involved trade, she had a feeling even they might not be quite so tolerant.
‘Perhaps I ought to tell them...’ Lydia’s rosebud mouth curved into a smug-looking smile. ‘After all, they have a right to know when you’re sullying the family name.’
‘I’m not sullying anything!’
‘That is unless you’re prepared to deliver one little message for me?’
‘All right, Lydia, you win.’ Frances dropped back, defeated, into her seat. ‘What do you want me to tell him?’
Frances weaved a slow and reluctant path along the beach, stopping occasionally to pick up a pebble and skim it across the tops of the oncoming waves. She didn’t bother to count the bounces. Her record was fourteen in a row, but today the stones felt like lead weights. She was dragging her feet so heavily that if she didn’t hurry then the tide would be all the way up to the cliffs before she could make her escape back to Whitby, but at least she knew the tempestuous North Sea and its shoreline well enough to know exactly how much time she had.
Besides, she reassured herself, her errand wouldn’t take long, just a few minutes to deliver the message and get a response. For her sake, she hoped it was a yes, if only to prevent Lydia from sending her back again. For Arthur Amberton’s sake, however, she hoped it was a definitive no. Family loyalty aside, she couldn’t help but feel that he’d been the one who’d had a lucky escape six years before. He might have been head over heels in love with her sister, but he hadn’t known her at all.
Frances’s stomach had been performing a series of unwanted contortions at the prospect of seeing him again, her emotions torn between excitement and dread. After his surprise return, she’d hoped to catch a glimpse of him in Whitby, if only to reassure herself that he was truly alive and well, but to no avail. According to the local rumour mill, he rarely came to town, let alone attended social functions, and after a while she’d given up hope.
Which was, she’d eventually decided, for the best. As much as she’d wanted to see him, she’d had absolutely no desire for him to see her. If they’d met again, then she would have had to explain the veil that she habitually wore out of doors and then listen to the inevitable words of sympathy and reassurance. She was heartily sick of those words, shallow platitudes that meant nothing, especially from men, though perhaps not from Arthur...
Would he have behaved any differently from Leo if he’d been in the same situation? she wondered. She didn’t want to believe that Arthur would ever have been so fickle, but he was still a man, and men seemed to value beauty in women above all else. Lydia was living proof of that and Arthur had been smitten with Lydia... In which case, yes, he probably would have behaved like Leo after all!
She stopped short, shocked by the direction of her own thoughts. They sounded bitter in her own head and she didn’t want to be bitter, even if it was hard not to be sometimes. Besides, what did it matter how Arthur would have behaved? What did it matter what he thought of her veil? This visit had nothing to do with her. She was there to talk about Lydia, that was all.
She tossed her last pebble into the sea and then started up the sandy slope towards a gap in the cliffside. According to Lydia, Arthur’s farm was located just before the small fishing port of Sandsend, half a mile from the shore and accessible along a gorse-lined path from the beach.
She made her way along it, skirting around the perimeter of the village to join a dirt track on the other side. It was steeper than she’d expected and rutted with holes that made walking difficult, so that she was panting by the time she reached the edge of the Moors, where lush green fields gave way to brown heathland. Breathless, she stopped at a wooden gate, taking a few moments to admire the view. From this vantage point, she could see the sea spreading out like a shimmering turquoise carpet all the way to the horizon beyond. It was a beautiful position for any dwelling, even a ‘woebegone, old farmhouse’, though as she trudged on through the gate and around the side of a small woodland copse, she could see that it was anything but.
Far from dilapidated, it was clearly a working farm, a scene of well-organised chaos with giant bales of hay stacked along one side of a three-storey stone house and what looked like a newly built log store on the other. It was hardly deserted either. On the contrary, there seemed to be animals everywhere: pigs in a sty, goats and sheep in two separate pens, at least two dozen chickens and five lazy-looking cats roaming wild, not to mention a pair of horses peering out from over the top of a stable door.
Frances stopped in the centre of the yard and turned around slowly, searching for any sign of a human in the midst of so many animals, but there seemed to be no one, just a brown-and-white speckled dog sitting by the front door of the farmhouse, its head tipped to one side as if it were the one in charge. Judging by its short coat and piercing blue eyes, she guessed it was a sheepdog, though fortunately it seemed to be friendly as well.
She bent down to ruffle its ears, struck anew by the impropriety of her situation. She was an unmarried, unchaperoned, uninvited lady, trespassing on behalf of her widowed sister in order to persuade a single gentleman—a viscount, no less!—to accept a request that he’d already refused! Only Lydia would ask such a thing. Only Lydia would expect it to work!
But she was there now and she might as well get the whole mortifying scene over with. Lydia was more than capable of carrying out her threat and telling their parents about her fledgling business if she didn’t do what she wanted and her work was too important for her to risk that. She’d tell them about it herself eventually, once she’d earned enough to stand on her own two feet if necessary, but not yet. She had her own plans for the future and she’d reveal them when she was good and ready.
Bolstered by that conviction, she lifted her hand to the front door and knocked. There was no answer, though the door swung open on its hinges with a loud creak.
‘Lord Scorborough?’
She called out his name, but there was still no answer. No sound at all, in fact. Tentatively, she took a few steps inside and along a darkened hallway, poking her head around another door into what looked like the kitchen. That was empty, too, though there was a large iron kettle steaming on the range. Perplexed, she lifted her veil and pulled it back over her bonnet for a clearer view. Clearly somebody was nearby, but why weren’t they answering?
She felt a tremor of unease, resolving to go back outside to search the yard again, when she heard the click of a door opening further down the hallway. Quickly, she turned around, ready to explain her intrusion, only to find herself face to face with a complete stranger wearing nothing more than a pair of short, cotton under-drawers.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed aloud, sucking in a breath of panic as the stranger came to an abrupt halt, uttering a series of vividly descriptive expletives whose meanings she could only imagine. His legs and upper body were completely exposed so that, in the time it took for her to recover her wits, she had a close-up view of powerful calves, a muscular chest and arms that looked to be around the same circumference as her waist.
‘Oh!’ She wasn’t sure why she repeated the exclamation, only that it seemed appropriate as she dragged her gaze to his face. His rugged appearance was almost as alarming as his lack of apparel. Close-cropped hair and dark stubble gave him the look of a convict. Was he a convict? His colourful language certainly wasn’t that of a gentleman. She felt her palms break into a cold sweat, panic mounting as her heartbeat started to hammer erratically. The wrong farm! She must have come to the wrong farm, she realised, berating herself
