To Dream of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

bishop’s daughter, and the one thing she had in common with Cordelia was that her father had been a spendthrift during his lifetime and had died leaving his only daughter in straitened circumstances.
    But she hailed from the untitled aristocracy, and every dowdy line of her breathed gentility, respectability, and breeding. Agnes Hurlingham did not like Cordelia, but she was grateful to her for all the comforts of a home in the West End, and of the two of them she was the one who enjoyed the plays and operas—unlike Cordelia, who judged the evening by the notables in the audience.
    Agnes’s duties were to act as companion and chaperone. With her present, Cordelia felt that she had license to flirt outrageously. No one could accuse her of being
fast
with such a dragon beside her.
    Agnes walked into the drawing room and slumped down in her usual chair well away from the fire. She was wearing a dowdy gown of some repellent brown stuff that seemed to be held together at the neck by a large mourning brooch.
    “Who have we today. Lady Bentley?” she asked. “Arden, I suppose.”
    “Yes, Arden, and let us hope he leaves his cousin behind. It is very hard to indulge in dalliance with that young man glooming and dooming around the place.”
    “He is young, younger than you,” said Agnes, taking out some dingy gray knitting from a workbasket.
    “Youth is no excuse for bad manners. Don’t slouch, Agnes.”
    Agnes straightened her spine and stabbed one long needle into the gray wool on her lap as if she wished it were Lady Bentley’s cold heart.
    Cordelia heard the ponderous steps of her butler, Findlater, approaching the drawing room and hissed, “He is come. He is arrived.”
    She ran to the mirror and patted a curl into place.
    “A Miss Rebecca Clifton and a Miss Harriet Clifton,” announced Findlater.
    Lady Bentley’s pretty shoulders stiffened, but she did not turn around.
    “Tell them,” she said clearly, “we are not at home.”
    Harriet and Aunt Rebecca had had an exhausting time of it reaching London. Some young blood up on the roof had decided to try his hand with the ribbons and had ended up overturning the stage into a ditch. They and the other passengers were bruised and shaken but mercifully escaped worse hurt. But it had taken ages for the substitute coach to arrive. They had been unable to book rooms at the nearest inn, due to lack of money, and had had to spend an uncomfortable night dozing on chairs in the inn parlor.
    Their companions on the journey—three young bloods, a farmer’s wife, a clerk, and a maidservant—had all become rather tipsy and loud at the inn, and familiarity with these new acquaintances made Harriet long to see the last of them.
    When they were finally set down in the City, they had great difficulty finding a hack to take them to the West End. It was the busiest time of the day. Postmen in scarlet coats with bells were going from door to door. Bakers were shouting, “Hot loaves!” Chimney sweeps with brushes, hawkers with bandboxes on poles, milkmaids with manure on their feet and pails suspended from yokes across their shoulders were all crying their wares, competing with the bells of dust carts and the horns of news vendors. Great brewer’s sledges pulled by enormous horses rumbled across the cobbles. At last an elderly gentleman took pity on them and engaged a hack. The jehu brightened at the fashionable address, but only the imposing figure of a liveried footman on the steps of Cordelia’s house on Hill Street stopped the disappointed driver from cursing his fare over the paucity of the tip.
    Both Harriet and Aunt Rebecca were dressed in black silk, since black silk had been a “special” at the mercer’s in Lower Maxton. Aunt Rebecca had decided to add some color by fashioning herself a bonnet out of hen feathers and by draping her ample form with a multitude of colored scarves and shawls.
    Harriet was wearing a bonnet of chip straw that was tolerably smart. It had