coat and hung on. It was impossible to move.
‘Stand up straight,’ he said patiently, untangling her. ‘And put your feet like this and hold my arm.’
Nell’s feet shot out and she sat down with a thud. ‘Ouch!’
‘Up.’ Marcus hauled her to her feet. ‘Try again.’
After half an hour of skids, slides and inelegant landings on her bottom, Nell found she could stand up and move each foot forward in turn. ‘Look! I’m skating!’ Hal swooped past, laughing at her, and she grinned back. ‘I wish I could go fast like that.’
‘All right.’ Marcus moved behind her, put his hands at her waist and pushed. ‘Here we go, you move your feet too.’
And she was skating, laughing out loud, waving to Lord Narborough, who had Honoria on one arm and Verity on the other. Behind her, Marcus’s body was strong and warm, sheltering her, supporting her, keeping her safe. She turned her head and smiled up at him. ‘I love this!’
His eyes widened, his smooth pace faltered just a fraction and Nell lost her footing. Her feet shot out in front of her and she went down like a stone, landing virtually on Marcus’s feet. There was a sharp crack, echoing around the valley. He stumbled, but she was too close for a recovery, and they ended up in a laughing heap on the ice.
In a moment they were surrounded by the other skaters, helping them to their feet. ‘What was that noise, just as we fell?’ Marcus demanded, dusting ice powder off his coat. He looked around at the pond. ‘It isn’t breaking up, is it?’
Diana Price flew towards them from the far end of the little lake like a racer, her face white. ‘A gunshot!’ She came to a halt, her skates kicking up a shower of frozen fragments. ‘I felt the bullet go past me, just as you went down. Someone is shooting from the woods.’
The men, without a word being exchanged, encircled the women, hurrying them off the ice. ‘There!’ Marcus, tearing off the bindings of his skates without looking, was scanning the woods. ‘By that dead oak.’
‘I see him.’ Hal was already free of the encumbering blades and running hard for the carriage. Nell saw him pull a shotgun out from beneath the driver’s box, slinging it over his shoulder on the run as Marcus joined him.
‘Into the carriage, everyone.’ Lord Narborough was snapping orders, shepherding the servants into their brake. ‘Leave everything.’
Crammed into the carriage, they jostled together as the coachman whipped the horses into a skidding canter on the icy track. He pulled up as the carriage came out of the woods and Hal and Marcus jumped up, one on each step, clinging to the door frames on either side.
‘Gone,’ Marcus said through the open window. ‘There were hoof prints, then he was into the deep wood. The ground’s too hard and there is no snow in there. We lost him.’
Nell kept her eyes on Marcus as the carriage bounced and swayed its way back to the house. He looked grimly angry. She could imagine his frustration, chasing a ghost, his actions tied by the need to protect a houseful of women.
This campaign of persecution was moving beyond mere attempts to frighten and disturb. She had no idea whether that shot had missed on purpose or whether they had all been fortunate, but someone could have been killed.
As she went up the steps in the wake of Lady Narborough she realized, with a sort of calm fatalism, that she could keep her secret no longer.
‘George,’ Lady Narborough said as they stood in the drawing room, dripping onto the fine carpet. ‘What is going on?’
Nell saw Marcus meet his father’s eye and nod. Yes, the time had come. As his father began to explain, she touched Marcus’s arm. ‘I need to speak to you.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes,’ she murmured, drawing him aside. ‘Your father will tell the others what he feels they should know, will he not?’
‘Very well.’ He led her out of the drawing room, across the Great Hall to the small panelled room she remembered. ‘What is it, Nell?’ Marcus shut the door and leaned one shoulder against it. ‘There is no need to be afraid; he cannot get us in here.’
‘I am not afraid. Not of that.’ She found she was standing almost to attention as though she were in the dock of a court. Her hands were trembling. Nell clasped them tightly, raised her chin. ‘My real name is not Nell Latham. I was Lady Helena Wardale.’
He did not speak for a long moment, but he pushed away from the door and stood, quite still, staring at her across the six foot of space that separated them. Finally he said, ‘Younger daughter of the Earl of Leybourne.’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew what that rope signified.’ It was not a question.
‘Yes.’
‘You delivered it. You were in my father’s room when someone broke into it to bring another rope—and yet you said nothing.’ He sounded as coldly calm as a lawyer setting out the case for the prosecution, as though this meant nothing to him but an academic exercise injustice.
‘Yes.’
‘Is Salterton your lover?’
‘No!’
‘Your brother, then?’
‘No. Nathan may be dead, for all I know.’ I will not cry, she told herself fiercely, biting her lower lip in the hope the pain would steady her.
‘You have every reason to hate my father, this family. You were the instrument of his heart attack, you shot me. You have lived under our roof for weeks. My mother and sisters treated you as a friend. And all the while we worried and speculated and you said nothing.’
‘I never lied to you. Latham is the name I have used since I was a child. It is my name now.’
‘And if we had known all along who you were—can’t you see how important that could be?’ His calm cracked suddenly in an explosion of movement that took him across the intervening space to stand before her. When she had first met him, she had thought him too big and too male to be close to. Now she fought the instinct to flinch away and he saw the fear in her eyes.
‘I won’t hit you, Nell. I’m not like your mysterious friend. I don’t make war on women, even treacherous ones.’
‘I am not a traitor!’ she flared back at him. ‘All I knew was that my mother brought me up to hate the name Carlow and now I have read my father’s letters, her diary, I can see why. I did not know Lord Narborough’s family name when I brought the parcel.
‘Yes, I believe he betrayed my father, his friend, but now I have met your father I can see that he only acted out of conscience and he is suffering for it. He was wrong, so wrong, but he acted honestly and I forgive him.’
‘That’s magnanimous of you,’ Marcus said, his eyes narrowed on her face. ‘You can hardly take the moral high ground on this. Your father was a traitor and a murderer and an adulterer into the bargain.’
Nell slapped his face before she even
