you, child,’ Jane had whispered, because something in the girl’s face had touched her heart – and there was such sadness in those big brown eyes.
‘I am called Bella,’ the girl had whispered to her then. ‘They will beat me if they find me giving you sustenance, because you have angered the mistress …’ She’d gone quickly, afraid of being caught and punished.
Bella was dressed now in just her nightgown and a shawl, shivering with cold.
‘What are you doing here, child?’ Jane said. ‘You will catch your death on this terrible night.’
‘I had to tell you,’ Bella gasped. ‘I saw you from the window and I got out the back way! Don’t believe them when they say your babe died. She lived for I saw them take her out to the gates some two days later and give her to someone in a carriage. You were still ill and would not have heard her even if she cried, but I did.’
‘You saw it? You saw them give my child to someone?’ Jane clutched at the child’s arm, hope soaring. ‘Did you see her, Bella? Do you know if she lived?’
‘She did not die as they told you. Your babe was crying as they carried her away. I heard her and I saw them give her to someone in a carriage – but I am sorry, I do not know who it was.’
‘Thank you!’ Jane reached through the bars of the locked gate to catch Bella’s hands. ‘Go quickly before they discover you or you will be punished.’
The child had been going to say more but she nodded and, giving a little sob of fear, Bella fled the way she had come. Jane’s eyes filled with tears but her heart grew stronger. She had not imagined those cries. Her daughter lived somewhere and one day she would find her and take her back …
Raising her hand, Jane waved to Bella as she paused at the corner of the house, before disappearing round the corner. If she found her child perhaps she might come back and take Bella away from this terrible place … but for the moment it would take all her strength just to survive.
Once inside the scullery, Bella paused, listening for sounds, but the other inmates were in their beds and she knew she must hurry – if the mistress discovered her here at this hour she would be accused of stealing food from the kitchen and beaten. Her eyes stung with tears for she could not forget the look of despair in Jane’s eyes. There was nowhere the young woman would find proper shelter on such a night, for even the church was locked during the hours of darkness to deter those who would steal from God and the poor. It was likely that Jane would die unless she found a barn or a haystack to crawl inside. Bella shivered, feeling chilled, for there was little hope that Jane would recover her babe even if she survived the night.
‘God grant you peace,’ she prayed, knowing that Jane’s chances of survival were as small as Bella’s of finding happiness in this life. ‘If there is a God I think you need him this night …’
On the lonely road, a carriage bowled smartly through the gathering gloom of a bitter night, both coachman and horses eager to find an inn, stables and warmth. Inside, the man, his eyes closed as he endured the jolting of his well-sprung vehicle, let out a cry of pain, but it was not for physical discomfort. In his mind, he had seen again the dying agony of the woman he loved, cradled in his arms but beyond his help.
‘Katharine …’ he murmured, tears on his cheeks. ‘Katharine, why did you leave me?’
Yet it was not her fault that she now lay in the icy ground. The brute who had killed her was punished but that did not ease Arthur Stoneham’s grief. It was for her memory that he was set upon this road this dread night, because she would not let him rest and he knew he would carry this agony until he had fulfilled his promise to her – a promise to find the sister she had loved.
After weeks of following clues that led nowhere, Arthur was no closer to discovering what had happened to Marianne Ross more than twelve years earlier than he had been when he left London. He had visited the man Katharine Ross had spoken of in her dying fever. Squire Thomas Redfern had seemed a pompous young man to Arthur and uninterested in Katharine or her sister and so he had simply told him of Katharine’s death and her wish that Arthur would look for her sister.
‘It is my intention to do all I can to find Marianne,’ Arthur told the squire, looking for some flicker of feeling but there was none.
‘I do not believe you will find any trace of that unfortunate young woman,’ Thomas said in a voice devoid of emotion. Married, with two young sons, he had clearly ceased to mourn her long ago. ‘A search was made at the time. Marianne unwisely walked home through the woods, though she had been warned gypsies were camping there. My father and hers made searches but no word of her was ever heard. I think she was murdered and her body concealed …’
For a moment there was a flicker of something but then it was gone. If this man had ever loved Katharine or her sister, he had only a fleeting interest now. Arthur decided that he must have mistaken Katharine’s last words; she could not have loved someone as unfeeling as this man! He would not give him another thought, nor, if Marianne were found, would he pass on news of her to such an unfeeling oaf.
The resolution helped to soothe his wounded heart a little, for he could not be jealous of such a man. Katharine must have been trying to say something other than the words that had burned into Arthur’s soul: ‘Tell Tom I loved him …’
He would not think of this man as a rival for Katharine’s love again. Perhaps she had meant to say, ‘Tell Arthur I loved him,’ and the words had come out wrong.
The squire had no clues to help Arthur find Marianne Ross, nor did any others he questioned in the household. It was no different in the village. No one remembered much of the old tragedy. Marianne had simply disappeared that night and never been heard of since. Most who remembered the old story believed her dead. Arthur himself thought it was the most likely explanation, but he would do his best to exhaust any leads that might help him to discover the truth, though they were few indeed. Gypsies had been in the woods and one of Marianne’s shoes had been found so it seemed to him that there were two possible explanations: either Marianne had been attacked and killed or she’d been abducted by the gypsies. He was unlikely to find her whatever the case, but he must exhaust all possibilities before admitting failure for his own peace of mind.
Arthur lounged back against the comfortable squabs in his carriage, closing his eyes as his coachman drove through the icy night. Although his journey had been fruitless, he was still in Hampshire and not ready to return to London and give up the search for Katharine’s lost sister. As Hetty, his true friend and colleague, had told him, he owed it to the memory of the woman he’d loved. Hetty ran Arthur’s refuges for women and children in London and had been Katharine’s friend, nursing her when she lay dying.
Katharine’s tragic death was still like a stone in Arthur’s breast and he could not face the anxious looks and concern of his friends, especially those who had also loved her. The man who had caused her death was locked away in a cold cell from which he would emerge only to meet death at the end of the hangman’s rope. The rogue’s fate was assured, but that did not ease Arthur’s state of mind. His grief was too bitter, too personal, to be shared – nor did he wish for sympathy, and together with the grief came the doubts and the guilt.
Was it Arthur’s fault that Sir Roger Beamish had seized the chance to send his beautiful Katharine to her death in front of that brewer’s waggon? Sir Roger’s insane jealousy was certainly one cause for the spiteful act, but Arthur now knew that the man had been ruined, his fortune lost, and that in his twisted mind he’d blamed Arthur, who’d caught him cheating and accused him publicly of it, for his downfall. Or was it because Katharine had refused him and accepted Arthur’s proposal that he’d given her the vicious push that ended her life beneath the flailing hooves of the heavy horses? Arthur knew he would never discover the answers to his questions and it haunted him.
He groaned and pushed his tortured thoughts to a distant corner of his mind. Katharine was