Claudia folded the paper tightly and pocketed it among her skirts. She had a letter of her own to write, and its recipients had best be wiser than Spencer Winstowe.
Chapter 2
Hartsmere
Eden’s first glimpse of the estate was a view from the bumpy unpaved road that descended into the little valley from the rolling fells surrounding it. The coachman reined in his team, taking the slope at an easy pace. Everywhere the world was white with recent snow, and the sun showed no signs of emerging to melt it away.
One expected winter to be a time of quiet waiting, especially here in the rugged north. But as dull and bleak as Eden’s last winter here had been, she did not remember such an atmosphere of ruin and decline. It was as if spring would never come again.
Trees lining the road—coppices of pollard oak, ash, and elm—were bent in weariness under their burdens of snow. No few looked wasted and dead, as if struck by lightning or eaten from within by disease. And though the fields and pastures were no more than stubbled quilts of brown and white, even they seemed shadowed by death. Like Eden herself, the whole countryside wore mourning clothes.
The stone cottages and farmhouses on the fellsides seemed to cling there stubbornly like the remnants of a vanished race. Huddled sheep shifted like dirty wads of wool on the inbye pastures near the farmhouses. Eden didn’t see a single dalesman tending the animals nor a sign of smoke from the chimneys. She heard no sound, not even the bark of a dog.
“I do not remember feeling quite so cold in the north,” Aunt Claudia remarked, pulling her fur-lined cloak more tightly about her. She had endured the long journey from London with her usual stoicism, though the ancient berline, oldest and most practical of Spencer’s carriages, was neither swift nor comfortable.
During the five-day journey, Eden had had much time to prepare herself for what lay ahead. She, like Claudia, had heard the solicitor’s grim forecast. The elderly steward of Hartsmere had been ill for some time, and Spencer hadn’t bothered to replace him or answer his pleas for assistance. All her husband had cared about was the income… for as long as it had lasted.
Now Eden was to reap the harvest of his neglect and her own willful ignorance.
“Do you remember,” Eden said, “the stories you told me as a child? Hartsmere was at the very end of the world… a dreadful place that anyone of sense would avoid. There were monsters in the wood and ghosts in the house.” She shivered, and not with the cold. Even Claudia did not know just how real the “monsters” were. She hadn’t been there that night at the inn.
The fearsome night of which they had never spoken.
“I made no secret of my dislike,” Claudia admitted.
Eden forgot her own fears and covered her aunt’s hand. “I know that your memories of Hartsmere are not happy ones. The viscount—”
“Raines’s accident was before your birth, and long ago. It is not for myself I fear.”
No. You have always looked out for me, dear Aunt. But the one you warned me against is gone. Surely he is gone forever.
“You do not look happy, my dear. Have you second thoughts after all?”
“No second thoughts, Aunt.” She spoke the lie with perfect aplomb. She would not increase her aunt’s anxiety, or her own, with exaggerated fancies or sorrowful memories. She would not spend her time at Hartsmere looking over her shoulder.
The past was as dead as Spencer. She had come in search of her living son.
She tried to imagine what it would be like to be a mother. Her coterie of fashionable, fast-living matrons spent little time with their offspring, and she had avoided thinking about children. To do so brought forth too many painful emotions.
She could not remember grieving for her lost child; the days just before and after his birth had vanished from her memory. But even the possibility of getting him back dissolved the years, and the loss felt as fresh as yesterday.
How could I ever have believed you were dead?