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CHAPTER TEN

S he’d already done one thing she’d never dreamed of. Two things, really. She’d struck a man, when Anne had never in her life struck another person, not even inadvertently. And not just anyone; she’d struck the man she was supposed to marry.

After she’d been found in his bed wearing nothing but her shift, and that after allowing the man to pleasure her in ways she’d never known possible. That was the second unheard-of thing.

Now she did something else entirely out of character: Anne called for a horse.

A horse! My kingdom for a horse! They’d read several plays of Shakespeare’s, she and Gwen, at the behest of their tutor.

Gwen liked the wild poetry. Daron liked the insults and sexual puns and battles, and he would occasionally agree to act scenes with them.

Anne grasped little of the language, but she was fascinated by Shakespeare’s women.

The weeping heroines who killed themselves for love or shame.

The conniving queens. The girls who dressed as boys and got away with it, as if it were not another unheard-of thing for a woman to pursue her own goals single-mindedly.

“What kind of horse, miss?” asked the footman, wide-eyed, when Anne made her request. Greenfield, for all it lacked maids, did have footmen.

She imagined Lady Vaughn had found some means, here on the edges of Wales, to avoid paying the taxes on manservants and windows, since Greenfield had both in abundance.

“Any horse,” Anne said, trying to sound firm.

In truth, she didn’t ride often. She and Gwen were more like to ramble on foot, or take the pony cart and one of the workhorses when they and their nurse went out gathering herbs.

She hoped the groom would not bring some enormous gelding it would terrify Anne to mount.

A few minutes later, as she stepped off the porch to the gravel front drive, she saw the coachman driving the carriage around from the stableyard. A pair of dappled grays with dainty matching socks pulled the traces, and a groom clung to the perch in the back.

“They’ll take you anywhere you wish to go.” Hew appeared beside her, sneaking up in that silent way of his.

Anne stifled the leap of her heart. He was tracking her. Trying to find out where she was going, but in a subtle fashion. That—resentment, surely—accounted for the blaze that ran through her body at his nearness.

“I only wanted a horse.” She sounded surly. Well, she’d been trapped into marriage—again—and that could blight a girl’s mood. Let him insist on marrying surly Anne. Headstrong Anne. An Anne who suddenly, without having shown any previous inclination for doing so, decided to speak her mind.

What was happening to her?

“You are not familiar with the area, and there are some rough elements in Newport these days,” he said.

“You don’t have to tell me that,” Anne muttered. She’d been in the area longer than he had, a few weeks at least, while her brother and Daron laid their schemes. She’d been the one kidnapped by the Black Hound. Hew had shown up only a day ago.

And upended her world. Damn his mouth and the way she couldn’t stop watching his face.

He turned to stare down at her. “I won’t have you hurt.”

“At least not until after the marriage agreement is signed, I’m sure, and you have some claim to my supposed dowry.”

He held her elbow as she climbed into the carriage, ignoring her petulant tone. “Where are you going?”

As if he had any right to ask, Anne almost snapped, until she recollected that, as her presumed husband and the man who would control her life, he did.

“Away,” she said curtly.

He closed the door and reached up to hold his hand on the window, where the leather shade was rolled up. “For how long?”

“As long as I wish.”

“Return by dinner,” he said firmly.

“We shall see.”

“Have her home by dinner,” he called to the coachman, and Anne heard the man’s rumbled assent.

She threw herself back into the upholstered seat, incensed.

She couldn’t even manage to run away in high dudgeon.

She was in his carriage, leaving his house, in the hands of his servants, and he had every right now to dictate her actions.

She’d settled the noose around her neck when she knocked on the door to his room and handed over the loose end when she stripped off her shawl.

She simply hadn’t known it.

“To St. Sefin’s,” Anne called.

“Aye, mum.”

This time, Anne paid attention to the sights and sounds around her.

This place they called Rogerstone, after the ruined castle, was made of two towns, Tydu and Tregwillym, growing together like children growing out of short gowns.

And this odd place, in transition, would be her home for a while longer.

That hadn’t felt real to her when it was Calvin insisting they marry.

And now she was bound to Hewitt Vaughn. Who promised she could jilt him, whenever she was prepared to pull the full weight of scandal down upon her and her family’s heads.

But he was, by his own admission, not a man who felt bound by promises.

So she might find herself well and truly trapped here.

She looked about with fresh eyes, and wondered if this were a place where she could be happy.

The scenery wasn’t as dramatic as that surrounding Llanfyllin, but then, Llanfyllin was isolated within its valleys and hills. One had to choose to be there. The hills here were smaller as the land lowered into the sea, and the sky stretched further. Everything seemed more reachable.

She would swear the air carried the scent of salt and fish.

Every tree seemed to be bearing fruit, and the wheat in the fields ripened toward harvest. Cattle grazed the hills in fat brown clumps, and the spring lambs were fattening themselves for the table while the ewes fattened themselves for another season of mating.

Every other created thing had its season and purpose—had its destiny—save for Anne. What was hers?

She knew it was a slender hope that Gwen would be at St. Sefin’s.

She was a new-made bride and would be in her husband’s arms, likely already off on her wedding trip.

Anne had spent last night in a man’s arms, too, and for some reason she wanted to tell Gwen about it, as if their friendship had not been profoundly broken, as if Daron’s betrayal and Anne’s ignorance had not scored a deep rift.

The church of St. Woolos stood quiet among its overgrown graves, some tilting back into the earth, and across the hill the crumbling priory, once a shelter of impressive stone, lay as silent and dreaming.

She heard birds and the low drone of insects, bees busy about their task, but the only creature she saw was the enormous goat cropping grass around the headstones in the cemetery, raising its head to stare with its odd, flat eyes as Anne rolled past.

Then the carriage turned into the yard at the back of St. Sefin’s, and finally, there were people.

The two black-clad widows were laundering clothes, one poking at the copper boiler with the washing bat, the other scrubbing a garment along the washboard.

The two boys had the task of spreading wrung linens over every available surface, wooden frames, fenceposts, bushes.

The boys made her nervous. The blind one felt his way about with a shepherd’s crook, not at all stumbling as Anne would expect from one who couldn’t see, and the other one, the idiot boy with the round face and narrow eyes, chuckled all the time, as if the least thing delighted him.

“I don’t suppose—the viscountess?” Anne called as she descended the coach. “Gwen?”

“She’s off to the castle with his lordship to set up house, is our lady,” said Widow Jones with a merry smile. “Ah, her ladyship! What a fine thing to call our Gwen, aye, Mother Morris? Did you ever think we’d see such a thing?”

The crone turned and glared at Anne with beady eyes, muttering something in Welsh that ended with Saes , what the Welsh called the English. Which Anne was.

“Now, Mother, Miss Sutton was raised in Llanfyllin, she was, so a Welsh woman true as the rest of us,” the widow chided gently. “Ifor, Tomos, here’s Miss Sutton come to visit us! D’ ye want to give the fine horses an apple, Tomos?”

“ Pert ,” the older boy said, edging closer to Anne with a grin.

Anne edged away. “Er—Mathry?”

“Off with Mr. Ross to see to the castle as well, and there’s a ring on her finger at last, to be sure,” the widow said with glee. “Suppose we’ll travel to Penrydd for their wedding, Mother, and stay in a fine, rich castle, shall we?”

The crone muttered as she turned back to poking the wash, but her mien seemed lighter, and she stopped glaring in Anne’s direction.

So Mathry had won a declaration from Penrydd’s Scottish secretary.

He’d seemed an acceptable sort of man, not anyone Anne would set her cap for, and not as commanding or capable as her Hew, who?—

Anne threw a halter on those thoughts and brought them up short. He wasn’t her Hew, was he? He was her pretended husband-to-be, but she had no claim to his affection.

She could hold him to the marriage, she supposed.

Secure herself a roof over her head and some measure of economic security.

Perhaps even pleasure, now and again, until they wearied of one another.

And then she would be a wife like so many she knew, a polite acquaintance with the man whose name she bore, while they went about their separate lives and met over the dining table now and again to discuss the futures of their children.

Her belly rolled and bit like a feral dog, reminding her she’d put nothing in it but chocolate. She did not like that prospect for her life. She did not want that any longer.