Five years ago it had seemed like a sentence of death, or at least like a sentence of transportation to some primitive and dread penal colony. Even after her arrival she had been horrified. There was nothing but the wild, elemental scenery and no one but her aunts and a few—a very few—neighbors.
Now, five years later, she sometimes asked herself if she would go back even if she had the chance. And sometimes it surprised her that she did not want to leave, that she had grown to love this place and the unexpected peace it had brought her. Somehow her surroundings had become part of her, indistinguishable from her. London and all the ton balls and routs she had attended and her father’s estate seemed unreal now, as if they belonged to a different lifetime—and, of course, they did.
She would consider herself happy, she thought, stepping down the other side of the stile to the forbidden woods, if there were not the loneliness. It was not always conscious. It was rarely a raw pain. Rather it was a gnawing awareness of emptiness—an emptiness that waited to be filled. It was not in itself a bothersome feeling. It became so only when she thought consciously about it and realized that the emptiness would never be filled.
She had been hopelessly disgraced five years ago. It had been very public, quite impossible to cover up. And she had refused to take the only course that might have restored some measure of respectability. Hence the whipping—administered not so much for the offense but for the stubbornness that had followed it—and the exile. The perpetual exile.
But she would not think of it. She rarely did so now. Life for the past five years really had not been bad at all. Aunt Hetty was kind to her and Aunt Martha openly loving. She suspected that they both enjoyed having with them the daughter of their sister, the sister who had married so dazzlingly far above herself. The neighboring gentry—very low on the social scale and in very few numbers—treated her with respect. Papa would not have given any of them the time of day. And she had found in her surroundings all she needed to bring her peace.
But the peace never quite masked the loneliness.
There were more daffodil buds than she could count, many of them yellow tipped, most of them still tightly clenched, a few of them beginning to loosen, to consider the bold move of bursting into the glory of full bloom. She bent over one such bud and cupped it gently in her hands. She felt the familiar yearning that always came with the daffodils—half pain, half exaltation.
And then she heard a dog barking ferociously and looked up sharply to see a black-and-white collie racing toward her. She snatched her hands away from the bud and took a hasty step back before standing very still. Her heart was pounding with alarm.
“She will not touch you,” a voice called from some distance away. A male voice. “She is all bark and no bite.”
And sure enough, the collie stopped when she had bounded to within three feet of Kate and laid her forepaws along the ground while she wagged her tail, bottom elevated.
But Kate’s attention was on the man who was striding toward them, coming down the slope through the trees. He was in the shade, though she could see that he was indeed young and that he was dressed fashionably and elegantly in a many-caped greatcoat and tight pantaloons and white-topped Hessian boots.
If she could have found a rabbit hole in which to hide, she would have wriggled into it, she thought. How humiliating to be caught trespassing!
But the discomfort caused by her predicament fled when he came closer, together with the excuse her mind had been frantically composing. For as he approached and removed his hat, she could see his face clearly.
A startlingly familiar face. Belonging to a man she had hated passionately five years ago. A man she would always hate.
The Marquess of Ashendon had always known where she was. Lambton had told him—the Earl of Lambton, her father. There had been no reason not to tell him. He was the last person who would have thought of going after her.
Or so it would have seemed.
He had not gone after her. She had refused to marry him, both when they were in private together as he made his offer and after her father had joined them. She had refused icily and quite adamantly when they were alone together, fiercely and passionately when Lambton had urged the match on her. She had stamped her foot at her father and had then turned on Ashendon, her eyes flashing, and told him she would not marry him if he were the last man on earth. She had mouthed the old cliché with conviction.
No, he had not gone after her. Not again. He had done that once in order to save her from a dreadful future, though she would not admit as much, and then had brought her back, spending two nights on the road with her in the process, sharing a room with her each time. And they had been seen together by an alarmingly large number of acquaintances.
Any other woman—any woman but Lady Katherine Buchanan—would have realized that she had no alternative but to marry him. None whatsoever. Even though she hated him. Just as he had had no alternative but to offer for her, even though he loved her and knew this was an appalling way in which to enter marriage with her.
She had refused him.
Her father had summoned a servant to escort her to his study and then to go out to the stables to fetch his whip.
“I would rather you did not hurt her,” the marquess had said stiffly to Lambton, clasping his hands very tightly behind his back. “It is surely enough punishment that she is ruined.”
“She might have been yours to discipline, Ashendon,” the earl had said, fury vibrating in his voice. “She has chosen to remain mine. She will feel my whip on her backside until she can do nothing but lie on her stomach while I arrange to send her away.”
“Back home?” the Marquess of Ashendon had asked.
Lambton had laughed harshly. No, not home. She would be sent to live with her maiden aunts in the small village of Rhos in South Wales. To live there for the rest of her life.
She had been Lambton’s treasure, the only daughter after six sons. He had doted on her, given her everything she had ever desired. His wrath when she finally defied him was correspondingly harsh and unyielding.
Ashendon had shuddered as he walked away from Lambton’s house. He had had no doubt that Lady Katherine was about to feel a whip for the first time in her eighteen years and that the beating would be a prolonged and vicious one. But it had been out of his power to help her. She had taken away any such power by refusing his offer.
No, he had not followed her to Rhos. It would have been pointless to do so. Her hatred was too strong. But he had a retired lodgekeeper and his wife living on his estate. He delighted them by sending them each summer on a holiday to Wales, and each summer they spent a few days at Rhos, where they became familiar faces, dutifully walked the sands and took the air until it was time to come home and report to the marquess that Katherine was still there and that she was in good health. The aunts at least appeared not to be mistreating her.
And he discovered soon after her leaving that there was a large house and park—indeed it was called the Big House in Welsh, Ty Mawr—on the outskirts of Rhos that had stood empty for years. It had taken him some time to discover to whom it belonged. But even when he knew, he held back. He would wait for three years, he had decided at first. He would give her time to grow up, time to allow the passions of that incident in her life to cool, time for her hatred to fade. Time for her exile to have made her desperately unhappy. Rhos must be in one of the wildest, remotest parts of the British Isles, according to his old lodgekeeper, who talked a great deal about wind and rain and damp salt air and nothing but mile upon mile of sand and sand dunes and wild hedgerows.
Poor Katherine. He wondered sometimes if she regretted not marrying him. Sometimes he convinced himself that she probably did.
