And hence too her bonnetless state. The wind and the sea air would do dreadful things to both her complexion and her hair. She tipped her face higher into the air and shook out her tangled hair with smiling defiance.

Hence also the fact that the likelihood of rain was not sending her scurrying back to the dower house for shelter. If she got wet, she would also feel cold and uncomfortable and might ruin her bonnet and her good shoes. She looked up at the clouds and challenged them to rain torrents on her head.

She was not with child. She had wept in the privacy of her own room when her courses had begun less than a week after her return from Alvesley. She had grieved for the child who had never been and the marriage that would never happen. At the same time she had been overwhelmingly relieved. She had written the next day to Kit, breaking off their engagement—the most difficult task she had ever undertaken in her life.

The thought of it—of the moment the letter had left her hands—could still make her chest tighten with an almost unbearable pain. She would not allow herself to think of it. At some time in the future—still rather far in the future, she believed—she would be able to look back on the brief summer at Alvesley and remember with pleasure what had surely been the happiest time of her life.

But not quite yet. At this precise moment in her life she was almost happy. She accepted with quiet patience that she was not entirely so.

Tomorrow she was going to Bath. Oh, not permanently yet, but the wheels were being set in motion. Gwen and Neville were going to accompany her. An agent had found four different houses he considered suitable residences for a single lady of modest fortune. She was going to view them all and make her choice. Against the advice of everyone except Elizabeth, but with the reluctant support of all, she was about to embark upon the rest of her life. Not a passive observer any longer, but an active participant.

The mist of spray from the sea—or perhaps it was the beginning of the rain—was dampening her face. Her hair was going to be impossibly curly when she got back home and her poor maid was called upon to do something with it. Lauren closed her eyes and felt enclosed by wind. Exhilarated by the wildness of it. Empowered by it.

She had read fifteen years’ worth of letters from the stranger who was her mother. Cheerful, careless, untidily scrawled letters from a woman who was clearly enjoying her life even though she complained freely about anything and everything—particularly about the men on whom she had heaped rapturous praises in an earlier letter, and consistently over the fact that her beloved Lauren never wrote back to her, never came to live with her. They were letters that would have shocked Lauren to the core even a few months earlier. But she had acquired a new tolerance, an acceptance of the myriad ways in which other people coped with the one life allotted them. She felt an aching love for the mother she remembered so dimly that none of the memories was concrete. She had written a long, long letter and sent it on its way to India. She could not expect any reply until sometime next year, but she felt a connection with the woman who had borne her.

She should climb down, she supposed, looking with some misgiving at the footholds and handholds that had appeared perfectly manageable when she had examined them from the beach. But she had been looking up then, not down. If she waited until the rain was falling in earnest, the rock might become slippery and she would be stranded.

For a moment her mind touched upon the memory of Kit helping her descend the tree at Alvesley, his body and arms cradling her protectively from behind, though she had forbidden him to touch her or carry her down. She pushed the memory aside. She was not ready for it yet. It was still too painful.

Something caught at the edge of her vision, and she turned her head to look. There was a steep path down from the cliff top to the valley where the waterfall and pool and cottage were, just out of her range of vision from where she sat. But she could see the bridge that crossed the river as it flowed the last few yards to the beach and the sea. He was just stepping onto the bridge, his long drab riding coat billowing out to one side, his tall hat pulled low over his brow.

A mirage, she thought foolishly, whipping her head downward to rest on her knees. Her heart thumped uncomfortably, as if she had been running too fast. It was just Neville, sent by Aunt Clara to discover what kept her so long on the beach. But it was not Neville. The Duke of Portfrey, then, sent by Elizabeth and Lily on the same errand. No. No, it was not he. Besides, none of them would have come looking for her. She had told them she wanted to be alone.

She lifted her head again and turned it casually, so as not to disappoint herself when she saw empty beach and bridge and path.

He was on the beach, striding toward her.

Lauren clasped her knees more tightly.


All the guests had left Alvesley within two weeks of the birthday party. Sydnam had left a week after that, bound for one of the Duke of Bewcastle’s larger estates in Wales. He had been very cheerful about it. Doing a good job as someone else’s steward was a challenge he needed to take on, Kit had realized. Syd certainly had no need of the extra income.

Life at home would have been tranquil and happy except for one thing. His relationship with his father was better than it had ever been. They could communicate man to man. They could relate as father and son. His father was eager to teach; he was eager to learn. And he brought with him skills acquired during years of commanding men and shouldering life-and-death responsibilities, and a young man’s energy to complement his father’s slower, more deliberate wisdom. His mother was cheerful and affectionate. He was once again his grandmother’s favorite, though he had little competition, of course. He had come face-to-face with Rannulf when both were out riding alone one day. They had talked for a few hours, Ralf turning his horse to ride alongside his erstwhile friend since neither of them had had any particular destination in mind. They had fallen back into the easy camaraderie they had enjoyed throughout their boyhood years. They had met several times since then. Their friendship had resumed.

There was only one thing to mar the tranquillity, though to call it one made it sound small, insignificant, unimportant. It was the consuming fact of Kit’s life. Lauren had written a formal little note from Newbury, breaking their engagement, citing incompatibility and personal fickleness. Right to the end she had kept her part of the bargain, careful to assume all the blame for the breakup. And the letter was designed for other eyes in addition to his own. There was not a whisper of a mention of pregnancy. He had to assume from the nature of the letter that she was not with child. He had opened it not knowing which of two quite opposite fates he was going to be facing.

After reading it he had stridden down to the lake, torn off all his clothes—even though it had been daytime and total privacy had been by no means guaranteed—and swum the whole length of the lake, using every last ounce of his energy so that by the time he reached the far side of the island he had had to half stagger, half drag himself up the sloping bank to fall in a panting stupor facedown on the grass among the wildflowers. He did not even know for how many hours he had lain there.

The foolish part—the really stupid part—was that after he had returned to the house he had not immediately told anyone. He could not face the questions, the explanations, the emotion, the recriminations, the sympathy, the whatever it was he would have been called upon to face if he had told. He had postponed the telling until the evening, and then until the next morning, and then . . .

He had not told at all.

One morning when they were riding home from an inspection of the ripening crops on the home farm, his father admitted to him that he had arranged the marriage with Freyja only because he had thought it would please Kit. Left to himself, he had added, Kit had chosen far more wisely and well than anyone else could have done for him. He had matured into a sensible, dependable man despite the wild oats he had been sowing in London even as late as this spring. Miss Edgeworth would be a fine viscountess and a worthy countess when the day came.

The day Syd left, their mother linked an arm through Kit’s after drying her tears and strolled with him in the parterre gardens. She had had misgivings at the prospect of sharing a home with Freyja, she admitted, though she was very fond of her and of all the Bedwyns, who had suffered only from not having had a mother through their most formative years to curb their wildness and teach them some restraint. But she simply loved Lauren. She had done almost from the first, though she confessed that she had been predisposed to dislike her intensely. Lauren already felt like the daughter she had never had but had always longed for.

Kit’s grandmother spoke of Lauren when she got up in the mornings and Lauren was not there to accompany her on her walk, when she sat by the fire in the evenings and Lauren was not there to listen to her or to entertain her with conversation or massage her bad hand, and whenever she fancied that Kit was looking restless, which was almost every time she set eyes on him.

He had been able to find neither the courage nor the heart to tell them that the engagement was over, that they would never see Lauren again, that he would not either.

By the middle of September, with his mother asking almost daily when the wedding date was to be set and his grandmother urging that it be before Christmas so that they would have Lauren with them for the holiday—and so that they could start airing out the family christening robes—he knew that he was going to have to do something decisive. He was going to have to tell them.