Chapter 1 The Inheritance

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in early November, carried by a courier whose uniform was too fine for the weather and too worn for the man's face. Lady Eleanor Ashworth read it three times before she understood what it said. *By the last will and testament of my late brother, the estate of Blackmore falls to his niece, Lady Eleanor Ashworth, daughter of the late Sir Thomas Ashworth, on condition that she wed before the Feast of Saint Andrew, or the estate shall pass to the nearest male heir, to wit, Lord Sebastian Thorne.* The hand was her uncle's — precise and brittle — written in the last months of his life, when illness had taken his strength but not his obsession with property and lineage. Blackmore. The estate her father had spoken of in hushed, almost reverent tones: ancient stone and older secrets, nestled in the hills of Derbyshire where the light came thin and gray and the wind carried peat and pine. She had never been there. She had barely known her uncle. And now, at eight-and-twenty, a widow of two years and a governess by trade, she was being offered a choice between a castle and a ruin. Marry by November thirtieth, or Blackmore passed to Sebastian Thorne — the rake who had danced through London's ballrooms like a storm through a garden, leaving wreckage in his wake; who had ruined three debutantes and broken the hearts of two duchesses and stood, by every whisper of gossip, on the verge of ruining a fourth. He wanted Blackmore, and he wanted her ruined, because she was the only obstacle between him and his prize. Eleanor folded the letter into the desk drawer of things she could not bear to throw away — a lock of her husband's hair, the wedding ring she had never removed, a miniature of a life ended too soon — and sat listening to rain against the window while the mantel clock ticked past midnight. She thought of Marguerite, shut in that tower, facing the same kind of choice she faced now. Love or duty. Passion or prudence. A life lived fully or a life lived safely. Her mother had chosen safety again and again, until safety became a cage and she died inside it; Eleanor had sworn never to make that mistake. But what if choosing differently led only to ruin dressed as opportunity? By dawn she had decided. It was not a heroic choice, nothing that would make a fine speech at a dinner party. She was going north because staying meant admitting defeat, and she had spent twenty-eight years watching defeats accumulate — her father dead, a marriage ended before it could properly begin, her own life eroding from daughter to governess to woman who minded other people's children while it slipped through her fingers like water. She would read every line of the will. She would sit in every room. And if love against duty was truly the only choice the Thornes had ever been allowed, she would choose differently. The house would not break her. She was not built of porcelain. At the window the first gray light bled across the London rooftops. Somewhere below a baker fired his oven, a coachman cursed his horses, a child cried for milk; the world began again, indifferent to her dilemma, and the indifference comforted her. She had inherited a house, a title, a curse and a deadline, but she had not inherited the obligation to face them alone. She would write to her sister. She would pack her trunk. She would go north with both eyes open. The letter to Chloe took the whole morning, because honesty took longer than etiquette. Three paragraphs, no sentiment, only facts and one plea — *come with me if you can* — and beneath them the things she could not put her name to: that the house frightened her by description, that its heir frightened her more, and that what she wanted was not protection but a witness. She sealed it with candle wax and pressed her signet ring into the pool — the ring she had not worn since the funeral — and left it on the sill to dry in the cold light. Packing filled the afternoon: six dresses, two of them black; her good boots; the shilling primer from her last schoolroom, soft at the corners from thumbing; needlecase, nightclothes, a psalter. For the first time in two years she let herself cry — not for the life she had lost but for the one about to begin — and she did not stop packing while she did it. When the trunk clicked shut the sound was like a door locking behind her. The last morning was the hardest, and the quickest. The girls she taught gave her a posy of pressed violets done up in tissue; their mother shook her hand as though closing an account, relieved and sorry in the same breath. The cab to the coaching yard went through streets she knew by their smells — coffee, wet stone, the river — and she said goodbye to none of them aloud. At the yard she bought her place on the northern mail, counted her coins twice, and sat by the waiting-room fire with her hands finally still, while the guard called the Derby changes and the horses steamed in the cold. The mail carried her north through two gray days, the hedgerows thinning, the hills taking on the colors of iron and slate. At the first night's inn she ate alone and slept badly, waking at every creak of some other traveler on the stair — and each time she woke she was glad of it, because wakefulness meant the journey was still moving, still carrying her away from a life that had grown too small to hold her. Somewhere behind her, London would learn by Friday that the Ashworth governess had given up her post without a character and gone north like a woman with an appointment to keep. She smiled at that in the dark. She did have one. Twenty-two days remained until Saint Andrew's, and she intended to be awake for every one of them. ---