Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author
PENNY JORDAN
Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!
Penny Jordan’s novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.
This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan’s fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.
About the Author
PENNY JORDAN is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.
Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.
Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women’s fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Bride at Bellfield Mill
Penny Jordan
CHAPTER ONE
‘I CAN’T take you no further, lass, seein’ as I’m bound for Wicklethwaites Farm and you’re wantin’Rawlesden,’ the carter informed Marianne in his broad Lancashire accent, as he brought the cart to a halt at a fork in the rutted road. ‘You must take this turning ’ere and follow the road all the way down to the town. You’ll know it before you gets there on account of the smoke from Bellfield Mill’s chimneys, and then you keeps on walking when you gets to the Bellfield Hall.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Marianne asked the carter uncertainly.
She needed to find work—and quickly, she acknowledged as she looked down into the too-pale face of the baby in her arms. A lone woman with no work and a baby to care for could all too easily find herself in the workhouse—as she knew already to her cost.
The rich might be celebrating the Edwardian era, and a new king on the throne, but nothing had changed for the poor.
‘I says it on account of him wot owns it—aye, and t’mill an’ all. There’s plenty round here who says that he only come by them by foul means, and that the Master of Bellfield wouldn’t think twice about ridding himself of anyone wot was daft enough to stand in his way. There’s one little lass already disappeared from these parts with no one knowing where she’s gone. Happen that’s why he can’t get no one working up at the hall for him. No one half decent, that is…’
‘He doesn’t sound very pleasant,’ Marianne agreed as she clambered down from the cart, and then thanked the carter as he handed her the shabby bundle containing her few possessions.
‘I still dunno wot would bring a pretty lass like you looking for work in these parts.’
Marianne could tell that the carter was eager to know as much about her as he could—no doubt to add to his stock-in-trade of gossip. He had already regaled her with several tales of the doings of those who lived in the town and the small farms on the moors beyond it, with a great deal of relish. Marianne suspected it was an enclosed, shut-off life here in this dark mill town, buried deep in a small valley between the towering Pennine hills.
Her large brown eyes with their fringing of thick black eyelashes shadowed slightly in her small heart-shaped face. The carter had referred to her as a ‘pretty lass,’ but she suspected that he was flattering her. She certainly did not feel like one, with her hair damp and no doubt curling wildly all over the place, her clothes old and shabby and her skin pinched and blue-looking from the cold. She was also far too fine-boned for the modern fashion for curvaceous women—the kind of women King Edward favoured.
‘It’s just as I explained to you when you were kind enough to offer me a lift,’she answered the carter politely. ‘My late husband’s dying wish was that I should bring his son here, to the place where he himself was born.’
‘So you’ve got family here, then, have you?’
‘I haven’t.’ Marianne forced herself to sound confident and relaxed. ‘My late husband did have, but alas they, like him, are dead now.’
‘Aye, well, it’s natural enough that a man should want to think of his child following in his own footsteps. Dead now, you said?’
‘Yes. He…he took a fever and died of it,’ Marianne told him. It would not do to claim too close an acquaintance on her late husband’s part with anything that might enable others to ask her too many questions.
‘Well, I hope you manage to find yourself a decent place soon, lass. Although it won’t be easy, wot with you having the babby, and you don’t want to find yourself taken up by the parish and put in t’workhouse,’ he warned her, echoing her own earlier thoughts.
‘They don’t suffer strangers easily hereabouts. Especially not when they’re poor and pretty. T’master, is a hard man, and it’s him wot lays down the law on account of him owning t’mill.’
Despite her best intentions Marianne shuddered—but then who would not do so at the thought of ending up in a parish workhouse?
Images, memories she wanted to banish for ever were trying to force themselves upon her. That sound she could hear inside her head was not the noise of women screaming in hunger and pain, but instead merely the howl of the winter wind, she assured herself firmly.
‘You’ve no folk of yer own, then, lass?’
‘I was orphaned young,’she answered the carter truthfully, ‘and the aunt who brought me up is now dead.’
‘Well, think on about what I just said,’ the carter told her as he gathered up the reins and clicked his tongue to instruct the raw-boned horse between the shafts to move on. ‘Keep away from Bellfield and its master if you want to keep yourself safe.’
There it was again—the unmistakable admonition that the mill and its master were dangers to be avoided. But it was too late to ask the carter any more questions, as the rain-soaked darkness of the November evening was already swallowing him up.
Picking up her bundle, Marianne pulled her cloak as closely around the baby as she could before bracing herself against the howl of the wind and setting off down the steep rutted and muddy track the carter had told her led into the town.
Marianne grimaced as mud from the uneven road came up over the sides of her heavy clogs and the sleet-laden wind whipped cruelly at her too-thin body, soaking through her cheap cloak.