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Chapter One

Two Strangers Come to Hasterleigh

It was a rare warm day in October and Leonora Appleby sat at the piano-forte playing an étude, but her mind was on other things.

The full-length sash window was flung up and the garden with its late roses, penstemons and clematis beckoned.

She heard a hallo and looking up, saw a young woman appear, one hand carrying a sheet of music and the other fluttering over the top of the box hedge that lined the path.

The sun caught her fair hair. ‘Leonora!’ She waved.

‘Oh, Lottie.’ Leonora stopped playing. ‘I’m glad you’re early.’ She stood up and walked to the window. ‘I have a plan. Instead of your music lesson, let’s go to the lake. Summer is over and perhaps it’s our last chance to swim this year.’

Charlotte Blythe’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘Oh, yes! But I’ll have to be careful leaving the house in my bathing dress. Mama Mildmay does not approve of girls swimming, particularly if I’m missing a lesson to do so.’ She laughed.

Leonora was already dressed in the required blue calico bathing smock she had stitched for herself, with long sleeves and a high neck, copied from a print in The Lady’s Magazine. ‘Just wear an everyday cotton pelisse over the top. No one will guess what we intend.’

‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’ Charlotte Blythe turned and ran back down the garden to the pretty gothic house adjoining the Manor’s parkland.

Both the Vicarage and the Manor were so rooted in the surrounding land that they seemed to have grown out of the soil and to have been there forever.

Leonora walked into the garden. She was enveloped in scent and in the buzz of bees harvesting pollen with a busy diligence that suggested they also knew the days of bounty were numbered.

Leonora loved her childhood home. She gazed on the symmetry of its elegant stone facade with long sash windows opening to the garden.

To one side, an ornamental orangery was filled with fruiting citrus trees and the fragrance of an exotic and warmer land.

On her father’s death two years before, the entailed estate had been inherited by a distant relation, but the lucky recipient had shown little interest in taking possession.

However, that morning, a letter had been delivered from one George Lockwood, informing her in a measured hand that he would arrive the following Monday.

Leonora could barely conceive that the Manor would no longer be her home; her settled world was beginning to tremble under her feet.

When Charlotte returned, the two young women set off down the lane.

Hasterleigh was a downland village like many in the county of Berkshire, with church, vicarage and manor all in close proximity.

Then slightly set apart was the big house of the neighbourhood, Rokeby Abbey, with its estate of some thousand acres of prime land.

The forty or so tenanted farms provided the earls of Rokeby with the substantial income that funded a leisured, aristocratic mode of life, but the house had been uninhabited for years.

Leonora led the way as they clambered over a broken-down section of stone wall and began to make their way through the fringing woodland.

Full of ferns and moss with towering oak and beech trees hanging with lichen, the untended woods had a magical, other-worldly atmosphere.

The young women emerged from the cool shade as they reached the knoll, following the faint track curving through the grass until the dark water came into view, still and glassy in the late afternoon sun.

At the sight of it, Leonora’s heart began to beat faster.

Trespassing on the Rokeby estate some years ago, she had stumbled upon the lake and discovered the surprising joy of swimming.

Under an oak tree, they cast off their pelisses and walking shoes, pinned up their hair as high on their heads as they could and, slipping on some canvas pumps, waded into the lake.

Leonora pushed off into the chill water and gasped.

The cold was less intense after the hot summer, but it was still breathtaking and hit her like a body blow.

That first gliding stroke never failed to thrill as she breasted the still surface, drawing a cloak of ripples behind her, her whole being entirely alive.

The euphoria that radiated from her heart to her limbs was close to love.

It was a pleasure too to find that Charlotte, her young friend and pupil, also enjoyed these clandestine expeditions.

She was less bold and proficient in water and preferred to splash in the shallows while Leonora swam easily to the middle of the lake.

No one knew how deep it was, but the thought of the inky depths below did not trouble her.

Bliss lay in the peace that descended, and in how the lake and surrounding woods were so unfrequented and still.

She knew Earl Rokeby had left as a young man to fight as a hussar in the Peninsular War and had never returned.

His younger brother had joined him, and it was rumoured that during the Battle of Corunna, Rokeby had died in his brother’s arms. The house and estate had fallen into disrepair during the ensuing four years, and Leonora had come to treat the lake as her own domain.

Knowing she should not stay too long in the chill water, she turned to swim back to the shore where Lottie was well within her depth.

Yet the meditative pleasure of the place was rudely broken by the appearance of a man.

In the couple of years they had been visiting the lake, they had never seen another soul and it was a shock to find they were no longer alone.

He was walking with purpose towards the farther bank.

Leonora’s heart quickened with apprehension.

She sensed danger, as if a serpent had entered paradise and the certainties of her world had slightly shifted.

‘Lottie, swim to me,’ she urged, considering the water gave them the greatest protection.

The man shouted something and waved his arm.

He looked unkempt, and Leonora turned with Charlotte to swim in the opposite direction towards their clothes, hoping to get there before he could walk round the lake’s edge.

Suddenly, the sound of a gunshot shattered the silence and birds flew skywards, squawking in alarm.

Leonora felt the shock reverberate through her body and with it, anger and fear.

She turned, her eyes blazing, to see the man put down his flintlock rifle.

No longer feeling the cold, she was hot with rage.

Her responsibility for Charlotte also weighed heavily as they swam on towards the oak tree while the man walked round to meet them.

When Leonora was close to shore, she shouted, her anger still flaring: ‘How dare you shoot at us!’

The man was nearer now, and she realised he was in his middle years and dressed in the worsted jacket and breeches of a gamekeeper. ‘My lord don’t care for trespassers.’ His voice was loud and gruff and echoed over the water.

Leonora stood waist high in the lake, sheltering Charlotte behind her. ‘So your orders are to shoot before asking any questions?’

‘You ignored my shout. Discharged me trusty over yer heads to get yer attention.’ The man seemed on the defensive.

Leonora was not certain if he had any authority in the matter. ‘No one has been in residence for years. We thought the Earl had died at Corunna.’

‘His brother’s now the Earl. Escaped from Boney, didn’t he? Now he’s home, he don’t care for company.’

‘Well, will you tell your master that he will be troubled neither by Miss Appleby from the Manor nor by Miss Blythe from the Vicarage. Now please be gone so we can get dressed.’

The young women watched him turn on his heel, his gun over his shoulder, to walk back to where he had first emerged from the long tree-lined vista that led to the house.

Once he had disappeared, Leonora said, ‘I can hardly believe he fired his gun like that. Treating us no better than poachers.’ She was still shaken.

‘We’re neighbours and do no harm. It’s shameful! ’

Charlotte waded out of the water but Leonora turned and looked longingly at the lake.

She felt this secret place had been desecrated, but could not bear to think she would never be here again.

‘I’m going to have one last swim to the middle and back.

Wait for me under the tree, Lottie, I won’t be long.

’ She set off with strong strokes to where the clouds were reflected on the dark still water.

Only then was she ready to turn and swim back to shore.

Dressing in haste, Leonora and Charlotte headed to the fringing woodland and clambered back over the wall.

They walked the hundred yards along the lane to the Manor, carrying their wet canvas shoes in their hands and keen to put on dry clothes again.

Leonora struggled with a combination of outrage and sorrow that something she loved had been spoiled and snatched away.

Emotion made her stride out, and Charlotte picked up her skirts so she could catch up with her friend.

‘He seemed a giant of a man; do you think he would have aimed directly at us?’

‘No, he wouldn’t have shot us.’ Leonora was reassuring but her own calm was fractured.

‘But he has the power to stop us swimming in the lake?’ Charlotte was puzzled.