To Make It Count

Chapter 1

Numb. That's how Camila feels - cold and calm. Resigned.

Peering out the window at the crowded dock, Camila steels herself as the car slows. It's no secret how she feels about this trip to America - she made her opinion clear to her fiancée when he purchased the tickets over six months ago.

"Darling, it's the largest ship ever made. Grandiose, unsinkable! We'll arrive in New York on the finest transportation known to man."

"I don't want to go to New York, Caledon, as you would well know if you had asked me before making this life-altering decision."

"A woman's fancies aren't high on my list of priorities when it comes to business decisions, Karla." Caledon takes a swig of his brandy, his pomaded hair falling slightly into his reddened face as he paces in front of her.

"We're going to New York. The market is better, our wedding is already planned, and perhaps in better company you'll learn to obey your husband and forget these...dalliances of yours."

Camila's cheeks colour. "Veronica wasn't a dalliance -" she begins, rising from her seat.

"Sit. Down. They're a bad influence on you, these friends,women who try to act and study as men do. It will end, Karla. Along with your other associations here. I already withdrew your application to Oxford."

After that conversation, she didn't dare push the issue. She was being shipped to America, whether she liked it or not.

And she definitely leans towards the latter. Camila adores Britain. It's her home, the place she was born and the only place she could remember being loved. When the Bukaters adopted her, they were adamant that she be conditioned out of her 'provincial' cuban accent and trained to speak like a well-bred lady. Whenever she slipped up, she was punished. And of course after Alex's crimes led to stakeholders and lawyers demanding the majority of the Bukater fortune, she was punished even more harshly for every transgression.

She's expected to hold down a good husband now, one who can support Margaret as well. Their ticket, Margaret calls her.Happiness, freedom, joy - none of these are likely to be a part of Camila's future.

Her leanings towards women have always been somewhat of an open secret. While Alex had borne the burden of the Bukater legacy, she had been free to do more or less what she liked, as long as she was discreet - Veronica, a friend from finishing school, had been her last affair, but her mother had put a swift end to it. Camila still isn't sure what she did, but she suspects that it involved bribery.

She had hoped she could maintain those relationships even through her engagement - most people she knew of had indulged in extramarital affairs at some point, after all - but, she supposes, when your brother goes on a xenophobic murderous rampage, discretion and privacy go out the window. Now, she only has Caledon. An engagement ring. An obligation that she wishes she could escape.

Camila has never even left Europe before. MMargaret already successfully stomped out all noticeable vestiges of her lower-class origins, and now her final connection to her birth mother will be gone, severed like a thread as she sails away on the R.M.S. Titanic. She wants to fight. She wants to cry, scream, demand that she be listened to - she wants to go to Oxford and study engineering and leave her mother and her fiancée and this superficial life behind.