retorted through gritted teeth, ‘is testament to the effort I am making not to tell you what I think of you, Father. I came here to draw a veil over the past, but you will not allow it. I have done as you bid me for almost ten years, making no attempt to contact my family...’
‘You do not, then, count your sisters?’
‘Caro and Cressie had nothing to lose. I have not written to Celia or Cassie. I have not written to Aunt Sophia. Or...’
‘Spare me the litany,’ Lord Armstrong said, rising from his seat and leaning over the desk. ‘Rather let me set the record straight, Cordelia. My wife will ensure that any attempt to contact your half-brothers or Isabella will be unavailing. I myself will speak to Sophia. Her sense of what is owed to a brother will dictate her actions, as it always has.’
Cordelia also got to her feet. Though she had quelled the urge to shrink back in her chair, she was nevertheless horrified. She was also deeply hurt, humiliated and absolutely furious with herself for having given him the chance to hurt and belittle her again. ‘I don’t believe you. I shall not listen to you. I don’t need your permission or your forgiveness. I will allow no one—no one!—to dictate my actions other than myself. I thwarted you—there, I have said it—by refusing to marry a man of your choice, and you have held a grudge against me for ten years. Unbelievable! You are utterly unbelievable, Father.’
She began to gather up her things, her hands shaking with anger. Jamming on her bonnet anyhow, she bit the inside of her cheek very, very hard. So intent was she on getting out of the house before she broke down, that she did not notice the door to the book room opening until the same impassive servant, who had no doubt heard the muffled altercation, was standing in front of her father holding out the silver salver. ‘Your twelve-thirty appointment has arrived a little early,’ he said.
‘It’s fine. I’m leaving,’ Cordelia said. Snatching her shawl from the chair, she caught a glimpse of the card on the tray before her father picked it up, and her heart, already beating like a wild thing, skipped a beat. It could not be. Looking up, she found her father’s gaze on her. ‘You know, it may very well be in your interests to remain for this meeting,’ he said.
He had that faraway look. Considering. Scheming. She began to feel sick again. ‘No,’ she said, though her voice seemed to come from a long way away, because he had put the card back down on the desk, and she could read it.
‘Politics,’ he continued smoothly, as if she had not spoken, another of his tactics, ‘is all about compromise. I will concede that I cannot stop you from attempting to do as you say. You will fail, but your attempt, I will also concede—you see what I mean about compromise—will be unpleasant. For all of us.’
She stared at him. Her body was screaming at her to run. Her mind was struggling to deal with her father’s admission that he was— What, fallible? No. But he seemed to be offering her a deal. What deal? She looked at the card on the desk, but it made no sense, and the instinct to run got the upper hand. ‘No,’ she said, turning towards the door just as it opened, crashing full tilt into the man entering the room.
‘Ah, Mr Hunter,’ her father said, urbane as ever, ‘let me introduce you to my daughter Lady Cordelia.’
Chapter Two
Broomilaw, Glasgow—1836
Cordelia stood on the aft deck of the PS Argyle as the paddle steamer chugged down the River Clyde on the last stage of her journey. After several weeks travelling in the Highlands, the change to this vast city was almost overwhelming. The air was thick with smoke, tasting distinctly of coal, the clouds in the tarnished sky above were a strange metallic yellow colour.
Argyle sounded her horn, a loud, low, mournful cry that made the deck vibrate, and sent a noxious plume of black smoke into the air from the high stack of funnel as she began to slow, narrowly avoiding a large three-masted clipper anchored in the centre of the channel. The sound of the water being churned up by the two huge wooden paddles changed from a torrent to a slow slap as they drew alongside their berth, scraping between a host of other craft—so many, it seemed to Cordelia, that every ship in Scotland must be vying for space here in Glasgow.
The docks were crowded as she picked her way carefully over the narrow wooden gangway from the Argyle, across the deck of another steamer and up on to the pier, clutching her portmanteau. Beautiful as the Highlands had been, she had felt more alien there than at any time since leaving London eight years before. The Gaelic language, with its soft, lilting tones, was lovely to listen to, impossible to decipher. She had not been prepared for her own English accent to mark her out as foreign. At times, she had encountered downright hostility. They had long memories, those whose families had paid the price for fighting for the Jacobite Prince Charlie. More recently, enclosure and the introduction of sheep to the lands had brought a new grudge against the Sassenach landowners. Cordelia, raised in a household which lived and breathed the politics of Britain’s growing Empire, had been appalled by her own ignorance of what was, in theory, part of her own country.
On a very small scale, politics had torn her own family apart. Listening to the tales of what politics had done to the Highlanders gave her rather a different perspective on her own life. In those remote, tiny, hard-working communities, family was all. Cordelia could no longer ignore how much she missed her own. She was lonely. There were times when the cost of this independent path she had chosen felt like too high a price to pay. Times, such as now, standing on the quay with the crowd pressing round her, when she would have given anything for a familiar face.
But she had never been one to mope, had always loathed regrets, and there was no point in wishing things could be different. Cordelia turned her mind to the problem of her baggage, and where, and how she was supposed to collect it. Jostled, her skirts and toes well and truly trodden on, she looked for a porter. There were many, but all were occupied, and all seemed to be deaf too. She had thought that being back in a city would restore a little of her equilibrium, but the harsh language here sounded almost as foreign as Gaelic.
‘And to make matters worse, I seem to have become invisible,’ she muttered to herself, resorting to using her elbows to push past a large man holding a very loud conversation with a very small man on one of the steamers.
It was then she saw him, standing quite alone a few yards down, at the end of the quay. She could not have said what drew her attention, only that it was drawn, almost as if she were compelled to look at him. He was dressed sombrely, in a black coat and trousers, black shoes. His hair was cut short. Deep auburn, it was burnished by the silver-yellow rays of the setting sun filtered through the darkening clouds, giving him the look of a fallen angel. He had been staring off into the distance, but as she watched him he turned, their eyes met, and Cordelia felt a jolt of recognition, though she was sure she had never seen him before. Perhaps it was from having listened to too many ghost stories while she was in the Highlands, but she had the strangest feeling, like seeing another form of herself. You, her bones and her skin and her blood called, it’s you.
She couldn’t look away. It was with a feeling of déjà vu, or fate, inevitability, that she watched him approach her. His face was not gaunt, but it had little spare flesh. The lines which ran from his nose to his chin spoke of a tough life rather than either age or decadence. A hard face with a strong chin and nose, his mouth was his only soft feature, with a full bottom lip forming into a querying smile. The quiver inside her turned from recognition to attraction. This one, her body was saying now, this man.
‘Is there something I can do for you?’ he asked.
Is there something ah can do furr you? His accent was strange, a soft burr with a rougher edge lurking in the background, the sweetness of chocolate mixed with the grittiness of salt. ‘My luggage,’ Cordelia said, ‘I don’t suppose you know where I can collect it?’
‘You’re English.’ She must have instinctively braced herself for he smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to hold it against you.’