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Chapter 1
An Unlikely Rescuer
The English countryside in the full flower of summer rolled by outside the carriage window. It was a veritable explosion of warm, glorious life. Songbirds darted to and fro as they sang their merry songs, and over the steady hoofbeats of the horses came the cheery calls of frogs and the hum of bumblebees dipping in and out of irises and wild roses.
Somewhere just on the other side of the shady row of elms that whistled in the gentle breeze, there was a babbling brook running alongside the highway. Overhead the sky was a rich, Pacific blue, dotted with tiny white clouds like cotton bobbing in the firmament.
But despite all the pomp and pageantry of the British summertime that flew by her carriage, Alicia Ramsbury had only one thing on her mind:
Only another few hours until I can be back in my own blessed bed.
“Oh, it is such a jolly day, isn’t it, Miss Alicia?” chirped her maid, Jenny, in that wretchedly good-humoured way of hers.
“Hmm, yes,” Alicia murmured in reply.
Silence passed between them as the yews and hawthorns rushed by in a blur of verdant green. Alicia took in a breath, trying to ignore the smell as much as she could, and breathed it out again. She pushed away the sights and sounds of all that nature, bringing her thoughts again back to pleasanter things.
I hope Mister Wentworth has put clean linens on the bed already,she thought, a faint smile coming to her full, pink lips.I fancy I shall slip into the sheets the moment I walk through the door and then rise for an early supper before retiring right back to bed for the night.She could picture everything just as she had left it not three weeks before: her novel on the nightstand; her full, luxurious pillow fluffed just so; the deliciously warm duvet she could pull up over her ears when—
“But isn’t it justsolovely out this way?” Jenny chirruped again. “I am so pleased that even if we must spend all day in the carriage, at least it should be in such splendid weather. Don’t you think?”
Alicia winced at this interruption. Though she hardly liked to be rude to her doting maid, she preferred to savour her expectations of the end of their journey in hopes of perhaps hastening their pace.
“In fact, I cannot remember the last time we have had a day this warm and l—”
“I saidyes, Jenny,” Alicia snapped. Then, before the matron could attempt to infect her with that abominable enthusiasm yet again, Alicia rested her head against the wall of the carriage, closing her eyes and shutting out the view from her mind.
In a polite conversation among civilized society, Alicia would naturally nod her assent that, yes, the countryside has its unique charms. She would mutter something vaguely approving whenever some gentleman would wax rhapsodic about how the hills and fields of Old Blighty really were without parallel anywhere in the world, and would bite her tongue whenever, late into the night, a ball would lapse into a jovial drunken rendition of that song about ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.
But if she were pressed even a little bit, Alicia would loose her tongue and reveal what she secretly believed: the countryside was aterribleplace. It lacked all the conveniences that made life worth living, in her estimation, and even putting aside all the dangers that could befall a lady in the out-of-doors—the wolves, bears, rainstorms, and whatever else the Devil saw fit to plague ‘England’s mountains green’—even the mundane pleasures of the countryside held absolutely no appeal for her. The sun burned her delicate skin, the air was full of stinging wasps and foul animal smells, and the grass stained her fine garments.
Worst of all were the people who lived in the country, who had always seemed to Alicia to be the worst sort of yahoos and bumpkins. Privately, she had a suspicion that every intelligent person believed exactly the same way as she, and all carried on about the pleasures of bucolic life merely as an affectation.
No, she told herself for the dozenth time since leaving Missus Miggins’ home in Portsmouth, the countryside was a place to be endured while travelling to more worthwhile places, nothing more. At least until the great men of English society found a way to do away with it entirely.
And endure it I will, thought Alicia. Her head jostling and bumping against the wall of her family’s old carriage was a poor substitute for her beloved bed, but it would have to do for now.
Crash!
Before Alicia could draw breath, her eyes shot open as the world spun around her in a vortex.
What is happening?she scarcely had time to think.
Her stomach leaped into her throat with a sudden sense of weightlessness, but before she could even open her mouth to cry out in alarm, her innards slammed back down to the earth. She and Jenny were thrown into a tangle of limbs and shouts and screaming horses and sickening crunching sounds.
“Help!” someone cried—Alicia could not be sure if it was Jenny’s voice or her own.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was all over. She waited for the sounds of an angelic chorus—or barring that, a shooting sensation telling her she had broken a bone. None came. From her position on the floor of the darkened carriage Alicia dared to move a finger, then an arm. Somewhere nearby she heard the panicked cries of horses and a man’s voice attempting to calm them gently.
“Oh, Miss Alicia, what’s happened?” moaned Jenny from amid the cloud of dust that hung in the air between them.
“I don’t know. Are you all right, Jenny?”
“I think so,” she coughed.
Hesitantly, Alicia picked herself up onto her hands and knees, a task made considerably more difficult by the fact that the floor appeared to be tilted at a steep angle.
“Miss Alicia!” came a shaky voice from out the window above her. A worried face appeared at the window beneath a dusty top hat.
