Janice Preston
For Elizabeth Bailey, whose encouragement and advice during my early writing attempts was invaluable.
April 1811
Eyes streaming, coughing and choking, she tugged at the window, but it refused to budge. The floorboards scorched her feet and she could hear the ominous roar of the fire below. Dragging the pungent air deep into her lungs, she screamed.
‘Ellie. Ellie. Wake up!’
‘What?’
Eleanor, Baroness Ashby, roused to the gently rocking rhythm of her carriage. She stared groggily into the anxious eyes of Lucy, Dowager Marchioness of Rothley. Eleanor levered herself upright on the squabs, her nightmare still vividly real.
‘You screamed. Was it the nightmare again?’
Eleanor drew in a deep breath—fresh, clean, untainted. ‘Yes. I’m sorry if I frightened you, Aunt.’ Her heart slowed from a gallop to a fast trot. ‘Everything seems so real in the dream. And I can never get out.’
‘Well, we must be thankful you escaped the real fire, my pet. It doesn’t bear thinking about, what might have happened.’
‘Milady?’ Lucy’s maid, sitting on the backward-facing seat, opposite Eleanor, leant forward.
‘Yes, Matilda?’
‘Is it true someone set fire to the library deliberately?’
‘Yes.’
Eleanor did not elaborate. Someone had broken into Ashby Manor—her beloved home—at the dead of night, piled books into the middle of the library floor and set fire to them. The whole east wing had been destroyed. All those beautiful books!
‘I told you.’ Lizzie, Eleanor’s maid, also travelling in the carriage to London, nudged Matilda. ‘If milady had not woken up when she did, she’d be—’
‘Lizzie!’
Lizzie cast an apologetic glance at Eleanor as she subsided into silence. Eleanor needed no reminding of what would have happened had she not woken when she did, two weeks before. She shuddered, recalling that terrifying moment when, climbing from her bedchamber window, her searching toes met empty space where the top rung of the ladder had, only moments before, been placed against the wall by her head groom, Fretwell. If Lizzie had not come looking for her when she did... Fear coiled in Eleanor’s belly. Lizzie had arrived just in time to see a shadowy figure knock Fretwell out cold before flinging the ladder to the ground.
Who was he? Was he really trying to kill me?
They had been unable to find any trace of the culprit. Fretwell had not seen him, and Lizzie’s description was so vague it was no help at all, but there had been no further incidents and no one could recall seeing any strangers in the vicinity.
‘I hope Aunt Phyllis will be comfortable staying with Reverend