Miss Truelove Beckons (Classic Regency Romances Book 12) (28 page)

Prologue

In the quiet darkness of a warm, early autumn night near the Kentish coast, the sound of scraping echoed, followed by a muffled groan. Again scraping, the sound of a wounded man inching across a stone floor in a folly set deep in a wooded glade. The young man left a trail of blood as he pulled himself inch by torturous inch over the stone floor and deep into the sanctuary, where he collapsed, wracked by pain. The floor was cool and he laid his fevered cheek against it and wondered if this was where death would finally find him.

He had been many places in the last months; he had been running for his life, but never had he outdistanced those who were after him. He knew that now. He had felt safe in the Widow Jones’s arms and bed, but it had been a fool’s comfort, merely an illusion. And for that idiocy he had been stabbed while sleeping in bed, an ignominious fate for a Frenchman. And yet, if one must die . . .

But he was not dead. Not yet. Barely had he gotten away; by inches had he evaded capture, and only because of his stallion, his magnificent friend, Théron.

Surely Delisle would not find him here! Surely the Lord would protect him, though he was the least worthy of His creations and had many reparations to make in his lifetime before his debt was wiped clean.
Dieu,
but the wound hurt! The pain was a throbbing that shot through his hip. Perhaps he would die now. Brown eyes wide open, glazed by pain and loss of blood, he propped himself up against the wall and probed the wound with his good hand.

Diable! It is like being stabbed all over again,
was his brief thought, then his eyes closed and he slid down, unconscious, his head hitting the stone floor with a
thunk
.

Chapter One

Lady May van Hoffen galloped over the dry ground, tall grass whipping around the legs of her mount, Cassiopeia. The dun mare was responsive to her every move, and May, in men’s breeches and riding astride as she did in her childhood, felt the elation of sweet freedom throb through her veins. All summer she had indulged her every whim, now that she was free of her mother’s machinations and stultifying presence, and slowly she had shed the fears and haunting reminders of a spring spent in the dirty hole that was London, with terror as her constant companion. This morning she felt a hum of excitement through her veins, a new feeling of liberty and independence.

She could not remember a time when she had felt so at home at Lark House, the residence her father had left her, a rosy-colored brick manse in the countryside near the Kent coast. And yet always, since she had first learned that the house would one day be hers absolutely, she had felt that she
could
be happy there, that it was her home. But not with her mother there. Her father had died when she was just two years old, and in the more than twenty years since then her mother, Maisie van Hoffen—Lady van Hoffen, though in her case “Lady” was only a title and not a description—had become notorious among the
ton
for her licentious behavior. Man after man had become her lover. From lords of the realm down to her own footmen, Maisie, a onetime actress plucked from the stage and married by an aging European nobleman in need of an heir, was not particular, as long as they wore breeches.

And May, her only child—not the male heir Lord Gerhard van Hoffen had hoped for—had suffered in every way imaginable. Lark House had been the scene of many of her mother’s famous debauched house parties, and from a young age May had known to keep her bedroom door locked and to ignore the sounds coming from the rest of the house. Going off to school had been a sweet relief, but inevitably she had had to come back and take her place in society.

It had been five long, horrible years living with her mother again after leaving school, but now it was over. Her mother had finally stepped over the line last spring when she tried to sell her daughter in marriage to Lord Saunders, an elderly roué who needed to breed an heir. The
ton
would have looked the other way, for what young girl did not have to marry someone socially acceptable—meaning of the right lineage—sooner or later? But Maisie’s lover, a horrible, smelly, disreputable man who called himself Captain Dempster, had become involved. Old Lord Saunders did not feel himself up to “breaking in,” as he put it, a squeamish virgin. Dempster had volunteered to do the deed.

And so May had suffered through the most frightening night of her life. Kidnapped away from a masquerade ball where her friend, Lady Emily Delafont, Marchioness of Sedgely, was attempting to speak to May’s mother about the impending marriage, she was taken to a remote cottage. There, Dempster intended to take her virginity by force. But instead she had summoned all of her courage and defeated him, and then rode away on a majestic black stallion, sitting in front of the most handsome man she had ever seen in her life, the only man—

She turned her thoughts away from a subject that could only bring her pain and pulled Cassie to a halt. She was at the top of a long rise, still on her own land but a mile or more from the house, which she could barely see in the distance on another rise. The hillside sloped down to a sweeping panorama of green meadows, lush with late summer wildflowers, and groves of beech and alder, oak and chestnut, trees that had seen centuries come and go. The early morning sunlight slanted across the landscape, sparkling off dew and drawing a mist from the grass. Never had she seen anything so beautiful.

She was followed by no groom, and she gloried in the feel of men’s breeches clinging to her legs and her horse between her knees, the way God surely meant women to ride. What idiot thought that sidesaddle was in any way comfortable? It was another of those conventions intended to keep women bound and gagged by society, without one iota of the freedom men enjoyed every day of their lives. They misused that freedom to wield power over their wives and daughters, forcing women into stays and sidesaddles and restricting marriages.

But not her. She had finally come to appreciate her freedom after a summer spent searching her soul for answers to what she wanted from life. It was just this; it was merely to ride her land and live free.

This was the farthest she had been alone since coming to Lark House in the spring, a wounded, frightened mouse that trembled at the shadow of a hawk. But she was healing. She was stronger. Now she rode alone again. Now she felt the throbbing pulse of freedom in her heart.

She dug in her heels and Cassie bolted. They rode like the wind down the long sloping sweep of her land, her home, pins tumbling from her restrained hair and her auburn-tinted tresses flowing down her cambric-clad back, tangled curls fluttering in the breeze. She laughed out loud, thinking what people would say if they saw her.

She would be taken away to Bedlam! Everyone thought her so prim and proper, but it was a sham, a ruse, a cloak she pulled around herself to conceal her true nature, her wholly inappropriate wildness, from the
ton
. But here at Lark House, the
ton
did not exist. Even her friends—Lady Emily, who had been so good to her, and Lady Dianne Delafont, Dodo as she was affectionately called, Emily’s aunt, who even now stayed with her as she recovered her equanimity—even they did not know this side of her.

And never would. No one must ever know the true self she hid beneath gray gowns and gray shawls, her hair constricted and tortured into a tight bun, all spark and spirit in her eyes hidden by the down-sweep of thick fringed eyelashes. They would turn from her in disgust and revulsion if they knew that Maisie’s wildness had its form of outlet in May. She might not be sexually promiscuous, but she hated the strictures placed on her by society. She was fit only for the country, she thought, pulling her heaving mount to a halt near a copse of trees deep in the valley, to catch her breath. She was fit only for the country and her own company, and she would live out her days at Lark House, trying to help the people of her village in whatever way she could.

She envied women like Lady Emily, her niece Celestine, and her aunt Dodo Delafont. Those women were all effortlessly ladylike, cultured, womanly. They fit into society like a delicate hand in a lovely kid glove, smoothly and without a wrinkle, and yet were still themselves. They deserved all of the adulation the men around them offered them.

No man would want a woman like her, May thought, stroking Cassie’s neck and murmuring to the mare. What man wanted a wild woman, a girl who wore breeches and curried her own horse, who would spend hours—days if she could—in the forest with nature as her only companion? But it was all right; she never wanted to marry anyway. She could not imagine, despite what Emily had told her, letting a man touch her in the intimate ways a man must to beget a child when he married a woman. Emily had said that it was a beautiful thing, the intimacy between man and woman, but that was ridiculous! It was an animalistic rutting ritual, disguised by society’s veneer of chivalrous conduct toward women, a veneer that was stripped away as soon as a man became aroused. No one could tell her differently. No man could ever make
her
want to touch him, although—

She let Cassie walk and crop the tender shoots of grass near the edge of the wooded copse as she let her mind drift back to Etienne. Etienne Roulant Delafont. If he had not come to rescue her, she might have been taken forcibly by Captain Dempster. She had escaped the captain’s grasp by kneeing him, as a groom of hers once called it, “where it counts.” But Dempster had a gun, and if Etienne—handsome, gallant Frenchman that he was—had not been there with his magnificent stallion Théron, she might be lying under the ground six feet now, instead of riding on this glorious autumn morning across the grasslands of her home.

And she never had been able to thank him properly. He was dead, his splendid young life cut short in his escape to the continent—some said he was responsible for a series of attacks on the Marquess of Sedgely, her friend Emily’s taciturn husband, and that he was escaping “justice”—when his boat went down in the channel, near Dover off the Kentish coast. Not far from Lark House, in fact.

She had suffered a piercing pain on hearing about his death, and it still brought her such great sadness. She could have loved him like a brother—yes, like a
brother
! She told her mind that firmly, though her brain insisted that the hot feelings that coursed through her that morning as she rode in front of him all the way to London were definitely not sisterly. But she must not dwell on it! She must not linger on the sweetness of his lilting French voice, his handsome face, his perfect form. He was the most gorgeous young man she had ever in her life seen, and now he was entombed in the frigid depths of the channel. It was too painful to think about!

She slid from Cassie’s back, wiped the moisture from her eyes and led her mare by the bridle, comforted by the soft snuffling of Cassie in her ear as they entered the cooling shade of the copse. There was a path here somewhere, she thought . . . ah,
there
it was. This was the back way into the copse. As a child, mounted on one of Cassie’s predecessors, a small shaggy pony she named Jack, she would come this way after escaping from the groom who was supposed to be riding with her. She and Jack would wander through the woods—a forest that seemed deep and dark then, but was really a light-filled, planned glade—and would come to the folly.

She stopped and swept her tumbled mane of curls back. She had almost forgotten the folly’s existence but there it was, her fairy castle in her youth, her perfect hideaway. She would ride Jack into the woods, carrying pilfered fruit and meat pies wrapped in paper, and there she would spend the day. Mother would be busy with her houseguests, invariably male and invariably more than one, and so she would wander off.

Sometimes she would be a fairy or a princess, but often she would be a peasant girl. Anything but Lady Grishelda May van Hoffen. It was a magical place. Things would appear, and she often wondered if the wood fairies used it as a home when she was not around. Blankets would show up out of nowhere, food, dishes, clothing—

Her mother probably used the folly as the ideal place for an intimate tryst with some of her unsavory lovers. She released Cassie, who would stay close by, and strolled around, gazing at the old stone structure.

It was octagonal, constructed of smooth gray granite sometime early in the last century. No one knew why it had been built so far from Lark House when most follies were built to be admired, at the top of a hill or near an ornamental lake. But this one was buried in a planned glade of alder and beech, tall slim trees that let a dappling of sunshine through their leaves even in midsummer. It was constructed with an open doorway and high, gothic-arched windows that started several feet off the ground. The stone was covered in dark moss near the ground, and thickets of ivy had grown up, obscuring the lovely classical shape of the windows. Tumbled masses of old roses bunched and bloomed at its base.

Maybe she would have the delightful old structure repaired and cleaned up, the encroaching ivy torn down, the leaves cleaned out . . . she stopped in her perusal at the front of the building. The doorway. The stone step that led into the folly was stained dark, and the stain seemed somehow fresh.

She frowned as an odd sensation prickled up her neck. Had some poor animal, wounded by poachers or by a predator, crawled in there to die? She slowly approached, her heart pounding. This was the first time she had been out riding alone since she had come back from London and maybe she was still a little nervous. For months she had restricted herself to rides in the park at the front of Lark House, the side that faced the road. At first she had ventured nowhere without an armed groom, convinced that Captain Dempster would come after her and get her, even though he had been tracked to the Continent by Baxter, Emily’s husband. Her fear had abated gradually, but still she had not gone far alone.