The ton did not encourage such openness and faith in one’s fellow man. Eden had spent the past five years pretending to herself that trust was unnecessary. But she had little left to lose and much to learn if she was to survive at Hartsmere and prepare it for her son.
If necessary, she would make a personal friend of every servant and farmer in the dale, no matter how strenuously Aunt Claudia objected.
“Please continue about your business, Mrs. Byrne,” Eden said. “I wish to walk a little before I sample Mrs. Beaton’s cooking.”
“It’s late, my lady. I smell snow in the air.”
“I won’t be long.” She turned away before Mrs. Byrne could protest further.
Her half boots, sturdy and plain, were well suited for the outdoors. In London she’d seldom walked, but here she expected to do a great deal of it. This would be only the first of many excursions.
From this spot she could see the distant parsonage. Beside the curate’s house lay a small grove of limes and the family cemetery, enclosed by a wrought iron fence. There her newborn son had been buried… except that it was not he who had been placed in the hallowed ground but something or someone else. Eden had not witnessed the burial—her father and Aunt Claudia had kept her away—but she had wept. Wept so long and hard that they had sent for the doctor.
Her vision blurred. You are not there. You are coming home to me. The grieving was over. But there was one other visit to make before she returned. She set off at a brisk walk to the rear of the house.
Behind Hartsmere rose the fell with its snow-shrouded mantle of woodland. Outside the park were pastures fenced with stone, and just beyond that stood a natural escarpment of rock over which the beck tumbled and whispered amid the ice and snow.
On the other side of the rocky wall lay the forest. Eden stopped, struck with panic. How often he had wanted to take her there during his fraudulent courtship, tried to convince her that there was some redeeming quality to such a blighted wilderness.
But he was gone. He had fled back to whatever realm had spawned him. A chill caught her unaware, and she tugged at the collar of her cloak though it was already drawn tight up about her neck.
What will my son be? She’d pushed away that thought every time it had entered her head. Would he be… normal? Or something other than human?
It didn’t matter. He was her son, no matter what he was.
With every step, the escarpment loomed closer. Each time she paused to catch her breath, she urged herself on again. Climbing over the rocks would not be easy in this dress; once there’d been a rough wooden ladder, but it was gone now, like so much else.
That was merely one more excuse to turn back. She clenched her teeth and charged the wall like a knight hurling himself at the ramparts of a castle.
A streak of red, bright against the drab grays and browns of snow and dead grasses, flashed at the edge of her vision. She turned to see a fox, the only other living creature with whom she shared the pasture. It paused in its flight, one paw lifted, to regard her through button-bright eyes.
She smiled at the unexpected beauty of the creature and at a sudden welling of fellow feeling. Life did exist here, after all. It survived under even the harshest conditions.
“Be at ease,” she said. “There is no one here to hunt you.”
The fox cocked its head almost as if it understood her, flicked its brush, and executed a graceful spin to run directly toward the forest. Eden found her courage on more solid footing with the fox playing vanguard. But once again her progress was interrupted by movement. This time it was human.
A boy.
At first Eden thought it might be the same ragged child she had seen in the village, but he could not have run so far. His clothes were worn but not yet threadbare. As little as she knew of children, she guessed him to be five or six years old. His shock of unkempt hair was the rich brown of good English farmland.