The Cordless Diaries

The Dinner

Mary, my maid, tightened the lacing of my corset. ‘Breathe out, Miss.’

‘Like some poor pony having her girth tightened,’ said I as she drew upon the lacing. At last she was done and I could almost breath normally again. She told me I looked fine, her way of saying I was still alive. She handed me my dress, held it open as I ducked beneath her arms and surfaced through the waves of silk which she let fall, then buttoned and clipped until I was ‘presentable.’

‘Oh, Mary, how I hate this. To be parcelled, to be presented to the leering, chattering fools my mother values so highly. What I should give to be allowed to wear trousers like my brother Timothy. He runs free in the fields and woods while I, I am required to wear, to wear,’ I looked down at the dress that fell to the leather boots that covered my feet, ‘this.’

‘You look lovely, Miss.’

‘I look like wedding cake that has gone mouldy; like a set of curtains hanging in a tawdry drawing room.’

‘Well, I think you look lovely.’

‘Be gone, you idiot.’ I would have swallowed those words had I been able to. The look of pain in her eyes was like the look father’s spaniel gives when he kicks her. She bustled off and, I suspect, cried for the rest of the evening. I kicked a chair in anger and frustration. No doubt Mother would have brought some ‘suitable’ young man to view the goods, to assess the livestock. Had I known then words I know now I should probably have used them.

My hair having already been ordered by Mary’s ministrations I was ready, at least as ready as I ever should be, to face the clots Mother had invited. The parson would be there and his hideous crone of a wife. The schoolmaster, Jolly by name if not by nature and, of course, father. He, by this time of eight of the clock, would have enjoyed his brandy with our gamekeeper for they shared a bottle every sunset. He would be mild mannered but incomprehensible. How I loved him, for this was his retreat from Mother. He might, I hoped, be relied upon for some indiscretion to offend the Parson’s wife. Mrs Wellbeloved (another whose name ill-became her) was an asinine woman who believed herself to have merit because she had married a priest. The truth was, in my father’s estimation and my own, that only Wellbeloved would have been stupid enough to take her anywhere near an altar. Indeed, father once said in the veritas that vino occasions, Our Lord’s very existence was cast into doubt by allowing that union. How could He be so cruel to a man devoted to His service?

I knew not who else might be in the assembled company and with dread in my heart I descended the staircase, suitably late, to join the dinner party at pre-prandial drinks.

My name is Emma Cordless, daughter of Sir Josiah Cordless and his wife Emily. Do not, dear reader, be impressed by Father’s title into imagining great wealth. An inherited title did not bring with it the funds that Father’s father had so recklessly invested in the South Sea Bubble. Penniless we are not but nor are we rich and hence my mother’s desire to have me breed with some son who stood to inherit rather better than we had. Timothy was away at school and Father routinely cursed the need to buy his education from the small income derived from the estate. Last year he closed the east wing of Cordless Hall for lack of funds to maintain it.

I am allowed, or perhaps more accurately put, required to wear fine clothes because they will make me more ‘saleable.’ Even a bull is bathed and brushed before the market. And so, here I find myself about to enter the auction ring yet again.

Mother rises as I enter and, with great and entirely simulated affection, greets me as ‘her darling daughter. Parson Wellbeloved and his odious wife are there. Jolly and his cousin, Sofia (his wife having died of consumption) are there and so is, to my surprise, Mr Grenville Daker, a local solicitor whom, so far` as I was aware, my father detested. Mrs Felicity Daker is a pretty young woman, his second wife, and daughter, like myself, of impecunious gentry. The company also included a young army officer, whose rank I could not divine from his uniform, who appeared to be accompanied by his mother. They were, I learned from mother’s introduction, the widow Forson and her son, Lieutenant James Forson. He bore a ridiculous moustache which looked as though any high wind would have immediately rendered him clean shaven. Her facial hair, by contrast, would have survived a hurricane. It will not surprise you that I was eated for dinner between Wellbeloved and the brave Lieutenant who, to date, had seen action on Salisbury Plain and Smith’s lawn. Oh, how he bemoaned his not having been despatched by Her Majesty to face the fuzzy-wuzzies although his sense of precisely where these ‘savages’ as he called them were to be found was vaguer than my own. No doubt this lion-hearted warrior was to be the next to suffer my mother’s auctioneering technique.

We left the men to their brandy and cigars and retired to the withdrawing room, where Annabelle served us with coffee. Mother gushed and babbled and so did the mistresses Wellbeloved and Forson. Mrs Daker was, to my surprise, a charming companion. She was reserved, polite and cautious in her interventions but, when she did speak, it was with warmth and conviction.

Around eleven, Wellbeloved joined us, the noble Lieutenant in company with him and Daker, but no sign of Father who, we learned, had fallen asleep on the privy and was unlikely to rejoin us. Farewells were made and it seemed that Forson wanted, but knew not precisely how, to make some advance to me. I am experienced in avoiding such embarrassments and shook his hand with one of those weak, insipid grips designed to demonstrate utter disdain. He was not intelligent or worldly enough to realise that but surely even he would come to at some point before an enemy cannonball removed him to a better place.

I shook all proffered hands and, as quickly as decency permitted escaped Mother’s reproachful eye and hastened to my room, where I found a still tearful Mary to whom I extended a warm apology and an embrace. She undressed me and was about to leave when I suggested she might care to stay as, occasionally, she did. After all, as I explained to her, words of apology can only be bettered by deeds.