He glanced down the table to Sir Henry’s daughter. She was barely eating, which was a pity because she was as thin as a sapling. She definitely didn’t look strong enough to have ridden Petra so magnificently that afternoon. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the fact that he knew she was an only child, he could easily believe this girl was a pale twin. No wonder she had recoiled at being called plucky. When she had entered the dining hall that evening he had stared with disorientation at a completely different person from the pert and intrepid horsewoman. A prisoner on the way to the guillotine had more jump in their step than the pale effigy that had somehow made her way to the sofa in the corner. Her skin had been ashen under its sun-kissed warmth, almost green, and he wondered if she was going to be ill. Perhaps someone petite might have looked fragile, but she just looked awkward.
He had almost started moving towards her when her aunt had reached her, and though he had only been able to make out part of her words, the vitriolic viciousness had been distressingly apparent and the coy comments to the Poundridges had almost been worse. She had humiliated the girl in public without compunction and Sir Henry had stood unmoved as a post.
It wasn’t until he sat down by her that he had noticed she was shaking and immediately he was back with his brother. Tim’s legs would leap like that at the onset of the attacks of terror; that was how he could tell it was starting. He hadn’t even been able to hold his one remaining hand or touch him because of the constant pain. All he could do was sit there with him until it stopped. Not that it had helped in the end. To see that stare in the girl’s face and the telltale quiver of her legs had been shocking. She had finally calmed, but he hadn’t. He was still tight with the need to do damage to that vindictive witch. That poor girl needed to get away from this poisonous house.
He glanced at the girl again. She still wasn’t eating, just sitting ramrod straight, staring down at her plate. But there was a stain of colour on her cheeks as the aunt leaned towards her. She was at her again, the hag, he thought angrily. Why doesn’t her father do anything about this? If she had been his daughter he would have ripped this woman’s head from her shoulders long ago.
Something the pink-festooned brunette said to him required his attention and he turned to her resolutely. This wasn’t his affair and it wasn’t as if he had been so successful helping the people who mattered to him. It had been his father’s death that had partially released his mother from her humiliation, not any of his puny efforts to protect her. And Tim... He might have saved his brother’s broken body from a French prison, but he had failed on every other level. This girl was just another of a multitude of cowed women, just like his mother, beaten down until they could no longer imagine standing up for themselves. There was nothing he could do to change the trajectory of her fate.
* * *
‘Are you really fool enough to try and flirt with Lord Hunter? Do you really think someone like him will be interested in you?’ Aunt Hester hissed under cover of the conversation. Her witch’s smile was in full bloom, the one she used while spewing hate in company.
In a year this would be her life, Nell thought. She would be eighteen and for three long years until her majority she would have to suffer the whip of her aunt’s tongue and her father’s anger and indifference. No, she couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t.
‘He doesn’t need your money, so don’t think you can snare someone like him just because you’re an heiress. Like mother, like daughter. That’s how your slut of a mother caught Henry, you know...’
Nell stood before her mind registered the movement.
‘You will not speak about Mama. Not a word. Not ever.’
She hardly recognised her own voice. It was low, but the room fell into shocked silence. Her aunt’s face was turning the colour of fury, but Nell was far away. Soon the walls would collapse on her, but for a moment time had stopped and she could walk through this frozen little world out into the night and keep walking until she reached Keswick.
Then she saw Lord Hunter’s face. There was a smile in his honey-brown eyes and he raised his glass towards her and time moved again and she realised what she had done. Her aunt surged to her feet, which was a mistake, because she was much shorter than Nell.
‘If you cannot behave in a ladylike fashion, you will beg everyone’s pardon and retire, Helen.’ The words were temperate but the message in her aunt’s eyes wasn’t. I’ll deal with you later, they said.
Nell almost hung her head and complied, but looking down at the purply-red patches on her aunt’s cheeks, the thick lips tinted with the pink colour she favoured, she felt a wave of disgust, not fear. She took a step back and turned and curtsied to the others.
‘I apologise for not behaving in a ladylike fashion. I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Goodnight.’ She turned back to her aunt. ‘I will never listen to you again. Not ever. You have no voice.’
She heard her father bellow her name, but didn’t stop. She would leave for Keswick in the morning and she would never return.
London—1820
‘There’s no one there, miss,’ the driver of the post-chaise said impatiently as Nell stared at the empty house and the knocker-less door. How could this be? Her father’s last letter had been sent just two days ago and from London. As far back as she remembered he always spent the week before the Wilton horse-breeders’ fair in London, assessing the latest news and horses at Tattersall’s.
‘We can’t leave the horses standing in this rain, miss; they’ve come a long way.’
Nell turned back to the post-chaise. The driver was right. The poor horses had made excellent time over the last stage and they must be exhausted. But where could she go?
‘Do you happen to know where Lord Hunter resides?’
The words were out before she could consider and the driver cocked a knowing brow.
‘Lord Hunter, miss? Aye, I do. Curzon Street. You quite certain that’s where you’ll be wanting to go? Not quite the place for a respectable young lady.’
Nell breathed in, trying to calm her annoyance and fear. Nell knew memories were often deceptive, but she had found it hard to reconcile her memory of the troubled and irreverent young man with Mrs Sturges’s report of a noted Corinthian addicted to horse racing, pugilism and light women. Nevertheless, it was clear the driver shared Mrs Sturges’s opinion of her alleged fiancé’s reputation. Mrs Sturges might teach French and deportment, but she was also the school’s resident expert on London gossip, and when Nell had received the shocking newspaper clipping sent by her father, she had immediately sought her advice. Mrs Sturges had been delighted to be consulted on such a promisingly scandalous topic as Lord Hunter.
‘He is a relation of mine, so, yes, that is precisely where I’ll be wanting to go,’ Nell lied and leaned back into the chaise as it pulled forward. She, like the horses, was tired and hungry and just wanted to sleep for a week, but she was not going to back down now. She was twenty-one and financially and legally independent, and no one...no one!...was going to decide her fate any longer. She didn’t know whether it was her father or Lord Hunter who was responsible for the gossip in the Morning Post, but she wasn’t going to wait another moment to put a stop to it.
‘This here’s Hunter House, miss.’
Nell inspected the house as the postilion opened the chaise door. It looked like the other houses on the road—pale, patrician and dark except for faint lines of light sifting through the closed curtains in the room on the right. The hood of Nell’s cloak started sliding back and little needles of rain settled on her hair. She tugged her hood into place, wondering how on earth she was going to do this. She turned to the driver.
‘Will you wait a moment?’
The driver glanced at the sluggish drizzle and a little rivulet of water