PROLOGUE
SUFFOLK, ONE NIGHT IN SPRING
The old house by the sea was quiet. It was very late, and its inhabitants, all women apart from the elderly gardener, were, presumably, sleeping peacefully. The shutters were in place downstairs, the bedchamber curtains securely drawn upstairs, and not a glimmer of candlelight showed outside. But the moon was almost full, laying down a silver path across the waters of the deserted bay. It was quite easy to see one’s way, especially out on the pale sands exposed by the low tide. It had been raining earlier, and it was still unseasonably cold, but the clouds had now cleared away.
A figure in a long, heavy coat crossed the beach swiftly and surely, and then slowed a little, coming to the foot of the steps that led up to the garden. The mossy bricks were slippery, uneven in places too, but the mysterious visitor mounted them without difficulty. Turning towards the outbuildings, the figure – it was quite impossible to say if it was a man or a woman, though one might naturally assume it must be a man, out so late and alone – made their way into the stable, which was freshly swept and pleasant-smelling, to someone who cared for horses. There had been several hacks and carriage horses here once; there was only one now, and the grey stirred sleepily as he heard an unexpected footstep, and pecked a little at his straw. But he made no further sound of alarm, and the entrance the trespasser sought was not in his stall, which was close to the front, but in the furthest one. This was a dark, inconvenient corner even in full daylight, and would always be the last to be used unless the stables were quite crammed. The people who designed this secret way in and out of the house two hundred years ago, in peril of their lives, had thought of such things.
A light was struck, a stub of candle from a tinderbox, and then a very faint creak could be heard, as of an old key turning in an old lock, and after a moment, the flickering gleam vanished and peace was restored.
It was only a short while later, perhaps five minutes, that the visitor gained his or her objective. Inside the Tudor house, on the first floor, a panel swung open silently in the angle of a chimneypiece and the intruder stepped out into a dark chamber. This too presented no problems; there was little furniture to be tripped over, and no accidents occurred at this time of utmost danger. Nobody woke, nobody cried out in dismay.
A few steps, a rustle of fabric, and then a soft voice, drowsy, sensual, and entirely unsurprised. ‘You came…’
‘Of course I did. How could I resist? Did you doubt me?’
‘Never, but it’s very dangerous. If anyone should see or hear you…’
‘No one has seen or heard me, and I’ll be gone by morning, and nobody any the wiser. Besides, it adds a certain spice, don’t you think?’
No words were given in answer, just a laugh that turned to a gasp.
1
LONDON, SPRING 1815
It was a perfectly ordinary day a few weeks into the London Season. Not an exciting day, even, but a dull one. It was raining. And then the lawyer’s letter arrived at the shabby rented house in Bloomsbury, and changed everything except the weather.
There was a party that evening, and the three unmarried Constantine sisters were preparing for it with no marked degree of enthusiasm. Already, flounces had become torn, muslins tired, and a dozen little repairs were necessary. Wealthy ladies would have servants on hand for such work, and might even be contemplating exciting new additions to their wardrobes, now that they’d taken stock of the competition and seen their finest gowns. But the Constantines were not wealthy.
This was Cecilia’s fifth Season. If she’d ever felt any excitement about the prospect of coming out into the world, this had long dissipated. She found herself in a sort of limbo, a situation neither agreeable nor disagreeable. Miss Cecilia Constantine went to parties, so many parties, and sometimes, she enjoyed them, and sometimes, she did not. She was two and twenty only; though she was not engaged to be married yet, she was notdesperate. The fact that she quite frequently told herself this might, in fact, signify that desperation hovered not so very far away.
She had three married sisters. The two eldest, knowing their duty, had accepted flattering offers for their hands at the end of their first Seasons, when they were just seventeen; Allegra, the third, had wed at the end of her second. All three had attracted wealthy suitors, and by doing so, had lessened the pressure on the younger girls to accept the first eligible man who showed any interest in them. And all three of them were happily marriednow, but that had not always been the case for Viola, the second oldest. Cecilia was beginning to think that her chances of meeting the perfect man for her, supposing such a mythical creature existed, were dwindling with every day that passed, and soon would have vanished altogether.
Cecilia too had had her wooers, gentlemen of middling rank and fortune, and might be married with a child by now, if she had taken Mr So-And-So. But she had not. No one had captured her heart or even her interest, and at this distance, they rather blended into one in her memory, even the ones she’d kissed. She was grateful not to have been obliged by pressure of circumstances to tie herself to one of them, but she could not delude herself that any other options lay in her future but these two stark choices: marriage, or spinsterhood with all its disadvantages. This was the nature of a woman’s life; there were no other options.
Cecilia had never spent a great deal of time wondering what she’d do, what she’d feel, if matters were different, because they weren’t, and couldn’t be. She did not have the luxury of holding out for love, none of them did, and so she had tried not to indulge her fancy in imagining what that might be like. She’d read novels, of course, in which young ladies had been offered happy endings, but if she’d ever allowed herself to daydream on that topic, she’d ruthlessly repressed such unhelpful thoughts.
Before the letter.
She happened to be passing through the hall when the parlourmaid Amy answered the door; her mind was elsewhere, occupied with trivial matters she could not later recall, as anyone easily might be in the moment that their life changed forever, and so she didn’t note the messenger particularly. By the time she’d opened the extraordinary missive and realised that it might be useful (though unladylike) to question the person who’d brought it, it was too late; he’d gone.
The communication had been addressed to Miss Constantine (that was Bea), Miss Cecilia Constantine, and Miss Bianca Constantine. There had hardly been room for the house number and street name after that. And this in itself was unprecedented. Apart from on her birthday, when her older sisters might write to her specifically to congratulate her, if they happened not to be in London at the time, Cecilia wasn’t sure she’d ever received a letter addressed to her before. Bianca was positiveshehadn’t. They didn’t know anyone outside their immediate family who’d be writing to any of them, least of all in this formal fashion.
It was from a lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn, a Mr Cotwin, Esquire, and, tangled up in a great deal of legal language, the bare facts of it were that Mrs Augusta Albery, of Suffolk, an aged widow who had apparently been born a Constantine long ago, had left them her fortune, to be shared equally between them, and also her home, Albery Hall.Herfortune. It was almost impossible to take in.
They had an appointment with Mr Cotwin tomorrow, to sign papers and receive more details, including a series of mere formalities (as yet unspecified) that must be verified before they could take full possession of their inheritance.Theirinheritance. Beatrice, when she paused for a moment in her anxiety over whether the whole thing could even be true at all, was worried about the mere formalities; Cecilia and Bianca brushed them aside as minor details.
The letter said that Mrs Albery, despite being well on into her nineties, had insisted on being kept abreast of family events via her trusted lawyer, and this was why the three younger Constantine sisters were to be so favoured. Apparently, she had followed their doings for years in secret, and had therefore been aware that their older sisters, Sabrina, Viola and Allegra, were not in a position to need such an unexpected windfall. His now deceased client, Mr Cotwin had said drily towards the end of the missive, when he became slightly more human in his manner of expressing himself, had held decided views on the injustice of primogeniture, and indeed on many other topics. Most of all, he wrote, she abhorred the notion of the family entail which, upon their father’s death a few years back, had deprived the Constantines of their home in Surrey – which now belonged to their cousin John – may his name be forever cursed and may all his toenails in-grow – and could easily have left them destitute. This bequest was designed to rectify this manifest injustice.
This wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in real life, or not in their experience.
‘We do not,’ said Beatrice, for the third time, ‘have an Aunt Augusta.’ She didn’t seem to be able to get past this point.
‘Well, no.’ This was Cecilia, who had moved on some time ago, and was trying not to become impatient with her more painstaking older sister. ‘Obviously, we do not, now. You’ve read the letter. She’s dead.’
Beatrice all but growled, ‘We have never had an Aunt Augusta. Aunts don’t suddenly appear, alive or dead. Especially dead. It flies against all reason.’ Bea’s olive skin was unusually flushed and her brown eyes stormy; all three of the sisters, who greatly resembled each other in their dark good looks, were somewhat agitated this morning, and no wonder.
‘Do we care?’ Bianca was the youngest and the most impulsive of the sisters. ‘She must have existed – even if we’ve never heard of her – because she’s left us her home and her fortune. We can’t ask her why, because she’s dead, but we couldn’t have asked her while she was alive anyway, even if we’d known anything about it, because it would have seemed excessively uncivil and ungrateful. So we must just accept the situation, which I for one am quite prepared to do. I presume you’re not saying that some strange old lady pretended to be our aunt, and then pretended to die, so she could leave us a large sum? Because that really does make no sense at all. And the money is real enough; the lawyer says so. As – I hope – is the house.’
