going on?’ His father burst upon them suddenly, trailing a defeated-looking Arthur behind him. ‘Lance, I told you to behave yourself.’
‘I was behaving myself.’
He ran a hand through his hair, torn between exasperation and dull fury. How exactly had he found himself in this position, between two livid fathers, a silent brother and a tiny kitten of a woman who looked as though she wished the ground would open up and swallow her? Why the hell was he the one defending her?
‘He called me a liar.’ Harper’s tone was indignant.
‘And you called me a reprobate.’ Lance shot him a savage look. ‘I believe that makes us even.’
‘Apologise!’ His father’s voice was a hiss, bristling with rage. ‘Apologise to our guest right now.’
‘Don’t you want to hear my side of the story?’
‘Your side of the story is always the same. He called you a reprobate because that’s what you are. Now apologise or get out of my house this instant!’
‘Stop!’ It was Miss Harper who interrupted this time. ‘Please stop. It was all my fault. I overreacted, I’m sure.’
‘I doubt that, my dear.’ His father didn’t even bother to look at her. ‘You mustn’t distress yourself.’
‘But you mustn’t do this! Not because of me. It’s too awful.’
‘It’s no more than he deserves. This is the last straw, Lance.’
‘For you, too, Father.’ He didn’t wait another moment, turning his back and cutting a swathe through the dancers as he stormed towards the door. ‘Don’t expect me to set foot in this house ever again!’
‘Good!’ His father’s voice reverberated around the ballroom. ‘Because I wouldn’t let you in! You’re no son of mine any more!’
Lance stopped in the doorway, opening his mouth to hurl one final parting shot, then closing it again as he caught sight of his brother. Arthur was standing off to one side, a picture of such abject misery that he was half tempted to march back across the room and drag him away with him, too. But he was going back to his regiment and Arthur...well, Arthur was going to marry Violet Harper.
He took one last look at her face, at her big blue eyes made even bigger with shock. She was right about one thing. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t been so damned oversensitive, then he wouldn’t have had to run after her to apologise, wouldn’t have run into her father or stood up for her either, not that she’d thanked him for that! His lip curled contemptuously. From now on, he’d stick with the Cordelia Braithwaites of the world. Women like Violet Harper were more trouble than they were worth.
He turned away, mentally consigning his father, Harper and the whole room, Arthur excepted, to the deepest, darkest region of Hades. As for Violet Harper, future sister-in-law or not, he earnestly hoped he never set eyes on her again.
March 1867—five years later
The snow started to fall around midday.
Violet tugged at the hood of her thin grey, woefully inadequate cloak and tipped her head back, sticking her tongue out to catch a flake on its tip. It melted at once, sending an icy trickle sliding down the back of her throat. Snow. She’d never been out in it before, had only ever watched it fall through a windowpane, and the new experience was invigorating.
Nothing, not even bad weather, could dampen her spirits today. She ought to be frightened, sitting in the back of a rickety old cart rattling its way high over the moors, running away from her home, her few friends and everything else she’d ever known, but instead she felt exhilarated. Even the barren heather-and-gorse-filled wilderness didn’t intimidate her this morning, as it always had from a distance. Today it looked free and unconfined and alive, the way that she finally felt inside. In the space of a few hours, she’d travelled further than she ever had in the whole of her twenty-three years previously, not just in distance, but in herself, too. At long last, she’d taken charge of her own future, refusing to be the old, shrinking Violet any longer. For the first time in her life, she felt proud of herself.
Not a bad accomplishment for her wedding day.
‘The mine’s just over that ridge!’ the driver’s boy called back to her. ‘Don’t worry about the weather, miss. We’ve ridden through worse.’
She gave him a dazzling smile and settled back against the crates bearing supplies up to the miners at Rosedale. The driver had promised to take her on to Helmsley afterwards, though she could only imagine what he and his boy must be thinking of her. Her friend Ianthe had vouched for them, both for their characters as well as their ability to keep a secret, but they must surely still be wondering why a lone gentlewoman would arrange to meet them at dawn on the outskirts of Whitby as if she were fleeing the clutches of some evil tyrant.
Which in one sense, she supposed, she was.
She’d been planning her escape for the past week, almost from the moment Mr Rowlinson had taken her aside after her father’s funeral, saying he preferred to communicate the terms of the will in private. It hadn’t taken her long to understand why. The lawyer had been apologetic as he’d read, watching her anxiously over the metal rim of his spectacles, though no amount of sympathetic looks could have mitigated the shock of those words. Looking back she felt strangely detached from the scene, as if it had been someone else sitting in her chair like some kind of black-clad statue, frozen in horror as her father bequeathed her in marriage to the heir of Amberton Castle.
Bequeathed!
In that moment she’d felt something harden inside her, as if all her feelings of grief and loss had crystallised into something else, something colder and darker. She didn’t know what the emotion was, if it even was an emotion at all. It felt more like the absence of one, an emptiness at the very centre of her being, as if her ability to feel anything had been suspended.
She remembered laughing. She must have sounded hysterical because Mr Rowlinson had rushed to pour her a glass of brandy and, for the first time in her life, she’d accepted. Her father had never allowed her to touch any kind of alcohol, but she’d wanted to drink the whole bottle just to spite him.
A few sips had put paid to that idea, making her cough and splutter and her head spin even more as she’d tried to understand how her father could have done such a thing to her. After so many years of obedience, of living her life in the shadows, tolerating his abuse and his insults, how could he have arranged a marriage without even telling her—let alone asking her? Just when she’d thought she might finally be free.
She ought to have known that he wouldn’t let her go so easily. He’d never allowed her to make any decisions of her own and now it seemed he intended to keep on controlling her life even after his death. The terms of the will were so strict that even Mr Rowlinson had faltered in reading them. Unconventional as it was to hold a wedding so soon after a funeral, her father’s words were as uncompromising and unyielding as ever. Unless she married the man of his choosing within one month of his burial, she would be disinherited, would lose her home and her fortune to a distant cousin in Lancashire. In short, she would be penniless.
Unless
