Annabel was silent, unable to think beyond the impending horror of what she was going to be told. The vicar’s eyes came back to hers, and then passed on to Janet.
“Ah. Perhaps it would be sensible for your maid to remove the infant? Your attention, my dear, cannot be upon her well-being in this extremity.”
“Extremity?” It was both sharp and low.
Mr Hartwell smiled his reassurance. “There is no cause for alarm, Mrs Lett. I am the bearer of tidings more shocking than distressing.”
These words did nothing to allay Annabel’s fears. She turned with that automatic action which drives one through emergencies.
“Janet, take Becky into the house.”
She watched her maid walk across the grass and scoop up her daughter. Rebecca protested, and a slight delay was occasioned by her insistence on Janet’s gathering up the carefully selected store of pebbles from the bench. When the maid had slipped them into the pocket of her apron, there was yet recalcitrance. But Janet murmured soothingly—of cake, Annabel suspected—at which her daughter’s protests ceased abruptly and she allowed herself to be borne away.
“Sit down, Mrs Lett.”
Annabel sat down, vaguely aware that her two friends did likewise. She stared up into the vicar’s face, noting that his air of solemnity had been replaced with an edge of excitement.
“Pray tell me quickly,” she uttered rapidly. “This suspense is more than I can endure.”
He dropped back a pace, letting go her hands. “Mrs Lett, I have been requested to break to you a piece of news which may, in its production of joy, prove overwhelming.”
Benumbed, Annabel repeated it. “Joy?”
“Dear me, this is harder than I thought for,” said the reverend gentleman, his portentous air deserting him. “Nothing in my experience has prepared me for such a situation as this. I hope I may be forgiven if I mangle the task. Mrs Lett, my news is nothing short of miraculous. Your husband is alive.”
Annabel hardly heard the murmured expressions of astonishment. Her voice was faint.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your husband, Mrs Lett!”
Annabel stared at him, blank with incomprehension. What husband? She had never been married, for she was a fallen woman. Rebecca was the nameless product of an act of lunatic passion. What in the world could the man be talking of?
He seemed to read her thought. “I am speaking of Captain Lett.”
“Captain Lett?” repeated Annabel stupidly. But there was no Captain Lett!
“You believed him dead,” went on Mr Hartwell earnestly, and with growing eagerness. “But it appears that the report was false. He had been severely wounded, and taken prisoner. He was able to get a message to his regiment, and negotiations were begun which ultimately ended with his release.”
“Oh, Annabel, how fortunate!” came from Charlotte. “I am so happy for you.”
Annabel’s eyes turned towards her. Had she gone mad? Of all people in this village, Charlotte surely knew that she was not who she said she was. They had never overtly spoken of it, but hints enough had been passed for Annabel to know that Mrs Filmer had guessed the true situation, which had made it abundantly clear that her own was just the same.
“It is indeed miraculous!” said Jane Emerson warmly, and Annabel saw that her soft brown eyes were misted.
Annabel’s gaze returned to the parson’s face. “I don’t understand.”
“No wonder!”
“It is as he feared,” agreed Mr Hartwell worriedly. “It is just why the Captain requested my intervention. I wonder if perhaps I should—”
He had taken a few paces towards the corner of the cottage as he spoke, but he broke off. With a wide gesture indicating the way he had first come, he turned back to Annabel.
“But here he is—in person. Now perhaps you will believe what I am saying, Mrs Lett.”
A gentleman came into sight. A tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, clad not in scarlet regimentals, as might have been expected, but in frock-coat and breeches. He carried his hat in his hand, and the sun fell upon his head of bright red-gold hair, which was matched by a clipped moustache.
Annabel sat rooted to the spot. She heard nothing of what was said around her, for shock deprived her of everything but recognition of the stark, bare fact.
This was no husband—and no Captain Lett. It was Captain Henry Colton, the father of her illegitimate child.
Chapter Two
For a few breathless moments, Hal’s poise near deserted him. He had made a dreadful mistake! Was this whey-faced creature—this demure little matron, becapped and respectable—was this his fiery Annabel? She had never been a beauty, but she’d been spirited. She’d had a special magnetism that had haunted his dreams, along with those flashing green eyes.
Then he realised that they were staring at him in both shock and bewilderment. That there was a gauntness in her cheeks where there had once been bloom. But recognition surfaced just the same. This was Annabel.
Disappointment thrust at Hal, driving down the guilt, and he was conscious of a craven wish that he had not come. But his scheme—designed to thwart the inevitable defiance of the remembered Annabel—was fairly embarked, and he was as well trapped himself as he had thought to trap his quarry.
He became aware of the cleric at his elbow, the innocent Mr Hartwell, whom he had suborned into establishing his claim in a bid to make it impossible for Annabel to repudiate him.
“Mrs Lett is a good deal overcome, sir.”
An understatement. She was clearly near swooning with shock. There were two females fussing to either side of her, the younger of whom was despatched by the other to fetch a glass of water. He had not intended Hartwell to make so public an exhibition of the affair.
“I feared that it would prove overwhelming,” he responded, and noted with dismay that Annabel’s silent figure flinched at the sound of his voice. She evidently knew him.
The vicar’s expression was expectant. It flashed through Hal’s mind that his assumed role demanded more of him. He hesitated. Should he go to her? Would a true husband at this juncture seize her in his arms? He could not bring himself to do it! Not to the female staring at him in so bemused a fashion. He did not even know what to say to her.
In truth he had not planned beyond the softened presentation by a local man of the cloth. But then it had not occurred to him that he would find so altered a creature in the woman he had loved and wronged. Nor that he would meet with anything other than a rebuff. Hence Mr Hartwell.
“If Jane will only hurry with that water,” came worriedly from the older female, who was chafing one of Annabel’s hands. “I fear she may faint away, Mr Hartwell!”
“I never faint.”
Hal felt his guts go solid. Annabel’s voice was a thread, but he would have known it anywhere. Its clear tone was in his head in too many recollected utterances to be mistaken. Deep inside the stranger he was confronting lurked the woman he had known.
He knew that it behoved him to consolidate the position he had adopted, but some quality in Annabel’s dull green gaze—it had used to be anything but lacklustre!—made him pause.
His soldiering instincts came to his rescue. When baulked by the enemy, retreat and regroup. He set his shoulders and summoned a hearty air.
“Perfectly true. To my knowledge, she never has fainted.” He turned to the vicar. “All the same, I believe it will be best if we withdraw for