description, Father. For if you remember, Midas was the King of Phrygia whose touch turned all to gold, and on whom Apollo bestowed the ears of an ass. Lord Ravensden must be a fool to have turned Olivia against him, but it seems, like that ancient king, he cares more for gold than the sweetness of a woman’s touch.”
“Must be a fool then,” sighed a man who had loved his wife too much. “Olivia is better off without him. Write at once and tell her we shall be delighted to have her home. Never did think it was a good idea for her to go away…your mother’s idea. She wanted the chance of a better life for at least one of her daughters, and her poor sister-inlaw was childless. Thank God the Burtons didn’t pick you! I couldn’t have borne that loss, Beatrice.”
“Thank you, Papa.” She smiled and kissed his forehead lovingly. “You know, if you let all the steam go in one direction, it might pass through pipes before it finally escapes, and give some heat to the rooms. It would make the bedrooms so much warmer…as long as you could be sure the device that heats the water will not blow up like it did the last time.”
“Let the steam pass through pipes that run round the house.” Mr Roade looked at his daughter as if she had just lit a candle in his head. “That’s a very good notion, Beatrice. It might look a little ugly, I suppose. I wonder if anyone would put up with that for the convenience of feeling warm?”
“I certainly would,” Beatrice replied. “Have you made any advances on the grate for a smokeless fire? Mine was smoking dreadfully again last night. It always does when the wind is from the east.”
“It might be a bird’s nest,” her father said. “I’ll sweep the chimney out for you tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Papa, but I’m sure Mr Rowley will come up from the village if we ask him. It is not fitting for you to undertake such tasks.” Besides which, her father would make a dreadful mess of it!
“Fiddlesticks!” Mr Roade said. “I’ll do it for you first thing tomorrow.”
“Very well, Papa.”
Beatrice smiled as she went away. Her father would have forgotten about the smoking chimney five minutes after she left him, which mattered not at all, since she intended to send for the sweep when their one and only manservant next went down to Abbot Quincey to fetch their weekly supplies.
Seeing her father’s manservant tending the candelabra on the lowboy in the hall, Beatrice smiled.
“Good evening, Bellows. It is a terrible evening, is it not?”
“We’re in for a wild night, miss. Lily brought your letter?”
“Yes, thank you—and thank you for thinking to fetch it for me.”
“You’re welcome, miss. I was in the market at Abbot Quincey and it was the work of a moment to see if any mail had come.”
She nodded and smiled, then passed on up the stairs.
It was possible to buy most goods from the general store in Abbot Quincey, which was much the largest of the four villages, and might even have been called a small town these days, but when anything more important was needed, they had to send Bellows to Northampton.
They were lucky to have Bellows, who was responsible for much of the work both inside the house and out. He had been with them since her father was a boy, and could remember when the Roade family had not been as poor as they were now.
For some reason all his own, Bellows was devoted to his master, and remained loyal despite the fact that he had not been paid for three years. He received his keep, and had his own methods of supplementing his personal income. Sometimes a plump rabbit or a pigeon found its way into the kitchen, and Beatrice suspected that Bellows was not above a little poaching, but she would never dream of asking where the gift came from. Indeed, she could not afford to!
Walking upstairs to her bedchamber to wash and change her clothes, Beatrice reflected on the strangeness of fate.
“My poor, dear sister,” she murmured. “Oh, how could that rogue Ravensden have been so cruel?”
She herself had been deserted by a man who had previously declared himself madly in love with her, because, she understood, he had lost a small fortune at the gaming tables. She truly believed that Matthew Walters had intended to marry her, until he was ruined by a run of bad luck—he had certainly declared himself in love with her several times. Only her own caution had prevented her allowing her own feelings to show.
If she had given way to impulse, she would have been jilted publicly, which would have made her situation very much worse. At least she had been spared the scandal and humiliation that would have accompanied such an event.
Only Beatrice’s parents had known the truth. Mrs Roade had held her while she wept out her disappointment and hurt…but that was a long time ago. Beatrice had been much younger then, perhaps a little naïve, innocent of the ways of the world. She had grown up very quickly after Matthew’s desertion.
Since then, she had given little thought to marriage. She suspected that most men were probably like the one who had tried so ardently to seduce her. If she had been foolish enough to give in to his pleading…what then? She might have been ruined as well as jilted. Somehow she had resisted, though she had believed herself in love…
Beatrice laughed harshly. She was not such a fool as to believe in it now! She had learned to see the world for what it was, and knew that love was just something to be written of by dreamers and poets.
She had been taught a hard lesson, and now she had her sister’s experience to remind her. If Olivia had been so hurt that she was driven to do something that she must know would ruin her in the eyes of the world…What a despicable man Lord Ravensden must be!
“Oh, you wicked, wicked man,” she muttered as she finished dressing and prepared to go down for dinner. “I declare you deserve to be boiled in oil for what you have done!”
Lord Ravensden had begun to equate with the Marquis of Sywell in her mind. After her uncomfortable escape from injury that evening, Beatrice was inclined to think all the tales of him were true! And Lord Ravensden not much better.
A moment’s reflection must have told her this was hardly likely to be true, for her sister would surely not even have entertained the idea of marriage to such a man. She was the indulged adopted daughter of loving parents, and had she said from the start that she could not like their heir, would surely have been excused from marrying him. It was the shock and the scandal of her having jilted her fiancé that had upset them.
However, Beatrice was not thinking like herself that evening. The double shock had made her somehow uneasy. She had the oddest notion that something terrible had either happened or was about to…something that might affect not only her and her sister’s lives, but that of many others in the four villages.
The scream she had heard that night before the Marquis came rushing upon her…it had sounded evil. Barely human. Was it an omen of something?
After hearing it, she had come home to receive her sister’s letter. Of course the scream could have nothing to do with that…and yet the feeling that the lives of many people were about to change was strong in her. A cold chill trickled down her spine as she wondered at herself. Never before had she experienced such a feeling…was it what people sometimes called a premonition?
Do not be foolish, Beatrice, she scolded
