husband, I should like to know? How can the earl just let the two of them ramble about at Barton Park like that? The house is hardly fit to be lived in. Though we must be nice to them, I suppose. They are our neighbours.’
David suddenly glimpsed Lady Ramsay as she moved around the edge of the dance floor, seeming to look for someone. Her sister, perhaps? Miss Bancroft was nowhere to be seen. David had to agree that the Bancroft sisters’ situation was an odd one and not one his own highly respectable parents would have understood. The two women lived alone in that ramshackle old house, seldom going out into neighbourhood society, and Lord Ramsay was never seen. Lady Ramsay often seemed sad and distant and Miss Bancroft very protective of her, which was most admirable.
David thought they also seemed brave and obviously devoted to each other. Another thing about Miss Bancroft that was unusual—and intriguing.
Suddenly he felt a nudging touch to his hand and glanced down in surprise to find he still stood on the crowded dance floor. And what was more, it was his turn in the figures as the music ran on around him.
Miss Cole smiled up at him, a quick, dazzling smile of flirtatious encouragement, and he led her down the line of dancers in the quick, leaping steps of the dance. She spun under his arm, light and quick, the jewels in her twists of red-gold hair flashing.
‘Very well done, Sir David,’ she whispered.
Miss Cole, unlike Miss Bancroft, was exactly the sort of young lady his sister wanted to see him marry. The daughter of a local, eminently respectable squire, and friends with Louisa for a long time: pretty and accomplished, sparkling in local society, well dowered. The kind of wife who would surely run her house well and fit seamlessly into his carefully built life. And she seemed to like him.
Miss Bancroft was assuredly not for him. She was too young, too eccentric, for them to ever suit. His whole life had been so carefully planned by his family and by himself. He almost threw it all away once. He couldn’t let that happen again now. Not for some strange fascination.
Miss Cole, or a lady like her, would make him a fine wife. Why could he not stop searching the room for a glimpse of Emma Bancroft?
* * *
From the diary of Arabella Bancroft—1663
I have at last arrived at Barton Park. It was not a long journey, but it feels as if I have ventured to a different world. Aunt Mary’s house in London, the endless hours of sewing while she bemoaned all that was lost to her in the wars between the king and Parliament, the filth in the streets—here where everything is green and fresh and new, all that is almost forgotten.
I know I must be grateful to be brought here to my cousin’s beautiful new manor, this gift to him from the new king. I am a poor orphan of seventeen and must live as I can. Yet I cannot understand why I am here. My cousin’s wife has enough maids. I have nothing yet to do but settle into my new chamber—my very own, not shared! Heaven!—and explore the lovely gardens.
But my chambermaid has told me the most intriguing tale—it seems that during the wars one of King Charles’s men hid a great treasure near here. And it has never been found.
I do love a puzzle.
Chapter One
Six years later
Barton Park. Emma could hardly believe she was there again, after so much time. It felt as if she had been swept up in a whirlwind from one world and dropped into another, it was all so strange.
She stood at the rise of a hill, staring down along the grey ribbon of road to the gates of Barton. They stood slightly open, as if waiting to welcome her home, but Barton no longer felt like home. There was no longer anywhere that felt like home now. She was just a little piece of gossamer flotsam, blown back to these gates.
She gathered her black skirts in one hand to keep them from tossing around her in the wind. The carriage waited for her patiently on the road below, halted on its uneventful journey from London to here when she insisted on getting out to look around. Her brother-in-law’s driver and footmen waited quietly, no doubt fully informed by downstairs gossip about the unpredictable ways of Lady Ramsay’s prodigal sister.
Emma knew she should hurry inside. The wind was brisk and the pale-grey clouds overhead threatened rain. Her old dog, Murray, whined a bit and nudged with his cold nose at her gloved hand, but he wouldn’t leave her side. Murray, at least, had never changed.
Yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to go to the house just yet.
She’d left Barton five years ago as Miss Emma Bancroft, full of hopes and fears for her first London Season. She came back now as Mrs Carrington, young widow, penniless, shadowed by gossip and scandal. The fears still lingered, but the hope was quite, quite gone.
She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the light and studied the red-brick chimneys of Barton rising through the swaying banks of trees. Spring was on the way, she could see it in the fresh, pale green buds on the branches, could smell the damp-flower scent of it on the wind. Once she had loved spring at Barton. A time of new beginnings, new dreams.
Emma wanted to feel that way again, she wanted it so desperately. Once she had been so eager to run out and discover everything life had to offer. But that led only to disaster, over and over. It ended in a life with Henry Carrington.
Emma closed her eyes against a sudden spasm of pain that rippled through her. Henry. So handsome, so charming, so dazzling to her entire senses. He was like a whirlwind, too, and he swept her along with him, giddy and full of raw, romantic joy.
Until that giddiness turned to madness and led them on a downward spiral through Continental spa towns where there was plenty of gambling to be had. Henry was always so sure their fortunes would turn around soon, on the turn of the next card, at the bottom of the next bottle. It only led them to shabbier and shabbier lodgings on shadier streets with uncertain friends.
It led Henry to death at the wrong end of a duelling pistol, wielded by the husband of a woman he claimed to have fallen in love with at Vichy. And it took Emma back here to Barton, when she found the scandal had blocked her escape anywhere else.
‘Let me help you,’ Henry’s cousin Philip had said, grasping her hand tightly in his when he gave her the news of the fatal duel. ‘Henry would have wanted it that way. And you know how very much I have always admired you. Dearest Emma.’
Philip had indeed always been Henry’s friend, a friend who caroused with him, but also loaned him money, made sure he made it home, visited Emma when she was alone and frightened in strange rooms with no knowledge of when Henry might return. She appreciated Philip’s kindness, even in moments when his attentions seemed to ease over a line of propriety.
In that moment, with Henry so newly dead and the shock so cold around her, she was almost tempted to let Philip ‘take care of her’. To give in to the loneliness and fear. But then she looked into his eyes and saw something there that frightened her even more. A gleam of possessive passion she saw once in Mr Milne, the dancing master, and in that villain who had once kidnapped her in the rainstorm at Barton.
The same look they had just before they violently attacked her.
So she sent Philip away, swallowed her pride, and wrote to her sister. Jane had warned her against Henry when Emma wanted to marry him, had even threatened to make Emma wait a year before she would even agree to an engagement, which
