Paris
1927
In the finishing school in her eighteenth year Charlotte was in a class with fourteen other aristocratic girls who all knew each other and were socially confident. She tried to take an interest in flower arranging, etiquette, table settings, personal grooming, fashion, deportment, curtseying, dancing, sketching, the use of watercolours and spoken French, skills that would help catch an aristocratic husband provided there was money to go with them. During all these classes she kept seeing Cormac’s mocking smile, especially when she was painting botanical specimens in a constrained, ladylike way, and could hear his voice urging “Don’t hold back. Let fly. Get stuck in,” and knew how unacceptable those words would be in this establishment. The girls were resentful when they heard how fluent her French was, so she became hesitant in her delivery and used incorrect words at intervals to appease them.
She became isolated and unhappy and took larger portions of food to console herself. Her cheekbones and jaw line began to lose their definition again. All this she could bear as she knew the year would soon be over and it was necessary for her plan, but what she couldn’t bear was how she had unwisely confided in her roommate and suffered the consequences. Having read in books that confiding was an essential ingredient in friendship and, never having had a friend to know if this were true or not, she took the theory on trust and told her roommate that she intended to marry the first man who asked her so that she could have a baby as soon as possible to replace her lost sister to please her mother whom she was responsible for crippling. Instead of praising her altruistic ambitions, the girl screamed that she couldn’t stay around a person who was cursed with such bad luck, called her a freak, and picked up her things and went off demanding to be allotted another room.
While her former roommate was socialising with the other girls after dinner she lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, imagining how much louder the girl’s screaming would have been if she had told her the full story.
The next day one of the other girls came up to her and said, “I know who you are. I thought I’d heard the name before. Everyone knows about the lost Blackshaw, but they didn’t make the connection. You’re her sister, aren’t you? And it was you who was expelled from school in England for attacking a girl and putting her into hospital.”
For taunting me. For accusing me of crippling my mother and being such a bad rider that my horse had to be shot. That pupil deserved what she got, Charlotte believed, staring dumbly back at her accuser.
“We don’t want your sort around here. Why don’t you go back to the bogs where you belong?” the girl concluded before returning to join her group.
To avoid the risk of repeating her past behaviour, Charlotte packed her bags and returned home, telling her mother the course bored her and she had no intention of returning. Edwina knew from experience that there was no point in trying to force her to change her mind.
Charlotte learnt her lesson. From now on she would never again confide in anyone. She would block the past from her mind and keep her old secrets hidden so deeply that even she wouldn’t be able to gain access to them.
When her turn came to be launched into society at the traditional ball she didn’t know how to behave around men. The joking informality that she used in her conversations with Cormac caused them to look askance at her, so she switched to speaking in the clipped cadences favoured by her mother. Before she had time to gauge if that yielded more success, she noticed three girls from her finishing school mingling easily with the established crowd and knew any chance she had of finding a husband in this company was now gone. She saw the girls looking towards her as they whispered, and noticed the horrified looks on the faces of those who listened to them. After she wasn’t asked for a single dance during the length of the ball, she admitted defeat and retired from the social scene.