The American Heiress Page 3

  When, at last, they drew back from each other, neither smiled.

  Cora said, ‘I was right then.’

  ‘You were right about the intention. Of course I want to kiss you, what man wouldn’t? There are fifty men out there who would give anything to take my place, but I had promised myself not to.’ Teddy smiled at his good intentions.

  ‘But why, if that was what you wanted?’ She sounded suddenly much younger than eighteen.

  Teddy looked away from her at the horizon where he could see the moonlight playing on the sea. ‘Because I am afraid.’

  ‘Of me?’ Cora sounded pleased.

  He turned to face her. ‘If I fall in love with you, it would change everything, all my plans.’ His voice trailed away as he saw that the flush had spread down across her chest; down, he was sure, beneath the infanta’s modest neckline. He picked up her hand and turned it over, pressing the scar to his lips.

  Cora trembled and the shudder ran through the construction of her dress.

  ‘Do you know I am going away to Europe?’ she said in a strained voice.

  ‘The whole of America knows you are going to Europe, to find a suitable consort for the Cash millions.’ Teddy tried to bat away her emotion but Cora did not respond in kind. She leant towards him, her eyes dark and opaque. When she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper.

  ‘I don’t want to go, you know. I would like to stay here – with you.’

  Teddy dropped her hand and felt the heat of Cora’s stare. He wanted to believe her, even though this would make his choice so much harder. She kissed him again, more fiercely this time. It was hard to resist the foxy smell of her hair and the downy smoothness of her cheeks. He could hardly feel her body through the architecture of her costume but he could feel the pulse beating in her neck. Who was he to resist Cora Cash, the girl that every woman in Newport envied and every man desired? He kissed her harder, grazing her lip with his teeth. He wanted to pull the combs and jewels out of her hair and take her out of her prison of a costume. He could hear her breathing quicken.

  The music stopped. Then came the crash of the supper gong rippling out into the still night air.

  For the first time Cora looked nervous. ‘Mother will notice I have gone.’ She made a gesture as if to go back inside, but then she turned back and spoke to him in a torrent of urgency. ‘We could go now to the city and get married. Then she can’t touch me. I have my own money, Grandfather left a trust for me which is mine when I am twenty-five or when I marry. And I’m sure Father would give us something. I don’t want to go away.’ She was pleading now.

  Teddy saw that it had not occurred to her that he might refuse to accept her proposal.

  ‘You are the one who is being disingenuous now. Do you really think that I can elope with you? Not only would it break your mother’s heart, it would surely break my mother’s too. The Van Der Leydens are not as rich as the Cashes but they are honourable. People would say I was a fortune-hunter.’ He tried to take his hands from her waist but she held them there.

  ‘But they would say that about anyone. It’s not my fault I’m richer than everyone else. Please, Teddy, don’t be all…scrupulous about this. Why can’t we just be happy? You like kissing me, don’t you? Didn’t I get it right?’ She reached up to stroke his cheek. And then a thought hit her, amazing her with its audacity. ‘There isn’t someone else, is there? Someone you like more than me?’

  ‘Not someone, something. I want to be a painter. I’m going to Paris to study. I think I have a talent but I have to be sure.’ Even as he said it, Teddy realised how weak he sounded against Cora’s passionate intensity.

  ‘But why can’t you paint here? Or if you have to go to Paris, I could come with you.’ She made it all sound so easy.

  ‘No, Cora,’ he said almost roughly, afraid she might persuade him. ‘I don’t want to be that kind of painter, a Newport character who sails in the morning and paints in the afternoon. I don’t want to paint pictures of ladies and their lapdogs. I want to do something serious and I can’t do that here and I can’t do that with a wife.’

  He thought for a moment that she would cry. She was waving her hands in front of her face as if trying to push away his words, swaying clumsily in her galleon of a dress.

  ‘Honestly, there is no one I would rather marry than you, Cora, even if you are too rich for me. But I can’t now; there is something I want more. And what I need can’t be bought.’

  She looked back at him crossly. He saw with relief tinged with regret that she was not so much heartbroken as thwarted. He said firmly, ‘Admit it, Cora, you don’t really want to marry me as much as you want to get away from your mother. A sentiment I can fully appreciate, but if you go to Europe you will no doubt find yourself a princeling and then you can send her back to America.’

  Cora gave him an angry little shove. ‘And what, give her the satisfaction of being the matchmaker? The mother who married her daughter to the most eligible bachelor in Europe? She pretends she is above such things but I know she thinks of nothing else. Ever since I was born my mother has chosen everything for me, my clothes, my food, the books I can read, the friends I can have. She has thought of everything except me.’ She shook her head sharply as if trying to shake her mother out of her life. ‘Oh Teddy, won’t you change your mind? I can help you; it wouldn’t be so very terrible, would it? It’s only money. We don’t have to have it. I don’t mind living in a garret.’

  Perhaps, he thought, if she really cared for him…but he knew that what he principally represented to her was escape. He would like to paint her, though, angry and direct – the spirit of the New World dressed in the trappings of the Old. He couldn’t resist taking her face in his hands and kissing her one last time.

  But just as he felt his resolve weaken, as he felt Cora’s shudder, the Spirit of Electricity exploded into the darkness and they were illuminated. Mrs Cash stood like a shining general at the head of her legion of guests.

  There was a ripple in the air as a sigh of surprise was expelled across the terrace.

  The radiant bulbs cast harsh shadows across the contours of Mrs Cash’s face. ‘Cora, what are you doing?’ Her voice was soft but penetrating.

  ‘Kissing Teddy, Mother,’ her daughter replied. ‘Surely with all that candle power, you can see that?’

  The Spirit of Electricity brushed her daughter’s insolence aside. She turned her glittering head to Teddy.

  ‘Mr Van Der Leyden, for all your family’s pride in your lineage, you appear to have no more morals than a stable hand. How dare you take advantage of my daughter?’

  But it was Cora who answered. ‘Oh, he wasn’t taking advantage of me, Mother. I kissed him. But then my grandfather was a stable hand so you wouldn’t expect any better, would you?’

  Mrs Cash stood in shining silence, the echo of Cora’s defiance ringing in the air around her. And then, just as Mrs Cash was about to deliver her counter blow, a tongue of flame snaked round the diamond star in her hair, turning her headdress into a fiery halo. Mrs Cash was all at once ablaze, her expression as fierce as the flames that were about to engulf her.

  For a moment no one moved. It was as if the guests had all gathered together to watch a firework display, and indeed the sparks springing from Mrs Cash’s head shone prettily against the night sky. And then the flames began to lick her face and Mrs Cash screamed – the high keening noise of an animal in pain. Teddy rushed towards her, throwing his cloak over the flaming head, and pushed her to the ground, pummelling her body with his hands. The stench of burnt hair and flesh was overwhelming, a gruesome echo of that hint of feral musk he had smelt on Cora moments before. But Teddy was hardly aware of this; later, all he remembered was the band striking the opening bars of the ‘Blue Danube’ as Cora knelt beside him and together they turned her mother over to face the stars above. The left side of her face was a mess of charred and blistered flesh.

  Teddy heard Cora whisper, ‘Is she dead?’

  Teddy said nothing b
ut pointed to Mrs Cash’s right eye, her good eye. It was bright with moisture and they watched as a tear made its way down the smooth stretch of her undamaged cheek.

  In the conservatory the hummingbird man took the cloth from his cage. The gong had sounded, that was his signal. Carefully he opened the door and then stood aside as his birds scattered like sequins over the dark velvet of the night air.

  A minute later Bertha found him standing in front of the empty cage.

  ‘Samuel, I have something I want you to take to my mother. This should take care of her while I am in Europe.’ She held out a little purse with the seventy-five dollars. She had decided to keep the ‘boulder’, it was not the sort of thing her mother would be able to sell easily.

  The hummingbird man said, ‘There was nobody to see them fly out. They looked so fine too.’

  Bertha stood there with her hand still outstretched. Slowly, Samuel turned to face her and without haste he took the purse. He said nothing, but then he did not need to. Bertha filled the silence.

  ‘If I could leave now I would, but we sail at the end of the week. This is a good position. Mrs Cash, she’s looked after me.’ Bertha’s voice rose, as if asking a question.

  The hummingbird man’s stare did not waver. ‘Goodbye, Bertha. I don’t reckon I’ll be coming up here again.’ He picked up his cage and walked into the darkness.

  Chapter 3

  The Hunt

  Dorset, England, January 1894

  ‘BE CAREFUL WITH THAT NEEDLE, BERTHA. I DON’T want to be blooded before the hunt has even begun.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Cora, but this wash leather is tough to work and you keep moving so. If you don’t want to get stuck, I reckon you’ll have to keep still.’

  Cora tried to stand motionless in front of the oval cheval glass as her maid stitched the chamois leather bodice together so that it was perfectly moulded to the contours of her body. Mrs Wyndham had insisted that the only riding habits worth having were from Busvine, ‘He shows the form to perfection, my dear, almost indecently so. There’s something quite naked about his tailoring. With a figure like yours, it would be a crime to go anywhere else.’ Cora remembered the gleam in Mrs Wyndham’s eyes as she said this and the way the widow’s bejewelled hands had speculatively spanned her waist. ‘Nineteen inches, I would say. Very nice indeed. Made for a Busvine.’

  In order to ensure that the habit had the requisite smooth line, Cora could not wear her usual corset and stays. She wore a specially cut undergarment of chamois leather which she had to be sewn into so that no hooks or bumps would disfigure the unforgiving tailoring. Cora almost thanked her mother for the hours spent in the spine straightener when she saw how fine and upright she looked in her habit. Her chestnut hair had been pulled back into a high chignon, exposing the tender nape of her neck. As she adjusted the brim of her hat so that it tilted at just the right angle over her left eye, she felt quite equal to the day ahead. It was only when she pulled the veil down over her face to see whether she should stain her lips red as Mrs Wyndham had advised, ‘Just a spot of colour, dear, for snap,’ that she thought of her mother and the way the left half of her face was now shrouded in a gauzy white veil to conceal the devastation beneath. Cora knew that her mother would expect her to go in and submit herself for approval, but she hated the sight of her mother’s naked, maimed face before she had put on her veil. Of course her mother’s accident had not been her fault precisely, but she felt responsible nonetheless.

  Cora reached for the cochineal stain and dabbed a little on her lips. That woman was right again, the splash of colour made all the difference. Cora had not liked the way that Mrs Wyndham had looked her over as if pricing horseflesh. She had felt ashamed when her mother had brought her in, ‘to introduce us to the right people’. She was almost sure that her mother had paid Mrs Wyndham for her services. Still, Mrs Wyndham had been right about the Busvine. The leather felt warm and soft against her skin. She bent forward, intoxicated with the freedom the habit gave her to touch her toes. As she straightened up, she found the loop on the left side of her habit, which allowed her to lift it up out of the way as she walked. The left side of the skirt was about three feet longer than the right so that her legs would be covered at all times as she rode side-saddle. The trick was to hold the excess fabric across the body with the right hand so that it looked like Grecian drapery. Cora fiddled with the material until she had achieved the desired effect.

  Bertha looked on with impatience; she wanted Miss Cora out of here so that she could have some breakfast. Her stomach was rumbling and breakfast for the upper servants was served promptly at seven thirty at Sutton Veney.

  There was a knock at the door and one of the housemaids walked in shyly.

  ‘If you please, miss, the master says that your horse is being brought round from the stables.’

  ‘Tell Lord Bridport I will be down directly.’ Cora turned to Bertha. ‘Can you tell Mother that Lord Bridport insisted that we leave promptly, which means I didn’t have time to visit her this morning.’

  ‘She won’t be happy, Miss Cora. You know how she likes to make sure you look the part.’

  ‘I know, I know, but I don’t have time to stand there while she picks over me. It is bad enough being sneered at by all those English ladies with their red hands and their small blue eyes looking at me as if I was a savage. I don’t need Mother telling me how her whole happiness depends on seeing me splendidly married.’ Cora picked up her ivory-handled crop and brandished it at her maid. Bertha looked at her wearily.

  ‘I’ll pass on the message to the Madam. What do you want to wear tonight?’

  ‘The pink mousseline from Madame Fromont, I think. It will make all those English hags green with envy. Shame I can’t wear the bill around my neck. I would like to see their faces when they realise that I can spend more on one dress than they spend on their clothes in a year. They’re all so dowdy, and yet they dare to look down their long dripping noses at me, even though they’re all desperate for me to marry one of their nambypamby sons.’ Cora brought the crop down on the bed with a thwack.

  She smiled when she saw Lincoln waiting for her in the stable yard, twitching his head impatiently. A sixteen-hand grey stallion, Lincoln was the finest product of her father’s stables. Cora was not ready to admit that she might find a British horse to suit her, so she had brought her favourite hunters with her, walking them every day on the deck of the SS Aspen, her father’s steam yacht. Lincoln’s breath condensed in a white cloud in the chill January morning. There had been a frost and the ground was white and hazy with mist. But the sun was beginning to break through and for the first time since she had come to England, miserable and guilty about her mother’s accident, Cora felt excited at the thought of the day to come. To ride as hard as she could, with no conversation to make or customs to observe, was an irresistible prospect. She felt as if she had taken off more than her corset. She felt unbound.

  The Myddleton considered itself the finest hunt in the southwest. Lord Bridport, the Master, was stingy when it came to his house and children but stinted nothing on his beloved hounds. His mother had been one of the first society ladies to ride to hounds and the Myddleton was now as famous for its ‘Dianas’ as for the quality of the sport. Mrs Wyndham had looked Cora over in her drawing room in Mayfair and had declared, ‘The Myddleton for you, my dear. I think you will keep up.’

  At the time Cora had not been quite sure of the older lady’s meaning, but now, as she rode up after Lord Bridport, she understood that the competition had already begun. So far her exposure to smart British womanhood had been restricted; Cora and her mother had arrived in London at the end of the season when all the people of fashion had left for the country, or else were lying low so as not to draw attention to the fact that they had no estates to go to. Lord Bridport’s wife and daughter were not in Cora’s view ‘smart’ even if they could trace their lineage back to the Conqueror. But here were women whose Busvine habits fitted as closely as her ow
n. Her appearance did not cause the ripple of anticipation that always heralded her arrival anywhere in her native country. Not a single shining head turned in her direction as she followed Lord Bridport into the throng. Cora was not sure how she felt about this, to be anonymous was an unfamiliar sensation.

  ‘Ah Charlotte, may I introduce you to Miss Cash. Miss Cash, my niece by marriage, Lady Beauchamp.’

  A blond head turned fractionally in her direction and gave her the faintest of nods.

  ‘And here is my nephew Odo. Miss Cora Cash – Sir Odo Beauchamp.’

  Odo Beauchamp put even his wife’s elegant habit to shame. His pink coat and white breeches were immaculately tailored. His hair was as blond as his wife’s but her chignon was tight, while a suggestion of a curl had been allowed to escape over his collar.

  He turned his wide face with its limpid blue eyes and flushed cheeks to Cora. ‘How do you do, Miss Cash. Is this your first time riding to hounds? I suspect you have wilder sport in your country.’

  His voice was surprisingly high and light for such a big man, but it had an unmistakable edge. Cora replied in her most American drawl.

  ‘Oh, we hunt foxes at home right enough, but we find them pretty tame after the bears and the rattlesnakes.’

  Odo Beauchamp lifted an eyebrow. ‘You American girls are so spirited, let’s hope you feel as plucky after a day with the Myddleton. That’s a very large animal you have there, I hope you can remount without help.’

  ‘Where I come from, Sir Odo, a lady would be ashamed of herself if she rode out on a horse she couldn’t manage herself.’ Cora smiled.