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I ce needles stung Leona’s cold-reddened face, obscured her vision, and slid under the collar of her oversized coat.

She should have wrapped a muffler about her neck, but she’d been too impatient, too anxious to carry out her wild plan.

She shivered as rivulets of melting ice tracked down her spine.

Bracing herself against the rough brick wall, she clung one-handed to the vines that were at once handholds and safety line. She wiped her eyes clear.

This was the winter solstice night. Was there pagan magic in the air?

Was there magic that fostered mad, impetuous schemes?

She stared out into the night. She knew the ground was ten feet below her, but it might as well be fifty, as much as she could see.

The day had been veiled in soft, misting rains.

No doubt tomorrow’s sun would reveal a world shrouded in a glittering ice mantle.

But now, with a capricious north wind freezing rain into ice spears to fling against any so foolhardy as to leave the warmth of a home fire, it was winter’s hell.

It’s only a little farther.

Grimly she held that thought, held it like a shield against fear, fatigue, and discomfort. She repeated it endlessly, like a Gregorian chant.

She’d come this far; there could be no turning back.

Leona reached up higher, searching for another secure handhold.

Then she raised her booted right foot, blindly seeking out a foothold on one of the jutting quoins hidden in the massive tangle of vines that climbed the west-wing walls of Lion’s Gate Manor.

She pulled herself higher, praying the vines would hold.

A fool's errand.

The errant thought, like the biting north wind, pierced her mind.

She tossed her head to clear her thoughts and sharpen her determination.

Her other foot left the narrow ledge of the decorative string course separating the ground floor from the first floor.

A few feet more and she would be to the cornice ledge separating the first floor from the second.

From there she could edge her way over to the second-floor window, where a solitary burning candle cast a soft beam of golden light out into the night.

The only light in the wing, it beckoned her with the promise of warmth.

Though even without the light, that window, that room, would have been her goal.

Leona did not know what to expect when she attained her goal and looked inside.

Until now, she’d not thought beyond looking inside.

The vines grew thinner with each hand and toe hold, weaker, and the jutting stones farther apart. One patch of vine ripped loose from the wall where Leona grabbed it. The suddenness of its release nearly sent her reeling backward. She swallowed a scream of fear.

Charlie always maintained that scaling the vine-covered walls of Lion’s Gate was a bit of child’s work—no doubt an attitude he formed in his youth when sneaking out at night to kick up a lark with Squire Hembridge’s son.

Foolishly, Leona believed him. Under her breath she cursed, then bit her chapped lower lip in contrition.

The closer Leona Leonard came to her goal, the more the niggling thought that she was on a fool’s errand pervaded her mind.

It hadn’t seemed so that afternoon when the idea came to her.

She’d sat in the parlor of Rose Cottage with her companion, Maria Sprockett, and listened to the concerns of their visitors, Lady Hembridge, Mrs. Thrailwithe, Miss Semple, and Vicar Davidson about their estate renters.

At the time, climbing Lion’s Gate's walls to peek into Charlie’s old room seemed the logical course of action.

As the only member of the Leonard family in the neighborhood (and as the nominal estate manager in the absence of Lion’s Gate’s real owner, her brother, Captain Charles Leonard), Leona felt duty-bound to investigate.

The villagers did not like the new tenants at Lion’s Gate Manor, and so they —represented by those gathered in the parlor that afternoon—told her. Repeatedly.

Truthfully, Leona didn’t like the Norths either, particularly the son, Howard North. However, when she let the Leonard family estate to the Norths, she’d been more concerned with rental income than personalities, and the Norths did unflinchingly agree to the high figure she named.

They’d been at Lion’s Gate eight months, and for eight months they’d irritated the good folk of Crawfords Dean with their superior ways and secretive dealings.

Those secretive dealings were what led Leona to be dressed in her brother’s cast-off clothes and climbing the old established vines and the odd jutting stonework that was peculiar to Lion’s Gate Manor to reach Charlie’s boyhood room.

A month ago, the Norths began to say a young relative was coming to stay with them.

A young girl, they said, who was sadly demented.

This unfortunate situation in itself was not an unbelievable event.

Cases of insanity were blessedly rare; nonetheless, they were known to occur, and heated debate on the wisdom of home care for the afflicted invaded polite drawing rooms. What shifted the North situation into the realm of suspicion was the undeniable fact that in the months the Norths had lived at Lion’s Gate, they’d been singularly unfriendly.

Repeatedly they declined invitations to sup with one or another member of Crawfords Dean’s restricted society.

Nor were they prone to social conversation should one chance to encounter them in the village.

Plainly spoken, they snubbed their neighbors. Why the sudden course of volubility?

When the child finally arrived, she was placed in Charlie’s old room in the nursery wing of Lion’s Gate. The servants were not allowed to go near, nor even see the girl. She was kept locked in the bedchamber, attended only by Mrs. North and her daughter Joanna.

Mrs. Thrailwithe’s housekeeper’s daughter—a maid at Lion’s Gate—reported to her mother that she’d heard pitiful sobbing coming from the room. On another occasion, she’d heard the child screaming at Mrs. North, telling the woman that her uncle would kill them.

The unmistakable sound of a resounding slap ended the screams.

The young maid’s disclosures rekindled the villagers’ dissatisfaction with Lion’s Gate’s tenants. Finally, the vicar—prompted by outrage among his parishioners (particularly the more affluent ones)—called on the Norths and asked to see their afflicted young relative. He was refused.

These actions, coupled with their previous attitude and Howard North’s unspeakably lascivious behavior toward several young girls of the neighborhood, raised the hackles of Crawfords Dean’s inhabitants. Thus the reason for the assemblage that afternoon at Rose Cottage.

It was ironic. When Leona assumed the stewardship of Lion’s Gate three years before, upon the untimely death of her eldest brother, Edmund, the same self-appointed village representatives gathered in the Blue Saloon at Lion’s Gate.

Their mission that day had been to urge Leona to desist in her foolish idea of managing the property for Charlie.

It was beneath her and unladylike. They flocked to insist she go live with her sister, Rosalie, and her husband, George Sharply.

She appeased them that day by saying she wished a quiet year of mourning away from the embarrassment she would most certainly feel as the sister of Edmund Leonard.

Socially, she explained, it could not do her favor to be known as the sister of the man who was killed by an enraged husband after being found in flagrante delicto with the man’s wife. Though they all professed shock at her indelicate language, they were forced to concede her point.

By the time her formal full year of mourning ended everyone in the neighborhood was used to her managing the Leonard property.

In truth, she made amazing strides in the reorganization of the Leonard family fortune.

She’d removed herself and her companion to Rose Cottage, leased the house, repaired the outbuildings, and turned a good profit on the harvest. The first lessees she found for Lion’s Gate had been a retired naval captain and his family.

They were well-liked in the neighborhood.

They might have been there still if, after two years, the captain hadn’t missed the daily sight of the sea.

With mixed feelings, the captain and his family moved away to take a house nearer Bristol.

Given the popularity of the naval family, it was not to be surprised that the neighborhood would look at their replacements with a wary eye.

For a while, that was the excuse Leona gave to herself when she discovered the villagers did not like the new tenants of Lion’s Gate.

Finally, she was forced to admit—albeit reluctantly—that she might have made an error in judgment.

That admittance rankled. Nonetheless, she was bound by her duty to her family to see the situation set to rights.

Furthermore, she did not want any talk or even whispers that it would be best if she left the stewardship of Lion’s Gate in the hands of her officious brother-in-law and quietly went to live with Rosalie and him.

That was a suggestion she would fight with every ounce of her being.

She held a duty to her brother Charlie and a duty to her family name.

She would not let Edmond’s profligate existence destroy the family honor.

Not so long as she could draw breath and work to regain the dignity that Edmund so casually stripped from them all!

That was why she clung precariously to the side of Lion’s Gate, struggling to find a secure foothold on the rapidly icing quoins and ledges.