Page 2 of The Elusive Phoebe (The Widows of Lavender Cottage #1)

Chapter One

T he rooster crowed too loudly in a place that rarely saw the sun.

The infernal animal would wake the servants before Phoebe could escape.

But she couldn’t shush him. She’d tried for these past long two years, and he simply insisted on crowing before dawn.

Every morning she’d awoken to his noise.

But this morning, she would be gone from his life forever, hopefully before any of the servants would be the wiser since they were used to his infernal racket same as she.

The far northern reaches of England had been the home of Phoebe’s marital enforced captivity for two years now. But no longer.

A flicker of light lit in the upstairs window. And then voices alerted her to someone up and aware of her absence. She closed the carriage door, nodding her gratitude to the stable hand. “We must go! Hurry now!”

Someone from the house stepped out onto the porch, but what could they do to stop a moving carriage? Was she imagining things or did the housekeeper lift her hand up in farewell?

She tensed, but no other people were seen, and no one seemed interested in her pursuit. Once she rounded the bend, she fell back against the seat back. Her smile of relief travelled down to her toes with such a warmth she was almost not chilled in the early morning air.

She was free.

Phoebe pulled her thin, threadbare coat about herself in a fruitless effort to block the chill.

The servants had barely let her escape, even in the knowledge of their cruel master’s death, they were loyal to his wishes, watching her every move, monitoring her movement: an iron grip on her life and imprisonment in the farthest northern tundra of England.

But one stable master with a tender spot for her had done what he could and in the dark of night, horses and an old carriage for hire waited down the lane from her tiny home.

She’d given him what she could of her saved pin money, paltry though it was, and knowing it did not cover the full expense, escaped into the night desperate to at last be free.

Nothing would make her return to her previous home.

Nothing would ever motivate her to speak to her father again.

To think she’d gone from one tyrant to another without a blink, without a season, with nothing to show that her life would be anything but drudgery and fear.

She clutched the letter from Lillian in her hand, not daring to misplace it lest it become something of her imagination, lest it flit off in the wind, a falsehood and not the salvation she hoped it to be.

Could there at last be a sliver of light?

Her husband had left her a bit of something to live on which she would have access to by the time she arrived at Lavender Cottage. And she hoped it would be sufficient to pay for her living there. She could survive by paltry means. She’d proven that thus far.

Her trunk contained all the earthly possessions in her care, few indeed.

But some very dear. A necklace from her mother, the lace from her great grandmother that should have been part of her clothing for her first child.

The ache in her heart that never went away flared into a full force of sorrow.

For years, every attempt at child bearing had come to loss, every possible bit of love she could have shared grew inside for what seemed just moments and then flowed out of her leaving her more barren than the time before.

She had had precious little left to hope for.

Until this last time. She placed a hand on her stomach. She couldn’t be certain, but she suspected something dear indeed grew within her.

And the lace remained.

She kept it, folded in the bottom of the trunk.

“Maybe some day” it seemed to say. She smiled.

Something akin to hope teased her. And that was good enough for now.

The trunk had other things. She’d kept one thing from her husband, a note.

He’d given it to her in the very beginning, before he’d shipped her off, shutting her out, before all the loss, before the barren womb.

He’d written simply, “you’re beautiful.”

Even now, after everything, after all that time alone, she believed him. There was a time when he thought her beautiful.

She thought she had no more tears but the solitary drop down her cheek proved otherwise.

Ashamed of herself for still feeling anything for that sorry excuse of a husband, she clenched her teeth, but her eyes still blurred with more tears.

He’d been handsome enough but not heart break worthy.

He’d been smart enough but not so much that she lived for his turn of conversation.

He’d been fun. He had a nice smile. But all of it should not have captured her heart.

And he hadn’t, not really. But still the tears had come.

Such a severe rejection hurt the most not because of his particular qualities, but because of what it could have been.

She mourned the life she was not living, that she could have lived.

People were happy. People fell in love with their husbands.

People had children and lovely nice things.

But none of that happened to her. And the great loss of all that potential is what caused the lone tear to track down her cheek.

And that other part. The rejection. Was she so lacking that he couldn’t bear to show her to anyone in society?

Was she an embarrassment? She blinked furiously.

“No more tears Phoebe.” She pressed her lips together.

“You don’t have to be with another man ever again.

There is no lost potential for you anymore. ”

What do people expect from widows? She smiled to herself. Nothing. There were no expectations of her. Her life was hers to make for herself.

She pulled out her letter from Lilly, clinging to her friend’s cheerful and hopeful response.

A group of women to help her? A nice cottage to live in with the most picturesque name.

Lavender Cottage. She folded the letter again and placed it in her pocket amongst the folds of her skirts.

She could not have what she lost. She would not have love or the typical hopes of any new bride.

But she could have friendship. She could make a place for herself.

She could survive. And that’s what she needed at the moment.

Survival. Which is partly why she’d run.

Because she was not going to be doing any of that in the northern wilds of England.

She couldn’t bring a single servant except her stable hand. She didn’t dare, not knowing what kind of funds would be available to her or the cost of the cottage.

The air grew colder, the sky darker. They would stop at one more inn because the coachman insisted that he rest. She had so little but spent a great portion of it on a room, attempting to hide the fact that she travelled alone.

The weak lock on the door rattled every time heavy boots walked down the hall.

It seemed the whole place with its thin walls and uneven floors would blow away in a great wind.

But after little sleep, before dawn, she was up and waiting to leave.

Luckily the driver and her footman were of the same mind, and they left just as the sun touched the tips of the grasses on the rolling hills around her.

“Looks like a nice clear day miss. We’ll be arriving before dark I’d wager. ”

She nodded and climbed in with the same threadbare coat wrapped around her shoulders.

Someone knocked on her window and when she opened, a kindly woman’s face smiled at her and then waved a servant forward. “We have warming blocks for ye, miss.”

“Oh, thank you.” She was so surprised at the offer of kindness, the awareness from another human, she wasn’t certain how to express her appreciation. “I find I am quite cold on the journey.”

The woman might be the inn keeper’s wife. She couldn’t be sure. But she took in Phoebe’s tightly wrapped coat and the sparseness of the carriage and held up a finger. “Wait just a moment more. I’ll prepare something more to warm ye from the insides.”

She nodded to the coachman and put her feet on top of the warming blocks.

The heat lifted in waves up through her skirts and into the bottom of her feet.

The sharpness in the air dulled, and her body shivered once to try and shake off the deep cold that attempted to overtake her well-being.

The surprise angel from the Inn returned with a basket.

“Compliments on the house. Please enjoy and warm yourself love. You look as though you might wither away. ”

Phoebe’s smile grew and she reached an arm out to hug what she could reach of the woman. She squeezed her tight. “Thank you.”

“Oh, ‘tis nothing. I wish you the best, now, be off with ye.” Her gruff voice did not fool Phoebe. The woman had a heart the size of England itself, and Phoebe would remember her kindness for a long time to come.

She closed her door and tapped on the side. The coachman clucked to their horses and once again they were moving down the road towards an unfamiliar destiny, but one that she knew had to be better than what she left.

As she was pulling out, a large and important looking dark carriage pulled up.

Men jumped out, running inside as though someone were chasing them.

They turned the corner before she could see more and then her ramshackle conveyance turned again down a road that looked as though it was never used.

The pot holes, the grooves in the dirt were packed and so permanent, she felt her own wheels would roll right off before they could navigate such a path, but her coachman kept on.

The fancy carriage tore past them on the main road and they stopped in the shade of a tree.

She poked her head out the window. “What’s going on if you please? ”