Page 2 of Miss Beresford and the Beast

“Be careful who you go showing kindness to in this village, miss. You never know when an evil creature might follow you home.”

Charlotte suppressed a laugh. “Come now,” she said. “Cats aren’t evil.”

Mrs. Goodenough flashed her a dour glance. “Who says I was talking about cats?”

Charlotte’s smile dimmed. It was more superstition of course. This local belief in evil and curses. In her younger days, she might have been influenced by it. Not now, however. Despite her occasional flutterings of girlish imagination, she flattered herself that she had matured into a woman of relatively good sense.

“The cheese?” she prompted the housekeeper.

With a disgruntled mutter, Mrs. Goodenough at last abandoned her stirring. Wiping her hands on her dirty apron, she repaired to a cupboard where she retrieved a cloth-covered lump. “This is all that remains until Frog gets himself to market.” She passed it to Charlotte. “But give it to wild animals, by all means.”

Charlotte tucked the cheese into the basket. An ancient coatrack stood by the kitchen door. She’d hung her soiled outer garments there after her walk yesterday, and there they remained—her hat unbrushed and her cherry-colored wool redingote still sporting dried mud at its hem. She put them on again without hesitation.

“I’m happy to purchase more cheese,” she said to Mrs. Goodenough. “I shall be stopping at the post office. I can easily stop at the market too.”

Mrs. Goodenough returned to the stove where she promptly resumed her stirring. “You must do as you please, miss.”

Charlotte looped the basket over her arm. “Do you know,” she said cheerfully. “I do believe I shall.”

Exiting the house with a smile, she strode off through the yard and out the gate onto the winding road that led into the village.

It wasn’t freedom like she’d imagined it being. Not here, in the middle of nowhere, with no one to welcome her and nothing much to do. But it was freedom of a sort. North Yorkshire was far removed from the stifling control of Mrs. Daventry and her finishing school. Even farther removed from the control of Charlotte’s mother and father, and the meddling of her overprotective older brothers.

Here, in this abandoned house and cursed village, she could do what she wished. Left alone to wander, to think, and to daydream. To finally come to a decision about what she wanted to happen in the next chapter of her life.

She already knew what her parents wanted. They’d like her to have a London season. To make a brilliant match. It was the goal of everything Charlotte had endured thus far. The governesses, the deportment lessons, the finishing school. She was the daughter of a viscount. The granddaughter of an earl. Pretty enough in her own right, and worth a hefty sum upon her marriage.

Yet, her mother had made it clear that it was Charlotte’s wishes that would ultimately prevail.

If only Charlotte knew, beyond all doubt, what those wishes were.

Did she desire to be a spinster, like Agatha? Or did she want a season and all the trappings that came with it—beautiful gowns, dazzling parties, a handsome suitor to win her hand and, if she was lucky, her heart?

“A puzzle,” Charlotte remarked to herself as she walked. “How does one know what one wants in the abstract? Wouldn’t it make more sense to experience it all and then decide? To be on one’s own for a time, and to be in love with a fellow for a time, and to weigh the two as carefully as a judge?”

She gazed over the empty road before her, possessed by a boundless optimism. It had rained last week. There were still patches of mud about, as the hem of her redingote could attest. But the sun was out this morning, and the day promised to be a fine one.

The village was but four brisk miles ahead. An easier drive than a walk, though not terribly difficult for one who was accustomed to a good country ramble. Which Charlotte was. The halfway point was marked by a broken hawthorn tree, blackened from a lightning strike. Lucy had pointed it out on their first day here with ominous significance. “The devil’s crossroads,” she’d called it.

Charlotte reached it in record time. She rewarded herself with the apple in her basket. She hadn’t yet had breakfast. Indeed, it was likely the very meal Mrs. Goodenough had been preparing on the stove. Another offering of lumpy porridge, thick as glue and scarcely fit to eat.

“It’s too far off, the future.” Charlotte bit into her apple, ignoring the mealiness of its flesh. “Besides,” she added. “Who knows what might transpire over the next several months?”

She could win the locals over. Make new friends. Expand her horizons. Perhaps, she might even dispel this backward notion of curses that had plagued the village for far too long.

“I can certainly show them that not every member of the gentry is a devil from the pit,” she said. “Regardless of what the dastardly son of an earl once did.”

Her footfalls sounded on the recently dried road, a soft echo in the endless silence.

“Killed someone, I don’t doubt,” she mused. “Or ravished a girl.” A notch worked its way between her brows. “Or ravished her and then killed her.”

The unsettling thought was so consuming that Charlotte didn’t realize she’d taken the wrong path until her eyes lit on a startling prospect: a looming stone wall, covered with thorny vines and brambles.

She stopped where she stood, her last bite of apple sticking in her throat. She hastily gulped it down.

Good heavens. It was the evil earl’s estate! But how⁠—?

“Botheration!” she said in swift realization. “I should have stayed to the right after the broken tree! I must have gone left instead, drat me. This is what I get for being absorbed in a conversation with myself.”