followed her gaze to where a little girl was attempting to coax her trembling dog out from beneath a caravan, the wheels of which were scarred by the blade of an axe.
‘It’s only—they said they’d be back.’
‘What?’
Selina turned to him, her eyes huge with worry. ‘As they were leaving Grandmother heard them. They said it was only on your land that you would feel obliged to protect us, and that as soon as we moved they would come to find me.’
Edward felt his pulse quicken. Those two-faced, disobedient rogues. How dared they make new threats? How dared they try to get around his express word? And yet...
There isn’t much I can do to prevent it, he thought darkly. Edward couldn’t control what they did outside his estate, and short of catching them in the act he would have no concrete proof of their involvement in any future incidents.
Selina’s voice was hoarse. ‘It’s all my fault.’
‘It is not.’
‘Oh, but it is.’
She smiled then, a tight stretch of her lips filled with such sadness and fear that Edward felt another sharp stab of that something lance through his chest, only to flicker and fade the next moment.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s me they want. And they’ll continue to hound us, over and over, until they find me.’
He gazed down at her. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the group of women watching him, Selina’s grandmother among them. Nobody seemed willing to come nearer, and the contrast between their wary distance and the way women of his own class clustered around him at any given opportunity was so absurd a part of him wanted to laugh.
The sight of Selina’s rigid face stopped him. ‘What is your plan?’ he asked.
She sighed—a long drawn-out shudder of breath that seemed to come all the way up from her toes. ‘I’ll have to give myself up to them. There is no other way.’
‘You cannot possibly!’ Edward stared at her, hardly able to express his disbelief. ‘You cannot mean that!’
‘What choice do I have?’ Selina stepped away from him, her face shuttered and blank. ‘Apparently I’ve made fools of them—and they won’t stop until they’ve proved they’re the victors and I’ve lost.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘They’ll continue to terrorise us when we leave here, and with the health of the babies and our menfolk’s jobs we can’t get far enough away to escape them. This is the only way.’
Edward passed a hand through the tousled thatch of his hair. Selina had given him a brief outline of the Roma’s current situation as they had ridden out from Blackwell. To move the community now would indeed spell disaster.
‘So, you see, it’s what I must do. Grandmother forbids it, of course.’ There was a ghost of that terrible smile again. ‘But I won’t allow a repeat of what happened tonight.’
It was unthinkable. Edward paced a few steps away from her, noting with perverse amusement the way the group of women standing nearby flinched backwards. She couldn’t. The very idea that Selina would consider sacrificing herself for the good of her community was madness.
A commendable sentiment, Edward thought, but utter madness.
The fact that he couldn’t see how to prevent it from happening pained him more than he cared to admit. He had no choice other than to acknowledge that she was a remarkable woman, quite unlike any he’d met before, and the notion of her in such danger was abhorrent to him. Of course she would face that danger bravely—there was that damned flicker of admiration again—but still...
If only there was a way he could reliably intervene...a set of circumstances that meant Harris and Milton could never touch her and she would be permanently out of their reach...
They would continue to hunt Selina, of that he was certain. Their lust for vengeance for her perceived victory and the pull of that generations-strong prejudice was too powerful. Neither common decency nor the pleas of their wives would prevent them from attempting to punish Selina and the other Roma. She had escaped them not once, but twice, and now their resolve would be firm.
No doubt it was the rumours of his family’s mistreatment of the Roma that had made the men feel safe in persecuting them, Edward mused darkly. Charles had done something terrible, and Ambrose had all but chased the travellers off his land. Their prejudices had been clear to all—perhaps people suspected that Edward shared their sentiments.
The idea that he might so easily have followed their unthinking bigotry was uncomfortable. Thank goodness I was taught better than that, he thought, his eyes on Selina’s silent face.
His childhood Romani friends had done him that favour, by including him in their play and allowing him to be himself in a way frowned upon at his austere home.
And that little Roma girl who showed me such rare kindness will never know the difference she particularly helped to make.
Her tender care of him was something he hadn’t experienced at Blackwell Hall; his mother had been only occasionally attentive, in a detached sort of way, and Ambrose had never so much as lain an affectionate hand on his shoulder.
The thought of his father caused a pain in his chest Edward could have done without, and resentment swelled within him once again as the contents of that enraging final letter ran through his head.
Having been temporarily replaced by the severity of Selina’s situation, his own troubles now returned to the forefront of his mind with a vengeance, and Edward felt his insides twist with renewed anger at the late Squire’s meddling. Time was running out for him to claim his inheritance—a needless pressure born out of one man’s obsession with control.
But Edward was his own master and always had been—that was what his father had hated so much. To make Edward obey him in death in a way he hadn’t managed in life would have been Ambrose’s final victory.
An idea exploded into Edward’s consciousness with such vigour he could have sworn he heard it. Of course. It was so simple—and wouldn’t it neatly solve Selina’s problem at the same time as his own?
He would obey his father’s will to the letter—right down to the final dot of the final ‘i’. He would marry as instructed—but not to the kind of woman Ambrose would have so ardently desired, nor one in any way reminiscent of the lady who had taken his heart only to grind it into dust.
It was risky. People wouldn’t like it. Certainly his father would have been beside himself with rage. But the opinion of society had never mattered much to Edward and, given the desperate circumstances of both parties involved, it now mattered even less. There was even some satisfaction to be taken in knowing he was, as always, acting according to his own wishes—dictated to by nobody but himself.
‘Miss Agres?’
Selina had turned away from him. Standing before the fire, only her silhouette was visible to Edward’s gaze, outlined in sparks and tongues of curling flame. He could see the tension in her back and knew it was only by sheer willpower that she was maintaining her composure.
‘Yes.’
‘I think I may have a solution to your current dilemma—depending on your answers to two questions.’
‘Have you?’ Her tone was flat and devoid of curiosity. ‘And what would those questions be?’
Edward ignored how dull she sounded, feeling his hopes beginning to build. ‘The first is: What is your age?’
She didn’t turn to look at him, her eyes still fixed on the flames before her. ‘How is that of any relevance?’
‘Please. Humour me.’
She sighed, as though it was an effort to find